Health and Medicine

Making Sure Obamacare Wrecks The Holidays, Too

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments
What if you choked on that turkey and went into a coma...did you consider that? How would you pay for the the hospitalization? That's why you need insurance...

“What if you choked on that turkey and went into a coma…did you consider that? How would you pay for the hospitalization? That’s why you need insurance…”

Ah, the holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas! Time to gather together in safe, friendly, warm and loving homes, united with loved ones, family and friends, to eat good food together, laugh and sing together, exchange gifts, good wishes and hope, perchance to worship and pray, but most important of all, to hector the stuffing out of everyone on behalf of the Democrats and Obamacare, because there really is no private, family time, time to give thanks and reflect of better things for our fellow human beings—just one great opportunity to carry the message of Big Brother to the eager, desperate and gullible, because, after all, the holidays are really about Barack Obama and his struggling health care law. Right?

Yecchhh.

Also..how dare they? Programming an army of Obamaphiles to turn the holidays into an extended infomercial for Obamacare crosses multiple lines, several of which place the stepper into disturbingly familiar totalitarian, collectivist territory, where every citizen is deemed a deputized agent of The One True Authority Over Us All. On BarackObama.com, the faithful Obamabots are given all they need to ruin the holidays, including a helpful “packing list” (to make sure your family has everything they need to enroll in Obamacare),  various ways to plot to ambush your loved ones to turn the conversation away from peace, good will and sugar plums to saving the President’s bacon, and talking points, so you can be just as charming and honest as Jay Carney, David Plouffe and Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Continue reading →

Op-Ed Columnist Kathleen Parker, Case Study: Why A Truthteller Can’t Be A Weenie

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments
You are so NICE, Kathleen! Now please find a another job where that's an asset.

You are so NICE, Kathleen! Now please find a another job where that’s an asset.

“I tend to be generous with the benefit of doubt,” wrote Kathleen Parker, the mildest of conservative Washington Post columnists, in a recent effort at punditry. That’s an understatement, but then, understating is what Parker does. She also excels at writing equivocal near-condemnations that end up in pretzel form and stuck in dead-ends of ambiguity when clarity is called for.

This makes her very useful to the mainstream media, which like to present the illusion of balance while rigging the game. When I see her on a Sunday morning “roundtable” as one of the conservative voices recruited to spar with sharp, aggressive, no-holds barred progressives like Kathleen van der Heuvel  or Van Jones (and a left-biased moderator), I know that the discussion will make any uninformed viewers believe that the truth consists of the midpoint between progressive spin, and Parker smiling and raising her eyebrow. She is, in short, a weenie. A nice weenie, to be sure, but when your job is battling in the marketplace of ideas, unyielding politeness, measured words, and the insistence that all sides have merit—which is often, indeed usually true–results in shorting her side, and giving the contest to the combatant with no such reticence about full-throated advocacy. Parker isn’t wrong. Parker is incompetent at her job, as it has evolved. Thus when she accepted a co-hosting gig in a CNN “Cross-Fire” clone as the Right commentator to Eliot Spitzer’s Left, he completely dominated her (he was also a bully and a boor in the process) until Parker left the show, frustrated and humiliated.

I was horrified recently to discover that Parker had written a column about the President’s non-apology apology that tracked closely with mine (posted the following day), because I dreaded  Ethics Alarms readers concluding that I was cribbing from her. Her column was also notable for its theme, which was signaled by its opening sentences: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: 33% of the U.S. Public

/ Jack Marshall / 77 Comments

Gumbies

Today’s headlines shout out that the public’s faith and trust in President Obama has turned sharply down.  From ABC:

“The president’s job approval rating has fallen to 42 percent in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, down 13 percentage points this year and 6 points in the past month to match the lowest of his presidency. Fifty-five percent disapprove, a record. And 70 percent say the country’s headed seriously off on the wrong track – up 13 points since May to the most in two years.Other ratings of the president’s performance have tumbled as well. He’s at career lows for being a strong leader, understanding the problems of average Americans and being honest and trustworthy – numerically under water on each of these (a first for the latter two). His rating for strong leadership is down by 15 points this year and a vast 31 points below its peak shortly after he took office. In a new gauge, just 41 percent rate him as a good manager; 56 percent think not.”

Wow. Not only that, but a whopping 63% of the public—“by nearly 2-1, 63-33 percent”—disapprove of Obama’s handling of implementation of the new health care law! And…wait, what???

33% of the public approves of the implementation of Obamacare? Continue reading →

NOW Do You Agree That Congress Should Read Bills Before It Passes Them?

