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A Second Look | Air America Fails Obama Again

Sep 10th, 2009
by Tom.
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via Post Mortem: Did Obama’s Speech Set Stage For Death Of Change? | Air America Media

Okay okay, I know I’ve gone back to the trough. I wrote about Air America yesterday. But honestly, how can Air America, our first and only progressive news outlet, support this right-wing drivel about Obama’s setting up the “death of change”?

President Obama Calls a Joint Session of Congress

Wednesday, Barack Obama addressed a joint session of Congress to lay out a more specific vision for health care reform, spur compromise and shore up support within his own party for meaningful legislation.

But if the booing, heckling, legislation-waving conservatives–let alone their pre-canned statements of opposition–are any guide, it never mattered what the president had to say, so, one would have thought he might say something. And one would be more or less wrong.

Yesterday, I criticizedAir America for publishing the same author, Megan Carpentier, who coughed up a fact-less and baseless argument that Joe Kennedy was scared out of his wits by his past association with Hugo Chavez and that he had no choice but to decline to run for his late uncle’s Senate seat in Mass. because of it.

Now she turns her right-wing pen toward Obama. Carpentier had this to say about Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress last night:

What Obama did say tended to be as short on specifics as previous speeches on the topic have been, and high on the same reassurances he’s unsuccessfully repeated in the past. It’s as though, having repeated ad nauseam that his health care reform wouldn’t allow employers to drop people’s insurance coverage and most Americans would see no changes other than (maybe) lower costs, Obama thought that repeating it in front of Congress and with Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi behind him might make it all more believable.

Here’s the rub. The reassurances Obama gave last night, and I’m assuming she’s speaking of the public option, rang true to me. Obama is not giving up the fight for the public option, and he said so:

“It’s worth noting that a strong majority of Americans still favor a public insurance option of the sort I’ve proposed tonight. I will not back down on the basic principle that if Americans can’t find affordable coverage, we will provide you with a choice. And I will make sure that no government bureaucrat or insurance company bureaucrat gets between you and the care that you need.”

Carpentier could have defended Obama’s goals for health care reform as easily as she spewed more right-wing talking points. The more we progressives, and I am assuming that Air America still calls themselves progressive, support the right-wing framing of issues, the less room there is for the liberal frames.

Obama made one of the most eloquent defenses of liberalism that I’ve heard in two decades. The President said that he would “call out” Republicans that misrepresented the points in his plan. And toward the end of the speech he set his feet firmly on liberal ground declaring it’s time to move away from Reagan era policies. From Huffington Post’s Jacob Heilbrunn:

Obama didn’t simply come out swinging. He also made the single most persuasive case for government intervention in decades in the final section of his speech. He put an end to the Reagan era dogma that America’s biggest foe is government itself. With this speech, Obama has begun to fulfill the promise of his presidency. Obama, you could say, found his sea legs. He’s ushering in a fundamental philosophical shift that could set the stage for several decades of a revived and modern liberal movement, while the right spins off into noisy irrelevance.

Why didn’t she make this case for Obama instead? The answer is obvious. She’s a P.U.M.A. Her own words:

For those people, some of whom adopted the acronym P.U.M.A. (or Party Unity My A** in response to calls by Democrats — including Hillary — to come together to elect Barack Obama), there is no president who could be better than Hillary, no vice presidential pick that wasn’t a slight. Some of them would even call the secretary of state slot a “safe, expected place for a woman to be,” in order to denigrate the selection of yet another woman for the position, even if that woman is Hillary Clinton.

Well, the rest of her article is snippets from his speech and then more vitriolic and disgusting verbiage about how Obama has failed to deliver. This crap might as well have been written by Rep. Michelle Bachman.

C’mon, Air America, you guys can do better than this!

 

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A Second Look | Even Huffington Post Hates Obama

Sep 2nd, 2009
by Tom.
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via Obama Plans “New Season” Of More Direct Health Care Advocacy.
AP/Huffington Post   |  CHARLES BABINGTON
First Posted: 09- 2-09 08:53 AM   |   Updated: 09- 2-09 12:00 PM

Yet another AP article that is published in the so called “liberal media’s” leading on-line news source that slams President Obama. If Huffington Post wants to promote the progressive viewpoint, then they need to start editing these articles submitted by the

The Huffington Post

Associated Press because this article that begins with David Axelrod speaking about Obama’s new strategy quickly turns into a right-wing bragging session. This snippet is where things start to get contentious:

Congress’ August recess was brutal for Obama and his allies, as lawmakers faced raucous crowds denouncing Democrats’ health proposals. When Congress comes back Tuesday, Democratic leaders hope to change the dynamic by holding quiet, closed-door sessions with nervous colleagues and arguing that far-reaching health care changes can be good politics as well as good policy.

There’s not one word about how these “raucous crowds” were planted inside the town halls, or about how the whole fake grassroots activism was organized and seeded by AHIP, the nation’s largest insurance lobbyist. These phony protests are nothing short of a well funded insurance corporate campaign to kill much needed healthcare legislation.

The Associated Press, with the help of Huffington Post has once again broad-brushed the Democratic Party. This time as somehow inferior or weak by having to calm “nervous” colleagues.  If we left things up to Huffington Post, the right-wing news monkeys could start posting their hate-filled vitriol as legitimate news. Who needs FOX when we have the Huffington Post?

This next snippet is the last two paragraphs of the article and they are what Huffington Post wants you to walk away with – the last word per se:

Republicans approach Labor Day feeling upbeat about the ground they gained during the August recess. Some are confident that no amount of closed-door hand-holding of nervous Democratic lawmakers will reverse the momentum.

