Breitbart

IDIOT TAX: Breitbart’s Bonehead Defense Of Matt Drudge’s ‘Liberty Tax’

Posted by on March 23, 2014 at 11:31 am. 19 Comments :

Anyone familiar with Breitbart News will not be surprised to learn that they did something stupid, again. After all, they are the geniuses who think that “E Pluribus Unum” is English. But their latest inanity stretches the boundary of blockheadedness even for them.

Drudge Idiot Tax

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The story began when conservative muckraker Matt Drudge boasted on Twitter that he had just paid what he called his “Liberty Tax,” a reference to the penalty for not getting health care coverage. The problem is that this fee is not payable until his 2014 taxes are due in 2015. Subsequently, Drudge was chastised by more knowledgeable people (e.g. almost anyone) who wondered whether he was deliberately lying or just ignorant.

Coming to Drudge’s defense is Matthew Boyle of Breitbart News. Boyle proceeds to back up Drudge by accusing his critics of not understanding how businesses pay taxes. So Boyle sets out to explain it to them and cites language from the IRS form for filing estimated taxes:

[S]ince he is self-employed as the proprietor of The Drudge Report, he files as a small business. According to the IRS’s website for self-employed individuals, they are required to pay taxes quarterly. […] So, when they file and pay those 2014 first quarter taxes, such individuals have to pay the Obamacare Individual Mandate tax if they opted to not have health insurance—like Drudge just did. […] Additionally, the IRS form (1040-ES) for estimating quarterly taxes specifically recommends adding the mandate penalty to line 12 for ‘other taxes’ — to pay before the first quarterly deadline of April 15.”

It’s true that some self-employed individuals are required to make quarterly estimated payments on their taxes. However, none of them are required to include the penalty for not getting health insurance until the following year. In fact, it says just that in the same paragraph that BreitBrat Boyle quoted only a portion of. Here is the whole paragraph:

“Health care coverage. When you file your 2014 tax return in 2015, you will need to either (1) indicate on your return that you and your family had health care coverage throughout 2014, (2) claim an exemption from the health care coverage requirement for some or all of 2014, or (3) make a payment if you do not have coverage or an exemption(s) for all 12 months of 2014. For examples on how this payment works, go to www.IRS.gov/aca and click under the ‘Individuals & Families’ section. You may want to consider this when figuring your ‘Other taxes’ on Line 12 of the 2014 Estimated Tax Worksheet. For general information on these requirements, go to www.IRS.gov/aca.”

Furthermore, Boyle’s defense is based on Drudge’s assertion that he is filing as a business, not as an individual. But what both Boyle and Drudge neglect to mention is that the mandate for businesses with fewer than 100 employees (which certainly includes Drudge) to provide health insurance to their employees was delayed until 2016. So no matter how you slice, Drudge has no tax liability for the coverage mandate in 2014.

So Drudge’s “Liberty Tax” really turns out to be an “Idiot Tax,” because he doesn’t actually owe it. If he did pay the penalty (which we don’t have any proof of) it’s his own ignorance of the law that is to blame, not ObamaCare. And Breitbart’s lame-brained attempt to rescue Drudge only proves that when dumb right-wingers do dumb things, other dumb right-wingers will jump at the chance to compound the dumbness. And dumbest of all is that Drudge is bragging about putting his health in jeopardy by not having insurance. He regards liberty as being at risk for devastating financial hardship that would ultimately fall to other Americans in the form of higher premiums and fees for services.

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Further evidence of this cycle of stupidity is that Fox News featured this Breitbart story as the top headline on their lie-riddled Fox Nation website. And round and round it goes.

President Obama Makes Breitbart Editor’s Brain Hurt

Posted by on March 14, 2014 at 12:05 pm. 4 Comments :

The staff at Breitbart News has never distinguished itself as particularly astute or intellectually gifted. A recent case in point was their giddy victory dance when Coca-Cola supposedly validated the right-wing campaign for English-only ads by adding the Latin phrase “E Pluribus Unum” to a TV commercial.

Breitbart Ben Shapiro

Today Breitbart’s senior editor-at-large, Ben Shapiro, penned a column outlining what he called “Obama’s Top 5 Distractions.” The article regurgitates a well-worn attack strategy that alleges that anything the President says or does that is not about ObamaCare is a deliberate attempt to distract from that issue, rather than the responsible performance of the duties of his office. BreitBrat Ben begins by admitting his own mental shortcomings:

“Psychologists posit that the brain can only handle so many narratives at one point; if we are distracted by problems at home, for example, we tend to perform less well at work. The same holds true in politics: if our brains are occupied with worries about the war on women, for example, we’re less likely to be thinking about the horrors of Obamacare.”

