Most Americans Still Confused About Health Care Law

No, I think the problem is that the media has done a piss poor job of reporting on the Health Care law, concentrating on the lies and "he said, she said" bullshit. Glad to know they're finally getting around to doing some specific messaging. Via Taegan-

A new Kaiser Health Tracking Poll finds that 8 in 10 Americans know that President Obama signed health care reform legislation into law. But 55% say they are confused about the law and more than half (56%) say they don't yet have enough information to understand how it will affect them personally.

To address that, the New York Times reports that communications strategist Stephanie Cutter is returning to the White House to help sell the newly passed health care bill.

Christian leaders to Congress: Ignore misinformation on abortion, pass health reform

By GottaLaff

(click on image to enlarge)

The other day on the Rachel Maddow Show, Nancy Pelosi made a point of telling Rachel that health care reform was not just about abortion, it was about saving lives, money, and providing care to millions.

She repeated the positives of the plan and steered Rachel away from concentrating too hard on something that shouldn't be an issue (mainly because Bart Stupak is spreading misinformation; abortion will not be being funded by the government).

Pelosi is one of the few that has insisted on clarifying and laying out the benefits of the bill. Anthony Weiner is another. Their consistent message of what health care reform offers, rather than getting sidetracked by GOP talking points, is something that's been sorely missing over the past year.

Meanwhile, a group of "pro-life" Christian leaders has come out in support of the plan. They're darn pretty clear, too.

Think Progress takes it from there:

Underscoring this point, this week, a group of 25 “pro-life Catholic theologians and Evangelical leaders” sent a letter to Congress urging them to look past the misinformation on abortion and pass health care reform. From their letter:

As Christians committed to a consistent ethic of life, and deeply concerned with the health and well-being of all people, we want to see health care reform enacted. [...]

We are writing because of our concern about the lack of clear and accurate information regarding abortion provisions in the health care reform bill passed by the Senate on December 24, 2009.

Reforming our health care system is necessarily complex, and the provisions related to abortion, or any other issue, require careful examination of the facts as they exist in the legislative language. We believe that the provisions below provide extensive evidence that longstanding restrictions on federal funding of abortion have been maintained. Furthermore, this bill provides new and important supports for vulnerable pregnant women.

The Catholic Health Association also sent a letter (see image above) to Congress urging passage of the Senate bill. They pointed out that millions of Americans would benefit.

Imagine that.

Senate sitting on 290 bills already passed by House

Democrats suck so hard. D's should be standing up at every opportunity and pointing directly at the R's who play these bullshit games. I'm tired of ranting about the horrid messaging of these jackasses, and I'm not the only one.

Exasperated House Democratic leaders have compiled a list showing that they have passed 290 bills that have stalled in the Senate.

The list is the latest sign that Democrats in the lower chamber are frustrated with their Senate counterparts.

An aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) says the list is put together during each Congress, but that this year’s number is likely the largest ever. However, he said Pelosi blames GOP senators, not Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) or Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).

“The Speaker believes that the filibuster has its place, but clearly Senate Republicans are taking what was once a rare procedural move and abusing it to the detriment of progress for America’s working families,” said Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill.

(snip)

The list of stalled bills includes both major and minor legislation: healthcare reform; climate change; food safety; financial aid for the U.S. Postal Service; a job security act for wounded veterans; a Civil War battlefield preservation act; vision care for children; the naming of a federal courthouse in Iowa after former Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa); a National Historic Park named for President Jimmy Carter; a bill to improve absentee ballot voting; a bill to improve cybersecurity; and the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

John Podesta: American political system 'sucks'

By GottaLaff

What's up with politics these days? According to John Podesta, it's suckitude, pure and simple. Can't argue with that:

Asked in an interview with the Financial Times to comment on "the health of American political system," Podesta responded: "Sucks." [...]

"I think the president is trying to re-engage with Republicans, but quite frankly he is not dealing with the party of Lincoln, he is dealing with the party of Palin and the party of McConnell and the party of Boehner," Podesta said in the interview, which was filmed and posted online Monday. "They have a political strategy, really, which is that fierce opposition, trying to say no to everything will endure to their political benefit, and so far it looks like that is working for them, so I don't see them changing all that much." [...]

