A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”
In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting “illegal” or “unlawful” weapons into the country on Prince’s private planes. They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the US State Department and other federal agencies. The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety.
These allegations, and a series of other charges, are contained in sworn affidavits, given under penalty of perjury, filed late at night on August 3 in the Eastern District of Virginia as part of a seventy-page motion by lawyers for Iraqi civilians suing Blackwater for alleged war crimes and other misconduct. Susan Burke, a private attorney working in conjunction with the Center for Constitutional Rights, is suing Blackwater in five separate civil cases filed in the Washington, DC, area. They were recently consolidated before Judge T.S. Ellis III of the Eastern District of Virginia for pretrial motions. Burke filed the August 3 motion in response to Blackwater’s motion to dismiss the case. Blackwater asserts that Prince and the company are innocent of any wrongdoing and that they were professionally performing their duties on behalf of their employer, the US State Department.
I eagerly await the pooh-poohing of this as something “out of the movies” by the erstwhile Jack Bauer fanboys.
The sad truth is that whatever we think we know about how the white house ordered the CIA to torture terrorist suspects or the military special forces to assassinate civilians, what these people did completely off the books is likely to be even worse. These military contractors are all heavily connected to the CIA and to the conservative movement. I’m sure they understood their orders very well and were extremely well compensated for carrying them out.
This may end up being one of the few paths open to finding out what really happened. These guys are civilians. But then, both the Bush and Obama administrations have used the state secrets rationale to shut down lawsuits against civilians, so it will be very interesting to see if they do the same thing here. Anybody taking bets?
Euna Lee, someone with whom I worked briefly several years ago, is coming home.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has issued a “special pardon” to two American journalists convicted of sneaking into the country illegally, and he ordered them released during a visit by former U.S. President Bill Clinton, North Korean media reported early Wednesday.
The release of Laura Ling and Euna Lee was a sign of North Korea’s “humanitarian and peaceloving policy,” the Korean Central News Agency reported.
Clinton, who arrived in North Korea Tuesday on an unannounced visit, met with the reclusive and ailing Kim — his first meeting with a prominent Western figure since his reported stroke nearly a year ago.
Euna and Laura Ling have been in North Korean custody since St. Patrick’s Day. Activists have worked tirelessly for this release, and the high-profile visit by President Clinton worked.
Really good news for the families and friends. It’s almost as if talking to enemies can make a difference or something…
UPDATE: Media turning this into Bill Clinton “upstaging” the White House. Uh, what? Also the usual suspects, John Bolton et al talking about Clinton used as a “propaganda tool.” You’d almost think they would rather have two American citizens rot in a North Korean labor camp….
God, they really can’t get over their Clinton obsession.
…the Bolton video. Maybe he should visit Euna Lee’s family and tell her how their daughter needs to stay in a prison cell because anything else would send a bad message.
Jane has the deets on Freedomworks, the lobbyist-funded group activating the teabag rallies at health care town halls across the country. Somehow CBS, with its large cadre of producers and researchers, put a Freedom Works spokesman on its air last night without disclosing their ties, but a blogger with virtually no staff can uncover all this useful information about the organization.
Freedomworks isn’t some “organic grassroots” outfit. It’s run by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey — corporate lobbyist, global warming denier and ladie’s man. The President and CEO of Freedomworks is Matt Kibbee, who was trained by Lee Atwater. Kibbe was behind the attempt to get Ralph Nader put on the ballot in Oregon in 2004, prompting a complaint to the FEC of illegal collusion with the GOP.
Freedomworks has a long history of skunk works. In 2004, a woman who identified herself as a “single mother” in Iowa, Sandra Jacques, appeared at a George Bush town hall and gushed about his plan to privatize Social Security. She left out the part about being an employee of Freedomworks, who were lobbying on the issue at the time.
David Koch is also Chairman of the other major outfit heavily involved in these “organic” uprisings, Americans for Prosperity, whose members lynched Democrat Frank Kratovil in effigy. Koch is the 19th richest man in the world. They recently renamed the New York State Theater in Lincoln Center the David H. Koch Theater.