Poor Ben. By inconsiderately managing the broad array of issues that any president must address, Obama is taxing the shallow capabilities of one of Breitbart’s senior staffers. How dare Obama deal with trivialities like raising workers out of poverty; or mitigating the environmental, economic, and national security threats of Climate Change; or taking action to relieve the suffering of poor families and hungry children; or advocating on behalf women who are exploited, abused, and discriminated against; or endeavoring to advance solutions to the long-term hostilities in the Middle East.

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In Shapiro’s world, placing those five items on the presidential agenda are merely attempts to distract people from the only issue that really exists: ObamaCare. And for the White House to engage in any other domestic or foreign policy can only result in a cognitive breakdown, emotional distress, and a severe brain owie. In the view of these mental deficients, political leaders must always concentrate on a single issue to the exclusion of every other event in the world. Shapiro closes by claiming that…

“…the bottom line is that the Obama administration will do everything in its power over the course of the next few months to distract from the issues Americans care about most.”

For the record, according to the Pew Research Center, the top five issues that Americans care about most are:

  • Strengthening the nation’s economy.
  • Improving the job situation.
  • Defending the country from terrorism.
  • Improving the educational system.
  • Making Social Security system sound.

These are all issues that the Obama administration has identified as priorities. The American people expect him to work toward advancing their interests on these and many other areas, including health care, taxes, crime, the environment, and immigration. And he must do them all simultaneously. In fact, if Obama were to abandon other issues and focus solely on health care, Shapiro would be among the first in a long line of hypocritical right-wingers to criticize him for being too narrowly focused and negligent.

If BreitBrat Ben has his way the nation will be stuck in a single-issue ditch that doesn’t put a burden on the limited brainpower of dimwitted conservatives and Tea Party twerps like himself. So at least we can be grateful that he will not get his way no matter how noisy his juvenile tantrums.

Fox Nation vs. Reality: ObamaCare Is NOT Recruiting Undocumented Immigrants

Posted by on February 15, 2014 at 3:08 pm. 7 Comments :

Fox News has labored vigorously to establish its reputation as America’s whites-only cable news channel. Simultaneously they have distinguished themselves as the nation’s foremost purveyor dishonest and politically biased “reporting.” But every now and then they manage to score extra points by melding these two achievements into a single story. That goal was realized today by Fox’s community website, Fox Nation, with help from their disreputable pals at Breitbart News.

Fox Nation

Read Fox Nation vs. Reality for more documented lies from Fox World.

The headline declaring that “ObamaCare [is] Recruiting Illegal Immigrants” is absolutely, provably false. As is the content of the article that says in the opening paragraph that “Covered California–the flagship of state Obamacare exchanges–is recruiting illegal (“undocumented”) immigrants to sign up for the program, regardless of their eligibility.”

There is no truth whatsoever to that claim. But adhering to factual reporting has never been the mission of Fox News. It’s especially humorous that Joel Pollak, the BreitBrat author of the article, attempts to align his bogus assertions to Republican congressman Joe Wilson who, you may recall, shouted out “You lie,” during President Obama’s 2009 State of the Union speech when the President stated that the Affordable Care Act would not cover undocumented immigrants. Pollak believes that Wilson is due an apology based on his deeply misconstrued interpretation of a page on the Covered California website.

The shoddy news sleuthing by BreitBrat Pollak turned up a page that informed readers that they did not need to worry if they were “undocumented and want your family to enroll in health insurance. That was the spark that set fire to Pollak’s active imagination. Without wasting any effort on reading further or trying to understand the context, Pollak concluded that this was an attempt to enroll undocumented immigrants in ObamaCare, which the law explicitly prohibits. This is what the very first paragraph on the page actually said:

“According to the laws and implementing regulations, the information provided by individuals for coverage can not be used for purposes other than ensuring the efficient functioning of the insurance market (Covered California) or administration of the program, or to verify certain eligibility determinations including verification of the immigration status of these people.”

If Pollak had the comprehension skills to grasp this, he would have noticed two things: 1) The page is assuring applicants that the information they provide will not be shared with immigration agencies. And 2) That verification of immigration status will be a determinant condition of their eligibility.

