AFP (Koch Funded?) Invests in Blatant Anti-Obamacare Propaganda

Last month Americans For Prosperity, funded who knows to what extent by the billionaire conservative Koch brothers, released an ad calling on voters to speak out to Senator Mary Landrieu about how much Obamacare is hurting Louisiana families. 

The ad starts with a middle class Mom on the porch and two gorgeous middle class kids running out to the post box, laughing. A very sad, kind voice over says “Dear Mrs. Kelly; your family plan is no longer available under the Affordable Care Act.” as the kids pull the letter out the box. Cut to a young middle class African American woman coming into her apartment, opening up her letter box. The same voice says “Dear Ms. Davis, we can no longer offer you the same policy; your doctor is no long in the network due the Affordable Care Act.” She looks devastated.

Cut to a father and his daughter on a farm standing at the letter box. She’s adorable. He’s the poster boy for responsible, down to earth Dad. The same voice says “Your monthly premium has increased…” at which point Dad looks at adorable daughter with great distress, “…no longer covered due to the Affordable Care Act”. One more shot of a woman opening her letter box and the final message is “send Senator Landrieu a message. Obamacare is hurting Louisiana families.”

When Americans for Prosperity was pinned down on the veracity of the ad a spokesperson admitted the characters were all actors. There wasn’t any truth in even a second of that footage.

In February the AFP made another ad and they used a real person for this one: a Julie Boonstra who was diagnosed with leukemia 5 years ago. Ms. Boonstra speaks directly to the camera,  looks sincere and her words are heart stopping. 

“I was diagnosed with leukemia. I found out I only have a 20 percent chance of surviving. I found this wonderful doctor and a great health care plan. I was doing fairly well fighting the cancer, fighting the leukemia, and then I received a letter. My insurance was canceled because of Obamacare. Now, the out-of-pocket costs are so high, it’s unaffordable. If I do not receive my medication, I will die... This is serious. It’s not a game…”

The Washington Post runs a fact checker blog written by journalist Glen Kessler which grants a Pinocchio rating from one to four. One is a few errors, four is a whopping lie. When Kessler first reviewed this ad he had been told by the AFP that Ms. Boonstra had a Silver individual plan through Blue Cross Blue Shield but they didn’t give details of the actual plan. Still, Kessler was able to expose ‘contradictions’ so he gave Ms. Boonstra two Pinocchios. 

Why? Because Ms. Boonstra not only has a plan that saves her $571 a month, but she keeps that wonderful doctor she found. Kessler discovered also that the Silver plan doesn’t cover out of pocket (OOP) expenses, as her previous plan did, but it puts a cap on them of $6,350. The money she saves comes to $6,852.  Until they reach the cap those OOP expenses are unpredictable; they may be more than $571 a month, they may be less. When the lie that she’s lost her lovely doctor and that she’s going to die was exposed, Ms. Boonstra was forced to resort to saying, in another ad, that the unpredictability is the real problem and it’s making her life a nightmare. It didn’t have as much punch.

But that isn’t the end of the story. The Detroit News subsequently discovered that Ms. Boonstra has a Premier Gold Plan which has an OOP cap of $5,100. So in fact Ms. Boonstra saves $1,200 because of Obamacare. The lovely Ms. Boonstra’s reaction was to say “I don’t believe it”. Blue Cross Shield’s reaction was to say that they are available to help their clients understand policies; clients just have to pick up the phone. 

Kessler reviewed his first rating of the ad and now gives three Pinocchios. The end to this sad tale is that in fact Ms. Boonstra isn’t going to die or to lose her doctor, or lose anything at all  because of Obamacare. In fact she’s going to gain. Is she grateful? Nope. And millions of previously uninsured people are going to gain healthcare, perhaps for the first time in their lives. Many who are as sick or worse than Ms. Boonstra now have a chance at treatment and survival. Many who have previously been bankrupted or whose children have never been able to see a doctor now have medical care.

Not if Ms. Boonstra has anything to say about it, though. The AFP spent $30 million on ads attacking Democrats and Obamacare for the Senate races. The first ad has had over 400 000 views on YouTube and the second has had over 98,000 views.  

