OBAMA SAYS SANDERS, FAR LEFT HELPED UNDERMINE OBAMACARE

BY REUTERS

President Barack Obama said on Friday that criticism from the left wing of his own Democratic Party helped feed into the unpopularity of Obamacare, his signature healthcare reform law.

Obama has been spending part of his last two weeks in office urging supporters to speak out against plans by Republicans - who will soon control both the White House and Congress - to dismantle the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

At a town hall event with Vox Media, Obama acknowledged the politics have been stacked against his reforms, mainly blaming Republicans who he said refused to help make legislative fixes to Obamacare, which provides subsidies for private insurance to lower-income Americans who do not have healthcare plans at work.

But Obama also said Liberals like former Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders had contributed to the program's unpopularity.

During Sanders' campaign for the presidential nomination, he proposed replacing Obamacare with a government-run single-payer health insurance system based on Medicare, the government plan for elderly and disabled Americans.

"In the 'dissatisfied' column are a whole bunch of Bernie Sanders supporters who wanted a single-payer plan," Obama said in the interview.

"The problem is not that they think Obamacare is a failure. The problem is that they don't think it went far enough and that it left too many people still uncovered," Obama said.

Michael Briggs, a spokesman for Sanders, agreed that many people would rather the government "take on the private insurance industry and the pharmaceutical companies" and play a bigger role in providing healthcare.

"There are many millions of Americans, including many of Bernie's supporters, who don’t understand why we are the only major country on earth that does not provide healthcare as a right and they don’t understand why we pay more but get less for what we spend on healthcare," Briggs said.

Polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation last month showed 46 percent of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Obamacare, while 43 percent have a favorable view. Americans are also split on whether the law should be repealed.

Trump and congressional Republicans have vowed to quickly repeal the law, but Obama and Democrats have argued they should reveal a replacement plan before dismantling the program.

More than 20 million previously uninsured Americans gained health coverage through Obamacare, according to the White House. Coverage was extended by expanding the Medicaid program for the poor and through online exchanges where consumers can receive income-based subsidies.

Advocating ‘opportunity for all’

Will O'Reilly Let Obama Actually Answer The Questions This Year?

ERIC BOEHLERT/Media Matters For America

Tapped to interview President Barack Obama on Super Bowl Sunday, professionally hostile Fox News host Bill O'Reilly insists he's deeply interested in what the president has to say. "We do want to hear his side," O'Reillysaid last week. "I think that's the key thing. I'm genuinely interested in hearing his response to my questions."

If the Fox host wants to pay attention to Obama's comments, maybe he'll let the president actually answer his questions this year? In 2011, the last time O'Reilly sat down to interview Obama for a Super Bowl telecast, the host famously interrupted Obama.

A lot.

He cut the president off, constantly interjected comments, and redirected the interview midstream. O'Reilly often asked Obama questions that required complicated answers and then jumped in with new ones after giving Obama just a few seconds to answer the first query. It seemed like he didn't want the president finish a sentence. O'Reilly kept up the constant stream of interruptions even when the interview shifted towards non-combative topics, such as the pending Super Bowl. (O'Reilly: "You know blitzes and coverage and all that?")

Here's the clip Wonkette put together of O'Reilly spending much of his 2011 White House interview trying to talk over Obama, butting in nearly 50 times during a 14-minute Q&A. (That's once every 17 seconds.)

But maybe that's just O'Reilly's style, right? Perhaps he's trying to drill down and not let his interview subject off the hook? Following the Super Bowl interview, O'Reilly defended his interview-by-intrusion by insisting, "The truth is that TV interviewers who want to get answers must--must--interrupt their guests."

But when he sat with President George W. Bush for an exclusive interview in 2006, those trademark O'Reilly interruptions were nowhere to be seen. Previewing his three-part interview with Bush, O'Reilly told viewers that you "cannot be confrontational with the president of the United States. You can be direct, but you can't be disrespectful." He certainly kept his word during his sit-down with Bush.

Noted one analysis:

In the entire 14-minute interview of Obama in 2011 the President's longest answer was 51 seconds long. President Bush's first answer to O'Reilly's question lasts 69 seconds. Later in the interview Bush is allowed to speak for two minutes straight, something President Obama could have only dreamed of 2011.

See here as O'Reilly sat respectfully silent and stone-faced while Bush answered question after question, uninterrupted, for more than a minute at a time.

The Fox hosts insists he respects the presidency and wants to get Obama's take on key issues. If so, he should let the president actually answer the questions this year. 

