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Right-Wing Health Care Group Tricked British Women Into Appearing In Anti-Reform Ad

By Zaid Jilani on Aug 15, 2009 at 10:40 pm

Earlier this year, Conservatives for Patients Rights (CPR), an anti-health care reform group led by the disgraced former CEO of Columbia/HCA Healthcare Rick Scott, began running a commercial attacking the British health care system. The TV ad runs through “tragic stories” of British citizens who it portrays as being against government-run health care such as the National Health Service (NHS). Watch it:

Now, the Daily Mail is reporting that two of the women featured in the commercial say they were “duped” into appearing in CPR’s ad campaign:

Furious Kate Spall and Katie Brickell claim that their views on the NHS have been misrepresented by a free market campaign group opposed to Mr Obama’s reforms in a bid to discredit the UK system. [...]

Ms Spall and Ms Brickell both agreed to appear in a documentary on healthcare reform. But neither knew that the footage would be used as part of a TV advertising campaign carried on US networks.

The Daily Mail article goes on to note that both Spall and Brickell actually support government-run health care and were advocating for reforms within the NHS, not for its abolition.

CPR’s ad campaign is one of many misleading attacks being used by American conservatives against the United Kingdom’s single-payer health care system, which is so popular that even Conservative Party politicians unambiguously endorse it.

The right-wing Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) ran an editorial recently claiming that physicist Stephen Hawking “wouldn’t have a chance” in the UK because the NHS does not offer proper care to the elderly, prompting Hawking to remind IBD that he both lives in Britain and that without the NHS’s “high quality of treatment,” he “wouldn’t be alive today.”

Fed up with the deceptive attacks against their health care system from the American right, British citizens have started the “We love the NHS campaign” on Twitter, which has become one of the top trending topics on the service, with even British Prime Minister Gordon Brown taking part.

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Yglesias

The Enthusiasm Gap

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 15, 2009 at 5:05 pm

Unquestionably one challenge for the White House is that they haven’t succeeded in mobilizing their supporters to the degree they were able to during the campaign. But I see this as largely a sub-element of the problems they’ve been having with the congressional schedule and in particular the Senate Finance Committee. If Finance had done its work on time, we’d be having a “summer health care fight” that was about a more-or-less fixed object, with proponents of the plan arguing with its opponents. You would also have members of congress committed to the plan, members opposed, and a defined group of undecided members. Then you could mobilize grassroots supporters to contact undecided members and urge them to push reform.

What we have instead is a mush. It’s hard to be sure what “reform” is. And it’s hard to be sure who to pressure. Is Chuck Grassley an ally or an enemy? Is Max Baucus? Is Olympia Snowe? Opponents know that they’re against Obama and for the status quo. Proponents of change are having problems identifying exactly what’s happening.

Politics

Lawmakers Tell ThinkProgress That Angry Town Hall Protesters Deserve No ‘Glorification’

By Amanda Terkel on Aug 15, 2009 at 3:46 pm

At Netroots Nation, ThinkProgress spoke with Reps. Patrick Murphy (D-PA) and Alan Grayson (D-FL) about the contentious health care town hall protests that lawmakers around the country are facing in their districts. These representatives and senators are facing angry crowds, death threats, and disturbing bigoted harassment. Both Murphy and Grayson disagreed with members of the Republican leadership who have condoned these protests.

Grayson was especially critical of the recent chaos at Rep. Kathy Castor’s (D-FL) town hall, where crowds — inspired by Fox News’ Glenn Beck — were banging on windows and getting into fist fights. Grayson said that such “disrespect” doesn’t reflect badly on Castor, but “on the people who show the disrespect for the democratic process.” He said that the positions and actions of such people deserve no legitimacy:

And I think in any society, you’re always going to have a certain percentage of people who are nuts. But these are not people who deserve any special recognition, much less glorification. You don’t treat people the way those people treated Kathy Castor. It’s wrong. [...]

I look for intelligent, well-founded criticism of any bill because that’s how you make the bill better. But if you have people running around saying this bill is going to kill every old person in the country, how could you possibly show any respect for that silly point of view? It makes no sense to me.

Watch it:

When ThinkProgress asked Murphy whether he has received any death threats, Murphy said that he hasn’t received any “to [his] face.” As a veteran, Murphy also took issue with conservatives claiming that he and other Democratic members of Congress are trying to take away Americans’ freedoms:

I had a guy yesterday try to say to me, “You know, I’m worried about my freedoms.” I say, “Sir, I fought for your freedoms. I’m going to protect those freedoms. I took an oath to support and defend those freedoms. And I take that responsibility very seriously. But, you know, we need to understand that the current path for small business, for everday families, for seniors, is unsustainable.

