Medical Insurance

It's not very often that a federal judge begins a ruling by saying that "Sometimes even a person with excellent vision does not see the forest for the trees." That happened yesterday in a case involving former First District Democratic Congressman and sore loser Steve Driehaus, whose district mostly comprised the western two-thirds of Cincinnati's Hamilton County. Yet it's not news at Gannett's Cincinnati Enquirer -- or anywhere else, for that matter.

After his 2010 defeat at the hands of Republican Steve Chabot, Driehaus sued the Susan B. Anthony List in federal court  for defamation and -- get this -- "loss of livelihood." Why? Because, during that campaign, SBAL told Driehaus's constituents -- correctly, it has since been proven -- that his vote for ObamaCare was a betrayal of his pro-life principles. Yesterday, despite his obvious conflict of interest as former president and director of the Planned Parenthood Association of Cincinnati, Judge Timothy Black, a Barack Obama appointee, found a way to do what he should have done in the first place, and rejected Driehaus's nonsense. 

It's pretty safe to say that a Monday evening story appearing at Buzzfeed which should thoroughly embarrass President Obama will continue to be ignored or seriously downplayed by the Associated Press, (aka the Administration's Press), the New York Times, the TV networks, and most of the rest of the establishment press. Longtime media followers will also recognize the story as the type of item which would become a press obsession if it occurred betweem the election and inauguration of a Republican or conservative president.

It seems tha former Obama campaign staffers are getting seriously dissed in the runup to President Obama's second inauguration. It turns out that they shouldn't be surprised. Buzzfeed's Zeke Miller notes that more substative dismissive treatment -- and even dismissals -- began shortly after the election was over. Excerpts from Miller's write-up follow the jump (HT Instapundit, whose mini-post is titled "Used Up, Thrown Away"; bolds are mine):

A search this morning at Google News on "Liverpool Pathway" (not in quotes) returned 69 items (Google's initial indication was over 800, but it was really only 69). Roughly 60 of them related to the National Health Service's "palliative care" protocols known as the "Liverpool Care Pathway" employed in the UK's government-run health care system to place hospital patients on a path to death. The latest news about the pathway has drawn the attention of a few prolife blogs in the U.S., but almost no attention from U.S. establishment press sources.

That's stunnning, given both the seriousness of the news about the pathway's real-world effects, and the reactions of those who insist that it's still a great thing in their brave new healthcare world. A UK Daily mail item on December 30 summarized the extent of the horror in three succinct sentences (bolds are mine throughout this post):

An unbylined Associated Press story at 1:34 p.m. (saved here for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) disgracefully covered a federal ruling which delivered a defeat (for now) against the enforcement of ObamaCare's contraception mandate.

Unlike the Hobby Lobby situation (covered earlier today at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), where the dispute is over certain portions of the contraception mandate requiring employers to cover abortifacient drugs and devices, the ruling in the case of Thomas Monaghan, the founder of Domino's Pizza who is now has a property management business, involves the entire contraception mandate. Monaghan nevertheless was able to get a temporary restraining order (TRO). The full five-paragraph AP report is after the jump (bolds are mine throughout this post):

One of the establishment press's favorite tactics to diminish the perceived strength of a position taken by people or companies they are inclined not to favor is to take objectively true facts and statements and reduce them to things only those people or companies "say" or "believe."

Hobby Lobby's court battle against the ObamaCare mandates is a perfect case in point, with both the Politico and Associated Press providing recent related examples of this fundamentally dishonest tactic. In the December 26 item at the Politico, Jennifer Haberkorn and Kathryn Smith also falsely framed the situation as an argument over "contraception" (more on that in a bit; bolds are mine throughout this post). But first, let's look at how the pair employed the "they say" tactic:

The UK's National Health Service has been around since the late 1940s. Despite over 60 years of trying to get health care right, it still doesn't come anywhere close. This long-term failure has done nothing to deter the Obama administration and Democrats from attempting to replicate the horror here in the U.S.

