Over and over, during the 2008 election cycle, I saw Barack Obama win the long game and I learned to trust him to pretty much always come out on top. This video shows the Barack Obama I knew could get the job done.
Bring it, you paranoid, racist, uneducated mo-fos who don’t have health insurance and aren’t bright enough to recognize when you’re being helped. We’re ready for your dim-witted asses.
SurveyUSA conducted a poll on health-insurance reform, basing its questions word-for-word on questions in the three most recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls. (The Wall Street Journal is, of course, owned by the same company that owns Fox News.)
Question 2: In any health care proposal, how important do you feel it is to give people a choice of both a public plan administered by the federal government and a private plan for their health insurance–extremely important, quite important, not that important, or not at all important?
Results:
58 percent: Extremely important
19 percent: Quite important
7 percent: Not that important
15 percent: Not at all important
1 percent: Not sure
What this means is that, while the GOP disinformation campaign is playing front and center on cable news, the lies at its foundation are not fooling normal Americans.
Even FactCheck.org has had it with the level of inanity coming from opponents to health care reform. The normally dispassionate site is addressing a ridiculous email (which so far, I haven’t gotten, praise Allah!) written by a rightwing blogger who posts the famous “Joker” picture of Obama on his home page.
It’s clear from the tone of FactCheck’s response that even they consider these lies over the top.
Our inbox has been overrun with messages asking us to weigh in on a mammoth list of claims about the House health care bill. The chain e-mail purports to give “a few highlights” from the first half of the bill, but the list of 48 assertions is filled with falsehoods, exaggerations and misinterpretations. We examined each of the e-mail’s claims, finding 26 of them to be false and 18 to be misleading, only partly true or half true. Only four are accurate…
This chain e-mail claims to give a run-down of what’s in the House health care bill, H.R. 3200. Instead, it shows evidence of a reading comprehension problem on the part of the author.
Ouch, FactCheck! But right on. We also like what they had to say about the ridiculous nod-nod-wink-wink campaign against ACORN. ACORN is an advocacy group for the poor that mainly deals with such issues as predatory lending but was portrayed as something else entirely during the last election. The misrepresentation evidently continues in the notorious email.
It claims that a section about “Community-based Home Medical Services” means “more payoffs for ACORN.” ACORN does not provide medical home services. The e-mail interprets any reference to the word “community” to be some kind of payoff for ACORN. That’s nonsense.
If you got the email, get over to FactCheck.org. Hit the “Share” icon at the top of the page and send the assessment to whoever sent you that piece of rubbish, and everyone else on their address list as well.
Despite the carefully contrived optics — the cell-phone videos of deranged Tea-Baggers, Birthers and Deathers disrupting town hall meetings; the armed “right wing terrorists” posing menacingly outside the meeting halls; and signs depicting Pres. Obama as Hitler — and in spite of Republican propaganda about death panels and the rest, a new poll finds that huge majorities of American voters of all ages* remain solidly behind the Democrats’ two primary goals for health-insurance reform: insuring everyone and offering the public access to the same coverage available to elected officials, federal employees, the military and veterans:
Nearly 8 in 10 Americans support a federal health insurance plan for those who can’t afford or can’t get private insurance, but only 37 percent define “public option” correctly, a new national poll found.
The majority of people polled — 86 percent — say insurance should be available to everyone regardless of health history.
And:
…79 percent say they believe a federal government health insurance option should be available for people to buy.
* Update: To be clear, the survey was paid for by AARP but the survey group of 1,000 Democratic, Republican and independent voters was not limited to AARP members. According to this pdf, the age range of those polled was 61 percent 49 years old and younger, and 39 percent 50 years old and older.
During the public comment period of a town hall in Iowa this week led by Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, an elderly veteran took the microphone and called for violence against the president and the United States government:
“The president of the United States, that’s who you should be concerned about. Because he’s acting like a little Hitler,” said Tom Eisenhower, a World War II veteran. “I’d take a gun to Washington if enough of you would go with me.”
Grassley — whose oath of office includes swearing fealty to the Constitution and thus the government, and who lives in Washington — pointedly did not disassociate himself from Eisenhower’s call to arms against the government. Instead, the senator responded with faint praise of Pres. Obama followed by a long, rambling spin through RNC talking points that included a laundry list of wrongs the president has perpetrated on the country in the scant seven months he’s been in office.
Among these complaints, a good many were actually perpetrated by Obama’s predecessor. In particular, it is rich that Grassley decried the “Federal Reserve dropping money out of airplanes,” when it was the Bush Administration that, in 2003, shrink-wrapped $100 bills in bundles and then flew 281 million notes weighing 363 tons — $12 billion — into Iraq, where it disappeared forever.
Sen. Grassley was the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee at the time, and never lifted a finger to investigate what is likely the biggest single-shot intra-government heist in world history.
But Grassley’s failure to distance himself from a call for destruction of the government is practically statesmanlike compared to the praise Rep. Wally Herger (R-Calif.) heaped upon a man at a town hall meeting last week who described himself as a “right-wing terrorist.”
“God bless you,” Herger responded. “There goes a great American.” Through a spokesperson, Herger has refused to apologize for endorsing terrorism.
These and other Republican pols are playing with fire. Their silence in response to calls of violence by extremists in their base is de facto assent to the threats — and their assent is now in the public record.
A poll last week about who believes what lies about health-insurance reform proved to be a damning indictment of Fox News and of the insurance lobby’s use of the Republican Party’s propaganda machine to disinform the public about reforms.
The NBC poll found that a whopping 75 percent of Fox viewers, versus 45 percent of the population overall, believe that Democratic reforms include provisions that would require senior citizens to be evaluated for euthanasia by “death panels.”
This lie, which was first floated by health-industry lobbyist Betsy McCaughey and Facebook blogger Sarah Palin and has been heavily promoted on Fox, has been disproved by non-partisan evaulators like Factcheck.org. And yet, like the good soldiers that they are, Republican pols and pundits have fallen in line to promote this disinformation to their followers.
The latest is Sen. John McCain (R-Maverick), who flushed away what was left of his credibility in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week” yesterday:
As the campaign manager for the presidential bid of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), Kent Snyder received a lot of credit for raising $35 million from grassroots supporters, a phenomenal accomplishment for an insurgent campaign.
But, like 48 million other Americans, Snyder had no health insurance, and when he died from pneumonia on June 26 after a two-month hospital stay, he left medical bills totaling over $400,000.
It is emblematic of our age that Snyder’s boss, Rep. Paul, is a physician.
The story comes from the Washington Blade [that link is now inactive, here is an excerpt from the story published in the Daily Paul, a Paulestinian propaganda site – Editors, Sept. 14, 2011]:
Gay staffers from the Paul campaign, some speaking on condition that they not be identified, said they learned about Snyder’s unpaid medical bills from a web site created by his friends that calls on Paul supporters to contribute to a special fund to help Snyder’s family pay the bills, which come mostly from a two-month hospitalization. So far, the site (kentsnyder.com) has raised about $32,000.
Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario has created a litmus test —
Yield, and rename it Lake America, at Donald Trump’s behest,
Like Google and Apple, which already capitulated,
Changing the name just like Dear Leader stipulated,
But there’s one defiant holdout — the original mapping site, Mapquest.