The constant Republican warcry that the ACA is unpopular and destroying people’s lives is believed by many because of ads like these. The frightening part of it all is that these believers don’t ask themselves why, if so many people’s lives have been destroyed, doesn’t the AFP show footage of them, and instead chooses to resort to actors and people whose stories can so easily be exposed as lies. The truth is clearly that nobody cares about the truth. 

Republican politicians and their backers and supporters know by now that as soon as they put out anything masquerading as information about Obamacare/ACA it’s going to be rigorously checked. They don't care. They know that they're exploiting an unreasoning, atavistic fear of an African American president. This kind of propaganda works on Republican voters. Last year a Public Policy Polling found that 29% of [polled] Republican primary voters in Louisiana blamed President Obama for the disaster in relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina struck and levees broke. 

Katrina happened in August 2005. Barack Obama took office in 2009.

Legacy of the First African-American President

I wonder how many people who comment on what President Obama said in any particular speech actually heard him speak. It’s far easier to read the media and form an opinion, but often there’s very little difference between an article that’s supposed to be journalism and the op-ed pages that are openly personal opinion. 

Not long ago he said he made two promises at his inauguration: that he wasn’t a perfect man and wouldn’t be a perfect president; and that he would work unflinchingly towards giving the middle class better opportunities to be rewarded for their work. He smiled as he said he didn’t break either of those promises. And he hasn’t. As to the first, nobody’s perfect. But it’s a rare American President who will stand up and acknowledge that, and then do what he needs to do to fix whatever problem has resulted from his imperfection.

Obama has done that with Obamacare. He has acknowledged that HealthCare.gov is flawed, and he hasn’t blamed the IT specialists who set it up. He’s clearly said “that’s on me”. He promised people they could keep their old medical insurance policies and it turned out they couldn’t. Again, he shouldered responsibility for that and did something about it. 

You would think, from the way the media interprets what he says and how he says it that he’s on the back foot. But he isn’t. If you listen to him speak you can see that.

He was never going to have it easy. It’s one thing for a country to want change; it’s another for everybody to actually be willing do what’s necessary for that change to happen. For Obama to have been optimally effective, voters needed to take responsibility for properly informing themselves about the Republican agenda, and not give them so much power to thwart Obama at every step. 

And as for him being African American, the racist river of blood that has tainted America since forever never dried up, it just flowed underground. It will be generations before every white conservative American can look at an African American president and see a man or a woman before they see the color of their skin. If it ever happens. What's more likely is that the conservative base will die out. They're vocal, often vicious, and counter-productive. But they aren't smart. They don't even wait for somebody to give them rope. They just grab it and go about hanging themselves.

There’s been a lot of noise about how the ACA is Obama’s legacy, and Republicans celebrated wildly whilst they thought they could take it down, then when HealthCare.gov floundered at first. They believed part of their main objective – to destroy Obama – was achieved. 

Firstly, they didn’t succeed, and HealthCare.gov is already functioning a whole lot better. Secondly, Obama’s legacy is that as the first African American president in a country still dessicated by racism he hasn’t buckled and given in to Republican efforts to derail him and his mission – to improve the lives of the majority of Americans; to strengthen the middle class and to change a status quo that’s brought the US to its knees. Part of that has been to provide all Americans with affordable quality healthcare and destroy the power insurance companies have had which they abused by selling low quality insurance. 

Obama has also withdrawn America from war-mongering and brought the deficit down from 9.2% of GDP in 2009 to less than half of that, at 4.1%, currently. It’s the fastest sustained decline in a deficit since World War II. No wonder House Republicans, whose main opposition to Obama in 2012 was the deficit, who don’t want the status quo to change, don’t want reform, don’t want to lose the power they’ve abused for way too long, stir up dust storms wherever they can to distract Americans from the truth. 

That Obama is successful. He was always going to be, no matter how hard it was for him.

Obama on The ACA and HealthCare.gov - the Only Adult in the Room

The NYT ran an article yesterday on the reaction of the insurance industry to a bill the House passed on Friday. The bill, which passed because 59 Democrats buckled out of fear that they won’t be re-elected, allows people to keep their old insurance policies and also allows insurance companies to sell new ones – even if they don’t provide the benefits or consumer protection of the ACA - for another year. Well that’s a triumph for the American people.

The author of the NYT article wrote that Obama is trying to extricate himself from a political crisis of his own making. It’s that kind of spin which adds to public panic and feeds the beast of blame that Americans nurture with such care, regardless of whether there’s any truth to their reasoning or not.