The importance of the first item is to reassure people that an application will not result in an investigation or potential deportation. Many Latino families have mixed immigration statuses and they are sensitive to the possibility that their families could be separated. Consequently, they refrain from enrolling in benefits programs like ObamaCare. That means that many people who are actually citizens (i.e. children who were born here, or naturalized adults) would be deprived of services to which they are entitled because of their concern for other family members who may not be documented. This assurance allows them to apply without having to fear unrelated consequences.

The second item should be an assurance to bigots like Pollak that no undocumented immigrants would receive health care benefits under ObamaCare. It is an explicit declaration that citizenship is required for eligibility. And it is what makes Pollak’s assertion that illegal immigrants are being recruited regardless of their eligibility such a blatant lie.

It’s interesting to note that the Fox News Latino website does not have a story on this matter. Fox News Latino often takes positions that sharply contrast with those of the Fox News mothership. It is their way of trying to lure in the fastest growing demographic in the country without alienating them the way Fox News does. Although, there is a story that addresses the administration’s efforts to reach out to Latinos. And in that story they correctly point out the dilemma of mixed immigration status families who worry about separation, saying that “One big issue is that the law requires that those seeking coverage provide the immigration status of members of their household to determine eligibility.” That is what the page on Covered California is there for – to alleviate that concern.

It is remarkably dishonest and unethical to portray the information provided on Covered California as attempting to recruit undocumented immigrants to enroll in ObamaCare. Yet that is precisely what Breitbart and the Fox Nationalists did. And they did this despite the fact that the correct information was plainly in front of them on the same page. Therefore, it can only be assumed that they knew the truth and deliberately chose to ignore and/or distort it. But that’s the one thing that is not surprising about this. That is, in fact, standard operating procedure at Fox News.

Oy Vey: Tea Party Xenophobes Think ‘E Pluribus Unum’ Is English

Posted by on February 9, 2014 at 1:51 pm. 20 Comments :

The rightist wing of the Republican Party (aka Tea Party) has never been shy about making fools of themselves, particularly with regard to popular culture. An advertisement by Cheerios that featured a biracial family was a recent example of this as the conservative wackos went ballistic over a tweet that correctly predicted they would hate the ad. Following that, Coca-Cola incited wingnut rage by committing blasphemy with a multilingual rendition of “America the Beautiful” during the Superbowl.

Not content to growl menacingly at heart warming celebrations of America’s diversity, Tea Party factions are now claiming that their bigoted tantrums have won them a victory over the liberal multiculturalists in charge of the international soda conspiracy.

Breitbart News is reporting that Coke has “surrendered” to the Tea Party after complaints that their commercial offended right-thinking conservative xenophobes who are unable to tolerate people who show their love for America in a variety of languages.

Breitbart Tea Party Coke

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It is the evidence of this surrender that is so strikingly preposterous. The Coke ad was reworked a bit when it was broadcast during the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. A short segment was added to the beginning of the ad with the words “E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one.” It is that modification that the BreitBrats are asserting is proof that their vilification of human harmony was successful. So let’s get this straight. Coke, they said, “bowed to conservative critics” who insist on English-only by inserting a short phrase in — Latin.

These are the same rocket scientists who carried signs to their Tea Party rallies saying “Government hands off of my Social Security.” They are the same people who pledged to burn their ObamaCare cards (which do not exist). And now they think that appending a Latin phrase onto an ad is a testament to their strength in getting a cold corporation to acquiesce to their demands for an English-centric America.

All I can say is ach du lieber. These people are obviously loco. If they had any esprit de corps with their fellow Americans they wouldn’t show such disdain toward them, capiche? After all, these are the villains upon whom they are showering their hate:

Fox News May Be Anti Voting Rights, But At Least They’re Pro Election Fraud

Posted by on February 2, 2014 at 9:57 am. 1 Comments :

The Republican Party has been engaged in a prolonged and determined campaign to suppress the votes of citizens whom they believe are inclined to vote for Democrats. Their disingenuous claims to be battling voter fraud are exposed as lies by the fact that they cannot certify any significant incidence of unlawful voting, and the solutions they propose to the non-problem all seem to serve as impediments to voting by youth, minorities, seniors, and the poor. These are all commonly regarded as Democratic constituents, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

Conservative media, and especially Fox News, has been a full partner in this voter suppression effort. They have openly taken positions in support of the GOP’s discriminatory initiatives and given a platform to right-wing partisans who advocate for purging the electorate of Democratic voters. The issue has become a near obsession for the rightist media machine as it seeks support for restrictions that require photo IDs, reduce polling places and hours of operation, and limit the ability of independent organizations to register voters.