The latest example of scandlous neglect comes from a Labor MP, carried in the usually left-leaning UK Guardian and many other British news outlets. Readers can count on it not being noticed by the U.S. press (HT Samizdat via Instapundit). The second-last paragraph in the excerpt following the jump seems to give away a feeling by the dead victim's wife that she's somehow betraying her statist brothers and sisters by speaking out:

Just before Thanksgiving, the leftist think tank Demos issued a report by its own Catherine Ruetschlin advocating a $12 an hour minimum wage (stated as $25,000 per year by her) for those who work full-time in retail.

What's interesting about Ruetschlin's suggestion is that there is a retailer out there which is actually doing that and more -- and it's not Costco, which "pays starting employees at least $10 an hour." To be fair to Costco, rapid wage advancement is apparently quite common there, but that's off-topic. Perhaps surprising to the press, the company involved starts its full-time employees not at $12 an hour, but at $13. Perhaps if it spent less time trying to figure how to discredit this company, the establishment media might instead focus on how this company is able to be profitable under such a wage structure. Before identifying the firm after the jump, we'll first see in an open letter from its CEO why it's not getting favorable press attention (in full; bolds are mine):

On Monday's CBS This Morning, Cheesecake Factory CEO David Overton spotlighted the looming economic impact of Obamacare's implementation, especially on small enterprises: "For those businesses that don't cover their employees, they'll be in for a very expensive situation." Overton also warned that the cost of the law would be passed on to customers.

Anchor Norah O'Donnell raised the issue of the still-controversial health care law: "One of the things that's going to change, of course, in the new year is ObamaCare, or the Affordable Care Act. How do you implement that at Cheesecake Factory, and how will you pay for health care for all of your employees?" [audio clips available here; video below the jump]

The third page of an unbylined report with an early Saturday time stamp credited to "USA Today" carried at the Jackson, Mississippi Clarion Ledger (like USAT, a Gannett Company) claimed that "Walmart heiress Alice Walton expressed solidarity with Walmart's striking workers."

Putting aside whether or not an action taken by what the company estimated may have been fifty associates is a "strike" or a "temper tantrum," the claim was not true. USA Today fell for a hoax. Following the jump are several paragraphs from the Clarion Ledger report and an LA Times writeup identifying the hoax. Additionally, I learned that Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum was the object of Occupy and union movement protests when it opened a year ago.

In a Saturday PJ Media column ("A Physician’s New Reality: Patients Ask Me to Break the Law"), Dr. Peter Weiss, relays several important and ugly realities of what life will be like under the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as ObamaCare, which could easily have been reported any time during the past couple of years by members of the establishment press.

Most of what Dr. Weiss discusses has to do with ObamaCare's free annual exam. As will be seen, the administration and the press have made it seem far more valuable than what patients will see in the real world. If any of what the doctor describes below has been previously addressed in the press, I sure haven't seen it (italics are in original; bolds are mine):

In his Monday evening coverage of a federal judge's refusal to grant retailer Hobby Lobby injunctive relief from ObamaCare's mandate that it "provide insurance coverage for the morning-after and week-after birth control pills," the Associated Press's Tim Talley "cleverly" recast the government's argument over what constitutes an abortion (the government says that the morning-after pill isn't an abortifacient, when it really is) into one over when "pregnancy" (instead of life) begins. The company faces fines of $1.3 million per day (not a typo) starting on January 1 if it does not comply.

Several paragraphs from Talley's writeup will illustrate the misdirection (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

Hector Camacho might be in tough shape in hospital, but someone is out there bobbing and weaving like a champ.  Meet Karen Mills, President Obama's head of the Small Business Administration.

When Joe Scarborough asked her straight-up to state the cost per worker of Obamacare, Mills ducked like a pro, switched the subject, and wound up describing . . . how last year, she bought blueberry jam at a Maine farmers market as gifts for her friends! Not a joke—just a world-class non sequitur from an Obama administration that would rather talk about anything other than the cost of its big-government plans.  View the video after the jump.