Obama suggests racism animates some critics, animated conservative critics freak out

By Travis Gettys/Raw Story

President Barack Obama predictably angered his critics by suggesting that some of them don’t like him because he’s black.

“There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black President,” Obama said in a 17,000-word profile by The New Yorker’s David Remnick in the magazine’s Jan. 27 issue.

“Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black president,” he said.

The article notes that Obama lost among white voters in 2012 by a greater margin than any previous presidential victor in U.S. history and argues that his opponents are generally older white people who feel threatened by demographic changes or overlooked by the government and corporations.

White, working class voters are increasingly turning away from the president, whose approval ratings fell to historic lows late last year.

Conservatives suggested that Obama blamed his drooping approval ratings on racism, but that’s not exactly what he said.

In fact, he goes on to add some historical context to what drives opponents of his policies – particularly his signature Affordable Care Act legislation.

“There is a historic connection between some of the arguments that we have politically and the history of race in our country, and sometimes it’s hard to disentangle those issues,” Obama toldThe New Yorker. “You can be somebody who, for very legitimate reasons, worries about the power of the federal government — that it’s distant, that it’s bureaucratic, that it’s not accountable — and as a consequence you think that more power should reside in the hands of state governments.”

“But what’s also true, obviously, is that philosophy is wrapped up in the history of states’ rights in the context of the civil-rights movement and the Civil War and Calhoun,” the president continued. “There’s a pretty long history there.”

Obama called on his supporters to give greater consideration to arguments presented by his opponents, even if they are steeped in racially fraught language.

“I think it’s important for progressives not to dismiss out of hand arguments against my presidency or the Democratic Party or Bill Clinton or anybody just because there’s some overlap between those criticisms and the criticisms that traditionally were directed against those who were trying to bring about greater equality for African-Americans,” Obama said.

“The flip side is I think it’s important for conservatives to recognize and answer some of the problems that are posed by that history, so that they understand if I am concerned about leaving it up to states to expand Medicaid that it may not simply be because I am this power-hungry guy in Washington who wants to crush states’ rights but, rather, because we are one country and I think it is going to be important for the entire country to make sure that poor folks in Mississippi and not just Massachusetts are healthy,” the president added.

The Slow Motion Lynching of President Barack Obama

 By Frank Schaeffer/Patheos

I’ve watched liberal and right wing commentators alike blame the president for being lynched. They say “he’s not reaching out enough” or “he’s too cold.” It’s the equivalent of assuming that the black man being beaten by a couple of thug cops must have “done something.”

I am a white privileged well off sixty-one-year-old former Republican religious right wing activist who changed his mind about religion and politics long ago.  The New York Timesprofiled my change of heart saying that to my former friends I’m considered a “traitorous prince” since my religious right family was once thought of as “evangelical royalty.”

I’ve just spent the last 7 years writing over 200,000 words in blogs and articles in support of President Obama. My blogs on the Huffington Post alone would add up to a book in support of the President of over 300 pages. Weirdly, I just realized that through all my writing, this has been the first time in my life I’ve personally gone to bat for a black man. It just happens that he’s a president. But my emotional stake in his life is now personal.

So I’ve changed from a white guy who used to read news about some black man getting shot or beaten by cops or stand-your-ground types who assumed that the black man must have “done something,” to a white guy who figures that the black man was probably getting lynched. I’ve changed ideology but I’ve also changed my gut intuitive reactions.

I’ve changed because if this country will lynch a brilliant, civil, kind, humble, compassionate, moderate, articulate, black intellectual we’re lucky enough to have in the White House, we’ll lynch anyone. What chance does an anonymous black man pulled over in a traffic stop have of fair treatment when the former editor of the Harvard Law Reviewis being lynched?

One famous liberal commentator wrote a book on how Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neil could disagree and still be friends. Why, he asked on many a TV show promoting his book, couldn’t President Obama be like that? Because, I yelled at the screen, those two men were white Irish Americans and part of a ruling white oligarchy.

Because, I yelled, you might as well ask why Nelson Mandela didn’t talk his jailers in South Africa into seeing reason.

Because, I yelled, the President is black and anytime he’s reached out he’s pulled back a bloody stump.

Because, I yelled, liberal white commentators have been as bothered by a black man in the White House, who’s smarter than they are as much as right wing bigots have been bothered.

Because, I yelled, President Obama has been lied about, attacked, vilified, and disrespected since Day One.

Because, I yelled, this country may have passed laws so blacks can vote and eat in a white man’s world, but in our hearts we’re stuck in a place more like 1952 than 2013.

We’ve been watching a slow motion lynching of a moderate brilliant family man, a father, and faithful loving husband. The Republicans in Congress are so dedicated to lynching the President they’ve been willing to shut down our government and risk the future of our economy.

