“Conservative Crybabies Lose Again”: The Right’s Laughable New Obamacare Conspiracies, Officially Debunked
If you click through a few conservative news websites, you’ll learn all about the latest and most nefarious bit of lawless chicanery from the Obama administration as it tries to paper over the Affordable Care Act’s obvious failures. Jumping off from a New York Times report that the Census Bureau “is changing its annual [healthcare] survey so thoroughly that it will be difficult to measure the effects of President Obama’s health care law in the next report,” conservatives have put two and two together and come up with CONSPIRACY.
Megan McArdle asks, “Is Obama cooking the Census books for Obamacare?” Townhall’s Guy Benson suspects this change was implemented to boost Democratic fortunes for the midterms: “The brand new survey questions will unquestionably ‘reveal’ a dramatic decrease in the uninsured population, bureau experts say, which will deliver Democrats a super handy talking point. And oh-by-the-way, the artificially improved numbers will be released … this fall.” Mediaite’s Noah Rothman writes that the conservatives who argle-bargled in 2009 about the White House politicizing the census now look prescient. “The fears of some that the Census Bureau could be corrupted by the imperatives of the political operatives in the White House was today proven accurate.”
Nonsense. The timing of the switch is obviously not ideal, though, as Vox’s Sarah Kliff notes, the new methods will be used to collect data for 2013, before the state marketplaces went up and the Medicaid expansion took effect. The suggestion of political interference from the White House, however, is a bombshell accusation that, despite Rothman’s insistence, is nowhere near being “proven.” Evan McMorris-Santoro of BuzzFeed talked to a census official who said that the White House had precisely zero involvement in the changes implemented, and that the bureau had been discussing the shift “way before the ACA was an idea.”
“The Circle Of Scam Keeps Turning”: In The Conservative World, Everybody Gets Rich At Some Stage Of The Game
A couple of times in the past I’ve written about what I call the conservative circle of scam, the way so many people on the right are so adept at fleecing each other. Here’s a piece about high-priced consultants milking the Koch brothers for everything they can get, and here’s one about my favorite story, the way that, in 2012, Dick Morris played ordinary people who wanted to see Barack Obama driven from office (he solicited donations to a super PAC for that purpose, laundered the money just a bit, and apparently kept most of it for himself without ever spending any of it on defeating Obama). The essence of the circle of scam is that everybody gets rich at some stage of the game, with the exception of the rank-and-file conservatives who fuel it all with their votes, their eyeballs, and their money.
Today there are two new media stories showing that the circle of scam is humming along nicely. The first comes from Michael Calderone at Huffington Post, who reports on an interesting relationship between Sean Hannity and the Tea Party Patriots. Here’s how it works: TPP is a sponsor of Hannity’s radio show. Then Hannity appears in TPP’s fundraising appeals, and some of the money generated inevitably goes back to Hannity’s radio show. Then Hannity goes on his Fox News show and talks about the terrific work the Tea Party Patriots are doing. Everybody wins!
The details of Hannity’s contract with his syndicate have never been made public, so I have no idea if he shares in the show’s advertising revenue. But even if he doesn’t, he benefits from keeping that revenue high. Last year he moved from Cumulus, where he reportedly made $20 million a year, to Premiere Radio Networks, which, one would presume, pays him something similar.
The second story comes from Kenneth Vogel and Mackenzie Weinger of Politico, who report that it isn’t just Hannity. A bunch of conservative media figures are in on the action, none gaining more than Glenn Beck, who has been paid an astounding $6 million by the Tea Party group FreedomWorks in recent years to promote its efforts. As Dick Armey, who was ousted as FreedomWorks chief in a recent coup, says, this kind of arrangement “compromises the integrity of the pundit-guru, as it were, and it’s an undignified expenditure of the part of the outfit that’s mining the attention.” Well put, Dick. One does need one’s pundit-gurus to have integrity. But even if they don’t, they’ve still got authority, and that’s what the organizations are paying for: the hosts’ ability to tell their audiences: “This is where you should send your money.” And send it they do.
What’s most interesting is that all of this expenditure is fueling an occasionally vicious internecine battle within the conservative movement. Sure, all these hosts spend much of their time bashing Barack Obama. But they’ve been successfully enlisted on one side of the war between the Republican establishment and the ultra-conservative Tea Party, a war that still rages even if the Tea Party is having somewhat less success ousting incumbent Republicans than it did in 2010 or 2012. Instead of conservative media being a force for unity, one that educates the base on what they should be angry about and where to focus their energy, they’re fomenting division and strife within the conservative coalition.
Would the likes of Hannity and Beck be doing so anyway even if they weren’t getting paid? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s certainly something to see. Remember when the right was a smoothly functioning, terrifyingly unified monolith of opinion and action? I wonder if they’ll ever get that back.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 17, 2014
“Cliven Bundy Is No Hero”: Republicans Are Mistaking The Angry Nevada Debtor For A States’ Rights Crusader
It’s no surprise that Republicans are jumping on Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s bandwagon. They’re desperate for any issue that will help them push propaganda designed to attract votes.
