“GOP’s Fuzzy Math On Obamacare Enrollments”: Creating A Bubble That Keeps Reality Out, Then Reinforcing The Bubble With Nonsense
If the point of a press stunt is to generate some attention for your cause, House Republicans are waking up this morning happy: stories like these were picked up by quite a few news outlets.
House Republicans on Wednesday said they have data from insurance companies that shows only 67 percent of people who selected a health plan under ObamaCare have paid their first month’s premium. […]
The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s subpanel on Oversight and Investigations said it contacted every insurance company involved in the federal marketplace, and based its data on people who had paid by April 15.
It’s the latest evolution in the GOP’s anti-healthcare line. What started with “no one will want to sign up” eventually became “no one should sign up,” which morphed into “not enough people are signing up,” and finally “those who did sign up don’t count.”
Notice, of course, that Republicans involved in this debate make no effort to hide the degree to which they’re rooting for failure.
In this case, though, the trouble with the new GOP argument is that’s painfully, demonstrably wrong. It’s so wrong, in fact, that I’m a little insulted – regular ol’ hackery is occasionally functional, but this latest scheme is just sad. It’s one thing for House Republicans to try to mislead the public, it’s something else for them to be lazy about it, treating voters and journalists as if we were all easily fooled children.
How deceptive is the report from the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s panel? Let us count the ways.
First, note that the Republican numbers are sharply at odds with the numbers from the insurance companies themselves, most of which put the total of enrolled customers who’ve paid their first premium at between 80% and 90%. Given this, either the insurers or GOP lawmakers are exaggerating, and since insurers have no incentive to lie about this, it would appear Republicans are trying to pull a fast one.
Second, GOP lawmakers picked an arbitrary and misleading cut-off date: they only count customers who paid premiums by April 15. But that’s ridiculous – as Charles Gaba explained, literally millions of Americans enrolled very close to the March 31 deadline and they were still receiving their first bill around April 15.
Third, as Jonathan Cohn reminds us, insurers specifically told these lawmakers that the data as of April 15 would be incomplete and paint a misleading picture. Republicans ignored this in order to launch a cheap attack intended to mislead.
And while these factual errors are obviously important, and were very likely deliberate, there’s also a thematic problem hanging over the effort itself: House Republicans, who can’t produce a health care plan of their own despite promises to the contrary, still believe ACA enrollment totals are both too high and too low at the same time.
Remember, if these conservative lawmakers had their way, the total number of consumers signing up for coverage through exchange marketplaces and paying premiums would be zero. For them to keep whining about the successful enrollment process, looking for new areas to complain about, is effectively an “Annie Hall” moment: “Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know, and such small portions.’”
Whether or not Republicans understand any of this is unclear. At a certain level, I suspect the substance doesn’t much matter to them either way – it’s about making an attack, hoping the media will repeat it, and counting on at least some of the public to buy it.
But in a case like this, even this is self-defeating, since the actual data will soon be published and we’ll have a new round of evidence that the Republican attacks were plainly untrue.
So why do they bother? To establish the basis for a bogus talking point: thanks to yesterday’s misleading committee “report,” conservative media will repeat as gospel that “only 67%” of consumers paid premiums, so the right no longer has to believe the evidence about the Affordable Care Act exceeding its enrollment projections.
It’s about creating a bubble that keeps reality out, then reinforcing the bubble with nonsense.
Update: The “report” itself is online here. Note how it fits comfortably on one page.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 1, 2014
“So Much Stupid”: On Race, Meet Dumb And Dumberer
Oh, my Lord, where to begin?
You already know what this column is about. You know even though we are barely three sentences in. You knew before you saw the headline.
There are days in the opinion business when one story makes itself inevitable and unavoidable, one story sucks up all the air in the room. This is one of those times. One story.
Well … two, actually: the misadventures of Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling.
Bundy, of course, is the Nevada rancher whose refusal to pay fees to allow his cattle to graze on public land made him a cause célèbre on the political right. They enthusiastically embraced his government-is-the-enemy ideology (Timothy McVeigh would be proud) and militia types flocked to his side, eager for an armed standoff.
Until the press conference where Bundy relieved himself of a few opinions regarding — ahem — “the Negro.”
“They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy?”
And again: Where to begin? Black people “put” their sons in jail? Slavery promoted family life? And beg pardon, but what is free usage of federal land if not a government subsidy? There is so much stupid packed into those words you’d need a chisel to get it all out.
Small wonder that last week the extreme right treated its hero as the rats treated Titanic, shocked — simply shocked! — to learn that a guy who leads an army in refusing to recognize the existence of the federal government might be nuts.
