In 2013, CBS News, once the home of giants in journalism like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Conkrite, was caught deliberately misinforming its viewers about a series stories in the news — the Benghazi attacks, the rollout of the Affordable Care Act and the NSA. For these other Fox News-worthy exercises in propagandizing for the right wing, Media Matters has named CBS News its 2013 Misinformer of the Year:
Floridians led the nation in signing up for health insurance on the federal exchange since its inception on Oct. 1. Almost 18,000 state residents from all backgrounds have enrolled, despite the refusal of far-right Republican leaders to facilitate access to health care for the uninsured, noted in a recent Tampa Bay Times editorial.
Florida is stuck with a tea party governor who won’t talk and a tea party House speaker who won’t listen. Gov. Rick Scott refuses to repeat his earlier support for Medicaid expansion, and House Speaker Will Weatherford refuses to hear the economic and moral arguments for accepting billions of federal dollars to cover the poor.
But thanks to healthcare.gov, residents don’t need the permission of state officials to do what’s best for themselves and their families. And they are doing just that.
Since the site launched at the beginning of October, 281,517 Floridians have taken the first step in applying for coverage and 75,480 are eligible for a subsidy to help pay for it, according to federal health officials… [Navigator Jodi] Ray said Florida applicants don’t fit a particular profile, so far.
“They’re not necessarily the sickly. They’re not necessarily the poor. They’re not necessarily the white or Hispanic. They are a whole range of demographics,” she said.
The numbers show the need among working age people and children. While Florida is first in federal health exchange enrollment, it is fourth in population, with many of its residents seniors who are presumably already covered by Medicare.
One of the many hilarious tweets about the Hobby Lobby case. Too bad it also misses the point.
The wonderful website Wonkette dissected former Sen. Rick Santorum’s (R-Penn.) defense of a case the U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to hear, but they only rebutted the most obvious aspect.
The decor and craft merchandiser Hobby Lobby, which employs and targets mostly women, doesn’t think it should have to provide contraceptive healthcare coverage because it is a Christian-owned company. As Wonkette explained:
We are sure that Mr. Santorum would also support an exception where for-profit companies owned by Jehovah’s Witnesses won’t have to buy insurance that covers blood transfusions, and for-profit companies owned by Christian Scientists won’t have to cover anything but a trip to a Reading Room.
You know all those, “Ain’t it awful?” stories you’ve been hearing ad nauseam since the launch of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) website on Oct. 1? Expect to hear not one more word.
Now that things are working great, we’re betting that not only will you never hear again how bad they are, you will also never hear that they’re really super.
Here is a story that was featured on the front page above the fold in the Los Angeles Times yesterday but that has gotten little to no coverage anywhere else in the “liberal media”:
Despite the disastrous rollout of the federal government’s healthcare website, enrollment is surging in many states as tens of thousands of consumers sign up for insurance plans made available by President Obama’s health law.
A number of states that use their own systems, including California, are on track to hit enrollment targets for 2014 because of a sharp increase in November, according to state officials.
“What we are seeing is incredible momentum,” said Peter Lee, director of Covered California, the nation’s largest state insurance marketplace, which accounted for a third of all enrollments nationally in October. California — which enrolled about 31,000 people in health plans last month — nearly doubled that in the first two weeks of this month.
Several other states, including Connecticut and Kentucky, are outpacing their enrollment estimates, even as states that depend on the federal website lag far behind. In Minnesota, enrollment in the second half of October ran at triple the rate of the first half, officials said. Washington state is also on track to easily exceed its October enrollment figure, officials said.
In the segment of Fox and Friends in this video, while Fox Business News anchor Stuart Varney is in the middle of delivering carefully constructed misinformation about the Affordable Care Act, his anti-Obama talking point is stepped on by Fox’s newest spokesmodel, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who inadvertently reduces Varney’s lie to the absurd.
First, the lie:
Over at The New Yorker, John Cassidy sees a glimmer of hope for Pres. Obama in the GOP’s irresistible impulse to overreach and the perpetually inept leadership of House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa of California:
The situation is dire alright—arguably the worst moment of Obama’s five-year tenure. But the Hawaiian Houdini still has one thing going for him, and that’s the uncanny tendency of some of his Republican enemies to turn opportunities into calamities. And none is more adept at this party trick than Darrell Edward Issa, the San Diego loudmouth whose House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a public hearing today, which backfired almost immediately.
The GOP/tea party has been promising for years to offer a proposal for replacing the Affordable Care Act with a plan that would move the country toward universal health care coverage. Now, at long last, one of the tea party’s best minds and most innovative thinkers has revealed the basics of the tea party plan for health-insurance reform. Here it is:
“The plan is to allow those things that had been proposed over many years to reform a health-care system in America that certainly does need more help so that there’s more competition, there’s less tort reform threat, there’s less trajectory of the cost increases, and those plans have been proposed over and over again. And what thwarts those plans? It’s the far left. It’s President Obama and his supporters who will not allow the Republicans to usher in free market, patient-centered, doctor-patient relationship links to reform health care.”
Every word in this salad is either a lie or simply wrong, of course. […]
Pundits say that Trump’s $5,000 midterm bribe was an overreach,
And they agree that if lies were a crime, he’d be impeached.
Despite all the dividend promises he’s made,
The fact is, not one has ever been paid,
So even before the midterms, he already owes us $8,000* each.
*$5000 stimulus checks via “DOGE dividend”; $2000 stimulus checks via a “tariff dividend”; $1000-plus checks via “savings” from expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies
