Fox Nation vs. Reality: Bigfoot’s Epic Battle With ObamaCare And Congress

In takes a monumental heaping of chutzpah for Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell to criticize the approval rating for ObamaCare when he is the lowest ranked political leader in the nation with 22% favorability. He lands well below President Obama (49%), Nancy Pelosi (35%), House Speaker John Boehner (27%), and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid(27%). But even this act of audacity is eclipsed by Fox Nation’s brazenly deceitful presentation of it.

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The Fox Nationalist’s headline reads “McConnell: More Believe In ‘Bigfoot’ Than Obamacare.” However, that is not what McConnell said. The source article from the Washington Examiner quotes McConnell commenting on ObamaCare’s implementation saying that “just 12 percent of Americans think the rollout has gone well.” So this is not a referendum on the Affordable Care Act itself, just the admittedly glitchy launch of the website. McConnell failed to note, though, that the job approval rating for Congress is only 11%, so the nation regards Congress in even lower esteem than the ObamaCare website’s botched debut.

McConnell went on to note that 14% of Americans believe in the existence of Bigfoot (which is a sorry reflection on America). However, there is no argument that the vast majority of the country believes that ObamaCare exists. So the comparison doesn’t make any sense. If, instead, they had polled on the public’s approval of Bigfoot we might have a more apt (and interesting) comparison. But I still suspect that Bigfoot would have kicked McConnell’s ass off a cliff (figuratively and literally).

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Breaking Up With Fox News: Guess Who’s Dumping The Network Now?

The YouGov survey group does periodic studies on the reputation and appeal of major businesses and services. It is an indicator of the brands that Americans prefer and regard with respect and esteem.

Included in the study is a breakdown of brand favorability by political party affiliation. Last year the survey had Fox News as the number one brand favored by Republicans above all others (including Chick-Fil-A). The strong showing by Fox was an affirmation of the dependency that conservatives have on an authority to give them direction and validation.

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No one, not even Republicans, like being lied to: Fox Nation vs. Reality

However, in the intervening year a lot has taken place that has deteriorated the bonds that Republican viewers had with their daddy network. They lost an election that Fox had assured them they would win in a landslide. They launched numerous investigations into alleged scandals that, despite Fox’s endless hype, failed to catch on with the public or to prove any malfeasance on the part of the president they despise. They pursued a doomed strategy to shut down the government and threaten to throw the nation into default in an effort to reverse time and make ObamaCare disappear. And they continue to suffer through a relationship with the acutely demented Tea Party whose disintegrating appeal hasn’t stopped them from launching pernicious primary challenges that will inevitably benefit Democrats.

Not surprisingly, the results of the new BrandIndex survey reflect these realities. While Fox News was number one among Republicans last year, it didn’t even make the top ten this year (and neither did Chick-Fil-A). The precipitous decline of Fox parallels falling poll numbers for the GOP, the Tea Party, and the Republican congressional leadership, to historic lows. So just as the Tea-Publican Party has fallen out of favor with the American people, Fox News has fallen out of favor with those who correctly recognize it as the Republican network.

Fox News was already the product of intense PR that fooled people into thinking it was a broadly popular and influential cable news network, when in fact it is only viewed by about 3% of the American population. Yet despite countless hours of programming, and millions of dollars worth of political promotions, Fox has been pitifully ineffectual at swaying public opinion in the last two election cycles. Perhaps that failure of its core mission has contributed to Republicans abandoning Fox and refocusing on more important matters like the “girliness” factor of the new Marine caps and imaginary threats lurking in ObamaCare.

Having lost the respect of the key demographic segment of its audience cannot be regarded as fortuitous in these months leading up to the 2014 midterm elections. However, in the end, some portion of the GOP faithful will surely return to the Fox fold. After all, where else can they go to get such adoration, affirmation, and {free) airtime?

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Fox Nation vs. Reality: Putting Words In The President’s Mouth

The determination of Fox News to criticize President Obama over anything that he says or does is well established. They have a knee-jerk negative response to his every utterance, even if he is agreeing with them. But apparently that isn’t even an aggressive enough expression of disgust. So now they are inventing quotations that never occurred and assigning them to the President.

Fox Nation
For more Fox reality-busting, read Fox Nation vs. Reality

In an item posted to Fox’s community website, the Lie-Riddled Fox Nation, the headline reads “President: ‘I Don’t Know … and I Don’t Want to Know'” If the editors were referring to their own interest in what truthfully took place, that would would be an accurate headline. They clearly don’t know and don’t want to know the truth. However, they are allegedly quoting President Obama who never made those remarks.

The support cited by Fox were three items that took Obama to task for not knowing about the NSA’s alleged spying on a variety of world leaders. The first was an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal written by Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan. The second was a Bill O’Reilly rant on his Fox program. The third was a segment from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In none of these citations did Obama say the words that the Fox Nationalists attributed to him. They had three shots at the brass ring and missed all three times.

It is ironic, though, that Fox chose to include Noonan’s article to ding Obama on what he knew about some clandestine national security matters. Noonan’s former boss, you’ll recall, was summoned to Congress to give an accounting of his knowledge of the Iran-Contra Affair wherein he sold weapons to the Iranians in order to earn money with which to support fascist rebels in Nicaragua. He answered “I don’t remember” or “I don’t recall” 124 times. This far exceeds any allegation by Republicans today as to Obama’s mindfulness.

I guess Noonan, and Fox, can’t be expected to remember those serious felonies when they are so preoccupied with slandering Obama, who broke no laws. In fact, the sort of spying in question is presumed, by most intelligence professionals, to be occurring routinely every day by every major country. The only thing that is extraordinary about it is that it became public. And that’s all Fox needed to assemble their best storytellers and make up some things to pretend that Obama said.


The Tea Party Is Over According To – Bill O’Reilly!

The astroturf fraud known as the Tea Party was literally invented by a cabal of uber-rightist millionaires and corporations with interests in tobacco and oil. The prime movers were the Koch brothers, who transited from their father’s John Birch Society to their own front groups, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks.

The financial firepower of these entities, however, was still not enough to elevate the Tea Party “movement.” It required an aggressive media sponsor to flood the news zone with faux-populist themes and give birth to the puppetized pundits and politicians who would carry the message. For that mission Fox News was all too ready to volunteer and even went to great lengths to brand the Tea Party as a Fox News subsidiary with promos touting their “FNC Tax Day Tea Parties.” There can be no doubt that without Fox News there would be no Tea Party.

Bill O'Reilly
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That makes the new column by Fox’s star attraction, Bill O’Reilly, all the more startling. His own headline reads “Is the Tea Party Over?” And by the end he answers the question with a resounding “Yes.”

“The only way the Tea Party can resurrect itself is for it to coalesce around a strong leader. There has to be a central message delivered by someone with charisma, a person who is reasonable and persuasive. The movement has been damaged both inside and out. Only a very intense public relations campaign will turn the tide.

“I don’t think that will happen. It would take millions of dollars in TV ads and organizational infrastructure for the Tea Party to negate the national media’s contempt. And that kind of big money operation goes directly against what the Tea Party people want to be – a citizen movement that operates independent of party structure.”

O’Reilly’s opinion, in short, is that “The only way the Tea Party can resurrect itself is for it to coalesce around a strong leader,” and “I don’t think that will happen.” O’Reilly is throwing recent Tea Darlings like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul under the bus, along with baggers like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann who are already there.

I’m not going to argue with O’Reilly’s conclusion because the Tea Party has always been a constructed reality. It never existed outside of the power structure of the Republican elite. There were no Tea Party candidates, conventions, voter registrations, or platforms. They were all Republican politicians, voters, and policies. However, there is much to disagree with in the path to O’Reilly’s eulogy.

First of all, O’Reilly’s contention that the Tea Party’s problem is a lack of leaders can only be taken seriously by a deaf and blind pundit who lives in a Himalayan cave. There are many who do, and who aspire to, lead the phony parade. Their problem is that they advocate a broadly unpopular set of policies that the American people emphatically reject. People like Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin have favorable ratings that scrape the sea floor at record low levels, as does the Tea Party itself. The Tea Party doesn’t have a public relations problem, it has an agenda problem.

