TomCADem
TomCADem's JournalThe Atlantic - "The Republican Hardliners Aren't Conservatives, They're Radicals"
The corporate media is being over backwards to make Republicans sound reasonable by letting them go on TV and read the talking points that they are ready to negotiate even when they are not. Bob Dole is long retired. Ted Cruz is the current face of the Republican party.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/10/the-republican-hardliners-arent-conservatives-theyre-radicals/280217/
The current drivers of the GOP are much more hostile to government. Thus, the assault on all federal employees via cuts in pay and benefits; the all-out attack to delegitimize the Internal Revenue Service and its employees by Darrell Issa and his cronies, designed to make it harder for them to carry out their basic functions; the enthusiasm for the sequester; and the lack of concern about the societal impact of mindless cuts to basic research, food safety, and homeland security.
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But a lot of it is an emotional, zealous reaction to America today — an ardent willingness to break crockery and demolish existing institutions to achieve the goal of eviscerating government as we know it, the good with the bad. As Dreher put it, "When I think of the Republican Party, I don’t think of principled conservative legislators who are men and women of vision strategy. I think of ideologues who are prepared to wreck things to get their way. They have confused prudence — the queen of virtues, and the cardinal virtue of conservative politics — with weakness."
Not all congressional Republicans are in that camp. Many, especially in the Senate, fit a more traditional conservative mold. But few are willing to stand up to the zealots, and even fewer are willing to cast votes that depart from the pack. All of them dutifully recite the mantra that Obamacare is an abomination that ought to be eliminated, and none notes that it is basically the same plan as 1994’s Grassleycare/Hatchcare/Durenbergercare/Chafeecare, which was built around an individual mandate, private insurers on exchanges, and premium support for less fortunate Americans. More strikingly, no one notes that Ryan’s long-term plan for Medicare, built around regulated exchanges and premium support, is basically Obamacare for seniors. Every opportunity to reform and refine the Affordable Care Act through traditional institutional means, working with both parties, has been rejected by them.
Here is Dreher’s conclusion: "The Republicans cannot govern. These people aren’t conservatives. They are radicals. What on earth would Russell Kirk say if he were alive to see this?"
The Week - "Blaming Republicans for the government shutdown: The end of false equivalence?"
I think the Week is a bit premature in declaring that the media has begun to move off of its false equivalence brand of journalism. On CNN, Blitzer and Dana Bash repeatedly pushed the idea that Republicans are doing some sort of favor for them by raising the debt ceiling or passing a budget in return for negotiating over the ACA.
http://theweek.com/article/index/250470/newspapers-blame-republicans-for-the-government-shutdown-the-end-of-false-equivalence
"This sort of false equivalence is not just a failure of journalism," Al Jazeera America's Dan Froomkin writes. "It is also a failure of democracy."
House Republicans refused to pass what is normally a routine federal spending bill unless President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats agreed to defund or delay significant parts of ObamaCare, a law that was passed more than three years ago by both chambers of Congress, deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court, and at least tangentially endorsed by the American people when President Obama beat repeal-promising Mitt Romney last fall.
The result of this latest standoff over ObamaCare is that the federal government doesn't have a budget, forcing a major shutdown for the first time in 17 years. Froomkin urges his fellow journalists to stop pretending that Democrats are even partly to blame.
When the media coverage seeks down-the-middle neutrality despite one party's outlandish conduct, there are no political consequences for their actions. With no consequences for extremism, politicians who have succeeded using such conduct have an incentive to become even more extreme. The more extreme they get, the further the split-the-difference press has to veer from common sense in order to avoid taking sides. And so on.
Wonkbook: "This is what the Republicans were afraid of" Re ACA
I guess Republicans are hoping that Democrats cave and agree to cancel health insurance subsidies on all the folks who eagerly signed up for the ACA on the very first day.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/02/wonkbook-this-is-what-the-republicans-were-afraid-of/
The top story all day was that Republicans had shut down the federal government because President Obama wouldn't defund or delay the Affordable Care Act. The other major story was that the government's servers were crashing because so many people were trying to see if they could get insurance through Obamacare.