These aren’t just some organizations that these guys gave money to. They run them.
Americans for Prosperity, incidentally, are on the record about busing their people to rally against reform in 13 states.
Brian Beutler of TPMDC – again, with resources not nearly as large as CBS – has a lot more. He notes the role of Conservatives for Patients Rights, founded and funded by Rick Scott, a disgraced former head of the Columbia/HCA health-care company who paid the largest fine in US history, $1.7 billion dollars, for overcharging state and federal health plans. This guy has sunk millions of dollars of health industry money into anti-reform ads, and if you read Beutler’s piece, they are clearly orchestrating this “organic” uprising among the teabaggers.
The people on the ground may have their own extremist, anti-government beliefs. But they are being activated by corporate lobbyist-backed astroturf groups. And what is the mindset that this industry money is giving rise to?
From Burt Prelutsky’s August 3 Townhall.com column:
When it comes to our national security, keeping the likes of Barbara Boxer, Barney Frank and John Kerry in the loop would be the height of insanity. The only loop appropriate for most of the ninnies in Congress is one hanging from the branch of a very tall tree.
So far as I can tell, the only real difference between members of Congress and cockroaches is that one of the two species has a few more legs than the other.
Every Republican officeholder should be asked the question: are you with civil discourse, or with those advocating the lynching of Democratic politicians?
Health care reform will not be advanced by putting out bullet-pointed debunks. It will be advanced by forcing politicians to line up for or against lobbyist-supported and -funded lynch mobs.
UPDATE II: This is a very, very good point from Ezra, and I’ve noticed this too at most of the meetings I’ve attended:
I’ve been attending health-care panels and events on a pretty regular basis for four or five years now. Each event, of course, is its own precious snowflake, with its own set of graphs and bullet points and dweebish jokes. But one thing is perfectly predictable: The Q&A session will be dominated by single-payer activists asking about HR 676.
There’s not a mystery as to why this happens: Single-payer activists are very well organized, and they make a point to dispatch their people to these events and get their members to the microphone and ensure that their perspective is heard. But as the bills under consideration suggest, politicians have had no problem ignoring the single-payer grassroots. Max Baucus ruled out their participation on day one. The media hasn’t shown the slightest inclination to cover their presence at event after event after event.
To extend this a bit, 15 million people protested the Iraq war and the coverage was virtually nil. Lobbyists bus 100 people into a Congressional town hall and the media hypes the “Tehran-like” atmosphere of them. Groups of people at town hall meetings are not perfect indicators of the overall attitudes of a population, and even among the town halls, traditional media highlights and politicians respond to very selective segments of those groups.
UPDATE III: Good ideas for counteracting the teabagging, from an event organizer.
Q: Are you concerned at what appears to be well-orchestrated protesting of health care reform at town halls as derailing your message?
GIBBS: NO, I get asked every day about the myriad of things that could be derailing our message. I would point out that I don’t know what all those guys were doing, what were they called, the Brooks Brothers Brigade in Florida in 2000, appear to have rented a similar bus and are appearing together at town hall meetings throughout the country
Q: They seem to be pretty widespread.
GIBBS: I seem to see some commonality in who pops up in some of these things. Q: Like individuals?
GIBBS: Yeah.
Q: Really?
GIBBS: Yeah.
Q: Can you discuss names or ….
GIBBS: I don’t have names but I think you can see quite a bit of similarity between who shows up where.
He’s clearly trying to lead the horses of the press corps to water, not that they’ll drink.
We’ve seen this before. Remember the white-collar riot that shut down the MIami-Dade hand recount in 2000? It was carefully orchestrated to look like a spontaneous protest but of course, it wasn’t: it was planned and executed by Republicans to undermine the rule of law.