Secondly, O’Reilly seems to think that there hasn’t been enough money thrown at advancing the Tea Party mission. When he said that it “would take millions of dollars” which conflicts with the Tea Party’s alleged aversion to “big money operations,” he ignores the fact that the Tea Party has always been a big money operation financed with hundreds of millions of dollars by everyone from the Koch brothers to Karl Rove to the Republican National Committee, and dozens of mysterious Super PACs that keep their donor’s identities secret.

The central theme of O’Reilly’s column is that the Tea Party’s woes are all the result of the contempt of the media (as opposed to the contempt of the people). He says that “the Tea Party finds itself with an image problem and there are two primary reasons why.” The first of O’Reilly’s gripes is with the media, who he says “is at odds with Tea Party beliefs,” and that “demonizes the Tea Party all day long calling it racist, stupid and even worse – unsophisticated!” It’s telling that O’Reilly thinks it’s worse to be called unsophisticated than racist or stupid. But he may be onto something because, based on their behavior, most Tea Partiers don’t seem to be concerned about public displays of racism or stupidity.

The second of O’Reilly’s grips is with the media (just like the first gripe), but in this case it’s “the right wing media, which generally loves the party.” Here O’Reilly lays into the birther nutjobs who call the President a communist and a Muslim. In other words, most of the Tea Party and much of Fox News. O’Reilly attempts to take a stand for comity by declaring that “Hate is hate no matter what ideology you embrace.” This from the guy who opened the column by implying that the supporters of Occupy Wall Street “embrace violent tactics [and] infringe on the rights of the folks.”

So according to O’Reilly, the billionaire-backed Tea Party is not a big money operation, it has no national leaders unless you count the Cruzes and Palins and Pauls, and Limbaughs and Hannitys, etc., but it is plagued by a contemptuous media that hates them and an adoring media that loves them. [Warning: Don’t try to make any sense of this. It can only lead to confusion, severe mental anguish, logical disorientation, and acute migraines]. However, if O’Reilly’s tortured contention is that what it all adds up to is that the Tea Party is over, let’s just cross our fingers hope that he stumbled onto the truth for a change. But in all likelihood, he is just carrying water for the establishment GOP who are trying desperately to distance themselves from Tea Party crackpottery out of fear that it is going to be a big loser for them in the 2014 elections. He, and they, are too late. Now they have to live (or perish, as the case may be) with the monster they created.


So F**king What? Michelle Obama’s Princeton Classmate Is A Successful Businesswoman

When conservatives get desperate for derogatory material with which to bash President Obama, they generally make bigger asses of themselves than usual. For example, the Daily Caller, a right-wing rag run by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, just published a shocking expose that will surely topple the President and his evil cohorts.

The Daily Caller’s investigative reporter, Patrick Howley, who famously uncovered the Case of the Scandalous Hat, and the plot to Gobble Up Gun Magazines, is on the hunt again for officialdom’s dirty linen. Howley’s credentials are bolstered by his experience as a violent right-wing thug who admitted to infiltrating OccupyDC for the purpose of undermining it. And with that trophy on his mantle, he has now discovered an ominous link between the First Lady and an executive at CGI Federal, the company that built the troubled ObamaCare website.

Daily Caller
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It seems that Michelle Obama attended Princeton at the same time as Toni Townes-Whitley, who went on to become a senior vice president at CGI. While there is nothing in Howley’s article that proves that these two women knew one another, the accusatory tone is unmistakeable. After all, how is it possible that a graduate of a respected Ivy League university would otherwise manage to secure employment as an executive of a prominent, multinational corporation? Howley’s reporting on this, if anything, did not go far enough. He could easily have implicated the entire Princeton class of 1985 in some sort of criminal conspiracy with the Obama White House. But perhaps the most revealing part of his article is this (emphasis added):

“Toni Townes ’85 is a onetime policy analyst with the General Accounting Office and previously served in the Peace Corps in Gabon, West Africa. Her decision to return to work, as an African-American woman, after six years of raising kids was applauded by a Princeton alumni publication in 1998.”

It would have been nice if Howley had elaborated on what other options Townes-Whitley had to return to work as, if not an African-American woman. Perhaps she could also have returned as an Anglo-Prussian Hermaphrodite. Those Princeton grads can be exceedingly versatile.

