Bad Deeds for 10-6-2009

 

Michele Bachmann Says Michele Bachmann Will Beat Democrats to Death to Pass Health Reform – In a Fox News radio interview Monday, when asked whether the House Democratic leadership would give members of their party “Christmas tree ornaments” in an effort to effectively bribe members to vote for healthcare reform, Conservative Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann (Nut, Crazyland) said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) could resort to violence. “She’ll either beat them to death, bludgeon them to death…or she’ll try to buy them off,” Bachmann quipped.

 

Huckabee Sends Web Viewers to His PAC Under the Guise of Signing a Petition – On two Fox News shows, Fox host Mike Huckabee directed viewers to “go to balancecutsave.com,” urging them to sign a petition telling Congress to “balance the budget,” “cut their spending,” and “save American families”; however, balancecutsave.com redirects visitors to a web page soliciting donations for Huckabee’s political action committee, which financially supports Republican candidates and also pays Huckabee’s daughter’s salary. Huckabee is the latest Fox News personality to ask viewers to visit PAC websites without disclosing the website’s nature or whether they stand to gain financially from viewers’ donations.

 

Betsy McCaughey Tells More Health Care Lies – Betsy McCaughey is a famous liar whom the media keep inviting on their programs to continue to lie about health care, instead of banishing her to some wilderness, where she belongs, to lie to woodland creatures. And so, today she ended up on Dylan Ratigan’s Morning Meeting with Representative Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.). There was a brief, mad moment where I thought that this might end well, but it didn’t.

I’m getting used to the tactics McCaughey deploys in situations like this: heavy-duty pretense that she supports health care reform, the Palin-esque answer-a-question-with-an-answer-to-a-question-of-her-liking technique, the ability to quickly provide information and opinion that’s completely beside the point, et cetera. Unfortunately, Ratigan wanted to have a discussion on health care competition and cost containment, and that didn’t dovetail too well with what McCaughey prefers to do in such a debate: set aside all substantive issues so that she can fearmonger about seniors being killed by the government.

McCaughey did her best, though, defaulting to the secondary position of insisting that there wasn’t enough tort reform in the bill. Ratigan was quick to point out that as a cost-containment measure, tort reform would be a spectacularly insignificant one: “Why would you start with tort reform when you have an aniti-trust exemption for insurance companies?” Weiner attempted to inject actual facts, noting that the CBO determined that eliminating 30 percent of all tort claims would yield marginal savings of .04 percent, because most of the states already cap tort claims.

And so, McCaughey just unleashed her SENIOR CITIZEN HEALTH CARE APOCALYPSE nonsense, accusing Weiner of being ignorant and telling Ratigan that he wasn’t a “fair moderator,” to which Ratigan replied, “Well, you’re not a fair answerer.” Ratigan gamely attempted to get McCaughey to reconcile how she’d continue to provide the current level of unsustainable funding to Medicare without updating the system to address its inefficiencies, to no avail.

McCAUGHEY: This will go down in history as one of the most browbeating interviews in television history.
RATIGAN: I hope that it does, and maybe you’ll learn to go on television to answer questions as opposed to casting accusations.

 

Conservative Tycoon is Behind the Tea Party Movement – For months, liberal researchers from the Center for American Progress to Firedoglake to the Rachel Maddow Show have pored over the financial records of libertarian tycoon David Koch to see just how deep his influence ran within the Tea Party movement. On Saturday, speaking at the Defending the American Dream Summit sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, Koch did it for them. Walking onstage at a morning rally, holding a Washington Award that he was about to give to Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C), Koch took credit for launching one of the key organizations of the conservative insurrection. “Days like to today bring to reality the vision of our board of directors, when we founded this organization five years ago,” said Koch.

 

U.S. Near Bottom on Treating Preventable Deaths – As Congress presses forward with landmark legislation to revamp the nation’s health-care system, lawmakers are grappling with a troubling question: Are Americans dying too soon?

The answer is yes. When it comes to “preventable deaths” — an array of illnesses and injuries that should not kill at an early age — the United States trails other industrialized nations and has been falling further behind over the past decade.

Although the United States now spends $2.4 trillion a year on medical care — vastly more per capita than comparable countries — the nation ranks near the bottom on premature deaths caused by illnesses such as diabetes, epilepsy, stroke, influenza, ulcers and pneumonia, according to research by the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund published in the journal Health Affairs.

Regards,

Jim