All of this is done in the name of cracking down on illegal election activities. Which makes it all the more ironic that Fox News is now defending someone who has been indicted for actual election fraud, Dinesh D’Souza. As a veteran of right-wing punditry, D’Souza is a frequent guest on Fox News and is the writer and producer of the anti-Obama crocumentary, “2016: Obama’s America,” based on his own widely debunked book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage.”

D’Souza was recently indicted for felony violations of election finance laws. He is alleged to have solicited people to make donations to a candidate for the senate and then reimbursing the donors as a scheme to exceed contribution limits. The response to this by D’Souza’s pals at Fox News was to assert that the prosecution is all a part of a plot by President Obama to silence his critics. It’s an absurd and unsupported claim that doesn’t explain why Obama would go after a minor figure like D’Souza, whom few Americans have heard of, while allowing more prominent critics like Rush Limbaugh to remain free. Nor does it account for the fact that the same Justice Department that indicted D’Souza also convicted a Democrat for the same crime.

Fox News - D'Souza

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The attempt to whitewash D’Souza’s criminal activity included a guest spot on Sean Hannity’s program. Hannity called D’Souza “the latest victim to be targeted by the Obama White House,” without any evidence of White House involvement. Then Hannity gave D’Souza an opportunity to rebut the charges made against him. D’Souza said…

“Well, as you can imagine, it’s been quite a week. I can’t really talk about the case but I will say that I’m determined to continue my work. I’m making a big film called “America,” which is about the greatness of America that’s gonna come out for July 4th this year. So I just want to say that I’m undeterred and I’m marching full speed ahead.”

The notable thing about that response, other than its shameless self-promotion of a future project, is that D’Souza never once denied the charges against him. While he may not be able to discuss the details of the case, there is no prohibition on proclaiming his innocence. It is curious, to say the least, that when given the opportunity to do so in a friendly environment, he would so conspicuously refuse. Then when Hannity inquired whether D’Souza considered the indictment to be political retribution, D’Souza said…

“Well, I will say that “2016” was a film that does seem to have gotten under President Obama’s skin. And the reason for this is that it wasn’t just a critique of ObamaCare or his policies, but I, in a sense, went into Obama’s world and also into Obama’s mind. There I was at the Obama family homestead in Kenya. I interviewed his brother. And, of course, we advanced the thesis that here is a traumatized, and somewhat of a messed up guy who is, in a way, haunted by the dreams of his father, the topic of his own biography. There was a rant against the film on Obama’s own website, that is BarackObama.com, so we know the film rattled him. We know that it upset him. And whether this is some kind of payback remains to be seen.”

Once again, there is no denial guilt. But there is speculation about payback that is not backed up by any facts. There are also some rather ego-drenched assertions that his cinematic screed had a prodigious impact on the President’s state of mind, when in all likelihood Obama never saw it or cared about it. He’s a little too busy being the leader of the free world to be concerned about an amateurish hit piece by a disreputable hack.

Over at Fox’s community website, Fox Nation [see the ebook Fox Nation vs. Reality for documentation of their brazen dishonesty], they posted a link to an article by Charles Hurt on Breitbart News that went even further in defense of the criminal activities alleged against D’Souza. Hurt even conceded the question of D’Souza’s guilt and still excused him saying that he “very well may be guilty of a few winks and nods that wound up violating limits on campaign contributions’ The “few winks and nods” added up to more than $20,000 dollars in fraudulent donations. But the central theme of Hurt’s article is that the prosecutor, Preet Bharara, is some sort of White House enforcer assigned to rubbing out the President’s enemies. The article’s title calls Bharara a “hatchet man,” and Hurt’s first paragraph ominously intones that…

“Mr. Bharara is the snapping jaws of Attorney General Eric H. Holder’s junkyard attack dog and the velvet fixer of President Obama’s thorniest political problems.”