“After a disastrous month at home, the fact that Democrats’ new health care strategy is to hide in Washington from the people who elected them to get health care passed shows what bad shape they’re in,” said Antonia Ferrier, spokeswoman for House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio.

It would do the Democratic Party much good if these headlining articles in the Huffington Post would end on a positive, progressive note instead of a blatant endorsement of the right-wing echo chamber’s talking points.

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A Second Look | Right Wing Activism Is Faked

Aug 26th, 2009
by Tom.
1 comment

The Progress Report wrote:

Conservatives Try To Pare Down Reform

From: The Progress Report [progress@americanprogressaction.org]
Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 8:48 AM
To: tom
Subject: Conservatives Try To Pare Down Reform

Conservatives have used the August recess to mount an organized opposition to President Obama’s health care reform efforts. Even as 14,000 Americans lose their health insurance coverage every single day — half a million will become uninsured while Congress is on vacation — Republicans are insisting that Democrats pare down existing reform legislation. “We need to slow down and do a little less,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee and member of the “Gang of Six” tasked with producing bipartisan health care legislation, told a town hall gathering in Pocahontas, IA, on Monday. Similarly, during an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) predicted that the bill out of the Senate Finance Committee is “going to have to be significantly less than what we’ve heard talked about.” Yesterday’s revised deficit projections have given conservatives an additional argument for paring down existing legislation. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) issued a statement arguing that the higher projections were “a flashing red light for any health care proposal that doesn’t reduce the cost of health care for Americans and their government,” and Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), the ranking Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, declared that “if the House Democrats’ unaffordable $1 trillion health care bill wasn’t dead before, it should be now.”

Progressives must repeat and propel the truth behind the myth of this so-called “grassroots” effort at town hall meetings meant to stop the public option. When the above mentioned Congresspeople get any notion that there is a populist movement behind them to kill health reform they will continue to fight against it with whatever false or misleading statements they can.

Without support from us, our Congresspeople on the left will start listening to the lunatic fringe on the right and will think, in our absence, that what these whack-jobs are saying could have some weight. We liberals must let the truth behind these fake grassroots protest go viral.

The progressive movement that launched this era of change now has the burden of carrying the movement forward. We must get off our lazy asses and get to these meetings to counter the well organized and well funded opposition. They not only plant persons inside these town halls, but they give them scripts to follow – what to shout when a certain subject is broached. The instructions these radical loonies are handed when they step on the bus even goes as far as telling them where to sit. It is up to us, with utmost civility and sincerity, to tell these hate mongers the truth.

From the Huffington Post today in an article titled, LobbyBlog:

August 26, 2009

In a nod to the House Republicans who devised a chart supposedly showing the bureaucratic nightmare that would result from Democratic health care reforms, the Campaign for America’s Future has devised a chart of its own, titled “Who’s Paying to Kill Health Reform?”

It’s a tangled web, with big lobbying firms, industry groups, and Astroturf organizers all linked to town hall meetings. Reflecting a widely-held view among progressives, the big kahuna behind it all is the health insurance industry, via trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans.

2009-08-26-AHIP_chart7.jpg

Click for full sized image.

The chart is small, (click on image for full size) but you can plainly see that AHIP, America’s Health Insurance Plans, is squarely in the middle of the misinformation campaign. AHIP is perhaps the biggest PR company and lobby for the insurance industry.

Here’s an example of how high priced lobbying firms are used to fuel this so called “grassroots” movement:

AHIP used their subsidiary, Coalition for Medicare Choices, to hire the Dewey Square Group (a public affairs firm with specialties in “grassroots” and “grasstops” campaigns) who then fraudulently signed seniors names to letters to their Congressmen that regurgitated right-wing talking points against health care reform. The Dewey Square Group’s seniors weren’t the only victims. Seniors from other places discovered the treachery and called the newspapers.

AHIP has also turned out their own 50,000 employees to town hall meetings and has them involved in a letter writing campaign. This snippet from Think Progress:

AHIP, the lobbying juggernaut representing the industry, says 50,000 employees have been engaged in writing letters and making phone calls to politicians or attending town hall meetings.

These are just two examples of how the Astroturf, fake “grassroots”, movement has spread. We progressives must disseminate the truth and dispel the rumors and lies as far as our venues will take it. Today another 14,000 Americans lost access to health care because of the lies that the right is spreading. We must spread the truth.

UPDATE
6:49 PM PDT

From Mike Papantonio: Who’s Funding Healthcare Opposition?

One of the phony consumer groups that has created chaos at town hall meetings is a group called Conservatives for Patients Rights (CPR). The founder of CPR, Rick Scott, was CEO of Columbia HCA during a time when Columbia was punished with a 1.7 billion dollar U.S. Government penalty for fraud. The caliber of fraud that Mr. Scott allowed to occur at his company not only included ripping off patients, doctors, and the government, it also included kickbacks to health care providers.

Mr. Scott is back with his fraud games by trying to convince the brain dead media that the loonies showing up to shout and scream at town hall meetings represent America’s majority. Media has become incapable of asking basic questions like: Who’s money is paying for these protesters for hire?

Here is what Mr. Scott’s “protesters” probably don’t know: In the last 10 years, the health care insurance industry has increased their profits by 450 percent. In fact, if Rick Scott’s plan succeeds in ending reform, profits will get even bigger for the cash fat insurance industry.

The Pap Attack is right on target, once again. He has pulled back the curtain to expose the cockroaches scrambling from the light. Kudos.

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