Media Matters for America wrote:
Media Matters: Storming Camelot: Sen. Kennedy’s death brings out worst from the right
From: Media Matters for America [action@mediamatters.org]
Sent: Friday, August 28, 2009 11:48 PM
To: Tom
Subject: Media Matters: Storming Camelot: Sen. Kennedy’s death brings out worst from the right
On top of the relentless smears from media conservatives, several mainstream press outlets repeated without question the GOP claim that Kennedy’s absence from the health care debate prevented lawmakers from reaching a bipartisan compromise and that had Kennedy been present, agreement on health care reform would have been more likely. Several progressive commentators have identified this talking point as GOP spin intended to disguise Republicans’ obstructionism, with Salon.com’s Joan Walsh, for example, stating that “absolutely no evidence supports that point of view” and washingtonpost.com blogger Ezra Klein noting that Kennedy’s committee has already reported out a bill — a progressive one, at that.
Senator Edward Kennedy, Liberal Lion
It is unbelievable that these Republican Senators who sit on the HELP, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, would come out and say that if Senator Kennedy had been around there would have been a compromise bill. Hell, they were there!
Senator Kennedy and his staff worked tirelessly with committee members to put together a compromise bill beginning as early as March, 2009. The Affordable Health Choices Act was passed out of committee in July and it contained 160 Republican amendments. Republican leaders have since said that these amendments were only “technical” and did not effect the outcome of the bill. When republicans speak of amendments as “technical”, they really mean that these amendments deal with corporate welfare, probably billions of dollars, and shouldn’t concern the voters.
Main Category: Health Insurance / Medical Insurance
Also Included In: Public Health
Article Date: 18 Mar 2009 – 3:00 PDT
Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chair Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and a “core group” of five other committee members “will intensify their efforts in coming weeks to ready universal health care legislation for early summer,” CongressDaily reports. Kennedy’s drafting group includes Senate HELP Committee ranking member Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) and committee members Sens. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) and one of three other senators — Sens. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) or Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), who previously were named to working groups focusing on insurance coverage, prevention and quality improvements, respectively.
Kennedy’s staff has been holding stakeholder meetings, which include 20 interest groups, and members and aides from the Senate HELP Committee and the Senate Finance Committee have been holding joint and separate meetings to discuss reform. However, “nothing [from those meetings] has been made available for public consumption,” according to CongressDaily. Kennedy’s drafting group is scheduled to meet up to three times weekly over the next two-and-a-half months and hopes to have legislation ready for mark up by early summer, according to a source familiar with the talks.
Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), claiming that the absence of Kennedy somehow hindered bipartisanship, made this statement on CNN on or about August 27th.
“We would have worked it out [referring to Kennedy]. We would have worked it out on a bipartisan basis,” Hatch, who co-authored numerous health-care bills with Kennedy over the years, said on CNN. “I’ll be happy to work in a bipartisan basis any day, any time … but it’s got to be on something that’s good and not just some partisan hack job.”
Hatch was one of Chairman Kennedy’s “core group” during the mark-up of the AHCA and had every opportunity to have “worked it out” at that time. The truth is, the HELP Committee, more so the bipartisan “core group”, produced a compromise bill in July with a huge number (160) of giveaways to the Republicans. (After skimming the bill, it is clear that these 160 amendments are woven into the language of the bill and impossible to single out for the sake of example.) Orrin Hatch and the rest of the Republicans, to a man, voted against the bill because of the public option called The Community Health Insurance Option. Senator Hatch and others such as John McCain are making the baseless claim that Senator’s Kennedy’s absence is to blame for what is actually obstruction of the public plan, thereby using Senator Kennedy, his illness, and subsequent death, as a scapegoat.