Bharara is the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and supervises over 200 lawyers who handle hundreds of cases. He has presided over the recovery of a half-billion dollars in civil fraud cases. He has locked up numerous terrorists, narcotics traffickers, and violent gang members. Yet Hurt’s article cites only a couple of cases that he deems relevant to his theory that Bharara is Obama’s hit man. Neither of these cases were political in nature, nor did they involve any personal interest of the President. One case involved an Indian diplomat who allegedly lied about her employment and payment of a nanny. The other was a case where forty-nine Russians were charged with defrauding Medicare. In both cases Hurt seemed to imply that all of these lawbreakers should have been set free despite their crimes. And having made no logical connection to Obama, Hurt just seems to be praying that his readers are dumb enough not to notice what a laughably insipid argument he is struggling to construct. Since his readers are on Breitbart News, he doesn’t have to pray very hard. Hurt concluded by saying that…

“Certainly, Mr. D’Souza very well may be guilty. Same with the Russian diplomats – and perhaps the Indian attache really needed to be strip-searched. However, a filmmaker skirting campaign donation limits does not tear at the fabric of this nation of laws. Russians cheating our welfare system is not a constitutional crisis. A constitutional crisis that tears the fabric of this nation of laws is a federal prosecutor who uses his office to advance political vendettas.”

Hurt’s argument seems to be that any crime that he doesn’t regard as upending the Constitution should be dismissed. Therefore we should let all the murderers and drug dealers and embezzlers off the hook. Just think how much money we would save by shutting down the federal courts and virtually emptying the nation’s prisons.

Conservatives often portray themselves as being the party of law and order. However, the truth is that they only embrace the law when it serves their purposes, and they abhor it when it gets in their way. That’s why they advocate more laws that would deny a ninety year old citizen the right to vote if she doesn’t have a driver’s license. But they forgive, and even praise, a political crony who breaks the law in order to funnel money to right-wing candidates. It’s a perverse concept of justice that favors elitists and the corporations that they believe are people.

Breitbart ‘News’ Invents Quotes To Smear CNN

Posted by on January 13, 2014 at 1:39 am. 4 Comments :

There’s an old saying that wisely counsels to leave well enough alone. Unfortunately, the Tea-guzzlers at Breitbart News have dismissed that advice and unleashed an assault against CNN and its chief, Jeff Zucker. Never mind that CNN has devolved into a nearly useless platform for right-wing propaganda as evidenced by their recent interview of Glenn Beck by Beck’s own employee, S.E. Cupp. But that’s not good enough for the BreitBrats. Now they are launching an attack on CNN that is so feeble they had to make up quotes to hammer them with.

Breitbart News

The title on Breitbart’s article is “CNN To Republicans: Drop Dead.” Of course, no one on CNN ever said or even implied that. The flimsy impetus for the citation occurred in an article that was a slobbering love sonnet to Fox News by BreitBrat Tony Lee, whose feathers were ruffled by a remark made by CNN’s Zucker at a TV convention. Zucker responded to a question about a recent Fox criticism of CNN by correctly pointing out that “I think we all know what’s going on there. The Republican Party is being run out of News Corp. headquarters [and] masquerading as a channel.” Zucker was merely acknowledging the obvious: that the cozy relationship between Fox and the GOP is a well documented fact. [Note: Fox happily reposted the Breitbart article on their own web of lies, Fox Nation]

BreitBrat Tony rushed to Fox’s defense with a quote by the Chairman of the Republican Party, Reince Preibus who denied that Fox was his party’s mouthpiece saying “Hey Jeff Zucker, we’re the Republican Party and we speak for ourselves, pal.” Sure they do. They just do it mostly on Fox News, and when they aren’t available, Fox does it for them.

Lee then gets to the point by alleging that “It’s an interesting strategy Zucker has: trash the Republican Party and, by extension, all Republicans.” Except where in Zucker’s remarks did he trash the Republican Party? He merely noted that Fox is a GOP friendly network, which no one who is paying attention would dispute. Zucker’s comments were not even directed at Republicans at all. They were characterizing Fox News’ obvious partisan bias. But apparently associating Republicans with Fox News constitutes “trashing” in Lee’s view.

The rest of the article went on interminably about how Fox is beating their competition in the ratings, as if that had some relevance to the subject or to the measure of news quality. Lee’s conclusion, therefore, was summed up in the article’s second made up quote: “These factors led The Hollywood Reporter to declare that Roger Ailes and Fox News had won the cable news wars.” The only problem with that is that the Hollywood Reporter declared no such thing. In fact, it was Ailes himself who made the declaration in an interview with the Reporter.