Here’s another fact about the 2000 white collar riot:
I had another appearance on NPR’s Tell Me More with Michel Martin this morning. Could have went better (UPDATE: ok, GONE, grammar police. You get up at 5 in the morning for a radio interview and try to function perfectly. Sheesh…). I didn’t get out that my opponent on the program, Vin Weber, is a lobbyist for the health care industry, though I did mention that his group Empower America was bought out by Freedom Works, who is orchestrating a lot of the teabagging protests you’re seeing at town halls around the country. I got him to admit that the “Kill Grandma” euthanasia conspiracy theory is a complete falsehood, which was good.
Before my segment, Rep. Lloyd Doggett appeared on the show, and talked about the hooligans who descended on his town hall in Austin, Texas last weekend. He said that their extended sloganeering and disruption “symbolizes what the conservative movement is all about,” and while there are also efforts ongoing in favor of health care reform, the “commercial media handmaidens” refuse to give them an equal amount of attention. And that’s certainly true to an extent. I got an email from Organizing for America yesterday that touted 1 million people participating in some of their health care actions and discussed 5 concrete actions taken by people that were noteworthy:
• The newspaper in Exeter, NH is reporting that local supporters are canvassing everywhere to build support for reform: door-to-door, at farmers’ markets, and at state fairs. The article quotes volunteer Dave Munsey as saying that 2008 “was probably the most important election of my lifetime. This is just an extension of that.”
• Supporters in Florida held simultaneous press conferences outside of nine local Senate offices with doctors, small-business owners, and others, all telling their personal health care stories about why reform is so important to them.
• After a huge event in Wisconsin, hundreds of the participants headed to a nearby town hall event hosted by Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner to share their stories and urge him to stand with voters in support of reform.
• A host in Minnesota organized a barbeque for supporters to hear from speakers and write letters to their members of Congress. 1200 people joined in!
• Volunteer community organizers have participated in trainings in more than 13 states — and 17 more are scheduled for the upcoming weeks.
Needless to say, none of these five events appeared on Hardball because nobody was shouting while wearing a bumper sticker on their head. And even people on the left wonder “Where is OFA?Where is HCAN?” Now, I think those groups should ditch the outside events and just work these same town halls, but the fact of the matter is that Republicans have always been, and for the near future always will be, skillful in getting their crap spun through the right-wing puke funnel and inserted into the media. We are good at responding most of the time – and finding smoking guns showing this to be lobbyist-coordinated astroturfing will help – but cable news producers will cover the conflict every time. Ultimately, nothing will stop Chris Matthews from airing a bunch of knuckleheads bused into a town hall meeting yelling while holding pitchforks, or whatever, and going on at length about how “it’s like Tehran” and how this shows the passion on the right. And that perception will drive reality.
And so you have Michel Martin, after hearing Rep. Doggett talk about the corporate lobbyist-directed groups coming in and disrupting his town hall meetings, saying that they are “tapping into an ongoing anxiety” in the country. You have the New York Times, writing about these events, mentioning Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity without mentioning their founders (Congressman turned lobbyist Dick Armey, for example) and funders.
However, these may be organized attempts, but there’s substantial opportunity for them to go way off the reservation. Doggett reports:
“If you look at the YouTube video, you can barely see in the edge of that a beautiful marble tombstone with my name on it,” Doggett) said. “People that worked so hard to get their signs in full-color did not come to dialogue. They came to be destructive.” Video of protesters confronting Mr. Specter and Ms. Sebelius in Philadelphia was also quickly posted to YouTube.
In this YouTube video of the Doggett riot you can see a sign with Nazi-style “SS” lettering on it.
It’s ridiculous to suggest that this is some new-found passion on the right just bursting to the fore in reaction to a piece of legislation. These are the same people who crawled out from rocks and into Sarah Palin rallies last year, screaming that Obama was a terrorist and a Muslim. They are the Ron Paul supporters who chased Sean Hannity down the street when their candidate wasn’t allowed in Fox News debates. They are the young conservatives who yelled “Hey hey, ho ho, Social Security’s got to go” back in 2005. They are that same set of anti-government, anti-social, anti-Obama types who have struck out with fury and not a little bit of menacing implied violence. They hung a Democratic congressman in effigy last week. They harass Republican representatives about the President’s birth certificate. They are angry extremists, and it’s fair to ask Republican leaders whether they support hanging Democrats, imagery of tombstones, birther fantasies, and the rest. This is not about policy. It’s about incitement to violence.