Throughout the mark-up process that saw true bipartisanship, the HELP Committee Democrats worked hand-in-hand with their Republican counterparts to produce the best compromise possible. In Senator Kennedy’s own words,
“I could not be prouder of our Committee. We have done the hard work that the American people sent us here to do. We have considered hundreds of proposals. Where we have been able to reach principled compromise, we have done so. Where we have not been able to resolve our differences, we have treated those with whom we disagree with respect and patience,” Chairman Kennedy said. “As we move from our committee room to the Senate floor, we must continue the search for solutions that unite us, so that the great promise of quality affordable health care for all can be fulfilled.”
May he rest in peace.
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A Second Look | ACORN Is A Victim Of A Radical Right Set-Up
UPDATE 09/24/09
via ACORN Sues Makers of Pimp and Prostitute Video
This is very good news. The vicitms of the fraud are fighting back and I am very happy about that. It’s high time that the right-wing radical estreminsts, who illegally and purposefully attemped to create a gothcha moment that was driven by ideology, are taught a lesson in manners. Maryland requires two party consent to create sound recordings. That is the reason that the former ACORN employees will win the suit.
PS: To say that ACORN is a liberal group is not entirely true. They are an organization of families who help the poor no matter their political affiliation.
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Media Matters for America wrote:
ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis
What is really embarrasing is that the Senate jumped in with both feet firmly planted on the side of Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe without a minute of investigation into the story. First the Senate and now the House, voted to stop any federal funding of ACORN due to these illegaly gained video tapes that show ACORN employees speaking with these two imposters. O’Keefe and Giles deliberately made apppointments with unsuspecting secretaries and front people in order to secretly grab a “gotcha” peice of damning video. The two imposters then handed the videos of the interviews over to FOX News and then the crap hit the fan.
What the congress and the media failed to do was to consider that ACORN immeditaly fired the employees who gave these imposters advice and took quick action to remedy any more unprofessional behavior of their own frontdesk personnel.
CEO Bertha Lewis said, “We have all been deeply disturbed by what we’ve seen in some of these videos. I must say, on behalf of ACORN’s Board and our Advisory Council, that we will go to whatever lengths necessary to reestablish the public trust. For nearly forty years, ACORN has given voice to communities, and gotten results. Right now, our nearly 500,000 member are working their hearts out for quality, affordable healthcare for every American and to help stop the foreclosure crisis. We must get this process right, so the good work can go forward.”
Once FOX began airing the illicitly gained videos, the Senate, led by long-time ACORN hater Senator Mike Johanns (R-NE), almost immediately voted to withold all federal funds from ACORN without consideration of mitigating circumstances. The Senate did not consider that these two, Giles and O’Keefe, had actually been thrown out of ACORN’s offices and in one office the front desk person called the police when the actors mentioned underaged girls. What the Senate, in their fury of hate failed to do was to give ACORN, an organization that has helped millions of people, the chance to police their own employees – a courtesy even Wall Street has been given in the past.
Instead of investigating these right-wing radical “journalists”, congress is now considering investigating ACORN instead, in support of FOX News’s whacky assumptions that all of ACORN’s 1200 offices around the US is somehow equally guilty.
Since this incedent, ACORN has taken corrective measures by firing those employees invlolved outright, and instituting a rigorous training program for its front office personnel. ACORN’s CEO, Bertha Lewis, has also begun an independant internal investigation.
There are other mitigating circumstance that Congress and the main stream media has failed to take into consideration. There is another posting on this blog regarding Tresa Kaelke. Media Matters details how FOX, and Congress, got it wrong:
Here’s the dangerous part of this smear against ACORN; if you shut them down, you do harm to many Americans suffering from abject poverty from the Mississippi delta to the mountains of Kentucky to America’s inner cities. ACORN is made up of over 400,000 member families and is the nation’s largest grassroots community organization of low income families. A coordinated attack on ACORN is a coordinated attack on the poor.
The tragedy in this is not the lack of discreation by ACORN employees although they are gulty of violating ACORN’s rules and were fired for it. The real tragedy here is that ACORN is plainly a victim of radical right bloggers, scam artists, and an entire News network that propels a rabid hatred of the poor and supporters of the poor, and has the full support of the Republican Party.
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