Watch it:

Climate Progress

At Netroots Nation, Rep. Jay Inslee Decries ‘Undemocratic,’ ‘Schmuckbucket’ Filibusters

By Brad Johnson on Aug 15, 2009 at 3:17 pm

At Netroots Nation 2009 in Pittsburgh, PA, Rep. Jay Insleee (D-WA) decried the “undemocratic” filibusters that allow a small minority of senators to thwart majority rule and President Obama’s clean energy reform agenda. In a panel on restoring U.S. environmental leadership, Inslee told the audience of progressive bloggers what he believes allows the monied advocates of the status quo to block progressive change:

The filibuster is so undemocratic it just defies defense. Particularly, as you said, it used to be this once-in-a-generation regional conflict issue that’s meant to protect the regions that has now prevented majority rule in this country. It’s a huge, insidious problem. I have to tell you in my conversations with senators, including in our party, I’ve gotten nowhere on this issue. When they get into that fine institution, they kind of like the idea one person can stop the entire country dead on its heels to keep a post office open in Schmuckbucket or wherever. I have to tell you, I’m very frustrated by it.

Watch it:

Inslee later warned that the “Exxons of the world” are going to “strangle this [effort] in its crib” with their millions of dollars if climate and clean energy activists don’t start fighting. Speakers at this and other Netroots Nation panels on climate legislation and clean energy reform discussed how conservative Democrats who fear clean energy reform hold the balance of power in the Senate. Last year, conservative Democrats such as Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) filibustered the Lieberman-Warner climate legislation, protecting local coal and oil interests. This year, armed with the filibuster, these senators hold the fate of the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act in their hands.

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Yglesias

The Latest on Inequality

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 15, 2009 at 3:14 pm

Presumably the crash has changed this, but the top 0.01 percent’s share of American income reached a record high in 2007:

saez07

This trend has a variety of underlying causes, some of which are worth changing and others of which (better global communications leading to a bigger superstar effect) are basically good. Be that as it may, using the tax code to take some of this wealth and transform it into more and better public services for the broad mass of people would do a lot of good.

Yglesias

Will Abandoning Health Reform Create Jobs?

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 15, 2009 at 1:44 pm

I think William Galston is right to say that we’re looking at a real risk of a jobless recovery and right to say that such a scenario would be politically extremely tough for Democrats, but I’m skeptical that this conclusion really follows:

In this challenging context, the president would be well advised to focus more on the economy over the next three years, and to persuade average Americans that the economy is as central to his concerns as is it to theirs. That means taking what he can get on health care and climate change and clearing the decks well before the end of the year. It means going on the road to highlight the job-creating results of the stimulus bill, with events each week for as long as it takes to make the sale. And it means crafting proposals design to stimulate new hiring, not just in the long run, but as soon as possible. A revenue-neutral swap of lower payroll taxes in return for broadening the base of the income tax code could command support even among some Republicans.

If it were actually true that curtailing his administration’s goals on health care and climate change was likely to result in enhanced job creation, I think this would be very sensible advice. But what’s the reason for thinking it would? Some kind of comprehensive tax reform where you lower rates and broaden the tax base would be an excellent idea, but there’s no sign that congress is on the verge of enacting such legislation. If you think the mainstream health care proposals in congress are good proposals, then abandoning them at a moment when enactment seems realistic in exchange for nothing at all doesn’t seem like a very appealing course of action. If you had moderate Senators from both parties saying that they’re eager to enact a second stimulus but think it might be unaffordable in light of the pending health care legislation, then the White House would have a tough choice. Instead, moderate Senators from both parties are saying they’re interested in enacting a health care bill and not-at-all interested in further stimulative measures.

Climate Progress

Rebuilding America: A Policy Framework for Investment in Energy Efficiency Retrofits

By Joe Romm on Aug 15, 2009 at 12:28 pm

This post by By Bracken Hendricks, Benjamin Goldstein, Reid Detchon, and Kurt Shickman was first published here.

Investments in building efficiency retrofits can simultaneously address the challenges of economic recovery, energy insecurity, and global warming by laying the foundation for sustained economic growth, driving demand in the construction and manufacturing sectors, and creating hundreds of thousands of good jobs across the country. Retrofitting our homes and businesses will also slash consumer energy expenditures, increase real estate values, and provide low-cost, near-term reductions in global warming pollution.

