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Clueless: Anonymous Says Senate Pushes For Public Option Without Obama’s Support

Oct 25th, 2009
by Tom.
1 comment

via Leaderless: Senate Pushes For Public Option Without Obama’s Support

President Barack Obama is actively discouraging Senate Democrats in their effort to include a public insurance option with a state opt-out clause as part of health care reform. In its place, say multiple Democratic sources, Obama has indicated a preference for an alternative policy, favored by the insurance industry, which would see a public plan “triggered” into effect in the future by a failure of the industry to meet certain benchmarks.

This opening paragraph is unofficial conjecture and based on hearsay from sources either unwilling to go on the record about it, or fictional.

The administration retreat runs counter to the letter and the spirit of Obama’s presidential campaign.

Opinion. And anger.

“The leadership understands that pushing for a public option is a somewhat risky strategy, but we may be within striking distance. A signal from the president could be enough to put us over the top,” said one Senate Democratic leadership aide. Such pleading is exceedingly rare on Capitol Hill and comes only after Senate leaders exhausted every effort to encourage Obama to engage.

The sentence that begins with “Such pleading is exceedingly rare” is quite possibly changing the context of the quote from the anonymous “one Senate Democratic leadership aide”. The sentence is craftily joined onto this quote to make the reader think the person being quoted meant something entirely different than what he/she said. Is the statement by the anonymous person fact or opinion?

How do we know that “Senate leaders exhausted every effort to encourage Obama to engage”? The authors fail to tell us who has “pleaded” with Obama and who has simply suggested something to him.

This whole article is bent toward some sort of chastisement of the administration’s perceived lack of leadership, when the truth is Obama has gotten much done in his first year especially considering the condition of the economy when he took control.

Look, we all want a strong public option but we have to remember where all this would be if November 2008 had turned out differently, and then count or blessings we have gotten this far.

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via Leaderless: Senate Pushes For Public Option Without Obama’s Support

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A Second Look | ACORN Is A Victim Of A Radical Right Set-Up

Sep 19th, 2009
by Tom.
No comments yet

UPDATE 09/24/09

via ACORN Sues Makers of Pimp and Prostitute Video

BALTIMORE — Community activist group ACORN is suing the makers of a hidden-camera video that showed employees of its Baltimore office giving tax advice to a man posing as a pimp and a woman posing as a prostitute.

The liberal group contends that the audio portion of the video was obtained illegally because Maryland requires two-party consent to create sound recordings.

The two employees seen in the video were fired after it was posted online. The lawsuit says the employees, Tonja Thompson and Shera Williams, suffered “extreme emotional distress.”

The multimillion-dollar lawsuit seeks damages from James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, who played the pimp and prostitute in the videos, and from conservative columnist Andrew Breitbart, who posted the videos on his Web site.

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:

Media Matters: Fox News’ incomplete, misleading ACORN coverage is just nuts


From: Media Matters for America [action@mediamatters.org]
Sent: Saturday, September 19, 2009 3:13 AM
To: tom
Subject: Media Matters: Fox News’ incomplete, misleading ACORN coverage is just nuts

If you get your news from right-wing talk radio and Fox News, you probably think America is being overrun by a hyper-corrupt organized prostitution ring headquartered in the White House.

In case you missed this story: Two conservative activists, Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe, visited a host of ACORN offices around the country posing as a pimp and prostitute. They asked for help establishing a brothel, and even stated that underage girls would be working for them. They had a surveillance camera and recorded at least four interactions with ACORN employees and claimed these employees provided them with assistance. All of the employees implicated have now been fired, and federal aid to ACORN has been cut off.

 

ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis

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.

It was just the beginning. “Obama is Van Jones, Obama is ACORN,” right-wing pundit Monica Crowley said on Wednesday. “Just as he is ACORN, just as he is Van Jones, he is racism,” Rush Limbaugh parroted the sentiment on Thursday. Radio host Jim Quinn said that we were all living in the “United States of ACORN,” and Fox News’ Megyn Kelly had Karl Rove on to talk about the tapes exposing what was now a “remarkable criminal enterprise.” The stakes couldn’t be higher. ACORN, after all, was on tap to receive “eight and a half trillion dollars of stimulus money,” according to Sean Hannity — a number that was a thousand times greater than the equally fictitious billions that Beck had accorded to the organization on behalf of the government. ACORN had suddenly ballooned from an organization which had received $53 million in federal funds over 15 years to representing 67 percent of America’s gross domestic product.