Evangelical “Christians” have been so stuck on putting a rope around this black man’s neck they have denied their faith and been the backbone of the lying Tea Party who spawned the so-called “birthers” and the rest of the white people driving our news cycle.

Roman Catholic bishops have denied their tradition of helping the poor and been so eager to destroy this president they aligned themselves with white Evangelical bigots and tried to stop health care reform, all because the President wants to give women a fair shake. The bishops even called him “anti-religious” because the president wants insurers to pay for contraception.

This is a slow motion lynching of a black man who is so moderate and centrist that he favored Wall Street enough so that the Left is all over his case. He’s so “radical” and “leftist” and “hates America” so much, and “coddles our enemies” so much, that he killed bin Laden and used drones to kill our enemies. He’s such a “socialist” that he presided over the revival of our economy from the worst recession since the Great Depression, and led us to the present day stock market boom. President Obama is such a “Marxist” that he tried to give insurance – not socialized medicine – to all Americans.

President Obama never answered back to the disgusting southern right wing rubes from the former slave states that have tried to belittle, mock and stymie his presidency shouting “You lie” in a million ways, while actually meaning “You lie, nigger!”

And did the “enlightened” Left have President Obama’s back? No. They carp about his “failure” because a website was slow to get running! The white privileged “progressive” few were too busy blaming him for getting lynched and telling him how to craft policy while a rope was put around his neck again and again and tightened with each filibuster, each lie told on the radio, each self-defeating scorched earth action to stop him from succeeding, even if it meant taking us all down too.

We don’t like to admit who we really are. So we make excuses and blame the victim. I’m ashamed for our country, a country my Marine son fought for in two stupid wars this president has been working to end. And I’m still rooting for the best, smartest and most decent man who has been president in my lifetime. I pray for his health care reform to succeed. I pray for his immigration reform to succeed. I’m amazed he’s gotten anything done, but he has, even while the lynch mob gathers again and again to laugh, lie and spit and claim he’s “failed” while “liberal” commentators nod sagely and talk about his “mistakes” as if President Obama has been playing on a level playing field.

We have a lot to do to heal this country of the damage done by the right wing Obama-haters and the Left wing know-it-all pundits who did not have his back because they don’t have the honesty to admit that we still live in a backward racist swamp of prejudice. Maybe in 50 years our country will be worthy of someone of President Obama’s forbearance again. For now we can just hope that the hatred of the Republican Party for our first black president doesn’t drive us to the brink of ruin again as they strip food from the mouths of the poor, and try to get people to not sign up for health care, just to get even with the black man they swore to destroy from the day that “uppity” black who is smarter than all of them put together took the oath of office.

God bless you Mr. President. I’m praying for you. I am so very sorry. But take heart, in the long reach of history the door you opened will stay open for the millions of Americans of all colors, genders and beliefs who will follow you. They will bless your name. So will history.

President Obama’s Approval Rating Jumps 5 Points as Millions Sign Up for Obamacare

By: Jason Easley/Politicusa

President Obama is beginning 2014 on the upswing as millions are signing up for the ACA, and his approval rating has increased by 5 points according to Gallup.

The Gallup Obama approval daily tracking poll reveals that the president’s approval rating has jumped five points since the days before Christmas from 39%-44%. Disapproval of the president has fallen from 54%-49%. President Obama’s approval numbers shift wildly based on the tone of the media coverage that he is receiving, but media’s negativity was hiding a convergence of positive things.

Now that the ACA website is repaired, and millions of Americans are signing up, the media’s endless drumbeat of negativity has temporarily stopped. Without the Republican fueled Obama bashing from the corporate media, the president’s approval rating has gone up, and his disapproval rating has gone down.

Republicans and the media have consistently failed to understand, and in many cases actively worked to undermine, the fact that President Obama remains basically popular. For the sixth year in a row, the president was named the most admired man in the world. For as much as Republicans try to project their hatred and contempt for this president on to the nation, the rest of the country has never shared their feelings.

Obama’s improved poll numbers also reflect the fact that Obamacare is working. Enrollment surged in December, and yesterday HHS announced that 6 million people now have healthcare coverage thanks to the ACA. The negative stories about a glitchy website have been replaced with millions of Americans getting access to affordable healthcare.

A continually improving economy, a healthcare reform that is working, and a president who remains likable are all factors that suggest that the dip in Obama approval that occurred was caused by a combination of the ugly political environment caused by the government shutdown, a brutally negative Republican fueled media cycle surrounding the ACA website, and the public frustration caused by Washington gridlock and obstruction.

