The Morning Whorehouse

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

God, I hate Morning Joke, and today was particularly obnoxious. Charles Pierce:

Don’t know if any of you saw it, but Morning Squint, the wake-up show on liberal network MSNBC, had an episode today that can reasonably called epic. There was a long segment on the new bag of gossip produced by the Double Haitch Boys. (Listening to Mika Brzezinski talk to Mark Halperin about politics was like watching a seal and a goat recite Shakespeare.) It appears that sources say Barack Obama may have had some moments of doubt during the campaign. There was some usual Obamacare goofery. And then, because the opinions of Jack Abramoff’s sanctified bagman matter to somebody in the booking office, we had Ralph Reed giving sage political advice to the Republicans about how to get out of the ditch, as though he and his decades of Jesus-grifting hadn’t helped driven it there in the first place. Let us be plain. Ralph Reed is a con-man who would sell his gray-haired granny to the Somali pirates for fifty cents worth of consulting fees. He has nothing worth contributing to the national dialogue. This should be plain by now to all but the deliberately dim. The people who put this mess together every morning are not as embarrassing as the allegedly important people who appear on it, and nowhere near as embarrassing as the people who take it seriously, some of whom rule us.

Thanks to Price Benowitz LLP.

Another mainstream lie – populists are ‘taking over’

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

My friend the swamp rabbit was trying to make me stop reading a lengthy op-ed with the provocative headline “Plutocrats vs. Populists.” “This paper ain’t fit to wrap fish in,” he said. “Even virtual fish.”

He’s right. The New York Times rarely publishes anything truly provocative, even if the subject is as important as the corruption of government by the super-rich. The piece on plutocrats, by Chrystia Freeland, “a Liberal Party candidate for the Canadian Parliament,” makes so classic a case of false equivalence that I’m tempted to think The Times’s former editor Bill Keller helped write it. The first paragraph:

Here’s the puzzle of America today: the plutocrats have never been richer, and their economic power continues to grow, but the populists, the wilder the better, are taking over. The rise of the political extremes is most evident, of course, in the domination of the Republican Party by the Tea Party and in the astonishing ability of this small group to shut down the American government. But the centrists are losing out in more genteel political battles on the left, too — that is the story of Bill de Blasio’s dark-horse surge to the mayoralty in New York, and of the Democratic president’s inability to push through his choice to run the Federal Reserve, Lawrence H. Summers.

Populists are “taking over” what, exactly? How do you define “centrist” when one of the two major parties keeps moving further to the right? How valid is the phrase “rise of the political extremes,” given the fact that only one party, the GOP, is pushing an ideologically driven agenda? Use of the plural “extremes” points to the big lies at the core of Freeland’s argument — that populists are undermining plutocrats and their lobbyists, who control both major parties, and that left-wing populists — whoever they are — are having an impact on Democratic policy-making.

Freeland compares the GOP’s shutdown of the government with the Democrats’ nomination of De Blasio and resistance to Summers, as if these are equally significant examples of extremist power. As if the accepted choice for the Fed, Janet Yellen, is a fire-breathing leftist. As if there is a Tea Party equivalent on the left. As if there are any true leftists in the Dem Party!

If the Dems had a left wing, Obama’s nomination for a second term wouldn’t have gone unchallenged. There would have been resistance in the party to massive tax breaks for mega-corporations, pressure to prosecute George W. Bush and other war criminals, a strong push for single-payer insurance rather than acceptance of clumsy Obamacare. We would have seen a real fight for laws to address climate change and a serious effort to create jobs programs and rescue homeowners rather than big banks.

Freeland warms up using false premises then spouts one logical fallacy after another. Her false equivalence of the GOP’s billionaire-backed “populists” with mythical left-wing foes of the Obama administration seems willfully obtuse. Honest observers know the Tea Party is on board with plutocrats, and that the left — such as it is — isn’t.

But The Times is interested in the appearance of so-called objectivity, not in presenting an honest assessment of our broken political system, even in the op-ed pages. The plutocrats who own The Times and the other media giants don’t allow that.

Obamacare

~ susie

I do know a couple of people who are getting hit hard with premium increases, and I don’t want to diminish what they’re going through. But if we had a “normal” Republican Congress, they’d work on fixing this stuff.

In the meantime, there are a lot of improvements (assuming you have no problem with a corporate-friendly for-profit plan, anyway).

Across the country, insurance companies have sent misleading letters to consumers, trying to lock them into the companies’ own, sometimes more expensive health insurance plans rather than let them shop for insurance and tax credits on the Obamacare marketplaces — which could lead to people like Donna spending thousands more for insurance than the law intended. In some cases, mentions of the marketplace in those letters are relegated to a mere footnote, which can be easily overlooked.

The extreme lengths to which some insurance companies are going to hold on to existing customers at higher price, as the Affordable Care Act fundamentally re-orders the individual insurance market, has caught the attention of state insurance regulators.

The insurance companies argue that it’s simply capitalism at work. But regulators don’t see it that way. By warning customers that their health insurance plans are being canceled as a result of Obamacare and urging them to secure new insurance plans before the Obamacare launched on Oct. 1, these insurers put their customers at risk of enrolling in plans that were not as good or as affordable as what they could buy on the marketplaces.

TPM has confirmed two specific examples where companies contacted their customers prior to the marketplace’s Oct. 1 opening and pushed them to renew their health coverage at a higher price than they would pay through the marketplace. State regulators identified the schemes, but they weren’t necessarily able to stop them.

It’s not yet clear how widespread this practice became in the months leading up to the marketplace’s opening — or how many Americans will end up paying more than they should be for health coverage. But misleading letters have been sent out in at least four states across the country, and one offending carrier, Humana, is a company with a national reach.

“If you’re an insurance company, you’re trying to hang onto the consumers you have at the highest price you can get them,” Laura Etherton, a health policy analyst at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, told TPM. “You can take advantage of the confusion about what people get to have now. It’s a new world. It’s disappointing that insurance companies are sending confusing letters to consumers to take advantage of that confusion. The reality is that this could do real harm.”

Go read it, it’s enlightening.