I’m sure you’ve all been following this astonishing story about Roger Ailes striking a bargain with the corporate heads of GE to get Keith Olbermann to lay off O’Reilly. Glenzilla has been all over it and covers all the important angles. He takes particular aim at GE for their interference in the news business, and on a global scale their journalistic crimes are manifest. But I think the real corporate thug in all this is Fox.
Here’s what gets me: the essence of the agreement is that Olbermann would stop attacking Bill O’Reilly and Bill O’Reilly would stop attacking the multinational corporation GE. Does everyone see the asymmetry of that?
I frankly can completely understand why GE made that deal. Shutting up Keith Olberman about Billo the Clown is a very small price to pay for keeping the lid on its own corporate crimes. I’m sure the lawyers all said this was the cheapest settlement they ever got. But Fox isn’t po[erating like corporate criminals — it’ operating like the mob. Their boy was miffed at being the butt of Olbermann’s jokes, so he accused GE’s corporate bosses of crimes, published the CEOs email and home address and had protesters storm the shareholder’s meeting. Doesn’t that seem just a little bit excessive for hurting O’Reilly’s feelings?
If Fox News has the goods on GE they have an obligation to broadcast it regardless of whether Keith Olbermann agrees to stop picking on Billo — if they don’t have the goods, they should stop Billo from broadcasting it without extracting a deal from GE. Instead they used the story as a weapon to silence a critic of one of their stars and then agreed to bury it when the critic’s boss agreed to muzzle him. GE, while they also breached journalistic standards by agreeing to make Keith Olbermann stop taunting his rival, didn’t commit anything close to Fox’s journalistic malpractice. After all, shutting down stupid jokes about Bill O’Reilly hardly compares to shutting down commentary about GE’s involvement in the Iraq and Iran wars!
This kind of deal making is outrageous in its own right, of course. These two mega corporations exchanging quid pro quos over martoonis and pigs in a blanket at Charlie Rose’s house is enough to make you vomit. But the fact that Ailes blackmailed GE for such trivial reasons seems more like a shot across the bow to me. If they can scare GE with these tactics, imagine what they do to the average politician?
In the best case you can make for it, Fox seems to have done this simply to assuage the gargantuan ego of one of the many psychos they put on the air every day. The worst case is that they just wanted to prove to the ruling elite that they can bring absolutely anybodyand anything to heel by letting one of those psychos go to town on them, which is a truly scary prospect. Is Roger Ailes the new J. Edgar Hoover?
Update: That’s not all that far fetched, apparently . Here’s an excerpt from a Rick Perlstein post from a few months back:
One of the producers who put together Fox News for Roger Ailes, Dan Cooper, is previewing his new memoir online. The writing is atrocious, the memoirist an excruciating host to pal around with, but there are, for all that, certain rewards. Like his account of the time he did an interview with David Brock for a critical article Brock did for New York magazine on Fox News. Roger Ailes was not happy. Our hero gets a call from his agent, one of the most powerful in TV news:
“”Danny. Did yoo give an intavyoo to Noo Yawk magazine?… I already know the ansa. I got a phone call from Roger Ailes an owwa ago. He told me that until I drop you as a cloyent, any demo tapes I send ovah for talent jobs will sit in the cawwna and gatha dust.”
Here was the interesting part: the article had not yet been published. So how did Roger Ailes learn about his participation? Explains Cooper:
I made the connections. Ailes knew I had given Brock the interview. Certainly Brock didn’t tell him. Of course. Fox News had gotten Brock’s telephone records from the phone company, and my phone number was on the list. Deep in the bowels of 1211 Avenue of the Americas, News Corporation’s New York headquarters, was what Roger called The Brain Room. Most people thought it was simply the research department of Fox News. But unlike virtually everybody else, because I had to design and build the Brain Room, I knew it also housed a counterintelligence and black ops office. So accessing phone records was easy pie.