Barring a scandal or a self inflicted political wound, President Obama’s poll numbers are likely to continue to improve through 2014. Because in the sort of words of John McCain, the fundamentals of this presidency are strong. Obama may not Bill Clinton, but he isn’t George W. Bush either. This suggests that Barack Obama’s approval rating should be on the climb throughout 2014.

If 2013 was President Obama’s presidential storm, 2014 could be setting up for a bit of smooth sailing executive branch sunshine.

Why People Should Stop Referring To HealthCare.gov Problems As "Obama's Katrina

OLIVER WILLIS/Media Matters For America:

Media figures are comparing the troubled rollout of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to the Bush administration's botched response to Hurricane Katrina. This comparison ignores a crucial difference: Nobody has died because of problems with HealthCare.gov, whereas at least 1,833 people died as a result of Katrina.

The media have repeatedly referred to crises during the Obama administration as "Obama's Katrina."

[Source: Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Katrina, NOAA.gov]

The problems with the rollout of ACA include the malfunctioning website, problems with state health care exchanges, and confusion over insurance companies changing policies to comply with the law's requirements. In a November 14 press conference, President Obama announced changes that would accommodate people whose insurance policies have been canceled, while members of Congress are reportedly working on legislation to fix problems in the law.

To date, no major news outlet has reported that anyone has died as a result of the problems with the rollout of the law, though Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testified to Congress that delays in implementing the law -- something Fox News has pushed for -- could lead to deaths.

After Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, the Bush administration was criticized for its slow and inadequate response to the storm, which eventually took the lives of 1,833 people.

On November 15, The New York Times compared the loss of confidence in the Obama administration to the way the response to Katrina affected the George W. Bush administration:

President Obama is now threatened by a similar toxic mix. The disastrous rollout of his health care law not only threatens the rest of his agenda but also raises questions about his competence in the same way that the Bush administration's botched response to Hurricane Katrina undermined any semblance of Republican efficiency.

Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy and Research noted that "the comparison to the response to Hurricane Katrina has to qualify as more than a bit over the top":

People died because of the failed response to Katrina. For whatever reason, President Bush was unable to organize a response to a hurricane hitting a major American city even though its course and ferocity had been accurately predicted a week in advance. People in New Orleans died because they could not get access to food, water, and medical care. It seems more than a bit over the top to compare the difficulties that people are facing arranging for insurance to this sort of catastrophe.

Slate's Matthew Yglesias similarly noted that the comparison is flawed even in the most generous interpretation:

Obviously, George W. Bush and his administration are not responsible for all of those deaths. A storm's a storm. But let's be very generous to Bush and say that the underlying bad fundamentals are responsible for 95 percent of the damage and the bungled response gets just 5 percent of the blame. That's 91 dead people. How many people have died using HealthCare.gov? I'm pretty sure it's fewer than one. In fact, despite all the problems over 160,000 people have already gotten Medicaid.

Among the media figures who have made the comparison:

ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulous on Twitter: "How can President Obama recover from his Katrina?"

In a segment that aired on ABC's Good Morning America, Stephanopoulous said that "what happened with Katrina, once those questions about [Bush's] competence took hold" and asked former ABC political analyst and former Bush staffer Matthew Dowd if Obama is "in that kind of a position right now." Dowd noted that the storm and the reform were "qualitatively different" but that parallels could be drawn.

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote on Twitter: "President Bush did not design and enact Hurricane Katrina."

Fox News anchor Geraldo Rivera asked on the November 15 Fox & Friends: "Is this is like weapons of mass destruction? Is this like President George W. Bush after Katrina?"

Bloomberg columnist Al Hunt said on the November 14 Morning Joe: "I think Katrina may be the best analogy" to the handling of the ACA rollout.

The same problem holds for comparing the ACA rollout to the Iraq War:

[Source: Operation Iraqi Freedom Casualties, Defense.gov]

Disrespect, Race and Obama

By CHARLES M. BLOW/New York Times

In an interview with the BBC this week, Oprah Winfrey said of President Obama: “There is a level of disrespect for the office that occurs. And that occurs, in some cases, and maybe even many cases, because he’s African-American.”

With that remark, Winfrey touched on an issue that many Americans have wrestled with: To what extent does this president’s race animate those loyal to him and those opposed? Is race a primary motivator or a subordinate, more elusive one, tainting motivations but not driving them?