Fox was running so wild with the story that they were willing to lower their already dubious standards. The first problem was one of logic. Four videos were being promoted as unimpeachable proof that all of ACORN is equally corrupt — all 1,200 chapters and hundreds of ACORN employees. It was the opposite of how a credible investigation is supposed to function, in which conclusions are withheld until after all the facts are in. By comparison, here, the conservative media had a few isolated facts but were willing to extrapolate an entire thesis from them.

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.

“As a result of the indefensible action of a handful of our employees, I am, in consultation with ACORN’s Executive Committee, immediately ordering a halt to any new intakes into ACORN’s service programs until completion of an independent review.  I have also communicated with ACORN’s independent Advisory Council, and they will assist ACORN in naming an independent auditor and investigator to conduct a thorough review of all of the organizations relevant systems and processes.  That reviewer, to be named within 48 hours, will make recommendations directly to me and to the full ACORN Board.  We enter this process with a commitment that all recommendations will be implemented.”

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:

More important, Fox News failed to vet the tapes. This was made painfully clear with the case of the San Bernardino ACORN office, which was featured in the fourth video to be released. In the footage, ACORN employee Tresa Kaelke claimed that she had murdered her former husband following a period of domestic abuse. On September 15, Beck and Sean Hannity both broadcast Kaelke’s assertion. Beck, who had reported on the supposed confession during his radio program, added on Fox, “She never spanked her kids, but she did shoot her husband dead.” Later that night, Hannity played the same clip, and in a rare moment of intellectual curiosity, asked about the veracity of the murder claim. “We’re working on it,” Giles said, which was enough for Hannity. The following morning, on September 16, Fox News’ Gretchen Carlson repeated the allegation, saying, “She killed somebody? Despite this, some lawmakers want to keep funding the group.”

But Kaelke’s ex-husbands are alive. The San Bernardino Police Department confirmed this simple fact on September 15, releasing a statement that read: “Investigators have been in contact with the involved party’s known former husbands, who are alive and well.” (Kaelke was soon quoted in an ACORN press release saying that she had made the claim because she was seeking to mislead the undercover videographers, whom she was suspicious of.) In spite of these developments, the next day, Hannity was still treating the San Bernardino tape as fully credible. He even hosted Giles again but failed to ask her about her own investigation into the truth of the claim. (Here’s a full timeline of the attention the San Bernardino video received.)

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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A Second Look | Deathers, Shouters, and The Assault on the Truth

Sep 3rd, 2009
by Tom.
No comments yet

via Tackling Myths, Lies About Health Care Reform and Older Americans to Get to the Truth – AARP Bulletin Today.
By: Patricia Barry | Source: AARP Bulletin Today | August 14, 2009

Deathers

It has been a wild and woolly August for President Obama and his herculean task of turning our already overburdened ship of state around toward a more sensible and fair health system. But he has not been entirely clear with the American public about specifics that must be included in the bill and has left it up to Congress to hash out the mechanics of the turnaround. This has opened the door for skepticism. Wild statements of fear have been promulgated from the top and down through the ranks by the insurance lobby, who stand the most to loose by a change in insurance regulations, and the talking points have quickly spread to the bottom where all the radical right-wing extremists shout things like “Obama is a socialist” and “kill him”.

It is important that we pause, take a breath, and think. We must stop spreading myths about health care reform and start disseminating some truth. From the above linked article in the AARP Bulletin, September 2009.

…But this summer something new has entered the political arena—a tsunami of rumors, myths, fear-mongering and misinformation about the proposals that surges around the Internet in nanoseconds. “I’m totally confused about what’s going on,” one reader wrote to the AARP Bulletin. “How do I know who to believe?”

“What we’re seeing is a flood of viral content that distorts the Obama effort to reform health care,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, who codirects www.FactCheck.org, a website that examines questionable claims from all sides of the political spectrum.

Since the  White House has not unequivocally itemized the tenants of what health care reform will be, as mentioned before, there has been an opportunity by the right-wing to define the much needed reform in their image. High powered lobby efforts from AHIP and others have spread vitriolic myths and rumors in an effort to stop the whole process. The right-wing, once again, decides to obstruct legislation rather than offer concrete ideas.

This fall will see the merging of two separate bills in the Senate, and a floor vote on the House bill, H.R. 3200, America’s Affordable Health Choices Act. One Senate bill called the Affordable Health Choices Act produced by the HELP Committee includes the “public option” that can be defined as “government backed insurance” an option that would compete with private insurance to keep prices low. The other Senate bill which will be finalized soon by the Senate Finance Committee after the return from vacation on September 8th, is not expected to contain a public option. The House bill also contains a public option. It is important that the myths and fear-mongered rumors that have gone viral be compared to the actual language of these bills.

I applaud the AARP for tackling some of these wild myths and rumors, and am especially thankful that they are an organization that has the interests of our elderly and retired community at the core of their advocacy.

AARP has weighed in by debunking some of the myths in a Q & A format:

Q. Will the government take over health care so we end up with socialized medicine?

No. Neither the president nor the congressional committees have suggested anything remotely resembling a government takeover of health care.

Obama has specifically rejected the idea of a “single payer” system, like Canada’s, in which the government insures all citizens. None of the leading proposals in Congress even considers going down this road—a fact that has brought strong protests from some consumer and doctor groups that favor this approach. And although Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., has long called for a “Medicare for All” program, this is not included in proposals from the Senate health committee that he chairs.

Where did this myth come from? Opponents of reform constantly use the term “government-run health care” to disparage the reform proposals, despite the popularity and success of existing government-run programs like Medicare.

What do the proposals say? Obama has proposed setting up a single “public plan”—available only to those without employer insurance—to provide a voluntary alternative to the many private plans that offer individual health insurance.

Q. Will private insurance be outlawed or wither on the vine?

No. Obama and the congressional committees say their objective is to build on the current system—keeping employer-sponsored group insurance and giving more consumer protections to people who are employed by small businesses or buy insurance as individuals.

Where did this myth come from? Currently 177 million people have employer or individual insurance. The issue caught fire after the Lewin Group, a research consulting firm owned by United Health Group, estimated that 119 million of them would switch to a public plan, if everybody were allowed to join it. But the proposals actually exclude those with employer insurance from the public plan.

What do the proposals say? Each of the proposals calls for national or regional heath insurance exchanges that would allow people without employer or public insurance and small employers to choose from a menu of private insurance plans (and a public option, if there is one), with online information to help compare them.

Q. Will the government encourage euthanasia to save costs?

No. This false but scary idea—now surging around the Internet in blogs and e-mails—claims that the House bill would require Medicare beneficiaries to have mandatory classes every five years to decide how to end their lives earlier. Typical e-mails add: “They’re going to push suicide to cut Medicare spending!” All identify page 425 of the bill as their source.

Where did this myth come from? On July 16, Betsy McCaughey, a former Republican lieutenant governor of New York [and a paid spokesperson of a health industry think tank] , appeared on a conservative radio show. Citing page 425, she said: “Congress would make it mandatory … that every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner … all to do what’s in society’s best interest.”

On July 23, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, leader of the House Republicans, issued a statement saying: “This provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia if enacted into law.” On Aug. 7, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin described the proposal as setting up a “death panel.”

What does the proposal say? The clause on page 424 (section 1233) would require Medicare to pay doctors for their time if beneficiaries chose to consult them for information on advance care planning, such as making a living will, appointing a health proxy, and hospice care (already covered by Medicare). Medicare would pay for these sessions only once every five years.

Q. Will Medicare be eliminated or gutted to pay for reform?

No. It’s inconceivable that any lawmaker would commit political suicide by proposing to get rid of Medicare. But the rumor has fast gained ground.

Where did this myth come from? Dick Morris, a political commentator, posted an article on his blog that began: “Obama’s health care proposal is, in effect, the repeal of the Medicare program as we know it.”

What do the proposals say? It’s true they all seek to save billions from Medicare costs—not by cutting benefits, but by setting up new ways to pay doctors more fairly and to reward providers for quality of care instead of (as now) paying them a fee for each separate service; reducing waste and fraud; and reducing preventable hospital readmissions.

Q. Will the government ration care?

No. But the specter of “rationing” is the battle cry of reform opponents. They say people in their 90s, 80s or even 70s will be deemed “too old” for joint replacements and cancer care—and even, in one persistent rumor, that “Obama​care” would deny treatment to people going blind in one eye as long as their other eye still works.

Where did this myth come from? It’s part of the “government takeover” argument, playing on often inaccurate beliefs that countries with national health systems severely ration care. In a widely circulated memo, political consultant Frank Luntz offered Republicans language that he believed would most resonate with Americans to defeat the Democrats’ push for reform. He suggested they say: “In countries with government run healthcare, politicians make your healthcare decisions. They decide if you’ll get the procedure you need … We can’t have that in America.”

What do the proposals say? In fact, they seek to prevent denial of care. Under every proposal, insurance companies would no longer be able to deny coverage on the basis of current health or preexisting medical conditions.

Where to go for the facts on health care reform proposals:

The following websites are run by nonpartisan organizations with no stake in the proposals:

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