The ACA is fine. It’s the website that has glitches. Glitches are the IT industry norm. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Wordpress; they’ve all screwed up at some point. Microsoft is still a nightmare to work with. In itself the glitch wasn’t a political crisis. It was turned into the semblance of one by Republicans in the House blowing them into a monumental problem and, with the help of the media, whipping an easily influenceable conservative public into panic not because they (House Republicans) care about their electorate - they proved a short while ago that they don't - but because they want the power in Congress and they want the next President.

Then they could maintain the status quo. Introduce austerity which has worked so well in Europe and will only affect the middle class, further decimating it. And send America truly to the dogs. Right now infrastructure is falling apart – roads, bridges, electrical grids - not because the Obama Administration isn’t aware of it, but because Republicans refuse to raise taxes on those who can afford it and Obama refuses to raises taxes on those who can’t. The poor would get poorer again, America would engage in wars again, and insurance companies would sell low quality insurance to anybody who could afford it. And millions would be without. Soon something else that was part of the status quo will re-emerge; hatred of insurance companies that sell crap policies.

But Republicans are again banking on something that’s just their wishful thinking. This political crisis is mostly hot air and it’ll dissipate before 2016. Who remembers anything about the Syrian War? Who cares about terrorism? Who even remembers Edward Snowden, not to mention the other bod, the Australian holed up in an embassy in London. 

What’s going to be left of all this media-whip? The reality of a better life even if it’s not as good as it could have been with a responsible House; affordable health care that’s functional; and the memory of a Republican House that did everything it could (including shutting down the government and wasting $24 billion) to curtail the power of the middle class. A middle class that won’t be as white as the last time anybody voted. A middle class that isn’t lazy and stupid as Republicans have convinced themselves it is.

Republicans and the media are having a field day painting Obama as a man on the back foot, trying to extricate himself, save face. It makes for good headlines but it just isn’t true. He's taken responsibility and he's doing everything he can to help people affected by the glitches. He's working to fix the problems. He’s not willing to give up on the rights of the majority to have affordable quality healthcare. He's got a strong enough mind that he hasn't been influenced by the storm of misinformation that’s raising so much dust.  

A video posted on the Whitehouse website shows Obama speaking at a press conference about the ACA, Healthcare.gov and his willingness to take responsibility (2:34 - 9:55, after which he answers questions). He was clear and his sanity refreshing. As far I can tell he's the only adult in the room at the moment. Thank God there’s at least one.

Ultra Right Congress Declares War - On its own Electorate

Congress, controlled by the ultra right, is at war. Their foe? Their own electorate. It's debatable whether they've noticed or not.

The NewYork Times reported today that Republicans in Congress have said they’d agree to raise the debt ceiling if Democrats agreed to, amongst other things:

Delay the health law for a year; Overhaul the tax code; Keystone XL oil pipeline construction; Offshore oil and gas production; Increase permission for energy exploration on federal lands; Roll back regulations on coal ash; Block new Environmental Protection Agency regulations on greenhouse gas production; Eliminate a $23 billion fund to ensure the orderly dissolution of failed major banks; Eliminate mandatory contributions to the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; Limit medical malpractice lawsuits; Increase means testing for Medicare.

President Obama’s response was to say “No Congress before this one has ever, ever, in history been irresponsible enough to threaten default, to threaten an economic shutdown, to suggest America not pay its bills, just to try to blackmail a president into giving them some concessions on issues that have nothing to do with a budget.”

But he isn’t the only one who looks on this madness with disgust.

When the US Government shut down in 1995 after a budget battle similar to the one that’s currently happening, 51% of Americans blamed Republicans in Congress, and 28% blamed Bill Clinton. 

In a recent CBS poll 44% of respondents said if the same thing happened again they would blame Congress Republicans and 35% Obama. Obama has less support than Clinton did but how much of that is attributable to agendas that have nothing to do with budget or even of government is an unknown. Whatever the reason, despite that resistance to Obama, Congress Republicans are still in the firing line and their unpopularity is increasing virtually by the minute.

When asked ‘Who do you trust more to make the right decisions about the nation's economy – Republicans in Congress or Barack Obama?’ 45% of respondents chose Obama, and 33% chose Republicans in Congress.

