Bad Deeds for 9-4-2009

 

The Republican Party’s Fake Doctor Council – Can the Republican Party draft a doctor, entirely against his will and political inclination, into the Kill Obamacare movement? Well, it can try. Here is what happened to a physician and medical school professor, who prefers that I not use his name. I’ll call him Fred.

Fred received by fax a draft press release from Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., who is an orthopedist, head of the Republican Study Committee, and chairman of something called the Physicians’ Council for Responsible Reform. According to its Web site, this group seeks “to defeat Members of Congress who support ‘ObamaCare’ in the upcoming 2010 elections.” The PCRR is a front for the National Republican Congressional Committee. The draft press release listed Fred’s name along with 32 others as members of the council, “comprised of physicians who are respected by their peers.” These worthies, it said, “will be receiving special briefings and providing input to Republican members of Congress,” including House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio, “during their deliberations of the Obama administration’s efforts to reform health care.”

A handwritten note on the cover sheet explained:

Because of your invaluable experience, we are asking you to represent California as a consultant on the Physicians’ Council.

We’re running a press release to honor the achievements of you and other concerned physicians like you. Please call me with your approval at 1-877-416-7188.

Fred phoned the number and was connected to an employee at an InfoCision call center in Austintown, Ohio. The employee pretended to work for the Physicians’ Council. This person played Fred a prerecorded message from Rep. Price:

There’s a very real threat of Washington interfering even more with doctors’ efforts to provide the best possible care for their patients. And I’m afraid that declining reimbursements, frivolous lawsuits, and total governmental control of health care could be just the beginning of our worries. … Please stay on the line for my assistant, who will explain how I’d like for you to get involved. Your input is vital to our efforts.

But Rep. Price’s “assistant,” Fred says, assured him that his “input” would consist entirely of having his name listed on the press release. This agrees with the testimony of another M.D. on the Daily Kos, who said he was told “it would require absolutely no time commitment.”
The NRCC’s Physicians’ Council is dishonest in two ways.

1. Quite obviously there is no [real] Physicians’ Council for Responsible Reform. Serving on a real council requires some commitment of time. You can’t receive “special briefings” and provide “input to Republican members of Congress” if you’re just a name on a page. The real purpose is to identify doctors riled up enough about Obamacare that they’ll give money to the NRCC. (Good luck getting that face time with Minority Leader Boehner if you don’t write a check.) Since June, the NRCC has raised more than $1.2 million this way.

2. Fred believes that had he never phoned back and requested his name be removed, it would have remained there. When I asked a call center employee whether that was true, I was told it was not. But the draft press release did imply, falsely, that the other physicians listed had already agreed to be on the council. Yet when I phoned another name on the list—an oncologist in Missouri whom I’ll call Dr. Blank because, like Fred, he never asked to be included—I was told that Dr. Blank had not agreed to join.

 

Glenn Beck and the Society for (In)sanity in Art – Wednesday night, Fox News ranter Glenn Beck went off on art that was made more than 70 years ago for Rockefeller Center, corporate headquarters of NBC and — not coincidentally — supposed arch-enemy of Rupert Murdoch’s television empire. To the surprise of no one, Beck donned his art critic’s tin-foil conspiracy hat to find hidden evidence of “progressives, fascists and communists” in the carved reliefs and paintings of a landmark Manhattan building complex that was made a national historic monument in 1987. (Let’s see; who was president that year? Oh, yeah: Commie-symp Ronald Reagan.)

Wait till Beck finds out about the Commie tree they put there every December at Rockefeller Center!

 

And now for some Friday fun: Town Hall Organizers Put Out National Casting Call for Angry Jerks – Encouraged by their ability to disrupt a week’s worth of town hall meetings on health care, Republican organizers have secured the services of a Hollywood casting director to conduct a nationwide talent search for angry jerks.

Carol Foyler, who has stocked numerous Hollywood films with angry mobs for crowd scenes, says that she is looking for people who are “willing to shout and scream and get red in the face with no provocation.”

Saying that her current assignment was a “challenging” one, Ms. Foyler said finding “angry, out-of-control jerks” is harder than it looks: “You really have to tip your hat to Fox for finding Glenn Beck.”

 

In Move to Appease Critics, Obama Promises to Extend Health Care Coverage to Morons – Facing opposition to his health care reform proposals, President Barack Obama has decided to reach out to a key demographic: morons.

Starting this week, Mr. Obama will host a series of town halls to roll out new features of his health care plan which will extend health care coverage to “all idiotic Americans,” in the words of one White House source.

“We clearly underestimated the role that doofuses and dimwits were going to play in this debate,” the source said. “We want to send them the message that this plan will give them coverage – but we need to come up with a one-syllable word for ‘coverage.'”

But critics of the President’s new plan worry that extending coverage to every American who is a few bricks shy of a load could triple the size of the nation’s deficit.

“The sheer number of lamebrains in the U.S. is much greater than the Administration estimates,” says Davis Logsdon, who studies the demography of idiots at the University of Minnesota. “Just look at Glenn Beck’s ratings.”

 

America Less Safe With Palin No Longer Keeping an Eye on Russia – Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin said today that America was less safe now that she was no longer keeping an eye on Russia, but added that she hoped other Alaskans would step up to fill the security void she has left.

“What with me being out and about trying to progress the agenda of so many Americans out there, it’s not possible for me to be seeing when Putin’s rearing his head like I used to be doing,” she said.

Regards,

Jim