It takes an astonishingly low grade level of comprehension to take a quote by Ailes and attribute it to the Hollywood Reporter simply because that’s where it was published. But the quote itself was deliberately misleading and self-serving, as one might expect coming from the the CEO of Fox News about his own network. The only people who still believe that cable news quality is measured by ratings are the marketing and the PR departments. The truth is, in a point made often here at News Corpse, is that being number one is only a measure of popularity, not quality. After all, McDonalds is the number one restaurant in America, but very few people would say that it is the best quality food in the country. However, they do have something in common with Fox News:

Fox News / McDonalds

Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Case Of ObamaCare’s Uncooked Books

Posted by on January 9, 2014 at 1:50 pm. NO Comments :

The burden of coming up with ever newer and more hair-raising scandals against the Obama administration must be wearing heavily on the Fox News flunkies assigned to that task. What else could explain the article posted to Fox Nation that alleged that Mark Udall, the Democratic senator from Colorado, had “Asked State to Cook Books on ObamaCare Numbers.”

Fox Nation

For more documented examples of Fox Nation’s dishonesty,
read the acclaimed ebook Fox Nation vs. Reality, available at Amazon.

The article alleged that “Udall’s office pressured the Colorado Division of Insurance to downplay the number of insurance cancellations caused by the rollout of ObamaCare.” However, the evidence of that claim was not provided. The Fox Nationalists linked their article to a column on the uber-rightist Breitbart News, where a concerted effort was made to spin the story in the most negative manner possible. At issue were the number of Colorado residents who had policies canceled by their insurance companies, and were not given an opportunity to renew them or switch to a similar policy.

Only by following a trail back several more steps to the original source in the Denver Post was the truth revealed.

“Many of the cancellation notices, however, also contain language allowing customers to renew their existing policies.

“One consumer advocacy group said that while the impact on the small number facing an absolute cancellation is real, ‘there’s been a lot of hype and not a lot of drilling down into the facts.'”

So, in fact, many of the alleged cancellations were not really cancellations at all because the customer was permitted to renew the policy. Sen. Udall simply wanted the number of cancellations reported to reflect that fact. But in pursuit of another phony controversy, the Fox Nationalists, in conjunction with the BreitBrats, manufactured a marauding senator putting pressure on a beleaguered bureaucrat.

As usual, there was no controversy, there were no cooked books, and the only departure from the truth was by the fabulists at Fox News.

New Year’s Resolutions From Fox News: Gamble With Your Life And Bankrupt Your Heirs

Posted by on December 31, 2013 at 8:58 am. 11 Comments :

From the day that health insurance reform was proposed by President Obama and the Democratic congress, Fox News has been fiercely opposed to any change in the system that had been failing so miserably for decades. Conservatives were united in support of policies that left millions of Americans uninsured while making millions of dollars for insurance companies (and the GOP politicians who backed them).

Since ObamaCare was implemented, Fox News has worked tirelessly attempting to persuade people to refuse to participate in the program. It’s a mission that seeks to cause ObamaCare to fail. Fox has feverishly rolled out blatant scare tactics aimed at keeping citizens from taking advantage of the improved access to medical care and the lower costs that the ACA provides. And as the year comes to a close, Fox News is augmenting their fear mongering with dreadfully bad advice that, if followed, will cause certain harm and suffering.

Fox Nation

The article, “Eight Ways to Opt Out of ObamaCare,” was published on the Fox News community website and lie factory, Fox Nation (see the acclaimed ebook Fox Nation vs. Reality for more than 50 documented examples of proven lies). It was a reposting of an item from the disreputable rightist hacks at Breitbart News who have been Fox’s partner in falsely smearing ObamaCare and all things liberal. Below are the actual tips offered by the FoxPods and BreitBrats to convince people that not having legitimate, dependable health insurance is a good idea.

1. Join a health care sharing ministry

These “clubs” are set up as charitable organizations wherein people are reimbursed for their health care costs by the other members of the collective. But in order to join, applicants must first pledge their Christian faith and promise not to drink, take drugs or have sex outside of a traditional marriage. Some even require a reference from a minister. Clearly, this is not an option for most people. Furthermore, those with preexisting conditions are not accepted for membership. The coverage also doesn’t include “products of un-Biblical lifestyles,” such as contraception or substance rehab, or some preventive medicine, including colonoscopies and annual mammograms. The clubs are are not obligated to reimburse anyone for anything and there is no regulatory oversight that protects the consumer.