To some degree, the answers lie with the questioners. There are different perceptions of racial realities. What some see as slights, others see as innocent opposition. But there are some objective truths here. Racism is a virus that is growing clever at avoiding detection. Race consciousness is real. Racial assumptions and prejudices are real. And racism is real. But these realities can operate without articulation and beneath awareness. For those reasons, some can see racism where it is absent, and others can willfully ignore any possibility that it could ever be present.

To wit, Rush Limbaugh responded to Winfrey’s comments in his usual acerbic way, lacking all nuance:

“If black people in this country are so mistreated and so disrespected, how in the name of Sam Hill did you happen? Would somebody explain that to me? If there’s a level of disrespect simply because he’s black, then how, Oprah, have you managed to become the — at one time — most popular and certainly wealthiest television personality? How does that happen?”

No one has ever accused Limbaugh of being a complex thinker, but the intellectual deficiency required to achieve that level of arrogance and ignorance is staggering.

Anyone with even a child’s grasp of race understands that for many minorities success isn’t synonymous with the absence of obstacles, but often requires the overcoming of obstacles. Furthermore, being willing to be entertained by someone isn’t the same as being willing to be led by them.

And finally, affinity and racial animosity can dwell together in the same soul. You can like and even admire a person of another race while simultaneously disparaging the race as a whole. One can even be attracted to persons of different races and still harbor racial animus toward their group. Generations of sexual predation and miscegenation during and after slavery in this country have taught us that.

Alas, simpletons have simple understandings of complex concepts.

But it is reactions like Limbaugh’s that lead many of the president’s supporters to believe that racial sensitivity is in retreat and racial hostility is on the rise.

To be sure, the Internet is rife with examples of derogatory, overtly racial comments and imagery referring to the president and his family. But the question remains: Are we seeing an increase in racial hostility or simply an elevation — or uncovering — of it? And are those racist attitudes isolated or do they represent a serious problem?

Much of the discussion about the president, his opposition and his race has centered on the Tea Party, fairly or not.

In one take on race and the Tea Party that went horribly wrong this week, Washington Post opinion writer Richard Cohen wrote:

“Today’s G.O.P. is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the Tea Party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.”

What exactly are “conventional views” in this context? They appear to refer specifically to opinions about the color of people’s skin.

Cohen seemed to want to recast racial intolerance — and sexual identity discomfort — in a more humane light: as an extension of traditional values rather than as an artifact of traditional bigotry. In addition, Cohen’s attempt to absolve the entirety of the Tea Party without proof fails in the same way that blanket condemnations do. Overreach is always the enemy.

I don’t know what role, if any, race plays in the feelings of Tea Party supporters. It is impossible to know the heart of another person (unless they unambiguously reveal themselves), let alone the hearts of millions.

But nerves are raw, antennas are up and race has become a lightning rod in the Obama era. This is not Obama’s doing, but the simple result of his being.

According To Media Reports, Obama Is Responsible For At Least 8 ‘Katrinas’

BY JUDD LEGUM/Think Progress

On Friday, the New York Times ran a lengthy piece comparing the troubled rollout of Obamacare — including a dysfunctional website and the cancelation of some existing individual insurance policies — to President Bush’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina, a tragedy which cost at least 1,833 people their lives. ABC’s Good Morning America featured a similar segment, and both outlets relied on former advisers of George W Bush to bolster their point. But this is just latest in a long line of “Katrinas,” that Barack Obama is responsible for, according to the media. Here is a sampling:

1. BP Oil Spill

“[I]t’s getting baked in a little bit in the media that BP was President Obama’s Katrina.” [NBC News, Brian Williams, 8/29/10]

2. Bank Bailout

“A CHARMING visit with Jay Leno won’t fix it. A 90 percent tax on bankers’ bonuses won’t fix it. Firing Timothy Geithner won’t fix it. Unless and until Barack Obama addresses the full depth of Americans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed. It would be foolish to dismiss as hyperbole the stark warning delivered by Paulette Altmaier of Cupertino, Calif., in a letter to the editorpublished by The Times last week: ‘President Obama may not realize it yet, but his Katrina moment has arrived.’” [New York Times, Frank Rich, 3/21/09]

3. Benghazi Consulate Attack And The IRS

“When House Republicans decided to reopen investigations into the White House and State Department response to the attacks on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, few thought it would inflict any serious damage to the president. Then came an admission from the IRS that it had unfairly singled out conservative groups for scrutiny during the 2012 campaign…This is President Obama’s Katrina moment. If he cannot regain control of the narrative, he will face the same loss of public confidence suffered by President Bush.” [Baltimore Sun, 5/19/13, Todd Eberly]