The latest and possibly last (we can hope) preelection poll from partnership between the Associated Press and GfK Roper International purportedly tells us that most of us "now express prejudice toward blacks" whether we "recognize those feelings or not."

That's the conclusion communicated by AP reporter Sonya Ross and wire service deputy director of polling Jennifer Agiesta. In case we don't get the point, the item's accompanying photograph at the AP national site, Yahoo News and likely elsewhere is of Barack Obama, who despite the recognized and unrecognized racism of most Americans managed to carry 53% of the vote in 2008. Contrary to the report's headline, the AP pair admit that the AP-GfK poll results alone (done online, to add insult to injury) don't prove the point they're trying to make; other bizarre tests are also involved.

Saturday evening, via Emerson Marcus and with the Associated Press contributing, the Reno Gazette-Journal, which I hope doesn't try to describe itself as a family newspaper, published an irony-free a 500-word story (HT to a NewBusters tipster) on an appearance by Sandra Fluke earlier in the day "in front of about 10 people at the Sak ‘N Save in north Reno." You can't make this stuff up.

The story is currently the "Most Popular" at the paper's rgj.com home page. The Gazette-Journal seems to have been determined to hype Fluke's appearance no matter what so it could take shots at Rush Limbaugh and employ the "s-word" ("slut") Rush Limbaugh used (and then apologized for having used) to describe Ms. Fluke. It even employed the word in promoting her upcoming appearance in advance in one of two items dated Friday which were apparently meant for Saturday's print edition.

On Monday, the Cato Institute's Michael F. Cannon spotlighted how more than 150 employers inside the District of Columbia have signed onto a protest letter that decries the local ObamaCare board's "dismantling and recasting the separate health insurance marketplaces that serve small employer groups and individuals." One of the signatories was Chef Geoff's, owned by Geoff Tracy, who happens to be married to CBS This Morning anchor Norah O'Donnell.

This puts Tracy in, perhaps, an uncomfortable position, as O'Donnell has a record of defending the President's health care law. Here a few examples from the MRC's archives from the past few months:

For those who want the short answer to the question in this post's title, the answer is almost definitely "no." But in a New York Times op-ed piece in mid-September, former Obama "car czar" Steven Rattner effectively said that the so-called "fact-check" site known as PolitiFact should make amends to former Alaska Governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

In December 2009, PolitiFact's Angie Drobnic Holan outrageously characterized the following statement made by Palin in an August 2009 Facebook post as its "Lie of the Year" (bold is mine):

Earlier today (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I noted how the Associated Press's Steve Peoples and Politico's Juana Summers could only find hundreds of people attending GOP vice-presidential pick Paul Ryan's Wednesday appearance at Oxford, Ohio's Miami University. Perhaps even more troubling is how they somehow chose an odd angle for their coverage, namely that Ryan has supposedly avoiding talking about Medicare in his stump speeches -- and both wrote "that changed" in describing its first mention.

It seems more than a little odd that two establishment press reporters from supposedly separate and independent media outlets both apparently focused for four days on when Ryan would mention the word "Medicare" on the campaign trail. Summers even made it her headline, while Peoples seemed to want to convey the impression that Ryan has been afraid to mention the word:

Now that Mitt Romney has named Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan as his running-mate on the Republican ticket, dishonest liberals are dusting off their old standby of "Mediscare," making false accusations that conservatives want to completely dismantle Medicare and Social Security simply because they wish to make some changes in order to preserve them. Democrats, it is implied, would never dare to change such programs.

Unfortunately for this argument, there is one prominent liberal Democrat who has not only reduced Medicare spending growth, he's even touted his willingness to do the same to Social Security.

The far left has already started a campaign to misinform the public about Paul Ryan's views about Medicare and how he supposedly wants to destroy the program. (The irony, of course, is that President Obama actually reduced funding of the program by $700 billion as part of his healthcare law.)

Be that as it may, for those wondering what Ryan actually says about Medicare, National Review provides a helpful primer on the congressman's views, noting particularly that the newest Medicare proposal he's touting actually is quite a bit different from his older one:

Serious question: is there anything—anything!—Debbie Wasserman-Schultz won't say to promote Barack Obama?

