COVID-19 & Healthcare

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I stopped watching the Sunday Morning bobbleheads years ago. Why should I ruin a perfectly good Sunday morning watching incompetent infotainment actors pretending to be journalists? But I have relatives staying with me this weekend, and they insisted.

After sitting through the interminable torture of the Sunday Morning bobbleheads and their repetition of GOPropaganda talking points like the loyal little stenographers they are, all I can say is: "New Rule: cancel all the Sunday Morning bobblehead shows" — please, just make it stop!

I swear, American's I.Q. will increase a good 10 points after the first couple of weeks in the absence of these preening infotainment actors pretending to be journalists.

Who set me off in particular was Savannah Guthrie, who was sitting in as host of NBC's Meet The Press Gregory this week. I remember Savannah from when she was a TV news reporter for KVOA here in Tucson. I didn't think much of her then, and I think even less of her now. This morning she was the perfect little parrot for the GOPropanda talking point, "Why won't the president just sit down and negotiate with the Republicans?" (squawk!)

It's not just Savannah. I have heard the insufferable Wolf Blitzer and Candy Crowley at CNN parrot the same GOPropanda talking point all week.

Do you know who is the only infotainment actor pretending to be a journalist who answered this GOPropaganda talking point correctly? CNN's Fareed Zakaria.

by David Safier

Today's NY Times article, A Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning, isn't so much news as confirmation of what we already knew. The federal shutdown has been planned for months. It's a heavily funded, last ditch effort to wipe out Obamacare before people begin using it. They know any efforts after January 1 will be too late.

To many Americans, the shutdown came out of nowhere. But interviews with a wide array of conservatives show that the confrontation that precipitated the crisis was the outgrowth of a long-running effort to undo the law, the Affordable Care Act, since its passage in 2010 — waged by a galaxy of conservative groups with more money, organized tactics and interconnections than is commonly known.

[snip]

The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, have been deeply involved with financing the overall effort. A group linked to the Kochs, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, disbursed more than $200 million last year to nonprofit organizations involved in the fight. Included was $5 million to Generation Opportunity, which created a buzz last month with an Internet advertisement showing a menacing Uncle Sam figure popping up between a woman’s legs during a gynecological exam.

The article is filled with details, including the dual efforts to get young people to refuse to sign up, which would harm the revenue needed to keep the program viable, and to get the elderly — meaning people on Medicare who don't participate in Obamacare — angry enough to turn out for Republican candidates in large numbers.

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

As i posted yesterday, one of the high priests of Beltway centrism, political scientist Norman
Ornstein, has been ringing the warning bell about the radicalism of the
modern Republican Party for a couple of years now as well. Ornstein's
latest warning in The Atlantic is The Republican Hardliners Aren’t Conservatives, They’re Radicals.

Ornstein's frequent collaborator and high priest of Beltway centrism, Thomas Mann, writes in a CNN opinion, GOP House can't claim to speak for America:

One talking point frequently used by Republicans to justify shutting
down the government while trying to overturn the Affordable Care Act is
that the House and its Republican majority are more representative of
Americans' views than President Barack Obama and the Democratic Senate.

That is preposterous and beside the point.

The ACA is law. End of
story. The House Republicans' attempt to nullify a duly-enacted law
violates the norms of our constitutional system. It is reckless
economically and an egregious affront to our democratic form of
government.

House Republicans have
every right to press their views in Congress but not to threaten to blow
up the U.S. and global economy by shutting down the government and
threatening public default.

We have elections for all
three key players — the president, the House and the Senate. If
Republicans want to change the law, they must do it the old-fashioned
way: Persuade the others to accept their position or win control of the
White House and Senate.

House Republicans lost
ground in the 2012 elections, lost the national vote for the House by
over a million votes and retained a majority only because of favorable
districting.

Obama won re-election by
3.9 percentage points and got an overwhelming victory in the Electoral
College. Senate Democrats retained their majority despite having to
defend more than twice as many seats as the Republicans.

House Republicans
represent a distinct minority of public sentiment. They carelessly
generalize from the echo chambers of their safe districts to the
national electorate.