"All the concentration was on working the inside legislative process and I think they paid a price for that, in my mind, the administration paid a price for that because I think the narrative was all about the deals and not what was in it, what the substance of what the legislation was and how it connected to the broader project" of improving people's lives and strengthening the economy, Podesta said.

Another "that said" moment: He still thinks a health care bill and an energy bill can be passed.

Apparently, the suckitude isn't fatal.

CNN Poll: Specifics in stimulus popular while overall plan is not

Messaging, messaging, messaging. G-damn the D's are stupid.

Washington(CNN) - Although the overall stimulus bill is unpopular, most of its basic provisions are favored by a large majority of Americans, according to a new national poll.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday morning indicates that 80 percent of the public favors government spending on roads and bridges, and 83 percent approves of aid to unemployed workers. Seven in 10 support the idea of spending some of that stimulus money on tax cuts, and 62 percent think it's a good idea to increase spending on mass transit projects.

Then why is the stimulus bill so unpopular?

"Because, as we have seen throughout the week, there is much skepticism that the bill is wasteful, full of politically-motivated projects, and has benefitted fat cats at the expense of ordinary Americans," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "The positive aspects of the stimulus bill, such as infrastructure improvements and tax cuts, seem to have taken a back seat to those negatives."

“Obama took all his winnings and turned them over to Max Baucus.”

By GottaLaff

Barry Blitt

Frank Rich:

If the administration sticks to this trajectory, all bets are off for the political future of a president who rode into office blessed with more high hopes, good will and serious promise than any in modern memory. [...]

The president is no longer seen as a savior but as a captive of the interests who ginned up the mess and still profit, hugely, from it. [...]

Obama has blundered, not by positioning himself too far to the left but by landing nowhere — frittering away his political capital by being too vague, too slow and too deferential to Congress. The smartest thing said as the Massachusetts returns came in Tuesday night was by Howard Fineman on MSNBC: “Obama took all his winnings and turned them over to Max Baucus.”

Worse, the master communicator in the White House has still not delivered a coherent message on his signature policy. He not only refused to signal his health care imperatives early on but even now he, like Congressional Democrats, has failed to explain clearly why and how reform relates to economic recovery — or, for that matter, what he wants the final bill to contain. Sure, a president needs political wiggle room as legislative sausage is made, but Scott Brown could and did drive his truck through the wide, wobbly parameters set by Obama.

Ask yourself this: All these months later, do you yet know what the health care plan means for your family’s bottom line, your taxes, your insurance? It’s this nebulousness, magnified by endless Senate versus House squabbling, that has allowed reform to be caricatured by its foes as an impenetrable Rube Goldberg monstrosity, a parody of deficit-ridden big government. Since most voters are understandably confused about what the bills contain, the opponents have been able to attribute any evil they want to Obamacare, from death panels to the death of Medicare, without fear of contradiction.

It’s too late to rewrite that history, but it may not be too late for White House decisiveness. Whatever happens now — good, bad or ugly — must happen fast. Each day Washington spends dickering over health care is another day lost while the election-year economy, stupid, remains intractable for Americans who are suffering. [...]

The Obama administration is so overstocked with Goldman Sachs-Robert Rubin alumni and so tainted by its back-room health care deals with pharmaceutical and insurance companies that conservative politicians, Brown included, can masquerade shamelessly as the populist alternative. [...]

J.F.K. threatened to sic his brother’s Justice Department on corporate records and then held firm as his opponents likened his flex of muscle to the power grabs of Hitler and Mussolini. (Sound familiar?) U.S. Steel capitulated in two days. The Times soon reported on its front page that Kennedy was at “a high point in popular support.”

Can anyone picture Obama exerting such take-no-prisoners leadership to challenge those who threaten our own economic recovery and stability at a time of deep recession and war? That we can’t is a powerful indicator of why what happened in Massachusetts will not stay in Massachusetts if this White House fails to reboot.