2. Purchase a short-term health insurance policy

Short term health insurance policies provide coverage for a period of six months or less. They are intended for use between jobs or other temporary lapses in insurance coverage. They are not renewable, but you can purchase another after one expires. However, any condition that was being treated while one policy was in effect is exempted from coverage by subsequent policies. Short term health insurance policies are generally intended to only cover major medical expenses. In addition to excluding coverage for preexisting conditions, such policies generally exclude coverage for services like preventive treatment (e.g. routine physical exams and immunizations), pregnancy or childbirth.

3. Buy alternative insurance plans such as fixed-benefit, critical illness, or accident insurance

Fixed-benefit plans are described by Consumer Reports as “Stingy plans [that] may be worse than none at all.” These plans will reimburse you a fixed amount for a specified illness. It is usually far less than necessary to cover the services, and you’re responsible for the remainder. Illnesses not specified are not covered at all. Critical illness and accident insurance are similarly narrow and often do not cover common medical conditions. Included in this tip is a laughable suggestion to increase the accident coverage of your auto insurance policy as a alternative to real health insurance.

4. Visit cash-only doctors and retail health clinics

Cash-only doctors and retail health clinics provide only basic services that can be performed in the doctor’s office. Any more serious treatment like surgery, or services that require more sophisticated hospital equipment like MRI’s, must be paid for separately. Consequently, the most expensive types of care are not covered at all.

5. Sign up for a telemedicine service

Telemedicine is a great leap forward as a tool for providing a service in conjunction with conventional doctor’s care. However, it is wholly insufficient as a replacement for insurance. It basically gives a patient the opportunity to talk to doctor, but no actual treatment is covered. Costs for anything from a vaccination to open-heart surgery would be born by the patient alone.

6. Use generic prescription drugs whenever possible, and compare prices between pharmacies

This is prudent advice for any patient but, once again, it does not in any way replace health insurance. It doesn’t even provide the pharmaceutical benefits of a legitimate health care plan that can provide drugs for small co-pays of a few dollars.

7. For surgery find a facility that offers up-front “package” prices for self-pay patients

This is essentially a suggestion to shop around for cheap surgeons after you have already determined a need (and it does not address how that medical determination was arrived at or paid for). It does not guarantee that the costs will be affordable, even if they are less costly than the average doctor. And while comparison shopping for a Sony HDTV might save you a few bucks, is anyone really comfortable with having a heart bypass performed by the guy who offers to do it for the lowest price? Paging Dr. Nick.

8. When a hospital visit becomes necessary, work with a medical bill negotiation service

This advice can lower the cost of hospital services, but there is no promise that the fees will be reduced to an amount that is manageable for people with limited resources. For instance, your $50,000 cancer treatment might be reduced to $35,000, which is fine if you have $35,000 laying around. If not, you will wish you had insurance.

Every one of these tips are misleading and dangerous. They could result in people being unable to get necessary medical care and/or thrown into bankruptcy. For Fox News to offer them as suitable alternatives to health insurance is irresponsible and potentially tragic. The well-to-do pundits and editors at Fox won’t be the ones to suffer from this extremely bad advice, yet they knowingly put others at risk. And it’s especially offensive when the program that Fox is steering people away from is one that actually provides comprehensive care for more people, at lower cost, than anything that has been available in the past.

Health care is something that every citizen is going to require at one time or another, without exception. And while ObamaCare is not perfect, it is a step in the right direction. The more people who enroll, the more efficiently costs can be controlled and reduced. And of course, the fewer illnesses and injuries that go untreated. These are apparently goals that Fox News and the Republican/Tea Party right-wing oppose, hence this list of resolutions that can only make the new year a nightmare for those foolish enough to adopt them.

Not So Breitbart: McConnell Calls Tea Party Bullies Who Need A Punch In The Nose (Allegedly)

Posted by on November 24, 2013 at 10:18 am. 4 Comments :

The intrepid team of weasels at Breitbart News have published an “exclusive” scoop that threatens to sink the political career of Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. McConnell participated in a conference call with Karl Rove’s Crossroads PAC and a couple of dozen conservative donors wherein they discussed the political strategies for future electoral victories.

