I see that many of the players are doing their part in healthcare reform: Government, Hospitals are doing their part ($155 billion), Pharma even though they havent contributed a penny to the reform, is sort of doing something (but not enough) in pledging $80 billion to mitigate the Part D donut hole.
However the big MIAs are the Insurance Companies. Instead of coming to the table to work they are spending $1.4 million a day in lobby efforts to stop reform and competition from a public option.
The two big industries that profit more from our broken healthcare industry: Pharma and Insurance Companies are either contributing the less (Pharma) or doing nothing and obstructing the reform (Insurance Companies).
Brokers, Consultants should be investing their efforts in start defining how their roles and services will be needed after reform is enacted. Because dont get me wrong, after reform passes, the services of Consultants and Brokers will be needed more than ever to help the millions of companies and individuals to sort through the new system. I dont see any efforts from the broker/consultant community to address this.
--“Palin attorney warns press on 'defamatory material,’” by POLITICO’s Jonathan Martin: “Gov. Sarah Palin’s attorney threatened Saturday to sue mainstream news organizations if they publish ‘defamatory’ stories relating to whether Palin is under federal investigation. In an extraordinary four-page letter, Alaska-based attorney Thomas Van Flein warns of severe consequences should speculation that until now has largely been confined to blogs about whether Palin embezzled funds in the construction of a Wasilla, Alaska, sports arena find its way into print. ‘This is to provide notice to Ms. Moore, and those who re-publish the defamation, such as Huffington Post, MSNBC, the New York Times and The Washington Post, that the Palins will not allow them to propagate defamatory material without answering to this in a court of law,’ Van Flein warned, citing Alaska liberal blogger Shannyn Moore. … ‘Just as power abhors a vacuum, modern journalism apparently abhors any type of due diligence and fact checking before scurrilous allegations are repeated as fact’ … Neither The Times nor The Post made any mention of the embezzlement rumors in their Saturday editions, but sources close to Palin consider the letter a warning shot to stay away from the topic. …
“Scores of left-leaning blogs posted speculation in the wake of Palin’s surprise announcement Friday and among the most common theories was that she was on the verge of federal indictment over the 2002 construction of the sports arena. Making the case for his client, Van Flein writes that Palin, then the Mayor of Wasilla, did not oversee the Steering Committee tasked with running the project. … The attorney also addressed another of the bloggers’ claims: that Palin purchased building materials to build her own home from the same supply store as was used by those who built the arena. … As for how the Palin’s financed their home on Wasilla’s Lake Lucille, Van Flein says they ‘used a combination of personal savings, equity from the sale of their prior home, and conventional bank financing to build the house— like millions of American families. The deeds of trust are recordable public records. Basic journalism and fact checking would confirm this.’”
a note from People For the American Way I think is important to bring up:
Sotomayor and her panel colleagues were bound by longstanding precedent and federal law. They applied the law without regard to their personal views and unanimously affirmed the district court ruling. To do anything but would have been judicial activism.
The full Second Circuit backed up the panel, which came as no surprise. Nearly ten years earlier a Second Circuit panel -- consisting of three GOP nominees -- reached the same conclusion in a similar case (Hayden v. County of Nassau).
When a case virtually identical to Ricci came before the Sixth Circuit -- Oakley v. Memphis -- a panel rejected the plaintiffs' claims and affirmed the district court ruling. Notably, they did so in an unpublished summary order, and one of the three judges was conservative Bush nominee Richard Allen Griffin.
In other words, Sotomayor is anything but an outlier. She and the seven other federal judges who decided Ricci and Oakley at the district and circuit levels were unanimous in determining that precedent and federal law required the rejection of the suits.
This week, Examiner.com's Ron Moore reported that Savage (née Weiner), the nation's third-most-listened-to talk radio host, vowed to "retaliate" against Media Matters for America by posting photos and "pertinent information" about staff on his website. Seriously. You can listen to Savage's disturbing words for yourself.
The comments led Ed Schultz, host of MSNBC's The Ed Show, to discuss the right-wing fringe talker's attacks in his appropriately titled "Psycho Talk" segment. Schultz declared Savage "is pinning a 'Wanted' sign on employees at Media Matters."
As Huffington Post political reporter Jason Linkins put it, "What's strange about this is that Media Matters has been making the case for some time now that right-wing voices have been ramping up rhetoric that specifically urges violent acts and intimidation. So now, Savage is talking about a running a web-stalking campaign against them? Hmmm. I wonder what sort of conclusions a person might draw from that?"
Media Matters responded to Savage, posting a video on YouTube that juxtaposes the seemingly rational face the host put on a during recent CNN interview with screeching audio clips from his own nationally syndicated radio program, including his threats against Media Matters' staff. The video concludes with on-screen text stating "We're Still Listening."
That night on his show, Savage dug in deeper, telling listeners that he's getting "tax returns for Media Matters." Of Media Matters' staff, Savage also repeated his vow to "expose not only their names and their pictures, but also how much money they make for being the good Stalinists that they are."
Did ABC/WaPo poll stack the deck against public plan? http://mediamatters.org/blog/200906240003
June 24, 2009 8:49 am ET by Jamison Foser
ABC and the Washington Post has released a new poll that is sure to get a great deal of attention, as opponents of a public health care plan will use it to claim that the public doesn't really support such a plan. Many reporters will, no doubt, interpret it the same way. But the poll's actual wording appears to stack the deck against a public plan.
