COVID-19 & Healthcare

Carl Bernstein on false equivalency media reporting

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Carl Bernstein was the guest on The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell on Wednesday night for a segment on media false equivalency — the "both sides are to blame" default setting of media reporting (especially the Associated Press). So pay attention media villagers, Bernstein wants a word with you. (Video below the fold).

O'Donnell began the segment by referencing a piece by James Poniewozik at Time magazine, Not “Both Sides,” Now: Why False Equivalence Matters in the Shutdown Showdown:

This month’s fiscal crisis is one such situation. One party (in fact,
essentially one wing of the Republican party), seeking the elimination
or delay of Obamacare,
precipitated a government shutdown and threatened to force a default on
U.S. debt. Period. There was no corresponding threat or demand on the
Democratic or White House side; having gotten the Affordable Care Act
into law three years ago, they are not in the situation of saying, “Pass
Obamacare or we shut ‘er down.”

That’s the situation. To accurately describe it, as news coverage
should, is not to endorse an ideology. It’s not to say that Obamacare is
good or bad. It’s not to say that Republicans do or don’t have good
reasons to oppose it. It’s not to say that Democrats have or haven’t
sought political benefit in the aftermath. But it correctly places the
impetus where it belongs.

Much of the big-picture news coverage has been clear on this.
But as the crisis dragged on, more news stories framed the story as
old-fashioned bipartisan gridlock between two equally culpable,
stubborn, useless sides. It becomes “Boehner, White House Harden
Stances” (Washington Post); “Congress Plays Chicken” (a CNN chyron this morning); “each side trying to blame the other” (Politico).

“Both sides are to blame; the truth is somewhere in between”–that has always been the political media’s happy, safe place . . .

* * *

But in a case like the fiscal crisis, false equivalence matters. It’s
the difference between reporting an extraordinary event and an ordinary
one, which in this case is crucial to how the story plays out
politically. It’s a matter of whether “not changing current law” becomes
redefined as “getting 100% of what you want.” If this is just one more
case of those knuckleheads in Washington “digging in their heels,”
“playing the blame game,” and so on, it normalizes the situation for the
news audience: it sends the tacit message that it is entirely ordinary,
every so often, to have a forced debt crisis that reasonable people
resolve through “compromise” by renegotiating major pieces of U.S. law.

Brewer and Barton: Strange days indeed

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by David Safier

I don't know, maybe the end days are at hand. When the Brewer lies down with the Liberals and Barton is, well, Barton . . . Can someone dig up an appropriate quote from Revelations? Something better than Michele Bachman's "leaf is on the fig tree"? (What the hell does that mean anyway?)

Gov. Brewer is pleading with Republicans to leave Obamacare alone. Kill it and Arizona's economy will be crippled, she said.

“The bottom line is we need that money in our economy to save rural hospitals and jobs in the rural areas,” the governor said, as well as making sure hospitals in metropolitan areas, where most AHCCCS patients are seen, get paid. “It’s all about jobs and getting back federal dollars that our taxpayers have paid to the federal government, to bring them home.”

There's more to her calculation — I should probably say "her advisors' calculations" — than I realized. The only reason the lege was able to take people off of Arizona's Medicaid program AHCCCS was because the voter mandate said the state was only required to use "available" funds for the program. When the funds dried up, the lege was able to cut back. But now the state has a surplus.

Since [the budget crisis], state finances have recovered. It ended the last fiscal year with close to $1 billion in the bank, plus another $450 million in a “rainy day’’ fund — money Brewer said she fears a court would force it use to fulfill the voter mandate.

Brewer's people understood, if we didn't take a billion from the feds to fund the Medicaid expansion, the state might be forced to pay for the program. Kill Obamacare and you wipe out the Medicaid expansion money. Brewer may dislike Obamacare intensely, but she's gotta root for it regardless.

Then there's Rep. Brenda Barton.

Boehner Defiantly Rationalizes GOP Madness, as Stephanopoulos Presses for Shutdown End Game Strategy (video)

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by Pamela Powers Hannley

A week ago, Republican grandstanding in the House of Representatives shutdown the US government. Saying they want to "save the American people from the threat of Obamacare" Tea Party anarchists are risking the health and welfare of millions of Americans, our standing as a world leader, and our financial health as a nation, as they stall budget negotiations. This is beyond unconscionable. It is traitorous.

Bankrolled by the Koch Brothers and a handful of capitalists bent on denying affordable health care to millions of Americans, Republicans in the House of Representatives continue to use double speak lie to cloud the issues and deflect blame for this dangerous brinksmanship away from themselves.

From Esquire…

We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation's insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up to the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson's account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.

We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons. 

[Video after the jump.]

Time Magazine cover gets it right

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie: Time Magazine is still in business? Who knew. In any event, Time has the perfect cover this week on newsstands. So-called GOP "moderates" are held hostage by their radical extremist Tea Party captors, and in a classic case of Stockholm syndrome, are empathetic and sympathetic towards their captors to the point of … Read more

South Carolina and another nullification crisis

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The Washington Post's Colbert King got it exactly right in The rise of the New Confederacy.

Confederale SoldiersSouth Carolina, the state that gave us the Nullification Crisis with the South Carolina Ordinance of Nullification in 1832, until Congress in 1833 passed a Force Bill, authorizing President Andrew Jackson to use military force against South Carolina ended the crisis.

South Carolina, the home of Senator John C. Calhoun, the intellectual force behind states' rights and nullification, under which states could declare null and void federal laws which they viewed as unconstitutional, and who was an inspiration to the secessionists of 1860–61.

South Carolina, the first state to secede from the United States with the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.

South Carolina, whose Confederate militia batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, the first shots of the American Civil War in 1861.

South Carolina, which has refused to accept its defeat in the Civil War or to accept the post-Civil War Amendments, in particular the 14th Amendment, which forever ended any debate over Sen. Calhoun's theories of nullification and secession.