4. Hurricane Sandy

“I want to show you this report by our own David Lee Miller of a public housing unit in New Jersey, and — I’m sorry, in Brooklyn — devastated. This is Obama’s Katrina. And now the people are seeing that the gas lines and the suffering and the millions without power, the millions without heat, the millions — the ten and thousands that have lost their homes, and the cries for help.” [Fox News, Sean Hannity, 11/5/12]

5. Unemployment

“‘Will The Unemployment Crisis Be Obama’s Katrina?’ There’s a Category 5 storm about to make landfall, and the president and the officials in charge of preparing for the approaching disaster don’t seem to be particularly worried. Sound familiar? Just as Katrina exposed critical weaknesses in the priorities and competence of the Bush administration, the unfolding unemployment disaster is threatening to do the same for the Obama White House.” [Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington,11/23/09]

6. The Underwear Bomber

“To the list of phrases it may be best for political leaders to avoid after a major security incident, add ‘the system worked’ right after ‘Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.’ Just as the public did not really share President George W. Bush’s assessment of how things were going after Hurricane Katrina, so too was there a good deal of skepticism when President Obama’s homeland security secretary declared faith in a system that failed to stop a guy who tried to blow up a passenger jet on Christmas Day.” [New York Times, 12/29/09]

7. Haiti Earthquake

“‘Haiti: Obama’s Katrina.’ Four years ago the initial medical response to Hurricane Katrina was ill equipped, understaffed, poorly coordinated and delayed. Criticism of the paltry federal efforts was immediate and fierce. Unfortunately, the response to the latest international disaster in Haiti has been no better, compounding the catastrophe.” [Wall Street Journal, 1/25/10]

8. Obamacare

“‘Health Law Rollout’s Stumbles Draw Parallels to Bush’s Hurricane Response.’ President Obama is now threatened by a similar toxic mix. The disastrous rollout of his health care law not only threatens the rest of his agenda but also raises questions about his competence in the same way that the Bush administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina undermined any semblance of Republican efficiency.” [New York Times, 11/14/13]

Four years ago, the New York Times derided comparing every Presidential error to Katrina as “a Category 5 cliché.” Melissa Harris Perry, writing in the Nation in 2010, was even harsher: “These metaphors reduce catastrophe to an object lesson, implying that the effects of the disaster have been resolved, that the plot has been resolved and that the continued suffering of our fellow citizens is little more than a literary device.”

For Louisiana Republicans, Hurricane Katrina is Obama’s Katrina — a recent poll found more blame Obama than Bush for the federal response to the 2005 tragedy.

President Obama Check-Mates Health Insurance Lobby

 by Spandan C/The People's View

There are a lot opinions going around about President Obama's press conference this morning on the Affordable Care Act and its implementation. I see it as a singular thing: check mate. Once again, to quote my fellow contributor here at TPV, the president saved the Democrats' bacon, and once again, with his back to the wall, he delivered a masterful stroke of political genius curved out to avoid any interference with policy.

The headlines tell you that Obama will let Americans who are being dropped from their plans keep those plans for another year, and that is absolutely true. But the headlines do not tell the whole story. With the withering assault on health reform from the media, the Republicans and some Democrats, the president took the most blistering attack line against him, and turned it into a weapon against reform opponents. Here is what I believe were the two most important sentence the president spoke in the nearly hourlong presser (transcript).

 We’re also requiring insurers to extend current plans to inform their customers about two things: One, that protections — what protections these renewed plans don’t include.Number two, that the marketplace offers new options with better coverage and tax credits that might help you bring down the cost.

This, my fellow progressives, is how you keep your eyes on the prize. The entire problem of people who are currently in the individual insurance market being dropped resulted not from the president making a disingenuous promise to the contrary but from insurance companies making the conscious decision to drop their insured and blame it on Obamacare. Insurers have had more than 3 years to bring their plans into alignment with the minimum coverage requirements of health reform, and they have chosen not to do so over time, instead choosing this moment to scare their subscribers.

The president just turned the tables on the great villain, the insurance companies. He knows what everyone in Washington and the beltway media also know but won't tell you: insurance companies are dropping their coverage without offering reasonable alternatives to their individual market subscribers for one primary reason: they want a piece of the federal subsidiesavailable to millions of Americans through the health insurance exchanges. They need people buying from the exchanges with the subsidies to help their bottom lines as much as President Obama needs Americans to sign up in order for the Affordable Care Act to succeed. They want a piece of that pot of money, but they want to blame the Obama administration for dragging you there.