Which brings us to Sterling, owner of the NBA team the Los Angeles Clippers. A leaked audiotape has Sterling telling a woman friend to stop publicizing her relationships with African-American people and bringing them to his games. Sterling also says of Clippers players: “I support them and give them food, and clothes, and cars and houses. Who gives it to them?”
“Give.” Mind you, the man is talking about people who work for him.
So there you have it: frick and frack, the dumb and dumberer of American racial discourse, and predictably, dutifully, media figures, pundits and pols have come together to blow raspberries in their direction, to say all the right things in condemnation of them and their diarrhetic mouths. And yes, they deserve that. Still, there is something facile and dishonest in it, something that reeks of unearned righteousness and even moral cowardice.
The truth is, the idiocy of these men doesn’t mean a whole lot, doesn’t impact much beyond their immediate lives. We hyperventilate about it, yet somehow manage not to be overly concerned as black boys are funneled into prison, brown ones are required to show their papers, voting rights are interdicted, Fourth Amendment rights are abrogated and some guy has his job application round-filed when the hiring woman sees that his name is Malik.
We keep declaring our country cured of its birth defect of racial hatred. Indeed, that’s an article of faith on the political right.
It is only possible to think that so long as you don’t look too closely, so long as you are willing to ignore dirty deeds done largely out of sight and back of mind by collective hands — everyone guilty, so no one is. Then some guys who didn’t get the memo speak a little too stupidly a little too loudly and people condemn them and feel good about themselves for doing so.
But many of us don’t really understand what they purport to condemn. Otherwise, how could there be all this noise about that which doesn’t matter — and silence about that which does?
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist, The Miami Herald; The National Memo, April 30, 2014
“There Is No Simpler Way To Put It”: Cliven Bundy’s An Old-Fashioned Racist – And He’s Not Alone
When I was a kid growing up in South Carolina, I was racist. I used the ‘n” word. I was taught that word by those around me, men and women who I looked to for moral guidance. My late father was a horrible bigot and he truly believed black people were simply beneath him. My late grandmother didn’t really use that word around me but she made it clear by her actions that anyone who wasn’t white was simply “lesser.”
Yet, these were two people who had more influence over me than pretty much anyone else in my youth. I loved them both and even today their deaths affect me emotionally.
When I was finally able to admit and embrace being gay to my family, something in me changed. I was moved from a place of hate to a place of empathy. I began to see the world not through the eyes of a privileged white Southern kid but from the perspective of someone on the other side of the railroad tracks. It was, in a word, sobering.
When I hear white people talk about race, I get a little clammy. When I hear Cliven Bundy talk about race, I get really pissed off. This “tea party” favorite, an American grandfather who’s a rancher with a very loyal family, seems to have bared his soul for the press. He likes the bully pulpit that comes from being a “taker,” a freeloader, a tax evader. He’s a man who doesn’t recognize the U.S. government in any way shape fashion or form. He’s also a man who said this, as reported by the New York Times:
“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.
“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
The “negro?” Picking cotton? Seriously? Who the hell is this guy? Let me tell you who Cliven Bundy is. He’s a bigot who believes in “freedom.” In case it’s lost on you, Bundy is the ultimate government subsidy. He believes in feeding his cattle for free. He doesn’t believe he owes federal taxes. He doesn’t believe in the rule of federal law. Bundy is purely and simply a common criminal who deserves to go to jail.
He believes in using us in the press as his bully pulpit and we let him. Bundy believes in a land mass of 50 states, not one nation of 50 states. He’s a secessionist. He’s not a patriot as some have called him. George Washington was a patriot – who, not for nothing, used force to put down citizens who refused to pay the federal excise tax in the Whiskey Rebellion. Abraham Lincoln was a patriot, who by the way implemented the federal income tax. I’d love to hear Bundy’s wise opinion on Lincoln. No doubt he’ll tell us if we let him. No doubt we’ll give him that microphone. We should.
I guess the question we must ask is, does Cliven Bundy represent a thin and narrow sliver of American society or is he something bigger? With freedom fighters and birthers and tea partiers and their ilk rallying behind him and his right to steal from the American taxpayer, I’m convinced this man is no sliver of hate. Clearly, the freedom fighters hate what America has become and they’re convinced President Obama is leading us all down the path to Hell. Their new spokesman? Cliven Bundy.
This Bundy fellow isn’t a one-off. Conservative opinion columnist George Will seems to think so. He has opined that Democrats scream racism anytime we don’t like what we’re hearing. I’d probably agree if this were just Bundy but it’s not. Just Google Cliven Bundy and you’ll see his following, his supporters, his freedom followers. Even fools like Allen West support this racist.