On Fox News Sunday, interviewed by guest host John Roberts, the Chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee somehow managed to keep a straight face as she brazenly claimed: "I have no idea of the political affiliation of folks who are associated" with Priorities USA, the Super PAC that ran the ad essentially blaming Mitt Romney for a woman's cancer death. But as is undoubtedly well known to Wasserman-Schultz, Priorities USA is run by Bill Burton—Obama's former Deputy Press Secretary. View the video after the jump.

On Thursday's World News, ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl gave attention to  the now-infamous Obama superpac ad that blames Mitt Romney for a man's wife dying of cancer, labeling it "the single most outrageous ad of the campaign."

Karl's piece was devoted to criticizing campaign ads from both sides, and, after a clip of President obama complaining about ads from Romney's side, the ABC correspondent continued:

Clay Waters at NewsBusters addressed this item earlier today, but I want to emphasize one particular quote in the related New York Times piece which also caught the (possibly gullible) attention of Chris Ariens at Media Bistro's TV Newser: "In private meetings with columnists, he has talked about the concept of 'false balance' — that reporters should not give equal weight to both sides of an argument when one side is factually incorrect. He frequently cites the coverage of health care and the stimulus package as examples, according to aides familiar with the meetings."

Wow. Where do you start? I'll cite just one example in each area Obama cited. I suspect readers will have more.

On its Wednesday evening and Thursday morning newscasts, CBS didn't file one report or news brief on the controversial federal abortifacient/contraception mandate going into effect. Even worse, the only mention of religious liberty scandal over the regulation was CBS This Morning playing a clip of liberal comedian Stephen Colbert making fun of it.

ABC's Diane Sawyer heralded the mandate taking effect as "an important day for women's health" on Wednesday's World News, and forwarded the White House's talking points on the regulation: "Religious employers, like Catholic charities and hospitals, do not have to directly include free birth control under their health plans." On NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams lamented that "simply by taking effect, it started up the health care fight all over again."

As I noted yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) yesterday refused to call a vote on extending the Bush tax cuts, even though President Barack Obama days earlier urged passage of such tax cuts as soon as possible. Predictably, however, the July 11 editions of the network evening newscasts  -- ABC's World News, the CBS Evening News, and NBC's Nightly News -- all ignored the development. Ditto with the network morning shows today.

Each evening newscast did, however, note the House vote to repeal ObamaCare, the first such vote after the Supreme Court upheld the individual mandate as a tax.

On the night after seeming oblivious when Michele Bachmann explained the difference in principle between pushing all Americans to purchase health insurance versus pushing only the portion of Americans who make the choice to drive to buy car insurance, CNN host Piers Morgan again brought up the comparison on Tuesday's Piers Morgan Tonight as he hosted liberal actor Billy Baldwin as a guest.

During an interview with RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, Brooke Baldwin skipped her own network’s poll showing more independents disagree than agree with the Supreme Court’s ruling on ObamaCare.  Such cherry-picking is not uncommon for CNN hosts as Baldwin's colleague Soledad O’Brien has engaged in the practice to prop up ObamaCare as well.   

When Priebus challenged Baldwin over her polling claims, she doubled down and continued to selectively highlight data that fit her narrative.  Brooke cited a Gallup poll showing 46 percent of all voters agree with the Supreme Court’s decision and 45 percent of independents agree as well.  Baldwin left out the key piece of data from CNN's poll which found that while 47 percent of independents agree with the ruling, a majority, 52 percent disagree.  [Video coming soon.  MP3 audio here.]

On Monday's Piers Morgan Tonight, as host Morgan debated guest Rep. Michele Bachmann on ObamaCare, after the Minnesota Republican explained that a government requirement to purchase health insurance differs from a requirement to buy car insurance because "no one is forced to buy a car if they don't want to," her answer went over the CNN host's head as he continued to press the same flawed comparison.

After asking his guest, "Do you have car insurance?" and the followup, "Who told you to (buy it)?", Bachmann had responded: