COVID-19 & Healthcare

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Remember when the gatekeepers of the corporate media admitted their complicity in the Whitewater conservative scandal mongering of the 1990s, and promised that it wouldn't happen again? Yeah . . .

This was followed by their complicity in selling an illegal and unnecessary war in Iraq and fabricating justifications for war crimes: illegal torture, indefinite detention, and rendition of prisoners to black site prisons; and the wholesale undermining of American's constitutional right to privacy with pervasive electronic eavesdropping, "sneak peak" national security letters without a warrant, etc. War crimes are a "big f#%king deal," as Joe Biden would say. But IOKIYAR.

With the election of President Barack Obama, It's Whitewater all over again:

The “scandals” confronting President Obama are derived almost entirely from the political and media mindset that gave us Whitewater.

That is to say, they are minor instances of bureaucratic incompetence and/or executive overreach that are seized upon by hysterical right-wing media and politicians and eventually aggrandized by their craven mainstream brethren into red-alert-Chryon, full-scale Media Narratives.

The engine of belief that drives these stories is that, with enough rooting around by reporters and congressional panels and special prosecutors, the president eventually will be implicated in some kind of Major Impropriety.

This is what allows otherwise self-respecting journalists to flog stories that are, by all rational standards, partisan boondoggles.

This is the beauty of the scandal mentality: It’s inherently speculative. And it is thus nourished not by an accretion of increasingly damning facts, as in Watergate, but by a daisy chain of lurid conjecture and tangential inquisitions. To quote [bob Woodward], “You’ve got to investigate all these things.”

To put it plainly, Watergate was a foxhunt; Whitewater was a fishing trip.

The latest scandal mongering fishing trip by the corporate media has been the "ObamaCare" rollout. Echoing GOPropaganda talking points, the media villagers have been hysterically reporting any minor instances of bureaucratic incompetence as if it is the biggest disaster of all time! Just last week, the New York Times (of Judy Miller fame — Iraq war, Plamegate) made the ridiculous comparison that the "ObamaCare" rollout is just like the failure of the Bush administration to respond to people suffering and dying as New Orleans drowned after Katrina (with helpful quotes from Bushies making this unjustified comparison). "One of these things is not like the other."

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The one political pundit who pisses me off more than any other, mostly because he is treated as credible and "intelligent" by other media villagers, is the patrician prevaricator for the plutocracy, George Will. Just because Will uses the entire dictionary in his columns does not make him "intelligent." If you actually follow the substance of what he says, he is a conservative ideological extremist. Just because he is not a bomb thrower like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity does not make him any more credible.

Arizona has its own version of the patrician prevaricator for the plutocracy, a George Will mini-me if you will, Robert Robb of the Arizona Republic. This conservative ideological extremist sets me off in the same way that George Will does.

Here is the latest example of how mini-me at the Republic lives in the shadow his role model, George Will.

The patrician prevaricator for the plutocracy was on FAUX News Sunday, and "suggested that President Barack Obama had caused a "constitutional scandal" by giving states the option of letting insurance companies continue to sell junk insurance plans for one year. George Will: Obamacare 'Fix' Lets Next GOP President Stop Taxing Rich Without Congress:

"It looks to a great many of us [GOPropagandists] to be illegal," he added, referring to the so "fix" that will give insurance regulators the leeway of allowing low-quality insurance plans to continue for additional year. "What we're told in grade school when we study civics is in that building behind you are the two legislative chambers of the federal government, the Senate and the House. It turns out, there's a third. It's called the White House press room, into which the president can, on a whim, sashay and rewrite laws."

"I do think this is a constitutional scandal," Will said. "Suppose the next Republican president — and there will be another Republican president — comes into the press room sometime and says, 'You know, I really think the capital gains tax does not serve the national interest so we're just, as an act of executive discretion, going to quit enforcing that for a few years. That's not the rule of law."

by David Safier Oh wait. . . . by virtually all measures of cost, access to care and ease of dealing with insurance problems, Americans fared poorly compared with people in other advanced countries. . . . The United States spends far more than [10 other industrialized countries] on a per capita basis and as … Read more

by David Safier Oh wait. That was the bursting of the housing bubble in September, 2008. Never mind.

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

My apologies to Alfred Hitchcock for the wordplay on his brilliant adaption of "The 39 Steps."

No apologies are owed, however, to the 39 Democratic "squishes" in the House who voted for Rep. Fred Upton’s “Keep Your Health Plan Act.” Their defections were pointless. This Tea-Publican messaging bill will not get a hearing in the Senate, and even if it did somehow get a vote, President Obama has promised to veto it.

As Steve Benen observed, "[W]hat was the point of all of this effort? It boils down to Republican 'messaging' goals, which some party leaders consider more important than anything else."

So 39 Democratic squishes simply aided and abetted GOP messaging goals. With friends like these . . .

Andrew Rosenthal at the New York Times was unsparing in his criticism of the 39 squishes. Cutting the Heart Out of Health Reform:

It’s easy to be mad at President Obama over health care reform – the broken website, the confusing choices, his false promise that everyone could keep their current plans.

But it’s still hard to fathom why 39 Democrats voted for a bill in the House that would allow people to retain current, substandard individual policies, and renew them next year even if they don’t provide the basic coverage required by the Affordable Care Act. (You have to wonder, to start, whether they actually read the act before they voted for it, the same question I’d like to ask of Mr. Obama and his team. The changed requirements were in that law.)

Perhaps it was just a protest vote, a freebie based on the lawmakers’ certainty that the Senate will never take up or pass this ridiculous bill. But did those Democrats know what they were voting for this time around?