Reminder: March for Justice against SB 1070 in Phoenix on Wednesday

April 24, 2012

Posted by AzBlueMeanie: Announcement from the National Day Laborer Organizing Network: Phoenix to March Against SB1070 and Federal Deportation ProgramsDuring SCOTUS Hearing Who: A Wide Coalition of Organizations [including Somos America and the American Civil Liberties Union] When: April 25th. March to begin at 3:00 pm Arizona Time. Where: Opening Rally at Civic Space Park, 424 N. Central … Read more

The Daniel Patterson soap opera is over

April 24, 2012

Posted by AzBlueMeanie: ICYMI, the Daniel Patterson soap opera is over. The Pima County Board of Supervisors on Monday seelcted a Democrat independent to fill the unexpired term of Rep. Patterson. Fontana to fill Patterson vacancy: Attorney Nicholas Fontana will replace former state Rep. Daniel Patterson, who resigned earlier this month. Fontana said he was … Read more

Willard ‘Mittens’ Romney will be Cousin George W. Bush redux

April 24, 2012

Posted by AzBlueMeanie: Somehow I missed this bit of trivia from TIME magazine back in December. Romney and Bush Are Cousins, Ancestry.com Finds | NewsFeed | TIME.com: Believe it or not, Mitt Romney and George W. Bush are cousins — 10th cousins, twice removed, that is. Historians at Ancestry.com, the world’s largest online family-history resource, have … Read more

An annual ritual of spring: ‘The sky is falling! The sky is falling!’

April 24, 2012

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The Arizona Republic today published an annual ritual of spring, the gloom and doom forecasts for the social security and Medicare trust funds. Social Security heading for insolvency even faster. The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

First, you need to keep in mind that there is an entire cottage industry in conservative circles that has sought to do away with the social security and Medicare trust funds since the funds were first established. The latest iteration of this effort is Rep. Paul Ryan's "Roadmap to America's Ruin" that proposes to turn Medicare into a coupon voucher system to purchase private health insurance plans, and the GOP dream of privatizing social security into individual retirement investment accounts so the banksters of Wall Street can rip you off and leave you destitute remains alive.

And then there are the media enablers of this conservative opposition to social security and Medicare. I have told you about Pete Peterson ("I.O.U.S.A. Solutions") who wants to repeal social security and Medicare, and his group's unholy alliance with the Neoconservative Washington Post. Pete Peterson's war on social security – and his media enablers, and Washington Post GOPropaganda. This "GOPropaganda" gets fed into the echo chamber of the "lamestream" media for amplification without any critical analysis.

So it is nice to see that Sarah Kliff at Ezra Klein's WonkBlog tells everyone to take a deep breath and chill, Reports of Medicare’s death are greatly exaggerated:

Around this time last year, Americans got a dire warning: Medicare was heading into the red, quickly. “Medicare to go broke in 2024,” one headline proclaimed. “We know,” Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) told Fox News, “that Medicare is going broke by 2024.”

Those predictions of Medicare’s impending doom came from the 2011 Medicare Trustees Report, an annual look at the entitlement program’s finances. The dense, 267-page tome is never much of a page-turner. Most of it is obtuse, economical analysis and endless charts — not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with endless charts. But there’s one figure that always gets a lot of attention: The date by which, if things stay on current course, the Medicare trust fund will become insolvent.

[On Monday], the Medicare Trustees will release their 2012 report. It’s likely to elicit a similar round of headlines. Before that happens, it’s worth understanding why projections of the fund’s insolvency actually say very little about whether Medicare is going bankrupt. Reports of Medicare’s death are, as Mark Twain would put it, greatly exaggerated.

* * *

In 1970, the Medicare Trustees began issuing annual reports on the financial state of the Medicare Trust Fund. It has faced a projected shortfall “almost from its inception,” a 2009 Congressional Research Service report found. In 1970, the Medicare Trustees Report predicted that the fund would be insolvent just two years later, in 1972. Pretty much every year after that, the Trust Funds’ insolvency has never seemed that far off:

Flash forward four decades, and Medicare still has the dollars to cover hospital visits. How does that happen?

The ‘lamestream’ media loves a liar

April 24, 2012

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The rationale for Willard "Mittens" Romney’s campaign is based upon the idea that President Obama should be held responsible for the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs lost in the months just after he took office when the economy was in free fall — but before any of his policies took effect.

Greg Sargent writes at the Plum Line blog, Mitt Romney the Amnesia Candidate:

As I noted last week, the Romney campaign is betting that he can lull the American people into forgetting just how severe a crisis Obama inherited upon taking office. The “net” job loss metric is central to this effort to inflict mass amnesia on the public.

Yet despite the fact that this argument is absolutely central to Romney’s case against Obama, it has drawn very little media scrutiny.

So it’s good to see that Paul Krugman has devoted an entire column to it today, labeling Romney the “amnesia candidate”:

Mr. Romney constantly talks about job losses under Mr. Obama. Yet all of the net job loss took place in the first few months of 2009, that is, before any of the new administration’s policies had time to take effect. So the Ohio speech was a perfect illustration of the way the Romney campaign is banking on amnesia, on the hope that voters don’t remember that Mr. Obama inherited an economy that was already in free fall.

How does the campaign deal with people who point out the awkward reality that all of the “Obama” job losses took place before any Obama policies had taken effect? The fallback argument — which was rolled out when reporters asked about the factory closure — is that even though Mr. Obama inherited a deeply troubled economy, he should have fixed it by now. That factory is still closed, said a Romney adviser, because of the failure of Obama policies “to really get this economy going again.”

…he’s basically attacking Mr. Obama for not acting as if George Bush had been given a third term. Are the American people — and perhaps more to the point, the news media — forgetful enough for that attack to work? I guess we’ll find out.

The degree to which Romney has been able to skate by with this argument is truly remarkable. It’s the basis of Romney’s entire rationale for running for president. He has repeated it in every conceivable forum for months on end. Yet it has gone almost entirely unexamined by the news media. One hopes Krugman’s column today will begin to change that.

Sadly, Greg Sargent has the answer to this question is subsequent posts: