by David Safier TPM has a wonderful, short video showing both CNN and FOX declaring the Supreme Court shot down the individual mandate. Quick, someone superimpose Obama's face on Truman's and have the headline read "Health Care Mandate Struck Down!" instead of "Dewey Defeats Truman." Here's the video. Jaw-dropping. Hysterical. GRAPHIC UPDATE: Hat tip to … Read more
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
The U.S. Supreme Court will announce its opinion regarding the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") on Thursday.
Should the Court strike down the Affordable Care Act en toto, it will be disregarding more than 70 years of Supreme Court precedents on Commerce Clause jurisprudence — and if rogue Justice Antonin Scalia has his way — return to the long discredited "liberty to contract" analysis of the Lochner era.
The conservative media, led by FOX News Fraudcasting and hate radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck will declare this a "major defeat" for President Obama.The corporate "lamestream" media will follow their lead, as they always do, in the echo chamber of the right-wing noise machine.
But in reality, it will be a major defeat for millions of Americans who just lost their last chance at health care — and quite possibly their life. Jonathan Cohn notes the stakes: a ruling against the law will have far-reaching consequences for millions of Americans and those people — and their ailments — are not going away. The media villagers really ought to concentrate on them, not the transient political story.
Despite the vitriolic hatred expressed for "Obamacare" by the right-wing, that hatred is based upon Obama derangement syndrome. It turns out that if Obama's name was not attached to this landmark legislation, a majority of Republicans actually support its key provisions.
by Pamela Powers Hannley Congressional candidate Andrei Cherny–Mr. No Labels, the guy who was installed as chair of the Arizona Democratic Party by bending the rules, and then quit the post to run for Congress– has found himself entangled in a Mitt Romney moment. OK, we’ve seen this many times. Anyone who has been … Read more
By Pamela Powers Hannley When long-time Arizona Republican Senator Jon Kyl announced his impending retirement in February 2011, the chances of a Democrat filling that seat seemed so remote that most news stories—including this one from Politico—only mentioned the Republican heir-apparent, six-term Congressman Jeff Flake. Sixteen months later, Democratic challenger and former Surgeon General Dr. … Read more
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Greg Sargent has an important post about the failure of the corporate media to inform the public in the healthcare debate, which allowed the corporate forces aligned against the Affordable Care Act (the New York Times tallies it up: $235 million has been spent on ads attacking "Obamacare" since March 2010, versus only $69 million on ads favoring it), to create a narrative that was oft repeated in the media echo chamber.
This in turn created the milieu in which fringe right-wing ideas get mainstreamed, e.g., "death panels," and a conservative activist Justice like Antonin Scalia feels emboldened to legislate his radical political ideology from the bench by rejecting well-established court precedent, even his own opinion. Scalia Changes His Mind on Key Obamacare Precedent.
Greg Sargent writes GOP wims message war over health care:
A number of people are pointing to this big Pew poll today to argue that it shows that Republicans won the message war over health care reform. I don’t think there’s any doubt that this is true. But one of the reasons Pew cites for this victory seems particularly interesting:
An analysis by PEJ of the language used in the media (PEJ research) reveals that opponents of the reform won the so-called “messaging war” in the coverage. Terms that were closely associated with opposition arguments, such as “government run,” were far more present in media reports than terms associated with arguments supporting the bill, such as “pre-existing conditions.”
To conduct the analysis, researchers examined and identified three of the most common concepts being pushed by opponents of the bill and the three concepts being promoted by supporters and then examined the news coverage for the presence of those concepts and language. The concepts used by opponents were nearly twice as common as those used by supporters.
Pew finds that the press coverage was also more more preoccupied with the political strategies employed by both sides than it was with the policy specifics of the law itself.