Ailes, of course, like so many movers and shakers in the conservative movement, got his start in politics working for Richard Nixon. (Read about it in all in this indespensible classic. And this indispensble classic, too, available for pre-order at a steep discount.) Clearly, he learned his lessons well.
Read the whole thing and you’ll learn exciting new phrases like “pussy masala.”
Dday talks about how the misinformation gets into the ether below.
And here’s the way the overarching media narrative that supports it gets set:
Matthews: What do you make of this firestorm that’s going on across the country. We’ve got pictures from Texas and Long Island and Philly. Every time a congressman calls a town meeting now, the people show up and it’s like — I don’t know — it’s like Iran! It’s like the streets of Tehran!
Michael Smerconish: People are hot. I sense it in the phone calls that I get every day. I think they’re very nervous about what’s going to come out of this debate about national health care, and Chris if I’ve heard once in the last couple of days, I’ve heard it 50 times: “if they can’t get cash for clunkers straight, what in the world are they going to do with my national health insurance?”
Matthews: You mean they won’t get the numbers right?
Smericonish: Yeah they won’t get the numbers right and it smacks of bureaucratic ineptitude, that the federal government has blown through this money so quickly on a plan that seems so straighforward.
I also think that what going on is that many people don’t understand the elements of this debate, so what do they know? They know that they have health insurance and they know that this enormous price tag is being assigned for the 45 million or so who don’t have it. And frankly what they saying is, why can’t we just write them a check and pay for it. It sounds like it could be less expensive.
Ok, neither Smericonish, a conservative, or Matthews, a Village dullard, mention that the “riots” are not exactly spontaneous uprisings, but are rather the result of well-financed astroturfing enterprises, much like the ones that were done to disrupt the Clinton rallies back in 1994. (In fact, the threat of violence was so great that they ended up cancelling them, which is something we may yet see this month.) Matthews who prides himself on being an historian of arcane political strategy throughout the ages seems to know nothing of what’s happenening now or then.
Meanwhile, he lets Smerconish disseminate this summers “drill, baby, drill” — that insipid “cash for clunkers” line that Jim Demint cloddishly threw out there on the Sabbath Gasbag shows — with no explanation as to why it makes no sense at all. (After all, the program proved to be so popular that they need to extend it — that’s usually thought of as a success, not a failure. Everywhere but in the village, that is.)
It goes on. Surely Jonathan Martin of the Politico will straighten all this out, right?
Matthews: Ok , that’s the question, for Jonathan, for years now, ever since Harry Truman, the Democrats have said let’s have health insurance. Every poll that’s been taken saying we ought to insure the people who are uninsured in thiscountry, the number keeps growing. So in principle, everybody wants to do this, at least the majority does. What happened?
Martin: It’s hard to understand, given that. You have 60 Democrats in the senate and obviously the House is a lock too.
Matthews: And they all ran on promising health care.
Martin: The devil is in the detail on these things and the fact is that you’ve got a disparate party in the House on these things. As you know Chris, some of these Blue Dogs are not going to go along with the conventional liberal line of the party and that is causing problems.
Now the Democratic strategy right now is to try to blame the insurance companies, try to blame the Repub licans. I think the hard reality right now is that this is a Democratic problem and they’ve got to figure it out on their own.
Let me just speak real fast to the passion we’re seeing at some of these town hall rallies. It seems to me that for the first time we’re seeing maybe even in four years, we’re finally seeing some real fire and some real passion. You didn’t see it last year during the McCain campaign. I think folks now are finally fired up.
Ah, so this is all about the rebirth of the Republicans, I forgot. The fact that these same talk radio robots killed immigration reform under the GOP president apparently escaped Martin’s notice.