And so what the president did was simple, yet brilliant: he told Americans who are distressed that yes, they could keep their insurance plans if they like, instantly making all the cancellation letters blaming the ACA moot and taking away the insurance company's excuses for dropping people. But, with that same brilliant stroke, he forced insurance companies to do something they haven't been familiar with in decades: to tell their subscribers the truth. Insurance companies will now have to tell their subscribers whom they wish to sell junk plans to what essential benefit their plan will not cover: whether it's maternity care, mental health, hospitalization, prescription medication or another crucial essential requirement of the ACA. Oh, and they also have to tell their subscribers that they are likely to find a better plan for a cheaper cost on their state's exchange.

That the insurance industry wants people to move to the exchanges to buy coverage is not mere conjecture on my part. It is patently evident in today's apoplectic press release from AHIP President and CEO Karen Ignani:

 Changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the law could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for consumers. Premiums have already been set for next year based on an assumption of when consumers will be transitioning to the new marketplace. If due to these changes fewer younger and healthier people choose to purchase coverage in the exchange, premiums will increase in the marketplace and there will be fewer choices for consumers. Additional steps must be taken to stabilize the marketplace and mitigate the adverse impact on consumers.

I'm glad to see Ms. Ignani and AHIP suddenly recognize how important it is for consumers to move to the health insurance exchanges to purchase coverage, and that ACA's coverage requirements are a central catalyst to making that happen. One only imagines how much better it would have been if America's Health Insurance Plans instructed its member companies to convey that importance to their customers in the first place without the dramatic hoopla of trying to create political destruction for the president by omniously blaming the ACA for something insurance companies themselves want.

Because it is a dirty little open secret that the insurance companies want people in the exchanges as much as the administration, there is little risk of an actual negative effect from the president's announcements today on the exchanges. The president called the insurance companies' bluff, and the top lobbyist for insurers was immediate sent scurrying. People will still move to the exchanges, but it will no longer be because the big bad government is forcing one to, but because their insurance companies don't want to cover them outside the exchange.

The insurance industry, throughout the whole process - from the beginning of the health care debates in 2009 till now - have constantly acted like petulant children, and been treated as such by the administration and regulators. They tried to keep overhead high, and the law limited that to no more than 15-20% of premium revenue. They then tried to term insane things like collections as a "medical" expense, and the regulators showed them the door. They tried to jack up rates in retaliation, and in many cases they got shamed into retreating. They tried to protect Medicare Advantage overpayments, and Obamacare even did away with that. At every turn, the president has beaten them.

So this was their last play - to try to retaliate for politics' sake by blaming the Affordable Care Act for canceling people's coverage without telling them just what they didn't cover. For a while, it looked like they were winning. The media was completely on their side, telling trumped up stories about people losing their health insurance. The website issues added some fuel to that fire. Republicans were smelling blood, and some spineless Democrats found themselves ready to capitulate.

All these players though failed to count on one thing: a community organizer turned president named Barack Obama who has consistently turned in his best performances when his back was up against the wall. He nearly single-handedly rescued comprehensive health reform when many in Congress were ready to give up and his advisers were telling him to do it piecemeal. As a candidate in 2008, his best moment came in light of a loss to Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire. And in 2012, just when Chris Matthews was having a heart attack over his performance in the first debate, he came back in the second and leveled Mitt Romney (please proceed, governor.).

And he did it again. Today. With nearly no one having his back, the president struck a huge blow - not just against the intransigent health insurance companies but for reform, for the 40 million people who will be directly helped, and for countless millions who no longer have to fear cancellations or caps in coverage just when they need insurance the most.

Never, ever, EVER bet against this president. You will lose every single time.

Repeat after me: there is no liberal media

by Liberal Librarian/The People's View

The previous President, after the attacks of 9/11, engineered a war with a state which, though abysmal to its own people, had had no direct or indirect link with any terror attack on the United States. It was, if anything, a mortal enemy of the group which carried out the attacks, as that group saw the ruling regime as corrupt and un-Islamic. As the history of that war is being written, the regime sought to stave off war, willing to give the previous President anything he wanted, save for the regime's destruction. Of course, the regime as it existed stood in the way of the grand plan to remake the Middle East; its destruction, not its containment, was the goal. Anything short of political—and literal—suicide would not suit the ultimate purpose. So the country and the world were lied into a war, which cost nearly 5,000 American lives, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths; a war which was supposed to last a few weeks and pay for itself instead dragged on for nearly a decade, costing over $1 trillion. And the Middle East, far from being remade into a collection of benevolent American satrapies, teetered on the edge of all-out war for the eight years of the George W. Bush administration.

