Bad Deeds for 9-16-2009

 

45,000 Americans Die Each Year for Lack of Health Insurance – Harvard researchers published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health a study which reveals roughly 45,000 American adults die every year because they are not covered by health insurance. Researchers specifically noted that lack of health insurance now kills more adults than kidney disease.

 

Insurance Industry Enjoys Exemption From Anti-Trust Laws – Many people don’t know that the insurance industry, under the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945, has a broad anti-trust exemption that facilitates regional monopolies. The Act allows states to regulate the insurance business instead of the federal government, but also allows that, as long as the state regulates the industry, federal anti-trust laws would not apply.

As a result of this exemption, states have seen markets for health insurance where one or two companies predominate. In the state of Maine, Wellpoint controls 71% of the market. In North Dakota, Blue Cross controls 90%. Using the Herfindahl/Hirschman Index, a metric for market concentration, a 2007 study by the AMA found almost every health insurance market in the United States is highly concentrated.

 

Lou Dobbs Continues Wing-Nuttery – On his radio show — broadcast from the anti-immigration organization Federation for American Immigration Reform’s “Hold Their Feet to the Fire” legislative advocacy event — Lou Dobbs interviewed WorldNetDaily staff reporter Jerome Corsi, who Dobbs described as “a pretty good guy to talk to” about immigration issues. Corsi has most recently been promoting the theory that President Obama is planning to round up conservatives and put them in concentration camps.

This willingness to abet the most insane wing-nuttery is yet another drop in the bucket of evidence that CNN needs to give Dobbs the boot if it ever hopes to salvage what little credibility it has left. A new site called DropDobbs.com is a joint effort by various progressive organizations to demand CNN make a change. Also go to www.bastadobbs.com.

 

Government-Spending Protesters Protest That More Tax Money Wasn’t Used to Get D.C. Metro Service Ready for Them – Protesters who attended Saturday’s Tea Party rally in Washington found a new reason to be upset: Apparently they are unhappy with the level of service provided by the subway system. Rep. Kevin Brady asked for an explanation of why the government-run subway system didn’t, in his view, adequately prepare for this past weekend’s rally to protest government spending and government services. Seriously.

 

Limaugh Says We Need Segregated Buses – In a remark extraordinary even by the standards of conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio heavyweight declared on his program Wednesday that the United States needed to return to racially segregated buses. Referring to an incident in which a white student was beaten by black students on a bus, Limbaugh said: “I think the guy’s wrong. I think not only it was racism, it was justifiable racism. I mean, that’s the lesson we’re being taught here today. Kid shouldn’t have been on the bus anyway. We need segregated buses — it was invading space and stuff. This is Obama’s America.”

 

75 Percent of Oklahoma High School Students Can’t Name the First President of the U.S. – Only one in four Oklahoma public high school students can name the first President of the United States, according to a survey released today. The survey was commissioned by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs in observance of Constitution Day on Thursday. About 92 percent of the people who take the citizenship test pass on their first try, according to immigration service data. However, Oklahoma students did not fare as well. Only about 3 percent of the students surveyed would have passed the citizenship test.

This state also has a lot of people who don’t believe that global warming is real.

 

Fox News Promotes False Story About ACORN – Fox News conservatives, along with Foxnews.com and Fox Nation were agog over what Sean Hannity called “the most shocking undercover footage… captured to date” by those two conservative media darlings, Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe. Giles and O’Keefe, you may recall, have released a series of videos of their escapades posing as a pimp and a prostitute to entrap ACORN on film (and without a care that they likely broke the law while doing it). Although their previous efforts seem to have uncovered some genuine wrongdoing by some low-level ACORN staffers, their latest “expose” seems to have only exposed how shoddy their own journalistic instincts and ethics are, along with those of their benefactor, Andrew Breitbart, and Fox News. With video.

Predictably, Giles and O’Keefe’s latest video release was treated as major news on Fox News yesterday (9/15/09).

Glenn Beck devoted his entire show to it. Sean Hannity was full of credible enthusiasm as he announced that in San Bernardino, CA, the supersleuths uncovered “a much more serious crime.”
On Hannity, as on Beck, earlier, viewers were treated to ACORN’s Tresa Kaelke’s story about how she used to work for an escort service, her tips for how Giles and O’Keefe might cover up their prostitution business in order to acquire a home for themselves and their underage girls from El Salvador, and the “explosive” news that Kaelka had killed her husband.

The only problem? It’s not true. As ACORN has stated in its press release, “They were not believable”, said Ms. Kaelke of the two actors. “Somewhat entertaining, but they weren’t even good actors. I didn’t know what to make of them. They were clearly playing with me. I decided to shock them as much as they were shocking me. Like Stephan Colbert does – saying the most outrageous things with a straightface.” While her sense of humor might not be funny to many people, the fact is that she spun false scenario after false scenario and the videographer ate them up.

ACORN provided a copy of a San Bernardino police report of their investigation into the “homicide” of Kaelke’s husband. The police concluded, “the claims do not appear to be factual. Investigators have been in contact with the involved party’s known former husbands, who are alive and well.”

ACORN also points out that the fact that the filmmakers, Breitbart and Fox presented the video as truth, without any independent investigation, calls into question all of their journalistic standards. The organization also questioned why some footage that reflected well on ACORN had been edited out of the video.

 

Fox News Newspaper Ad Makes False Claims About Tea Party Coverage – In this morning’s Washington Post, on page A9, the Fox News Channel took out a full-page ad, chest-thumping about its coverage of this past weekend’s Tea Party protests in Washington, DC (which were heavily promoted by Fox News). “How did, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and CNN miss this story?” the text reads. It makes one wonder: Did Fox’s marketing department bother to check on its competitors’ coverage before they made these claims?

Here are the facts. By rough count, on September 12, CNN ran no less than 14 reports on the Tea Party rally, beginning at approximately 7:00 a.m. During the same time period, MSNBC offered viewers four reports on the Tea Parties.

In the local DC market, the Tea Parties also received coverage. CBS reported on the story during the six-o’clock and eleven-o’clock news broadcasts, NBC did the same during its six-o’clock and seven-o’clock broadcasts and ABC covered the Tea Parties in all three evening broadcasts. No one missed the story.

It’s especially galling to see an advertisement claiming that ABC News “missed the story” — and not just because ABC News Radio referenced the rallies in 69 separate broadcasts.

Regards,

Jim