Please read the whole thing here.

Reminder: I don't necessarily agree, or disagree, with articles that I post. I find them interesting or thought provoking, and maybe even mind-changing. I say this because so often Commenters confuse these articles with my own.

And sometimes I like to keep my opinions to myself and see how you bounce off those of others.

The Democratic Party just doesn't get it

If they think they can stumble around with half assed talking points on health care reform and then offer up to the screeching talk show monkeys stuff like this? Doomed, seriously doomed. The monkeys are already working on Obama hates women and Obama sells access, do we really need to give them fresh shit? Someone needs to shove some message discipline down their throats.

Health care ideas losing out to ideology

By GottaLaff

Michael Hiltzik has a few things to say about the wingnutty memes v. the substance of the actual, you know, merits of health care reform. In other words, the real, and vital, message is being drowned out by lies and propaganda.

We already knew that, but he spells it out clearly enough for even the dimmest bulbs to grasp the entire ugly picture:

The big mystery of the Democrats' loss of the commanding heights in the national healthcare debate is how they managed to let ideologies trump ideas.

The difference between these two terms is crucial. Ideas arise from recognizing reality for what it is; ideologies attempt to impose themselves on the real world, whether or not they fit.

In this case, the Republican ideologies of limited government, of the free market as the cherished American way and the answer to most problems, have taken over the discussion.

Meanwhile, the search for ideas to solve a real American crisis is left gasping for life like a gaffed fish.

When President Obama speaks Wednesday to a joint session of Congress on the subject of healthcare reform, his main task must be to retrieve the issue from the clutches of ideology and restore the search for ideas to the forefront. Nothing is as important for the economic recovery and the competitiveness of American business. [...]

Blacks and Hispanics account for nearly half the uninsured, and members of families living at or below the federal poverty line for more than a third. (These figures come from a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation.) [...]

Commercial insurers deploy armies of clerks to find excuses for rejecting claims and weed out less-profitable customers. [...]

Those are the facts, and there's nothing that ideology can do to change them.

Nevertheless, it's ideology that has dominated this summer's healthcare discussion, such as it is. Those people shrieking with fury at congressional town halls across the country aren't putting forth ideas; they're responding to a right-wing small-government ideology as though to a hallucination. They're being goaded into speaking out against their own best interests [...]

A common trope is that "obtaining healthcare will be like service from the DMV," as one e-mailer wrote.

These sound like the words of someone who isn't bothering to think through what he's saying. [...] In my experience, the California DMV manages my registration and license renewals with admirable efficiency [...]

By contrast, I've wasted days at a time trying to extract treatment approvals from anonymous bureaucrats at my insurance carrier. [...]

If their hypothetical DMV is emblematic of the inefficiency of government-managed healthcare, what's the proper analogy for the "efficient" private sector? Enron? General Motors? AIG? The health insurance industry itself? [...]

California has had one of the nation’s strictest malpractice tort limits for 34 years. But it still boasts among the highest per capita ratios of uninsured residents in the nation. And don't tell me that's because of our illegal immigrants; UCLA's figures show that if you factor out all uninsured residents lacking green cards (assuming they're all here illegally), California would still rank in the bottom half of all states in this measure.

What's surprising is that the White House and Democratic congressional leaders don't seem to have seen the ideological attack coming. Yet it's a familiar phenomenon. [...]

Ideologies aren't always virulent. Sometimes they can help structure a consistent approach to economic or social conditions -- from either side of the political divide. But not when their purpose is merely to body check rational debate out of the arena. On such occasions, aggressive treatment is necessary. Will Wednesday's operation on Capitol Hill set the patient on the path to recovery?

It's all about profit. Human lives are expendable. And our side needs to communicate clearly, forcefully, and in simple terms exactly what is taking place, and what is needed.

It's the same old story, but this is about our health, and we cannot afford to lose this one.

Gramm-pa McTheme-y

By GottaLaff

Perfect:

Off Message

Political Insider: The Obama campaign counts ten different themes coming from the McCain campaign today alone.

Shrinkage.