Submitted by Anne Landman on
The pro-health care reform group Health Care for America Now has released a study (pdf) that contradicts insurance companies' claims that their recent, exorbitant rate hikes were driven by increases in the cost of medical care.
Submitted by Anne Landman on
The conservative blogosphere is busy charging that the United States Missile Defense Agency's (MDA) new logo looks suspicious ... like a combination of the Muslim crescent moon and Barack Obama's campaign logo. Some even say they detect a similarity to the logo of Iran's Space Agency.
Submitted by Anne Landman on
By writing the health care reform bill as a budget bill, Senate Democrats could advance the measure using a procedure called "reconciliation," which would avoid a Republican attempt to stall the measure by filibustering it.
Even before a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision blew the lid off corporate campaign spending, it was clear that the big banks would be key players in the 2010 election cycle. Unemployment will remain high, and so will resentment against the banks -- a volatile combination that will encourage savvy members of Congress to continue to fight for meaningful reform of the financial sector.
Submitted by Anne Landman on
The Pentagon is formally rebranding the Iraq war by changing its name from "Operation Iraqi Freedom" to the sunnier "Operation New Dawn," to reflect the reduced role the American military is supposed to have in that country over the next year.
Front group man extraordinaire Rick Berman and his attack group, the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), have launched a new Web site, HumaneWatch.org, to harass the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), the country's largest animal welfare organization.
Submitted by Anne Landman on
The Republican National Committee (RNC) has sent out fund raising mailers that mimic the appearance of the 2010 U.S. Census forms, which started going out this week. The letters are sent in plain white envelopes bearing the words "2010 Congressional District Census" and "Do Not Destroy, Official Document." The word "census" is spelled with a capital "C," the same as the U.S. Census Bureau.
Submitted by Anne Landman on
Trijicon, which manufactures gun sights used by the U.S. Military, responded to international outcry and Pentagon concerns by saying it will immediately stop engraving biblical references on gun sights it sells to the military, and will provide the military with 100 free kits to remove existing biblical codes from guns it has already purchased. Guns in the military that currently carry the religious inscriptions may number in the tens of thousands.
US News and World Report blogger Peter Roff is comparing the Obama Administration's payments to Jonathan Gruber to the the pundit payola scandal of the Bush Administration paying Armstrong Williams.
In January 2005, USA Today revealed that a U.S. Department of Education contract paid Williams to promote Bush's No Child Left Behind legislation on his TV show and to ask other African American journalists to do likewise. Democrats and media activists were appropriately outraged at such blatant and hidden government propaganda. A January 7, 2010, report by Marcy Wheeler on her Firedoglake blog exposed the similar failure of the Obama Administration and influential MIT economist Jonathan Gruber to fully and consistently reveal Gruber's role in receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars as a paid consultant to the Obama Administration, while promoting Obama's health care legislation.
Roff, a long-time Republican activist and right wing pundit, notes that in the William's payola scandal "senior Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives wrote to President George W. Bush expressing their outrage. In one of those letters, then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Reps. Henry Waxman, George Miller, David Obey, and Elijah Cummings denounced the payments made to Williams under a government contract as 'illegal covert propaganda' intended to influence the American electorate."
What a difference partisanship makes now that Obama is president. In the Gruber scandal prominent liberals including New York Times columnist Paul Krugman have attacked the messenger, Marcy Wheeler and Firedoglake, rather than criticizing the lack of disclosure and the money changing hands, and digging further into the relationship between Obama and his paid health care advocate Jonathan Gruber.
A conspicuously biased news article printed in the Washington Post on December 31, 2009 is raising the eyebrows of public policy experts, bloggers, media watchdogs other news outlets alike. Sign our petition to tell the Post no more fake news!
Titled "Support grows for tackling nation's debt," the article discusses a proposal to create a government commission to examine America's growing debt. The new commission, according to the article, would be charged with exploring "how to rein in skyrocketing spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security," but the article failed to mention other significant sources of government spending, like the $663 billion military budget.
The story points to growing support for such a commission among political figures, but fails to mention the 40 or so prominent organizations that oppose the plan, including the NAACP, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), AARP, Common Cause, the AFL-CIO, and the National Organization for Women (NOW). The article was not written by Post reporters, but was produced by a startup "news" organization called the Fiscal Times, whose byline describes it is an "independent news publication that reports on fiscal, budgetary, healthcare and international economic issues." But is it truly "independent"?
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