So on the one hand, Washington was shut down because Republicans don't want Obamacare. On the other hand, Obamacare was nearly shut down because so many Americans wanted Obamacare.
The coming days will be a major test of the IT infrastructure supporting the Affordable Care Act. The online marketplaces were flooded with eager applicants on Tuesday -- a rush that far exceeded the expectations of marketplace directors. Reuters estimates that they got more than 10 million visits. But many of those applicants faced slow pages and error messages. Some waited hours to sign up for Obamacare. Others resolved to come back later.
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This is, of course, precisely what Republicans were scared of: That a law they loathe would end up being enthusiastically embraced by millions of Americans -- and thus proving permanent. It's Obamacare's possible success, not its promised failures, that unnerve the GOP.[/blockquote]
Overwhelming Demand for Obamacare Shows Potential Success
Source: Bloomberg
Obamacare’s opening day drew millions of consumers to the law’s core insurance exchanges, offering supporters and investors hope that if the websites can stay up and running, customers will follow.
In New York, officials said their exchange had 2.5 million visitors in its first half hour yesterday. California reported as many as 16,000 hits a second. And U.S. officials recorded 2.8 million visitors to the federal website, healthcare.gov, even as it fought technical problems much of the day.
The difficulties with the online insurance marketplaces gave new ammunition to Republicans who say the Affordable Care Act doesn’t work. President Barack Obama countered that the volume gives “a sense of how important this is to millions of Americans,” and administration officials said marketing of the exchanges will now start to pick up steam.
“Anything short of a calamity on day one is a victory,” said Dan Mendelson, chief executive officer of Washington-based consultant Avalere Health LLC. “It’s all about message and repetition, and making sure it’s accessible.”
Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-01/obamacare-exchanges-debut-with-websites-down-and-state-delays.html
The GOP and the corporate media are, of course, trying to turn a positive into a negative by complaining that the glitches, which are due in part to the unexpectedly large demand on the very first day, are signs that the ACA is unpopular. Of course, if there were no lines, no jammed servers, the Republicans would say that no one wants the ACA. Heads I win. Tails you lose.
House Democrats to Introduce Immigration Reform Bill
Source: ABC
House Democrats, frustrated by the lack of action by House leadership and fearing all hope of a bi-partisan comprehensive immigration reform bill is lost, are expected to introduce an immigration bill of their own today.
House sources tell ABC News the Democratic bill will mirror the bipartisan legislation passed by the Senate in late June -- including both increased border security and a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants.
Congressional aides who have seen the bill say much of it came from the months of work done by the "Gang of 7," before it broke apart in the House late last month, with influential Republicans abandoning the effort over disagreements on health care costs.
The new bill, which is expected to be introduced on the floor today, is purely a Democratic party effort designed, sources say, to put pressure on Republican leadership in the House who have refused to support a comprehensive bill in favor of a piecemeal series of laws, none of which so far includes the critical Pathway to Citizenship component so important to the Hispanic community.
Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/house-democrats-introduce-immigration-reform-bill/story?id=20440034
While House Republicans grandstand about how Democrats are refusing to compromise, most of the media ignores how House Republicans have been sitting on a bi-partisan immigration bill that was passed by the Senate.