Some are painting the Bundy rebellion as a states’ rights issue. It’s not. The federal government isn’t threatening people’s freedoms nor Nevada’s sovereignty. Nevada isn’t fighting the Bureau of Land Management to reclaim the land. Bundy got himself in hot water because he refused to pay his $1 million grazing bill.
It’s not like Bundy didn’t know that the bureau was going to his confiscate his cattle. His dispute with them is 20 years old. He had plenty of opportunities to pursue legal action. The government never denied him due process.
A law abiding citizen would have respectfully paid his debt, but Bundy believes he’s special and that the rules don’t apply to him. He didn’t like the outcome, so he resorted to terrorist tactics, organizing a 1,000 person, gun posse to threaten federal agents and make his point.
Bundy won applause from Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval and Republican Sen. Dean Heller. Fox News host Sean Hannity hailed him as a capitalist hero, and conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh said he’d make a good politician. Florida Republican House candidate Joshua Black said President Obama should be arrested and hung for treason. Texas Senate candidate Chris Mapp said ranchers should be allowed to shoot on sight anyone illegally crossing the border on their land.
This talk is politically useful. It plays on conservatives’ distrust of government. The Pew Center for People and the Press found that 65 percent of Democrats have a favorable view of the government, but only 23 percent of Republicans think the same.
The party admires Bundy, but they have shown no such sentiment when it comes to ranchers fighting against the Keystone XL pipeline. Randy Thompson and hundreds of other Nebraskan have been resisting TransCanada’s efforts to lease their property. The GOP isn’t hailing them as champions of property rights. They’re silent because these ranchers are fighting against their big money, big business supporters.
Conservatives would be better off seeing this issue for what it is: an angry debtor who pulled out his gun because he didn’t like the fact that he had to pay up. They won’t be better off believing the GOP means what it says.
By: Jamie Chandler, U. S. News and World Report, April 16, 2014
“Where Is The Republican Voter Expansion Project?”: Republicans Used To Support Voting Rights—What Happened?
During a speech on Friday at the National Action Network, President Obama made his strongest and most extensive comments yet on the topic of voting rights. “The right to vote is threatened today in a way that it has not been since the Voting Rights Act became law nearly five decades ago,” Obama said. “Across the country, Republicans have led efforts to pass laws making it harder, not easier, for people to vote.”
The election of the first black president and the resurrection of voter suppression efforts was hardly a coincidence. New voting restrictions took effect in nineteen states from 2011–12. Nine states under GOP control have adopted measures to make it more difficult to vote since 2013. Since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in June 2013, half of the states (eight in total) previously covered under Section 5 have passed or implemented new voting restrictions.
These laws, from voter ID to cutting early voting to restricting voter registration, have been passed under the guise of stopping voter fraud, although there’s scant evidence that such fraud exists. Obama cited a comprehensive study by News21 that found only ten cases of in-person voter impersonation since 2000. “The real voter fraud,” the president said, “is people who try to deny our rights by making bogus arguments about voter fraud.”
Obama’s speech highlighted how Democratic leaders are embracing the cause of voting rights. (Attorney General Eric Holder has made it a signature issue, with the DOJ filing lawsuits against new voting restrictions in Texas and North Carolina last year.)
A day before arriving in New York, Obama spoke about civil rights at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library’s commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act—where the subject of contemporary attacks on voting rights came up often. “Is this what Martin Luther King gave his life for?” asked Bill Clinton. “Is this what Lyndon Johnson employed his legendary skills for? Is this what America has become a great thriving democracy for? To restrict the franchise?”
Democratic presidential hopefuls like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden have recently championed voting rights. The Democratic National Committee has launched a new Voter Expansion Project and veterans of the Obama campaign started iVote to elect Democratic secretaries of state in Colorado, Iowa, Ohio and Nevada. Democrats hope that an appeal to voting rights will help mobilize key constituencies, like in 2012, when a backlash against GOP voter suppression efforts increased African-American turnout. “The single most important thing we can do to protect our right to vote is to vote,” Obama said on Friday.
It’s great that Democratic leaders are finally recognizing the severity of the attack on voting rights. But it’s sad that Republicans are almost unanimously supporting the restriction of voting rights rather than the expansion of the franchise.
Things weren’t always this way. In his new book about the Civil Rights Act, An Idea Whose Time Has Come, Todd Purdum tells the story of Bill McCulloch, a conservative Republican from Ohio who championed civil rights as the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee. The Politico excerpt from the book was titled “The Republican Who Saved Civil Rights.”
There would have been no Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Voting Rights Act of 1965 without the support of Republicans like McCulloch and Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois. For decades after the 1960s, voting rights legislation had strong bipartisan support in Congress. Every reauthorization of the VRA—in 1970, 1975, 1982 and 2006—was signed by a Republican president and supported by an overwhelming number of Republicans in Congress.