In addition to ferreting out the fact that two women who may not have known each other in school, and who still may not know each other today, are linked tangentially by a company that does business with the U.S. government, Howley also managed to regurgitate an already debunked myth that the ObamaCare website cost $678 million when it actually is estimated to have run at about $70 million according to the Sunlight Foundation. So Howley was only off by 90 percent.

This is typical of the quality of journalism practiced by conservative ideologues who have no respect for the truth and spend their careers trying to slander their perceived political enemies. [Note: The story was also re-posted at the Fox News community web site and Fib Factory, Fox Nation]. Howley is an obvious hack with unresolved issues of hostility. And he works for Tucker Carlson, the most notorious loser in the right’s media echo chamber. So we can expect more of this sort of hilarity in the future. And lord knows we need the laughs.


Fox News Investigates The ObamaCare Website Girl: An Al Qaeda Seductress?

The intrepid Fox News investigative team is well known for relentlessly pursuing stories that are vital to the welfare of the American people. Some recent examples include the new “girly” caps for the U.S. Marines, Fox’s “Psycho” analyst’s diagnosis of Obama’s “victim” mentality, government-supplied, free “Obama Cars,” and of course, endless misrepresentations of the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) as costly and unworkable.

Now the crack journalists at Fox are going beyond their standard Kenyan Marxist Muslim beat to expose a government secret on which rests the fate of every American. The top headline story of Fox’s website reveals their probe into the tightly guarded identity of “Adriana,” the ObamaCare Website Girl.

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Who is That Girl, indeed. It is about time that the administration cease its stonewalling and practice the transparency for which they boast. The nation’s security depends on an open government that tells the truth about critical matters that affect the lives and safety of its citizens. Without such candor we cannot know whether this anonymous woman is an innocent fashion model or the evil seductress of an Al Qaeda sleeper cell.

Fox has assigned Jana Winter, the reporter who is still in legal hot water for violating a judge’s court order in the case of the Aurora movie theater massacre. She is now reporting that Fox News is devoting substantial resources to this controversy. According to Winter, finding the mysterious Adriana is a top priority for Fox who “have combed the contact sheets of stock photo agencies, scoured social media and squinted at group shots of Democratic operatives, all to no avail.”

Winter’s efforts thus far have unearthed important observations such as an obviously expert analysis, by somebody on Twitter, that this may be the “worst modeling gig ever.” She also noted the explosion of public concern as evidenced by the emergence of an ObamacareGirl Twitter account that has already amassed thirty-three followers. Despite these hot scoops, Winter is still stumped as to the crux of the confounding riddles in this governmental enigma. She is pleading with readers for any information that could lead to the true identity of Adriana and asking them to send tips to the news manager at Fox News. Feel free to help out by sending your own leads to that email address. For instance, if you think you saw her at a Starbucks in Oshkosh, or if she resembles your niece who takes tickets at the local Bijou Theater, be sure to notify Fox News immediately.

The only official comment Winter was able to wrest from the administration was a typically evasive statement from Richard Olague, a spokesman for the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, who said that…

“The woman featured on the website signed a release for us to use the photo, but to protect her privacy, we will not share her personal or contact info with anyone.”

Unconfirmed reports are circulating around the Capitol that Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is clearing his calendar to make room for hearings and will issue subpenas for testimony and documents if the administration is not forthcoming. His current schedule of scandal inquisitions involving Benghazi, the IRS, the NSA, Benghazi, the shutdown’s closure of national parks, Fast & Furious, Solyndra, the Associated Press, Benghazi, and most recently, the ObamaCare website glitches, will be temporarily set aside so that he can concentrate on getting to the bottom of the Adriana affair.

ObamaCare GirlRecognizing the importance of this investigation, Fox News has also escalated it to top tier status by making it the featured headline on their web home page. With all of the issues facing the country – the economy, unemployment, immigration, national security, etc. – it is encouraging that at least one segment of the mainstream media has its priorities in order.

[Update: 1028/2013] After this shocking expose, the ObamaCare Girl has now gone missing. Her likeness has been removed from the Healthcare.gov website and her whereabouts are unknown. If you see her, please contact Fox News immediately.