And again, no mention of the fact that this is an astroturfing effort, replete with what is sure to be paid “volunteers” filming the events for Youtube, so as to look more like “the streets of Tehran.” (Look for a full blown twitter campaign, if they can teach the dittoheads how to do it.) There has never been a more gullible clown than Chris Matthews.
Matthews: Well, the dog that hasn’t barked here as we say in Sherlock Holmes lingo Michael, is where the hell are the people who want health care, the people who work hard but don’t have health care, the union people. I haven’t seen one placard, one protest for health care
Smerconish: No, and I don’t hear from them either as radio callers. You hear from those who say maybe in retrospect maybe my insurance isn’t so bad, heck, I’ll take what I’ve already got if I can maintain the status quo because I’m so concerned about the cost of whatever this change is going to bring.
Matthews: But Michael Moore, I don’t care what you think of Michael Moore, but his movie Sicko was really smart because it didn’t focus on the uninsured, it focused on the middle class person who is underinsured. You know all about this Michael, they found out that there’s geniuses working at headquarters who kept them from getting their coverage.
Smericonish: I think that’s legitimate, but how many people have been to that situation and consequently found out what they really have or don’t have. I think the vast majority, thank God, haven’t found themselves in that position yet.
Martin: Also, it takes somebody who is very passionate about the issue, in the middle of the summer, vacation,work what have you, to show up in a townhall meeting with a politician. most normal people just don’t do that kind of thing and those events drive people who are passionate about the issue on one side or the other.
So the people who don’t have health insurance aren’t passionate about getting it, but people who don’t want them to have health insurance are passionate about making sure they don’t get it. It’s probably true, but it’s sad. The people who are underinsured or living with pre-existing conditions are passionate about keeping their jobs. The uninsured are working at low level shit jobs if they aren’t standing in the unemployment lines. Going to rallies probably isn’t in the job description.
I guess I just can’t wrap my mind around what kind of people feel “passionately” about denying people needed medical care. It kind of makes me feel sick.
But there are other reasons that Matthews sees as to why feel people feel so passionately:
Matthews: How much of this is about people coming to you about end of life decision spooked people Michael. This thing, this provision that you get to talk about a living will. but it sounds to some people like you’re getting a little ill and somebody shows up at your door like you’re a missionary and says let’s talk about how you’re going to save the goivernment money and the burden on your family by continuing to live. That’s the way it hits some people.
Smerconish: Yeah, and I think Chris what you’re really saying that there are some soundbites out there and you’ve got to sift through the urban lore that attached to the health care debate. but the soundbites are what people repeat. I’ll give you another one. It’s that perpetual question of “to what extent is there going to be some level of funding for abortion?” So I hear a lot about abortion, and I hear a lot about the end of life as well.
Matthews: That’s legitimate by the way. The abortion thing is legitimate. The Hyde Amendment, which all know about said that no federal dollars can be paid for abortion for the obvious reason, people are opposed to abortion don’t want to have to pay for it as taxpayers. I don’t know why the Democrats just don’t say that not a dollar of this bill’s going to pay for abortion. But Jonathan, they won’t say that.
Martin: Well I think there are all competing interests here. But as you say Chris, there are polls …
Matthews: But the government says you can’t spend money on abortion.
Martin: The, those polarizing issues, the issue about euthanasia, however credible it might be, the abortion issue, are causing Democrats problems right now because the average American hears those things and they sort of flinch, whether or not they’re true or not and that’s what slowing this bill down are these kinds of flash point issues out there that Republicans are exploiting.
I guess Chris and the boys didn’t have time to point out that the “euthanasia” thing is complete fiction or that the public plan as conceived would be paid for by premiums and therefore abortion wouldn’t be “taxpayer” funded at all. The facts clearly don’t matter in this. It’s about “urban lore” which is something journalists and talk show pundits have no obligation to refute. (And needless to say, the idea that the Democrats have to pander to a minority of anti-choice zealots who never vote for them anyway is accepted as a matter of course. No word on when the Republicans will be required to do the same with the NRA.)