Republicans like Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, an heir to McCulloch who as the former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee oversaw the 2006 reauthorization of the VRA and is co-sponsoring a new fix for the VRA, used to be the norm within the GOP. Now he’s the rare Republican who still believes the GOP should remain the party of Lincoln. Where is the Republican Voter Expansion Project?
It’s also unfortunate that many in the media continue to report on voting rights like it’s a left-versus-right issue, as if supporting a fundamental democratic right suddenly makes one a flaming liberal. Jamie Fuller of The Washington Post called voting rights “the Democrats’ most important project in 2014.” Michael Shear of The New York Times dubbed Obama’s speech an effort “to rally his political base.”
The right to vote used to be regarded as a moral issue, not a partisan one. As President Johnson said when he introduced the VRA before Congress: “It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country.”
As long as Democrats are the party of voting rights and Republicans are the party of voter suppression, the right to vote will continue to be under siege.
By: Ari Berman, The Nation, April 14, 2014
“A Fight That Has Already Been Settled”: Nevada Journalists; Conservative Media Darling Rancher Is Clearly “Breaking The Law”
Local journalists covering Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s case stress he is no victim and is breaking the law, regardless of conservative media’s sympathy for his defiance of government orders to remove cattle from federal land.
Those reporters and editors — some who have been covering the case for 20 years — spoke with Media Matters and said many of Bundy’s neighbors object to his failure to pay fees to have his cattle graze on the land near Mesquite, NV., when they pay similar fees themselves.
“We have interviewed neighbors and people in and around Mesquite and they have said that he is breaking the law,” said Chuck Meyer, news director at CBS’ KXNT Radio in Las Vegas. “When it comes to the matter of the law, Mr. Bundy is clearly wrong.”
Bundy’s case dates back to 1993, when he stopped paying the fees required of local ranchers who use the federally owned land for their cattle and other animals. Local editors say more than 85 percent of Nevada land is owned by the federal government.
Bundy stopped paying fees on some 100,000 acres of land in 1993 and has defied numerous court orders, claiming the land should be controlled by Nevada and that the federal government has no authority over it.
Last year a federal court ordered Bundy to remove his cattle or they would be confiscated to pay the more than $1 million in fees and fines he’s accumulated. The confiscation began earlier this month, but was halted because the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had “serious concerns about the safety of employees and members of the public” when armed militia showed up to block the takeover.
Despite his lawlessness, Bundy has become a sympathetic figure for many in the right-wing media.
But for local journalists, many who have been reporting on him for decades, that image is very misguided.
“He clearly has captured national attention, among mostly conservative media who have portrayed him as a kind of a property rights, First Amendment, Second Amendment, range war kind of issue,” Meyer noted. “That’s how it has been framed, but the story goes back a lot longer and is pretty cut and dry as far as legal implications have been concerned.”
He added that, “Cliven Bundy and his supporters are engaged in a fight that has already been settled. There are a number of people around these parts who have strong reservations about Bundy’s actions.”
Las Vegas Sun Editorial Page Editor Matt Hufman said depicting Bundy as a victim is wrong.
“The BLM had court orders against him in the 90s telling him to get off federal land,” Hufman said. “He’s got a bunch of these arguments about state’s rights, it’s not federal land, blah, blah, blah. All of the arguments have been knocked down.”
Hufman cited Bundy’s claim that his family has been on the land since the 1870s, adding, “a federal judge said the land’s been owned by the federal government since 1848.” He later added that Bundy “was paying grazing fees until 1993 then he stopped. At some point it was okay for him to pay grazing fees.”
Ron Comings, news director of KLAS-TV in Las Vegas, offered a similar view.
“You have to keep in mind that huge percentages of western states are owned by the feds and that has rubbed people the wrong way for a long time,” Comings said. “But they are the same people who will say that ‘we all pay grazing fees and you have to pay and you should work this through other channels.’ There are a lot of farmers and ranchers who pay the grazing fees whether they like it or not, and they see him as someone who is not. They say to stop paying their fees is like not paying your rent and you don’t have a leg to stand on.”
Comings also pointed out that many of the armed “militia” who came to Bundy’s aid are from out of state, describing them as “just anti-government and … just seen as outsiders who are coming in to jump on this issue.”
Even Las Vegas Review-Journal Editor Michael Hengel, whose paper published an editorial in support of Bundy, admitted he is not legally in the right: “He’s breaking the law, that fact is true, they have ruled that … The courts have ruled that he is on federal land and he is grazing on federal land and he has not paid.”
In St. George, UT., the closest city with its own daily media, the online St. George News weighed in with a critical piece Sunday that also took aim at the national press supporting Bundy, stating: “The Bundy Range War was perpetuated by an irresponsible media vying for nothing more than ratings and an ill-informed and willfully ignorant public who, much like a NASCAR fan, come to the race simply in hopes of seeing a crash.”
By: Joe Strupp, Media Matters For America, April 16, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 