The Atlantic - "The Two Basic Facts That Should Be in Every Shutdown Story"
The current crisis amply illustrates the corporate media censorship that is going on. The media hides the truth from the public and continues to give the far right cover by convincing Americans that Democrats are equally to blame. For every Democrat that tries to speak the truth, the media will play Ted Cruz on endless loop to offer a countervailing lie. At the end, despite the focus on the shutdown, most media stories fail to illuminate the public as to these two basic facts:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/10/the-two-basic-facts-that-should-be-in-every-shutdown-story/280179/
To people who follow politics these two facts are obvious. But they're not part of most "tragedy of gridlock" false-equivalence stories, and I believe they would come as news to most of the public. The two facts are:
1. If the House of Representatives voted on a "clean" budget bill -- one that opened up the closed federal offices but did not attempt to defund the Obama health care program -- that bill would pass, and the shutdown would be over. Nearly all Democrats would vote for it, as would enough Republicans to end the shutdown and its related damage. (And of course it would pass has already passed the Senate, repeatedly, unless the minority dared filibuster it, and would be signed by the president.) For illustrations of the wanton damage, see here and here.
2. So far House Speaker John Boehner has refused to let this vote occur. His Tea Party contingent knows how the vote would go and therefore does not want it to happen; and such is Boehner's fear of them, and fear for his job as Speaker, that he will not let it take place.
These two points are why the normal D.C.-poohbah moanings about the need for compromise do not apply. The Democratic administration, and a sufficient number of Republicans, already agree and are ready enough to compromise to solve this problem. If the normal machinery of democracy were allowed to work, the manufactured crisis would be over. The only reason the senseless damage is being done is that hostage-takers have terrorized members of their own party.
Massive Demand as Obamacare Opens for Texans
Source: NBC
It’s the first day uninsured Americans can sign up for health care under the new law. But, NBC5 discovered the government website, healthcare.gov, wasn’t working properly.
More than a million North Texans don’t have health insurance. Many went to clinics like Los Barrios Unidos in Dallas to sign up, only to find out the website is down.
“Right now, I don’t have the money to pay for it,” says Gloria Cervantes. The mother of three can’t afford insurance. That could change with the Affordable Healthcare Act.
“It’s going to be cheaper, less expensive, and I really need it,” says Cervantes.
Read more: http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/Texas-Health-Care-Exchange-Relying-on-Feds-225967281.html
It is incredibly ironic that Ted Cruz's state is the home of massive demand for health care coverage under the ACA. I am sure that this does not make a whit of difference to Ted Cruz. Likewise, the media generally focuses on glitches while ignoring the fact that much of the glitches are due to unexpectedly heavy demand on the first day.
Salon - "Bogus 'he said-she said' reporting led to the shutdown " - Great Story
WaPo's false equivalence editorial that blame the shutdown on both Democrats, as well as Republicans, for refusing to compromise is indicative of the failure of the media to inform the public of the extreme and dangerous efforts by Republicans to risk destabilizing our country in an effort to ram their agenda down the throat of the rest of the public. However, Republicans could not do it alone. The media gives them cover and a free pass by repeatedly insisting that both parties are responsible for a shutdown arising from Republicans' refusal to fund the government at funding levels that they themselves just approved a few months ago.
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/30/bogus_he_said_she_said_reporting_led_to_the_shutdown/singleton/
Beltway reporters who see their professed neutrality as a higher ground bear an enormous amount of responsibility for encouraging this perversion of democratic governance. With a few notable exceptions, the media have framed what Jonathan Chait called “a kind of quasi-impeachment” in typical he said-she said fashion, obscuring the fact that the basic norms that govern Congress have been thrown out the window by a small cabal of tea party-endorsed legislators from overwhelmingly Republican districts. The media treat unprecedented legislative extortion as typical partisan negotiations, and in doing so they normalize it.
But it’s not normal. Republicans are demanding that Democrats unwind their signature achievement – a piece of legislation that took 18 months to pass, survived a Supreme Court challenge and a presidential election – in exchange for a stopgap budget resolution. On Saturday, they tacked on a provision that would limit access to contraceptives.
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Yet you wouldn’t fully appreciate the audacity of this tactic by reading standard Beltway coverage. As Brian Beutler notes in Salon, Time Magazine reporter Zeke Miller calls this “negotiating technique… is by no means novel. Hostage taking — by promising harm if you do not get your way — has long been a standard way of doing business in Washington.” James Fallows, decrying what he calls a “failure of journalism,” flagged the headline, “Parties Digging in Their Heels as Hourglass Empties.” (The Courier-Post, a Gannett paper, similarly went with, “Lawmakers dig in their heels; government shutdown nearer.”) And Politico’s Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan described the ransom note as simply a set of “demands for reform.” All of this coverage reeks of false equivalency, implying yet again that “both sides do it.”