Today, buildings account for 70 percent of all U.S. electricity consumption and 40 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Yet much of our housing and building stock is old, inefficient, and unnecessarily wasteful. While building codes and green building standards offer a tool for achieving deep improvements in energy use for new buildings, half of the buildings that will be standing in 30 years already dot our landscape. Any strategy to capture the benefits of energy efficiency in our “built environment” must include a program to retrofit our existing stock of residential, commercial and industrial structures.

Deep building retrofits can cut energy use by 20 to 40 percent with proven techniques and off-the-shelf technologies. Best of all, they can pay for themselves from the energy they save. “Rebuilding America,” a national program to cut energy waste in buildings, could reduce energy bills economy-wide by hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Energy efficiency retrofits also create good local construction jobs across the country at a time when well over a million construction workers sit idle in a sagging housing market. Demand for the manufactured products needed to retrofit buildings will also result in jobs by revitalizing the manufacturing sector and contributing to sustainable, long-term economic growth.
Read more

Yglesias

Chuck Grassley Endorses Glenn Beck’s Book

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 15, 2009 at 12:14 pm

A couple of my colleagues went to see a Chuck Grassley town hall last week and snagged this video of the Senator signing a copy of Glenn Beck nutty book:

TOWN HALL ATTENDEE: I noticed that you have the book “Common Sense” with you today, I hope you share it with a lot more of those 535 people.

GRASSLEY: Well the reason I brought it is you’re supposed to pass it on to other people when you’re not reading it.

Yes, Max Baucus is counting on a Glenn Beck fan to be his reasonable conservative partner in writing health care legislation.

Economy

Grayson On Banks: We Should Have Liquidated The Assets And Liquidated The Management

By Pat Garofalo on Aug 15, 2009 at 12:00 pm

Last week, the Congressional Oversight Panel charged with monitoring the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) released a report stating that toxic assets still pose a threat to the economy that Treasury’s approach to the banks has not fully mitigated. “If the economy worsens, especially if unemployment remains elevated or if the commercial real estate market collapses, then defaults will rise and the troubled assets will continue to deteriorate in value…The financial system will remain vulnerable to the crisis conditions that TARP was meant to fix,” the report said.

Yesterday, Bloomberg News reported that more than 150 banks hold a level of toxic loans that “can wipe out a bank’s equity and threaten its survival.” The number of banks holding this many toxic assets has doubled this year.

One of the most outspoken critics of both Treasury and the Federal Reserve’s bailout programs has been Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL). Yesterday, The Wonk Room spoke with Grayson and asked for his reaction to the persistence of the toxic asset problem. After introducing us to his friend — a cardboard cutout of President Obama — Grayson had this to say:

[T]he problem is not going to go away anytime soon because a lot of households are underwater. They owe more than they own, so not only is their collateral impaired, meaning their house, the value of a small business and so on, but their value as borrowers is impaired. [...] Now, does that mean we need bailouts? I say no. I voted against every bailout. I’m going to continue to vote against bailouts because I don’t believe taxpayer money belongs in the pockets of private interests. The way we should have done this is we should have taken these assets and liquidated them, we should have taken the management that was in charge of these financial institutions that failed and we should have liquidated them as well.

Watch it:

Transcript: Read more

Media

The Crisis of Authority

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 15, 2009 at 10:27 am

Rick Perlstein has a very nice op-ed putting the fringe rightwing craziness of today in the broader context of American fringe right-wing craziness. Then he makes this point:

It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to “debunk” claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president’s program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn’t adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of “conservative claims” to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as “extremist” — out of bounds.

The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America’s flora. Only now, it’s being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest. Latest word is that the enlightened and mild provision in the draft legislation to help elderly people who want living wills — the one hysterics turned into the “death panel” canard — is losing favor, according to the Wall Street Journal, because of “complaints over the provision.”

I guess one thing I would say to this is that the change in the media is part of a much broader shift in American society. Technological and economic change has just made authority weaker and tended to fragment perspectives. If you think of, for example, popular music things like MTV and Top 40 radio stations don’t have the level of cultural power that they once did. It’s extremely easy for people to bury themselves in a subculture of their liking and not worry too much about the mainstream. Or maybe you ignore the dross that is prime time television programming and rely on cable channels and Netflix instead. Walter Cronkite broadcast at a time when when big cultural players could really run things in a way they can’t these days. That shift has had a lot of consequences, some good and some bad.

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