Never once in this entire exchange did anyone mention where this spontaneous outbreak of enthusiasm for keeping people uninsured is coming from, and unless Jonathan Martin doesn’t read his own site, he certainly knew better. They disseminated the misinformation, even mentioning that the “debate” is driven by soundbites, then failed to refute any of it and proceeded to speculate wildly that the whole thing is being driven by culture war issues, which they also fail to put into proper perspective and correct the record.
And to top it off they seemed to think this was all just a terrific illustration of the conservatives’ commitment and passion for their beliefs. If the shoe were on the other foot, it would be characterized as the liberal fringe once again destroying the credibility of the Democratic Party.
I’ve noticed the change coming for weeks. The village has clearly turned —- they want to see health care reform fail. After all, as Mark Halperin said, just like all those people at the protests who think the uninsured and underinsured should just go die, they have health insurance. To hell with a bunch of losers who can’t even get the time off work or get out of their sick beds to come and protest with the teabaggers. They obviously just don’t have enough “passion.”
Set in a supply of cold beer and ice tea, folks. This is going to be a long, hot August.
Update: Up from the comments, by Carter:
I attended the Philly townhall meeting yesterday with a couple friends. The behavior of these RW nuts was incredible; it was like they were tripping on heroin. They were well organized & comprised about a third of the audience. I had the impression they were bused in – they had the signs taped to their chests & the little placards. They booed loudly regularly, starting with when Sebaelius (sic) & Specter were introduced & whenever either answered a question that indicated support for healthcare reform. Their task, as they saw it, was to disrupt the entire event.
Here’s Lawrence O’Donnell sitting in for Ed Schultz:
O’Donnell: AB, does it matter if these protests are organized or spontaneous? I mean, isn’t it true that it’s just the video that ends up on the local news that does the damage here?
AB Stoddard: It doesn’t matter at all, and the fact is that the only goal for the Republicans right now is to scare people off this, to depress voter support for this so that when they come back in September it’s even harder for the Democratic Party than the chaoes we just just witnessed on capitol Hill this month. All they have to do is just say, “this is going to be terrifying, this is a risky experiment.” They don’t have to be constructive right now. Remember who turns out in mid-term elections: the angry, ok? African Americans are not going to turn out at the rate they did last year and neither are young people. The people who carried marginal Democrats in in formerly Republican districts .. . It’s going to be a vey tough year for Democrats.
There you have it. The future is foretold. Journamalism isn’t there to give the facts or tell the truth. It doesn’t matter anyway, because “it’s out there.”
Last week, we learned about astroforging, the practice of corporate lobbyists forging letters from local advocacy groups that line up with corporate goals. More evidence has been uncovered today showing the widespread nature of this practice.
Joseph Richardson received a letter from Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) in reply to a letter that he never sent:
Richardson never wrote such a letter, and he never would. Calling himself a “vocal member” of the North Dakota Alliance for Renewable Energy, Richardson told ThinkProgress that he is an ACES supporter and even wrote a letter to Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-ND) calling on the congressman to support clean energy reform.
Bonner and Associates, the company nailed initially, has been engaged in this deception for well over 20 years. And as long as they got away with it, I’m sure they’d continue. It turns out that Bonner is linked to the clean coal lobby:
The Sierra Club today urged Attorney General Eric Holder to launch an investigation into the activities of a lobbying firm that has been linked to fake letters urging Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.) to vote against the climate bill […]
The request stems from a newspaper report last week that Bonner & Associates sent letters to Perriello’s office that were made to look as if they came from Creciendo Juntos, a Charlottesville-based Hispanic advocacy group. Perriello staffers also received similarly worded letters that were designed to look as if they came from the Albemarle-Charlottesville branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
The letters, which urged Perriello to oppose the House climate bill ( H.R. 2454 ), used the letterhead of the two groups but were signed by individuals who are not affiliated with the organizations ( E&ENews PM , July 31).
The group American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity acknowledged this afternoon that it had contracted Bonner & Associates earlier to perform “limited outreach,” but the advocacy group denounced the firm’s actions.
It’s insane that Democratic lawmakers are going out of their way to label the August recess as “consequential” for health care based on the reaction of constituents in districts, when this nasty little episode shows how so much of it is just theater and lies. But of course, the Village media plays along.
UPDATE: Think Progress has corrected this story. Conrad’s office miscategorized their response letter. The Perriello set of letters, however, are certainly real, which is to say fake. Brad Johnson has more.
SCRIPT: “Some of Congress’ health care plans could squeeze you four ways. It could raise taxes by $600 billion—even taxing soda. It could add a trillion to the federal deficit. New rules could hike your health insurance premiums 95 percent. You still might end up on their government-run health plan. Tell Congress you’ve been squeezed enough. Say no to a government-run health plan.” […]
ACCURACY: Although CPR lists individual sources for each statement in the ad, the facts are largely taken out of context, come from biased industry groups or have been discredited. “There’s absolutely nothing here that’s right. It’s unbelievable,” says John Holahan, director of the Health Policy Research Center at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
I think at this point a lot of these ads get drowned out and turn into just background noise. What’s far more insidious is that we’re seeing the return of the notorious email forward.
This week I received a mass email that exhorted the recipients to pray for our country because of the disaster surely to befall on us if health care reform is passed. It is very important for all of us to understand what health reform is about because being able to respond to these distortions is important. So I went through every charge and answered it and sent it back to the huge email list to which it had been distributed. I wish I had seen the excellent rebuttal done by Politifact before I spent all this time, but it’s encouraging to know we have multiple ways to toss this stuff back.
All the Politifact analyses in the world won’t get decent information out to the millions if not tens of millions of people who received this email. In it, there are 45 charges made about specifics language in the bill, every one of them false. When you go out in the world and wonder how everyone has appeared to swallow these talking points, this is at least one way that message goes out.
At some point, you have to fight fire with fire. It makes me wonder why something like this column isn’t sent virally to every inbox in the country.
So it’s proper to remind ourselves what that American way entails. For if the insurers have proved anything over the last 15 years as the health crisis has gathered speed like an avalanche roaring downhill, it’s that they’re part of the problem, not the solution.
The firms take billions of dollars out of the U.S. healthcare wallet as profits, while imposing enormous administrative costs on doctors, hospitals, employers and patients. They’ve introduced complexity into the system at every level. Your doctor has to fight them to get approval for the treatment he or she thinks is best for you. Your hospital has to fight them for approval for every day you’re laid up. Then they have to fight them to get their bills paid, and you do too.
One Wendell Potter reminded a Senate committee in June that health insurance executives had assured Congress in 1993 that they would work to secure universal medical coverage and end denials of coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. Then they moved heaven and earth to kill reform.
They’ve made the same promises now, Potter observed. But they’re in an even better position to throttle reform. Mergers and acquisitions have turned the industry into a cartel of huge corporations.
“The industry is bigger, richer and stronger, and it has a much tighter grip on our healthcare system,” he said. The last thing they want is a government program set up as their competition.
Actually, I’d make it simpler than that, as Kevin Drum did – why does health insurance exist? They are nothing more than middlemen who in theory smooth the payments for your health care over time so that you’re not hit with a big bill when you need treatment. But that’s not how it works in practice. So really what they have become is a middleman, taking a 30% profit off the top for the service of moving your money to your doctor.
But for some reason we’re supposed to care about whether they continue to exist or not. Why? I care about the quality of my doctors, my nurses, the hospital I go to, and the drugs I take. I don’t really care who takes on the administrative task of paying the bills — except that I wish they were handled a lot more efficiently and with a lot less hassle than private insurers typically do. Frankly, a world without private healthcare insurers sounds pretty good to me.
If that kind of sentiment pinged from computer to computer for a few weeks, with the intent of openly questioning why this large industry even exists or what purpose it serves, maybe there would be a choice in the level of dialogue “out there”.