That President, however, was never asked to apologize for the disaster he had wrought. And if ever had been asked to apologize in a face-to-face interview, he never offered one: no apology for the countless dead, for the treasure wasted, for the lives destroyed. It's just not the done thing.

Well, it used to not be the done thing.

Barack Obama's signal achievement was, finally, bringing health security to the world's richest, most powerful nation. A health system teetering on collapse due to the crush of uninsured is, finally, being put on a sounder footing.

Its roll-out this autumn has been laden with problems. Many of those problems involve Americans who bought subpar, almost worthless insurance on the private market, now being dropped from those plans because they don't meet the requirements of the American Care Act.

Mr. Obama's constant assurance during the run-up to the Act's passage was that if you liked your insurance plan, you wouldn't have to drop it. And as most Americans receive their health insurance from the workplace, that was an easy assurance to make.

But now insurance companies, which made quite tidy profits off of these junk plans, are throwing people off of them, and blaming Obamacare.

And the media has latched onto this subterfuge as some great promise broken, trumpeting the "broken promise" without reporting that the vast majority of those being dropped were in subpar plans, which were no longer legal under the ACA. These consumers would now have the ability to go on the exchange and purchase cheaper, better insurance.

But, for some people, better an awful insurance policy than a much better one brought about by "that man". And the media, in the form of an interview with Chuck Todd, finally got its symbolic pound of flesh, in which Mr. Todd asked the President if he wanted to apologize to Americans for his "broken promise".

George W. Bush: brought about the country's worse geo-political disaster, and has never been asked to apologize. Barack H. Obama: worked to ensure that Americans would never again have to face the threat of destitution because of medical bills, and has been tarred and feathered by our media.

We can be angry. We can be saddened. But what we mustn't be is surprised.

One can argue that there never was a "liberal media". But it's safe to say that there used to be a more balanced media, one in which factual reporting and accurate analysis were the linchpins of the industry. If the reporting on Vietnam was rosy at first, by the end of the war its full horrors were being reported on honestly.

But that was also in an era when media ownership was far more diffuse. NBC and MSNBC are owned by Comcast, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. ABC is owned by Disney Corporation. Fox News is owned by News Corporation. CNN is owned by Time Warner. CBS has remained "independent"; but it too is a large multinational.

Corporations may be many things. They may be the most efficient means to organize economic activity. They may give their employees a somewhat remunerative working environment. But one thing for which they can never be mistaken are altruistic institutions acting for the public good. By law, publicly held corporations must return maximum value for their shareholders. And when the political winds start to blow against that basic dictum, no one should be surprised if corporations direct their media arms to wage a scorched-earth campaign against a President who is trying to bring back some commonsense regulation to a capitalism run amok, a capitalism which almost brought the world to its knees in 2008-9.

Corporations are not altruistic. Corporations are not "liberal". They are engines of profit. And they will turn against anyone who wants to in any way curb or redirect that engine.

Of course, the humorous thing is that Wall Street has never seen profits as it has under the Obama administration. There is a very real possibility that the DJIA will close at over 16,000 to end the year. If Barack Obama is a socialist, he's a very poor one.

But what Barack Obama is is a believer in the American dream. Not the nightmare vision of a nation of John Galts, thinking they're world conquerors but actually under the heel of rapacious corporations, fighting for the scraps. It's the dream which has sustained this Republic for its entire history: that we can make progress, that we can continually work to perfect the Union, that the next generation will do better than the last, and that we are a community, bound together by common ideals and common goals, the greatest of which is to live a good, human life.

That dream has never been more imperiled. And the laughably named "liberal media" is handmaiden to the attempt to destroy it. People like the Koch brothers are the epitome of silent movie villains, tying the citizens of this country to the train tracks to be run over by the train they conduct. Any truly independent mass media could make massive profits by exposing them and those like them.

But the media is a loss leader. News has never made money. At one point in our history, that was fine. And it still is, but now the media serves to drive a narrative: America is in decline, Obama is a failure, we need a new direction. And as President Obama scores successes in spite of the media, and as the country continues to move in a direction which frightens the corporations, the attacks get more shrill, more vicious, more unhinged. George W. Bush wasn't asked to apologize for sending thousands to their deaths. Barack Obama was asked to apologize for, essentially, bringing good, affordable healthcare to millions who either didn't have it or were underserved by the existing system.

The media is not interested in truth, but in driving a narrative. The media is not interested in analysis, but in coming to predetermined conclusions.

But with every tweet, with every blog post, with every conversation we have, WE become the media. And we can be more powerful, because we retain something it has lost: trust. No one trusts it, and rightly so. There's a vacuum which we have to fill. If we do, then perhaps the American dream will continue for another generation.