Here's how the Post described the poll results:
Survey questions that equate the public option approach with the popular, patient-friendly Medicare system tend to get high approval, as do ones that emphasize the prospect of more choices. But when framed with an explicit counterargument, the idea receives a more tepid response. In the new Post-ABC poll, 62 percent support the general concept, but when respondents were told that meant some insurers would go out of business, support dropped sharply, to 37 percent.
So, it sounds like the ABC/Post poll asked whether people support a public option like the "patient-friendly Medicare system," then asked if they still support a public option if it meant some insurers would go out of business, right? The Washington Post presents this as framing the question "with an explicit counterargument."
But that isn't really what the poll did. Here's the actual wording of the two questions:
21. Would you support or oppose having the government create a new health insurance plan to compete with private health insurance plans? (IF SUPPORT) Would you rather have that plan run by a government agency, or run by an independent organization with government funding and oversight?
21a. (IF SUPPORT) What if having the government create a new health insurance plan made many private health insurers go out of business because they could not compete? In that case would you support or oppose creating a government-run health insurance plan?
Note that 21 does not actually include an argument in favor of a public plan. It doesn't indicate that a public option could be better and cheaper than private insurance. It does not link a public plan to "the popular, patient-friendly Medicare system," as the Post's write-up implied. But 21a does offer an argument against the public plan -- that "many" private insurers might go out of business.
The Post's write-up suggests that the poll shows what the American people think when presented with an arguement for the public plan and an argument against it. In fact, it merely shows what people think when they hear only an argument against it.
MediaMatters http://mediamatters.org Right-wing media and the fringe: A growing history of violence (and denial
This week, the country's attention was captured by the horrific shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, allegedly by James W. von Brunn, an 88-year-old man with ties to white supremacist and anti-Semitic organizations. The fatal shooting came just two months after an April 7 Department of Homeland Security report detailing potential increases in right-wing extremism.
As Media Matters for America documented, the DHS report was immediately and vehemently rejected by numerous conservative commentators, such as Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, and David Asman, who portrayed it as an illegitimate and politically motivated assault on conservatives. (Media Matters Senior Fellow Karl Frisch puts the attacks in even broader perspective here.)
Following the Holocaust Memorial Museum attack, these commentators faced criticism for their earlier dismissiveness. Some have since unconvincingly (and in the case of Joe Scarborough, inaccurately) defended their past assessment, and a handful of reporters and analysts are still engaging in falsehoods and inconsistencies in criticizing the DHS report. But on Fox News, Shepard Smith took a different position -- for which he was attacked by conservatives -- saying that the report "was a warning to us all. And it appears now that they were right."
The day before the Holocaust Memorial Museum attack, Media Matters Senior Fellow Eric Boehlert wrote that Fox News and its hosts "will have more right-wing vigilantism to explain." He added that "militia-style vigilante rhetoric has become a cornerstone of the conservative media movement in America, and it's now proudly championed by Fox News on a nearly hourly basis." (He also appeared on CNN this week.)
While right-wing media are certainly not legally culpable for any recent attacks, they are responsible for promoting a culture of fear, paranoia, and violence that is anti-government in the extreme -- a culture in which extremists, including von Brunn and Richard Poplawski, who fatally shot three Pittsburgh police officers, were apparently immersed. Poplawski was convinced that the Obama administration was going to take away his guns. Even though no evidence of such a policy exists, right-wing commentators and news organizations made the claim repeatedly before the shooting and have continued to do so since.
Predictably, conservative media figures responded to the museum shooting by attempting to shift attention away from themselves and onto political liberals and even President Obama himself. On June 10, the day of the museum shooting, financial analyst and radio host Jim Lacamp said on Fox News that "we have an administration that's really done a lot of class warfare, a lot of class-baiting. And so, it sets the stage for social unrest." That same day, conservative Tammy Bruce wrote that the Obama administration's "increasing anti-Israel rhetoric and the pandering to the Jew-hating world Arab world ... encourages all the beasts among us." Newsmax.com published an op-ed, cited on Friday by Michael Savage, claiming that Obama "is most certainly creating a climate of hate against" Jews. Colorado radio host Bob Newman even raised questions about whether Obama's recent visit to a concentration camp, or his statement about Israeli settlements, were factors in the shooting.
But as always, the most virulent reality-denier was Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh claimed that von Brunn "is a leftist if anything." He said that Obama is "ramping up hatred for Israel" and that "anti-Jew rhetoric comes from the American left." He claimed that MSNBC broadcasts "hate 24/7." Despite the right wing's repeated use of violent, revolutionary rhetoric, Limbaugh said that it was actually Obama who "thrives and needs chaos" to succeed. And in response to Shepard Smith, he remarked that the "claim that the atmosphere is somehow more violently anti-Obama is simply preposterous."
Indeed, Smith's remarks were the exception for the right. Despite its love of fearmongering, Fox News spent the 24 hours after the von Brunn shooting downplaying it. And on his broadcast that night, Bill O'Reilly, who hypocritically and incorrectly criticized the media for a supposed lack of coverage after the shooting death of Army recruiter Pvt. William Long, and who stokes the anger of viewers whenever it suits him politically, barely mentioned the shooting and instead featured what he called a "very important story" on gay penguins. "Do they wear tight T-shirts?" he asked, laughing. During the two shows after the shooting, Hannity barely mentioned it.