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The reason all of this is important is simple: A faction within one of our parties has rejected the basic structure of our democratic system – the separation of powers. The only thing that will break the fever that grips them – the only thing that can break the fever – is intense public backlash, and not just from Democratic partisans, but also from the majority of Republicans who don’t identify with the tea party movement and oppose these antics. By muddying the waters of what’s really going on here with their perpetual false equivalence, the Beltway media is making that reckoning unlikely to occur.
The Nation - "Media Coverage of Shutdown Threat: A Journalistic ‘Disgrace’"
Here is a nice piece by the Nation highlighting how the corporate media's ongoing practice of false equivalence as journalism helps enable the right wing extremists who now run the Republican party:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/176404/media-coverage-shutdown-threat-journalistic-disgrace#
Probably the smartest thing I read all weekend on the pending government shutdown, and the debt ceiling crisis, came from James Fallows. And, courtesy of the often laughable (and dangerous) Washington Post editorial section, we get yet another example in this parade of disgrace this morning.
At his Atlantic blog, Fallow slammed media for once again practicing “false equivalence,” but does provide links to a few folks who have gotten it right (see below). Read the whole thing as he traces a historic fiasco we haven’t seen in decades, maybe over a century
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Today the Post published this editorial drivel:
Ultimately, the grown-ups in the room will have to do their jobs, which in a democracy with divided government means compromising for the common good. That means Mr. Boehner, his counterpart in the Senate, Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), minority leaders Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the president. Both sides are inordinately concerned with making sure that, if catastrophe comes, the other side takes the political hit. In truth, none of their reputations stands to benefit. Of course, we get ths kind of “analysis” from Politico all the time
New Poll: Only One-Third of Americans Support Repealing, Defunding, or Delaying Obamacare
Source: Forbes
Polls consistently show that Americans aren’t happy with Obamacare. They think the law will make health care more expensive, and decrease its quality. But a new survey of 1,976 registered voters finds that only 33 percent believe that the health law should be repealed, delayed, or defunded. 29 percent believe that “Congress should make changes to improve the law,” 26 percent believe that “Congress should let the law take effect” and see what happens, and 12 percent believe that the law should be expanded. The bottom line? Voters are skeptical that Obamacare will live up to Democrats’ hype. But they also believe that it should be given a chance to succeed.
The new poll was conducted by the Morning Consult, a healthcare media company founded by Michael Ramlet. Ramlet, in evaluating the results of his survey, finds that voters are “unmoved by three months of the defund argument,” and that a majority would “blame congressional Republicans a lot for a government shutdown.”
Voters would blame “Republicans in Congress if the current budget dispute leads to a government shutdown starting October 1.” 51 percent would blame them “a lot,” 21 percent “some,” and 17 percent “a little.” Only 12 percent would assign no blame to Republicans. But voters would also blame President Obama for a shutdown, albeit by slimmer margins: 41 percent “a lot,” 15 percent “some,” and 18 percent “a little.” Fomr Congressional Democrats, the numbers were 36 percent “a lot,” 24 percent “some,” and 23 percent “a little.”
Voters believe, by a margin of 66-33, that the 2012 election “represented a referendum on moving forward with implementation of the 2010 health care law.” 24 percent strongly agreed with that sentence; 42 percent somewhat did; 17 percent somewhat disagreed; and 16 percent strongly disagreed.
Read more: http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/09/30/new-poll-only-one-third-of-americans-support-repealing-defunding-or-delaying-obamacare/
I think the most surprising aspect of this story is that it appears on Forbes, which has been spewing anti-ACA bullshit from the get-go.
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