But when the poll questions focused solely on Republicans in Congress – i.e. the distraction of the Obama-agendas is removed from the picture - then the reality of how much support Congress has even amongst Republican voters is quite shocking. 80% in total (and 75% of Republican respondents) disapproved of the overall job Congress is doing. 80% of respondents said they believed that threatening a government shutdown is not an acceptable way to negotiate.  

In this latest blackmail fiasco the ultra-right Cabal, which appears to control Congress, represents about 25% of the Republican electorate. Yet it continues with the behavior that is destructive to the US as if it has the right to ignore those it represents. Is that even constitutional? It sure doesn't look like democracy.

Edward Snowden - Playing Superman in a World He Doesn't Fully Comprehend

Truth is sometimes hard to find. Wikileaks lately published information, courtesy Edward Snowden, about the US spying on the EU. Nobody has reported the whole context or extent of that spying, or what information was gathered, or to what end. There are plenty of dramatic headlines but very few specifics. Also absent is information supplied by human rights activists from other countries about the spying their governments indulge in. 

So it looks as if the US is the only big bad wolf in the world. And that’s the real story. Which is a lot more dramatic than a scenario where EU, African and Latin American countries are all spying on each other and China and Russia are spying on everybody. 

Does it justify what the US has done? I have no idea, because I don’t know enough about what they’ve done and what is generally accepted at those levels in all countries. John Kerry, when asked to comment on allegations that the US has spied on the EU, refused to comment specifically until he had studied all the evidence, which was refreshing to hear. But he did say “every country in the world that is engaged in international affairs of national security undertakes lots of activities to protect its national security.” 

As for Edward Snowden, he continues to vilify the US, yet seeks asylum in Russia and China, amongst other countries. It’s clear what China’s position is. Vladimir Putin stayed out of the fray for a while, but he’s recently said that he’ll grant asylum if Snowden stops publishing damaging information about “our American partners”. Which he acknowledged would never happen as Snowden sees himself as a human rights activist.

Ecuador has backed right off. President Correa granted Snowden temporary travel documents to get out of Hong Kong and fly to Russia. He initially said Ecuador would decide the asylum request on its own merits and make a decision independent of foreign influence. Then he said that Snowden had to be in the country to start the process and there were no guarantees as to the outcome. He followed that up with an acknowledgment that he’d spoken to Joe Biden who was very polite and respectful. I’d love to have been listening in on that conversation. Perhaps Mr. Biden reminded him of how dependent Ecuador is on US trade.

Whatever was said, Correa’s latest statement was an admission that he acted rashly in granting those temporary travel documents. And he now says that to even process the asylum request could take months.

The net seems to be closing in on Snowden. He appears to be well under Assange’s wing now and speaks about how his life is in danger, just as Assange always has. I always thought there was a tinge of paranoia in that. 

Assange had a lot of connections and power but even he is mostly forgotten now. And what did he achieve? Meanwhile, those assault charges in Iceland still hang over his head. He says they were trumped up and it was all a conspiracy plot to get him back to the US. Maybe he’s right, but it doesn’t totally ring true. Men who did it always say they didn’t. He speaks about being a hero but he isn’t really. He’s just a sad man who never gets enough sun who’s on the run.

Snowden has nobody. He’s in the limelight now and a lot of the world thinks of him as a hero but his actions probably won’t lead to any change either. And much of the world isn’t convinced that what he did was heroic. 

It’s hard not to have compassion for him, though. The leaders of the countries he’s turned to who happily betray their own people don’t give a damn about him or about truth. At heart he believes he’s freeing the world but he isn’t really. This isn’t about the pursuit of truth or impacting on infringement of human rights. If it was, Snowden would have spoken out loudly against Russia and China. But he happily turned a blind eye to their behaviour - because he thought they might be useful to him, I guess. 

So it’s about the pursuit of half the truth. Which is no truth at all and speaks more of an agenda than anything else. I believe this is really about a young man with a childishly naïve understanding of international relationships playing Superman. Not fully comprehending that in the real world he’s entered, his cloak, more a fantasy for him than an absolute reality, can’t protect him.

Further reading: 

New York Times: Snowden applies for asylum in Russia

Reuters: Snowden threatens new US leaks; asks numerous countries for asylum

CBS News: Former NSA, CIA director: "the USA does conduct espionage"