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GIRLY MEN: Conservatives Insult America’s Women In The Military

Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post published an exclusive report on alleged changes to the uniforms of the United States Marines. The story claimed to unveil plans to rollout new caps that the Post said would “take the hard-nosed Leathernecks from the Halls of Montezuma to the shops of Christopher Street.”

NYPost: Thanks to a plan by President Obama to create a “unisex” look for the Corps, officials are on the verge of swapping out the Marines’ iconic caps – known as “covers” — with a new version that some have derided as so “girly” that they would make the French blush.

To begin the parade of errors in this article, President Obama had nothing to do with the “plan.” The proposed uniform changes were the result of decisions made entirely within the military. Secondly, the decision has nothing to do with creating a unisex look. Only female uniforms are being considered for any changes. Male uniforms will remain the same. Finally, this is not a plot to feminize the military. The decision was driven by the fact that the company that made the women’s covers went out of business and the Corps had to find a new manufacturer. They took this opportunity to update the cover based on one worn by a two-time Medal of Honor winner from World War I.

So the New York Post got almost everything wrong in their story. They apparently did no research whatsoever to confirm the highly suspect information they claim to have received in the form of an internal memo that did not identify the source. The story then worked its way to Fox News where Fox & Friends co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck regurgitated the error-filled article despite the fact that the Corps had already debunked it. A real reporter contacted a spokesperson for the Corps and got this statement:

“The President in no way, shape, or form directed the Marine Corps to change our uniform cover. We’re looking for a new cover for our female Marines for the primary reason that the former manufacturer went out of business. The Marine Corps has zero intention of changing the male cover.”

However, there is a bigger problem with the substance of this report than just the fact that it is completely false. The tone of the complaint is overtly disparaging toward women in the service. Why is the New York Post and Fox News using language to insult our troops by associating them with female characteristics? What is it about being “girly” that they find so derogatory? Do they regard women as inferior or substandard soldiers? Are they afraid that they will throw grenades like a girl? The whole tenor of the article is that it is bad to be female and any affiliation with that gender is presumed to be negative.

Girly Marines
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Somehow I suspect that the menfolk at the Post and Fox News would be at a significant disadvantage in a confrontation with any female Marine. Perhaps it would be a constructive lesson for the sexist cowards who spew this garbage to be placed in that situation.

Hypocritical conservatives like to boast about their support for the troops, but this is the sort of deliberate smear that exposes just how disingenuous and self-serving their hollow praise is. They are simply exploiting America’s warriors for their own political purposes. And nothing is more disrespectful than that.


OBAMA SCARE: Making A Bullshit Mountain Out Of A Moronic Molehill

Fox News has been engaged in a massive disinformation campaign against the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) for going on three years now. After all that time, and having exhausted the considerable creative resources that came up with twelve “Pants on Fire” lies about the program, Fox’s desperation is showing.

The right-wing’s Fright Offensive over ObamaCare keeps getting more deranged every day. If they aren’t spreading fears of getting victimized by hackers, or the horrors of Americans voting, or the return of the Zombie ACORN, then it’s threats of ObamaCare prisons and gun registries.

News Corpse previously reported the utterly inane allegation that the ObamaCare website contained an invisible contract that granted the government an unfettered right to spy on health insurance consumers. Of course, as any freshman law student could tell you, there is no such thing as an enforceable, invisible contract. The gist of the complaint was that there was language secretly inserted into the website’s source code that could not be seen but nevertheless bound users to an agreement that they have “no reasonable expectation of privacy.” However, this “ghost” language was actually removed with the use of HTML comment tags by the site’s programmers rendering it inoperative.

The mental deficients pushing this notion are getting way too wrapped up in Halloween. Unfortunately, amongst those imbeciles is at least one member of Congress, the dishonorable GOP Rep. Joe Barton of Texas (where else?). In a hearing today investigating the shortcomings of the ObamaCare website implementation, Barton asked representatives of the software contractor about the “hidden” code that he said violated the law. With a flair for both ignorance and panic he yelped “The privacy section on the ObamaCare website says your privacy will be protected. The hidden source code seems to say, ‘just kidding.'” He later added “That’s Obamacare in a nutshell. It says one thing on the surface and says something totally different behind the scenes.”

