Day: 1/21/2014

Now Fox News Is Organizing ObamaCare Opposition

Posted by on January 21, 2014 at 3:55 pm. 5 Comments :

It has been no secret that Fox News has been a virulent opponent of the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) since before it was even passed into law. They aggressively campaigned against its passage and launched a massive crusade to frighten people from taking advantage of the benefits available to them under the law. Now Fox News has taken the additional step of explicitly soliciting viewers to oppose the law.

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On a broadcast this weekend, Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer introduced Fox Business Network anchor Gerri Willis to deliver a flawed and misleading report that claimed that most ObamaCare enrollees already had health insurance prior to acquiring their ObamaCare coverage. The report was sourced to Fox’s sister newspaper The Wall Street Journal. Not surprisingly, it was biased by the predetermined viewpoint that is consistent throughout the Rupert Murdoch media empire. It left out or distorted information pertaining to participation in ObamaCare by those who qualified for Medicaid and adult children under twenty-six who were able to be added to their parents policies thanks to ObamaCare.

At the end of Willis’ report, Hemmer asked her a question that led to the unambiguous call to action to their viewers.

Hemmer: If this is a trend that continues, what is likely to happen as a result, Gerri?

Willis: Well I think the chorus of voices for this law to be repealed will grow louder and, frankly, will have to get more support from more and more people, Bill.

By directly appealing to their audience to join “the chorus of voices” opposing ObamaCare, these anchors have proven, once again, that Fox is a political operation and not a news network. They have unmistakably pledged their allegiance to the Tea Party Republicans who have been so determined to undo the legislation that is already bringing relief to millions of Americans.

Earlier the network aired a similar report without the direct appeal. On that segment anchor Julie Banderas and correspondent Doug McKelway took turns deceiving their audience with prejudicially charged rhetoric aimed at slanting the tone of coverage in a negative manner. Note the intentional bias in the bolded text.

Bandares: A stunning new report that is raising serious questions about the effectiveness of the President’s signature legislation.

McKelway: Only 11% of consumers who purchased new coverage under ObamaCare thus far have been uninsured previously. That is a remarkable figure. It means that the vast majority of Americans who have enrolled already had insurance and likely had their insurance policies canceled late last year as a result of the law’s mandate that certain procedures be covered even if the insuree didn’t want those procedures covered. It lends credence to those doubters who say they were mislead before the law’s implementation.

The figures cited in that report were not all that remarkable. One of the goals of ObamaCare was to bring affordable health insurance to people who were being gouged by the profiteers in the insurance industry. Consequently, many people would be expected to cancel their policies in favor of the new, less expensive options that provided better coverage. And McKelway threw in a remark about people who likely had policies canceled, even though that was not a part of the survey on which he was reporting. He simply made that up, just as he did the claim that insurees didn’t want the new procedures that the law mandates.

The only thing that is lent any credence is to those doubters who recognize the blatantly conservative politicking of Fox News. McKelway failed to provide any credible support for his reporting. In fact, the only two people that appeared in his report were Tom Price, a Republican congressman, and a representative of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Koch brothers financed think tank that opposes ObamaCare, denies Climate Change, and lobbies for economic reforms that benefit corporations and the wealthy. That’s Fox’s version of fairness and balance.

If Fox News is going to take an active role in organizing protests against political issues, they ought to be forced to register as a Political Action Committee and have their operations be subject to the laws governing such activities. That would include reporting all of their broadcasts that advocate on behalf of candidates and causes as in-kind political contributions. It would further limit the manner and time in which they can engage in political activities.

If the American political system were actually fair and balanced, the Federal Elections Commission would be slapping fines and injunctions on Fox News for violating federal law. But in an environment wherein corporations are regarded as people, and individuals can donate unlimited funds to candidates anonymously, it will take some time and effort before media enterprises like Fox will be called to account for their perversions of democracy.

So F**king What? The ObamaCare Website Contractor Scandal Delusion

Posted by on January 21, 2014 at 1:21 pm. NO Comments :

You know that things are getting bad for conservative wingnuts when they resort to complaining about President Obama for doing what they previously called for him to do.

Last October the ObamaCare website launched with an historic thud. It barely functioned and was widely deemed to be an embarrassing failure for Obama and CGI Federal, the firm that developed the site. Right-wingers from across the land were sent into a frothing ecstasy as they extended the website’s problems to all of ObamaCare and everything else the President did. One of their most often heard demands was that “heads must roll.”

So you might think that they would have been happy to learn that Obama had fired CGI for the website fiasco. They could have spun it as capitulation to their demands and a victory for their side. But if you thought that, you are not very familiar with their unique brand of psychosis and inbred hostility.

So instead, an article popped up today on the Daily Caller website, a disreputable operation run by Fox News host Tucker Carlson. The author is Patrick Howley, whose resume includes an attempt to infiltrate Occupy Wall Street groups to incite violence that he would then blame on the Occupy movement (he failed). The article was then picked up by Fox News for posting on their lie-riddled, hate site, Fox Nation.

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Howley’s article is a monumentally silly effort to invent a scandal where none exists. The shocking revelation he exposed is that the firm hired to replace CGI had once employed someone who had also been employed by the Obama campaign in 2012. Now try to follow this, because it’s even stupider than it sounds. Rayid Ghani had first worked for Accenture where he did research on consumer behavior. Later he was recruited by Obama’s campaign to work on voter tracking. Today he does not work for either Obama or Accenture, but Accenture has been hired to do continued maintenance on the ObamaCare website. Or put another way, the Obama administration has hired a firm that no longer employs someone who is also no longer employed by Obama. Scandalous, isn’t it?

Howley’s logic is painfully idiotic. He is proposing that you take everyone who has ever worked for Obama in any capacity, find out where they worked previously, and scratch them off of any lists for future employment or contracts. That would probably disqualify most of the Forbes 500 and ten or twenty million people.

To make matters even more comically obtuse, last October Howley wrote an article for the Daily Caller complaining about tangential affiliations between Obama and CGI. In that piece he asserted a wholly unsupported allegation that there was some sort of chicanery in the relationship because Michelle Obama had attended Princeton at the same time as a woman who later became a CGI executive. He made no attempt to prove that they ever met. Once again, Howley’s perverse logic suggests that any company that employs any of the thousands of people who attended the same Ivy League universities as the Obamas is exempt from government work.

So to summarize, Howley alleged impropriety when Obama hired a firm where a Princeton classmate of Michelle was employed, despite showing no connection between them. However, he was not mollified when Obama fired that firm and replaced it with another firm that does not employ a man who is also not employed by Obama. Nice work, Sherlock.

In addition, Howley squeezed another angle into his article that claimed that there were ongoing security threats within the ObamaCare website. He did not in any way substantiate his claim, but he did provide pretty good evidence that no such security exploits exist. He referenced the testimony of an ex-con who was paraded before a Republican-controlled committee hearing to say that breaking into Healthcare.gov “would be a hacker’s wet dream.” That’s actually true. And the fact that it hasn’t happened speaks to the reliability of the security on the website given the desirability of hackers to break it.

This is just another example of what happens when right-wing extremists have nothing of substance to say about policy or process. They scrape the bottom of the scandal barrel in a desperate search for controversy, or least distraction. It is their hope that they can either tarnish their foes with mud or keep them from bringing attention to the fact that the conservative platform consists of little more than repealing ObamaCare, cutting taxes for the rich, cutting benefits for the poor, and regulating the behavior of citizens in the privacy of their homes. That platform, along with alienating women and minorities, is not going to serve them particularly well in 2014, 2016, or beyond.