I don’t know Mr. Bundy but I knew his type when I was a kid. There’s not much difference between my father and Bundy. That makes me sad. I always held my father on a pedestal even with his grotesque flaws. When I hear the Cliven Bundys of the world spew out their filth, their racism, I’m reminded of my ignorant childhood, of my grandmother’s and daddy’s view of the world and I’m horrified.
By: Jimmie Williams, an MSNBC Political Contributor; Published in U. S. News and World Report, April 24, 2014
“The Religion Of Unreason”: Creeds Are Not Built Up Out Of Facts
I think it’s safe to say that this period in history is one in which liberals have felt unusually exasperated with conservatives, perhaps more than ever before. I can say this with some confidence as a liberal who runs in liberal circles; it may well be that conservatives are also more exasperated with liberals than they have ever been. Our ability to feed that exasperation is driven by the fact that, for all the polarization of information sources, we’re actually more aware of what people on the other side say than we ever have been before. Fifteen years ago, I would have had no idea if Rush Limbaugh said something offensive, but today (once it rises to a certain level of horror), Media Matters will record it and put it on their web site, the Huffington Post will put it on their web site, and half a dozen people in my Twitter feed will let me know it happened. So there are all kinds of new ways to become appalled with your opponents.
And there’s nothing we liberals find more frustrating than the contemporary conservative aversion to facts, particularly on a few select topics, none more than health care. We like to think of ourselves as rational, thoughtful people, who arrive at our opinions after careful consideration, while the other side is fed by prejudices, insane conspiracy theories, and an inability to admit when the world doesn’t turn out the way they thought it would. Conservatives find this to be an unfair caricature, but they can’t deny that many, many people on their side are—let’s be charitable and say unconcerned—with the truth of the world. Barack Obama is a natural-born citizen, Hillary Clinton didn’t engineer Benghazi for nefarious ends, there were no death panels, the ACA doesn’t explode the deficit, people did indeed sign up for insurance, a system where people get subsidies from the government to buy private health policies they can use at private doctors is not “socialism,” and so on. And yet these ideas persist. With characteristic eloquence, Gary Wills explains why:
The irrelevance of evidence in the face of sacred causes explains the dogged denial of global warming, the deep belief that the Obama Administration was responsible for the killing of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens in Benghazi and that Obama is not a legitimate American. To go back farther, it explains the claims that FDR arranged for the attack on Pearl Harbor and gave much of the world away to Stalin at Yalta (an idea Joe Scarborough is still clinging to). Repealing Obamacare will eventually go the way of repealing the New Deal. But the opposition will never fade entirely away—and it may well be strong enough in this year’s elections to determine the outcome. It is something people are willing to sacrifice for and feel noble about. Creeds are not built up out of facts. They are what make people reject all evidence that guns are more the cause of crime than the cure for it. The best preservative for unreason is to make a religion of it.
The priests of that religion are the media figures who pass down the injunctions from on high, telling their flocks what they should believe, whom they should hate, and what they should be angry about today. And the politicians? Some no doubt truly believe when they kneel at the altar. Others go through the motions, with an eye cast back over their shoulder at the pews to make sure everyone sees their piety. And some may even be looking forward to the time when a few of the religion’s more absurd tenets fall by the wayside, so they can tell the congregants what they want to hear without feeling like they’re feeding the madness of some unhinged cult.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 23, 2014
“A Shallow Television Political Reporter”: NBC Analyzing Poor David Gregory To See What Makes His Show So Bad
If it’s Monday, it’s NBC embarrassing itself in front of everyone. Today, the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi brings us the story of a network that can’t figure out why “Meet the Press” isn’t the runaway ratings smash it used to be. (This is not the first piece of this year exploring that subject.) Is the problem host David Gregory? They sent in experts to figure it out:
Last year, the network undertook an unusual assessment of the 43-year-old journalist, commissioning a psychological consultant to interview his friends and even his wife. The idea, according to a network spokeswoman, Meghan Pianta, was “to get perspective and insight from people who know him best.” But the research project struck some at NBC as odd, given that Gregory has been employed there for nearly 20 years.
Well, how absolutely humiliating, to have this reported in the Washington Post. (NBC disputes the use of the word “psychological,” claiming they brought in a “brand consultant.”)
Is there something psychologically wrong with David Gregory? No, besides the usual superhuman vanity of a television professional. He is just not a great host of a news talk show! He is incurious. He asks predictable questions and is not informed enough to ask follow-ups that go beyond the scope of his briefing materials.
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