Wrong! The hidden source code says nothing at all because — it’s hidden, and invisible text has no legal force or effect. In all likelihood, one of the programmers probably copied a block of text from a common privacy policy and then edited out the parts that don’t apply. But Barton compounded his misunderstanding by posting on his Facebook page after the hearing that the so-called hidden waiver “means it is an intentional policy decision of the Obama administration to deceive the American public.” Wrong again!

Not to be left out, Breitbart News editor, John Nolte, wrote a column about the congressional hearing under the headline “Hidden In Obamacare Site: Applicants Surrender Right To Privacy.” In the column he added his own chunk of stupid saying “[T]he fact that you are giving up your right to privacy is hidden in source code. […] The fact that the government is hiding the fact that you are giving up your right to privacy should be a major media scandal. But it won’t be.” BreitBrat John is right about it not being a major media scandal, but only because he’s wrong about everything else he wrote.

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Finally, Fox News weighed in with a report by correspondent John Roberts who said that this is “another step down the rabbit hole of ‘Big Data’ […] As we’ve learned, source code in the web site’s terms and conditions states that users have “no reasonable expectation of privacy.” Roberts hasn’t learned anything at all, nor have his viewers. And apparently none of these grown men in the press or politics has as much technology savvy as a fourteen year old WoW gamer.


Fox Nation Asks: Did Woman Fake Fainting During Obama’s Speech? And Other Idiocies.

No matter how prepared one is for outrageous stupidity and mind-numbing paranoid delusions, Fox News still manages to come up with surprises. Today the Fox Nationalists have sprung another winning lunatic exclusive on its assembly of gullible readers. The article asked the question that every batshit crazy American is hungering to know: “Did Woman Fake Fainting During Obama’s Speech?”

Fox Nation Fainting Woman
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The item linked to the blog of the “Lady Patriots” whose intrepid detective work uncovered this dastardly conspiracy to concoct a phony medical crisis in the middle of President Obama’s speech on the Affordable Care Act. Author: “Dr.” Sharon Schuetz discloses that she “couldn’t believe how phony it was. […] It is obvious that there are quite a few people involved in this latest fraud put out by the Whitehouse.” After admitting that she doesn’t watch a lot of television, Schuetz said in the video she narrated that she recognized the conspirators discussing the plot and their efforts to carry it out. Thank goodness we have people like Schuetz around to unravel these plots that, to everyone else, just look like some folks on a podium helping a pregnant woman in some distress.

Also today on Fox Nation, they explore the burning question as to whether ObamaCare killed the “Dollar Menu.” We could only hope. Think how many lives it would save.

Fox Nation Dollar Menu

And finally, the brain trust at Fox sought to learn what would happen if Sean Hannity called the ObamaCare hotline. What happened was that a pleasant agent answered almost immediately and was kinder to him than his obnoxious behavior deserved.

[Update: 10/24/2013 6:42pm] It turns out that Hannity got the agent fired. On his radio program today he spoke to her and tried to make amends by offering her money and saying he would try to help her get another job. Of course, none of that would be necessary if he hadn’t lured her into a conversation that violated her terms of employment.

Fox Nation Hannity Hotline

Fainting woman conspiracies, fast food menu murders, and exposes of well functioning call centers. It’s all in a day’s work at Fox Nation.


OBAMA SCARE: The Right’s Fright Offensive To Scare People Away From Affordable Health Care

Halloween is approaching and the hobgoblins of conservative minds are already spinning nightmarish tales of the horror of the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare). Actually, they have been doing it for quite some time dating back to at least March of 2010 when Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller published an article headlined “IRS looking to hire thousands of armed tax agents to enforce health care laws.” Fox News re-posted the article on their community web site and Fib Factory, Fox Nation despite the fact that it was a complete fabrication and was debunked by the Annenberg Center’s FactCheck.org

Fox News
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This year the campaign to recast a program that makes health insurance accessible to millions of Americans as a plague of locusts has risen to fever pitch. The Republican Party and conservative media has pulled out all the stops in a strategy aimed at scaring people from signing up with the hope that low enrollment will collapse the system. President Obama had the same concerns last month when he said…

“What you’ve had is an unprecedented effort that you’ve seen ramp up in the past month or so that those who have opposed the idea of universal health care in the first place — and have fought this thing tooth and nail through Congress and through the courts — trying to scare and discourage people from getting a good deal.”