The article on Breitbart News was authored by Matthew Boyle, a notoriously dishonest reject from Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller. Amongst his previous work for Breitbart was an article that invented the existence of ObamaCars, free vehicles that would allegedly be given out to illegal immigrants. He should be writing for The Onion.

In Boyle’s latest piece of fiction he claims to have an anonymous source who was on the conference call with McConnell and Rove and had some juicy tidbits to expose. The opening paragraph of Boyle’s article declared that…

“Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on a conference call organized by Karl Rove’s Crossroads organization for large donors and their advisers on Oct. 30 that the Tea Party movement, in his view, is a ‘nothing but a bunch of bullies’ that he plans to ‘punch … in the nose'”

Oh my lord. Mitch McConnell is threatening to assault the noses of some Tea Party bullies. And it must be true because there isn’t any indication in that paragraph that the remarks were conveyed by an unknown third party with no proof.

McConnell has had prior run-ins with Tea Party noses. [Author’s Note: You cannot imagine the willpower it took to avoid saying that “Tea Party noses are running.”] A couple of months ago McConnell’s campaign manager, Jesse Benton, who was hired specifically to appeal to Tea Party voters in Kentucky, was recorded telling a colleague about his reluctant association with McConnell. Benton said…

“Between you and me, I’m sort of holdin’ my nose for two years because what we’re doing here is going to be a big benefit to Rand [Paul] in ’16.”

Subsequent to that gaffe, the McConnell campaign released a lighthearted attempt at damage control showing McConnell standing next to Benton who was holding his nose. But now that we know how McConnell really feels about those Tea Party guys, perhaps Benton isn’t avoiding the stench. Maybe he just got slugged in the schnoz by the scrappy minority leader.

Mitch McConnell

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Ordinarily, embarrassing revelations about Republican politicians would be a welcome treat. And this one fits the bill because McConnell has previously expressed concerns about fringe candidates mounting primary challenges against sitting Republican senators and then losing winnable seats to Democrats. Boyle’s source told him that McConnell explicitly attacked the Tea Party and some of it’s rising stars like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee.

Upon reading Boyle’s article, however, there were some gaping holes that a conscientious reader could not ignore. For instance, McConnell is a highly partisan, right-wing, attack machine, but he isn’t stupid. It seems highly implausible that he would make derogatory remarks amount a significant bloc of constituents during a telephone conference call on which he doesn’t know who might be listening. What’s more, by citing an anonymous source in this sort of political dust-up, Boyle prevents his readers from having any sense of who is making these charges. It might very well be a supporter of Matt Bevin, the Tea Party candidate who is challenging McConnell in his own Kentucky primary.

Boyle did include a response from a spokesman for Karl Rove who flatly denied the charge that McConnell had demeaned either the Tea Party or Cruz:

“Your source is ascribing things to the call that simply were never said […] nothing about the Tea Party or Sens. Cruz or Lee.”

That unambiguous denial didn’t stop Boyle from posting an article that maligned McConnell. As it turns out, there was good reason to be suspicious of Boyle’s exclusive. Washington Examiner reporter Charlie Spiering did what real reporters actually do. He contacted Rove’s people and arranged to hear a recording of the conference call. In his column he noted that…

“McConnell’s comments about dealing with “schoolyard bullies” by punching them in the nose, as reported by Breitbart News, were accurate but were explicitly directed at the Senate Conservatives Fund, not the Tea Party or a specific conservative senator.”

So it appears that Boyle’s source was something less than credible, which is something that wouldn’t much bother Breitbart or Boyle. It is no secret that the BreitBrats are openly hostile to establishment Republicans and that they frequently promote Tea Party challengers. It would be consistent with their agenda for a mysterious McConnell critic to surface and assign comments to him that would harm his reelection effort. And Boyle is just the guy to invent a controversy that would help a candidate running against McConnell. It wouldn’t be the first time that Boyle has come to the aid of McConnell’s opponent. He’s written at least six other articles for Breitbart that feature Bevin favorably and McConnell disparagingly.

Despite the Examiner’s debunking of Boyle’s source, there has been no retraction on the Breitbart website. That’s typical of their shoddy brand of dishonest journalism. Even so, it’s hard to know who to root for in this affair. McConnell the repugnant, Republican pugilist, or Boyle the disreputable, right-wing hack. I must admit, though, it’s a highly entertaining show.

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

Posted by on October 24, 2013 at 4:18 pm. 5 Comments :

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.