These are not the hackneyed GOP talking points about death panels, job killers and government bureaucrats coming between patients and doctors. These are far more fanciful efforts that stretch the limits of credulity and appear to have more in common with satire than actual news reporting. Yesterday Rush Limbaugh “ruminated” (sourced to Breitbart) that ObamaCare may just be a ruse to set up gun registries in the United States. This is what it has come to as ObamaCare has finally reached the consumer stage and conservatives are desperate to keep people from discovering its benefits. For instance…

1) Fox News Warns That If You Sign Up For ObamaCare Hackers Will Steal Your Life Savings
On an episode of “The Real Story” on Fox News, host Gretchen Carlson introduced an ominous new strain of fear mongering to demonize ObamaCare. She interviewed John McAfee, the anti-virus software developer who is presently a fugitive from a murder investigation in Belize. He asserted a wild accusation that visitors to Healthcare.gov are going to be victimized by hackers who will steal their identities and/or drain their bank accounts.

However, neither Carlson nor McAfee actually provide any evidence of such a threat. In fact, when directly asked about it. McAfee diverts from the question and lays out a completely different threat that has nothing whatsoever to do with the ObamaCare web site. He alleges that nefarious individuals could set up their own unaffiliated web sites in the hopes of luring naive people of whom they will seek to take advantage. Of course, that is a threat that exists every day for every web site, and has since the Internet began. But visiting Healthcare.gov does not expose anyone to these phony sites as implied by the fear mongers at Fox.

2) WorldNetDaily Reports “Obama ‘Crashing Health-Care Site On Purpose'”
This article asserts that the President is so afraid that insurance shoppers will learn that ObamaCare is really more expensive than the old system that he deliberately caused the website to crash to keep people from seeing the rates. No one is defending the botched launch of the insurance exchanges, however, the notion that the technical glitches were intentionally caused by Obama is delusional.

WND’s argument (supported by links to Rush Limbaugh) that rates will increase leaves out the subsidies and tax credits that are available for many applicants. With these adjustments, premiums for most people will be substantially lower. The administration would, therefore, be anxious for consumers to have access to that information and would not be putting obstacles in their path.

3) Rand Paul: Take ObamaCare Or Go To Jail
The Tea Party darling Rand Paul has made innumerable false statements about virtually every policy that has emanated from the White House. But none surpass the diversion from reality than when he said “They say take [ObamaCare] or we will put people in jail. People say we aren’t going to put anybody in jail. The heck they won’t. You will get fined first. If you don’t pay your fines, you will go to jail.”

That’s interesting coming from someone who has frequently complained that no one in Congress has read the Affordable Care Act. If he had read it himself he would have known that the law explicitly prohibits criminal consequences for non-payment of fines. It states “In the case of any failure by a taxpayer to timely pay any penalty imposed by this section, such taxpayer shall not be subject to any criminal prosecution or penalty with respect to such failure.” It rarely gets more clear than that, but the mission to frighten the public exceeds the motivation for truth on the part of GOP scare-meisters.

Notably, Bill O’Reilly insisted that no one on Fox News ever claimed that failure to enroll in ObamaCare would lead to a prison sentence, but he was hilariously embarrassed by the videos that proved otherwise, including on his own program.

4) Right-Wing Think Tank Mortified That ObamaCare Web Site Links To Voter Registration Form
This is a particularly curious horror story as it seeks to raise an alarm over something that ought to be regarded as a civic duty. Nevertheless, the conservative MacIver Institute (a Koch brothers funded operation) published an article that implied there was some sort of heinous objective on the part of the Obama administration for having included a link to a voter registration form on the ObamaCare website. This startling revelation is met with foreboding by MacIver and a flurry of right-wing media outlets that disseminated MacIver’s story including National Review, Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, Breitbart News, the Daily Caller, and of course, Fox News. All of their reports agreed that this was a clandestine attempt to register only Democratic voters despite the absence of any partisan framing. MacIver even asks specifically “[W]hat does registering to vote have to do with signing up for Obamacare?”

The core of the right’s trepidation is rooted in a more fundamental aversion to the act of voting itself. It is why they are continually erecting new barriers to voting, such as unreasonably stringent identification requirements, shortening or eliminating early voting periods, wholesale purges of voter rolls, and of course, brazenly discriminatory gerrymandering. Democrats, on the other hand, have sought to expand voter turnout with bills like the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (aka Motor Voter) that mandates that certain government agencies provide people with access to voter registration. In fact, it is that twenty year old law that requires the ObamaCare administrators to make voter registration available. MacIver, and their similarly mortified conservative comrades, are either unaware of this, or are deliberately feigning ignorance in order to rile up their conspiracy-prone base.

5) Weekly Standard Finds Imaginary Threat On ObamaCare Website
The ultra-conservative Weekly Standard dispatched their crack reporters to ferret out what they portrayed as an ominous security threat on the Healthcare.gov website. What they found were comments in the site’s source code that said that “You have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding any communication or data transiting or stored on this information system.” The Standard notes that these comments were not visible to users and were not part of the site’s terms and conditions. But that didn’t stop them from implying that users would be still be bound by it because “the language is nevertheless a part of the underlying code.” Not really. It’s only a part of some inoperative text that carries no more obligation than some discarded notes.

This is another situation where you have to wonder whether these people are embarrassingly stupid or brazenly dishonest. There is a reason that this language was not visible. It was deliberately removed with the use of HTML comment tags by the site’s programmers. It was undoubtedly edited out because it was not an accurate expression of the site’s privacy policy. It does not mean that users are agreeing to a secret clause permitting the government to spy on them as the Standard implied. If any of these “reporters” had a fourteen year old at home they could have learned what this is about. But that would have interfered with their goal which is to leave Americans with the false impression that some hidden danger lurks beneath the surface of ObamaCare.

6) Fox News Fears ACORN Is Back To Push ObamaCare
The Curvy Couch Potatoes over at Fox & Friends had a jolly old time resurrecting their fear of a community organizing enterprise that no longer exists. ACORN was wrongly hounded out of business by right-wing opponents after pseudo-journalist and convicted criminal, James O’Keefe, distributed some deceitfully edited and libelous videos. But that hasn’t stopped conservative media from exhuming the corpse whenever they are in need of a sensationalistic story, as demonstrated by Fox co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck who announced that “We’re getting information that ACORN operatives are trying to sign people up for the Affordable Care Act.”

While ACORN was never found to have engaged in any unlawful activity, there was a bill passed that prohibited them from receiving federal funds. However, there is nothing in the law that prevents organizations with former ACORN staff from getting federal grants. In fact, there isn’t even any current law that prevents ACORN from getting grants as the previous ban was not included in the latest Continuing Resolution. Fox is brazenly misrepresenting the facts in an attempt to reignite fears of the old ACORN bogeyman. And they upped the terror ante by further alleging that ACORN would use your personal medical and financial information against you politically. They never revealed how that would occur, or to what end, but that isn’t the point. Their only interest is in spreading fear, no matter how irrational and unsupported.

Conclusion:
The zealousness with which these right-wing propagandists pursue their disinformation campaign is evidence of their own fear that Americans will come to appreciate having access to affordable health care. Therefore, they see their mission as derailing the program before that eventuality unfolds. Their tactics get more extreme and absurd the closer the program gets to gaining acceptance. A particular target of their attack is young people whose participation is important for the program to succeed. Consequently, opponents have launched a well-funded campaign (thanks to the Koch brothers) to scare off young consumers. Generation Opportunity has already released the now notorious “Creepy Uncle Sam” videos that make false implications of government intrusion into medical care. Next they are embarking on a twenty city college tour to mislead students.

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PolitiFact has reviewed sixteen claims made by ObamaCare detractors and found all of them false. Twelve of those were designated “Pants On Fire” lies. If there is one question that begs to be asked, it is this: If ObamaCare is so terrible, then why do opponents have to lie so much about it?

ObamaCare Myths