/ Jack Marshall / 65 Comments

runaway-train

The Obamacare meltdown should not be cause for joy anywhere, although I can understand why the Republicans are giddy and conservative pundits are searching for ways to say “Didn’t I tell you?” in unobnoxious ways. There are no obnoxious ways. There is no worse feeling than knowing that a leader, a movement or a cause that you fervently believed in and defended against doubts and criticism was not worthy of your trust. For the politically and socially committed, comparing this experience to losing a loved one is no exaggeration. Are you in the habit of pointing at your neighbor and shouting, “Haha, your mother died! I told you she looked sick!”? Mocking and razzing the Democrats or progressives in your life is not much better.

We all, however, share responsibility for running this republic, and lessons must be learned. Back in 2010, I wrote of the process whereby the Affordable Care Act was passed…

“…Once the bills began to emerge, though, things got worse. They were far too long and convoluted to read and understand; this was incompetent and irresponsible. None of the Senators or Representatives (or the President himself) who advocated the bills in the most emphatic terms had read them, which is a breach of diligence, and many frequently made statements in public that misstated the provisions of the bill, sometimes egregiously. Not reading a technical bill on a well-understood or narrow matter and still voting for it may be common (though, I would argue, outrageous), but doing so with a massively expensive and complex bill affecting the life of every American is irresponsible and an abuse of power. This has continued. Politicians who the public should be able to trust are still making assertions of fact that are not facts they have independently confirmed, and they are insufficiently familiar with the details to either make fair arguments or inform the public.

“Since nobody could read the bill, this allowed the President and his allies to make general arguments that were often half-truths devised to mislead the public or avoid raising sensitive subjects. President made many “promises” about what would and would not be in the bill, knowing that they were promises he might well not be able or willing to keep. Indeed, the bill now being voted on fails to fulfill many of those pledges.  Important policy trade-offs that might erode support were not discussed, or misrepresented.”

This isn’t a partisan point, you know. I am sure that Republicans don’t read bills before voting for them either, but the practice is unconscionable, professional negligence and reckless, and if nothing else good comes out of this miserable blot on democracy, if the public finally demand that its law-makers read, understand and be candid about the laws they make, then something of value may lie beneath the rubble. Continue reading →

As The Obamacare Ethics Train Wreck Accelerates, A Plea To The Bitter-enders: “Stop It. You’re Disgracing Yourself.”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

[I’m back from Colorado Springs, and as usual after that trip, momentarily cheered, encouraged and inspired by my experience discussing ethics with sheep farmer-legislators from Montana, surfer-legislators from Hawaii and other ordinary, diverse, dedicated, honest and smart Americans of all political persuasions who just want to do good things for their neighbors, communities, state and nation. This is, I think, what Mr. Jefferson and his friends had in mind. The annual training program for recently-elected state legislators run by the Council of State Governments is just marvelous—if only every legislator starting out could go through it (especially this really neat half-day ethics seminar a bald guy teaches).  In case you are wondering, the ACA despair, disgust and mockery was coming from both sides of the aisle—I did mention they were honest, right? And, obviously, not from Washington, DC. If we’re lucky, a lot of them will be here in a few years.]

Why are they still spinning? They're not getting anywhere, and they look ridiculous!

Why are they still spinning? They’re not getting anywhere, and they look ridiculous!

Now I’m trying to catch up—those few posts from Colorado Springs were by necessity early in the morning and late at night, and on less than earth-shattering topics. Sadly, the current Ethics Train Wreck involving the roll-out of Obamacare—-a rare example of one that could have and should have been seen coming years ago, and that some of us did see, and clearly—has only become worse. The integrity test that I announced  three weeks ago also continues to produce dispiriting results. I hope to do a summary of both the wreckage and the test eventually, but in the meantime, the Obamacare Ethics Trainwreck continues to pick up passengers who are flunking the Ethics Alarms Integrity Test in the process. Continue reading →

Colorado’s Astounding Pro-Obamacare Ads: What Kind Of Values Are We Nourishing In This Country?

/ Jack Marshall / 77 Comments

brosurance

When I saw the ad above, my first assumptions were 1) This is a spoof, or 2) Some insane Republican group who didn’t pay attention to what happened in the Rush Limbaugh-Sandra Fluke tiff made it as an attack on Obamacare.

No such luck. It’s real. I would have made the website (DoYouGotInsurance.com) that features this and many other such ads the Unethical Website of the Month (it’s also the ungrammatical website of the month), but it has been down for the last 12 hours or so, and hopefully will never get up again, except in Hell. And there is a lot more alarming about these ads than the website they come from.

For example, the organizations who paid to have the ads developed—ProgressNow Colorado and Colorado Consumer Health—plus the Colorado progressives, Democrats and brain-injured who run them, and the millions of entitled, ethically clueless Americans who perceive nothing wrong with the messages they convey all perfectly illustrate the unethical reasoning and motives driving many of the architects and defenders of the Affordable Care Act. Here…let me show you some more, assuming you have head-explosion insurance: Continue reading →

Hell Freezes Over! Bill Clinton Passes The Obamacare Integrity And Trustworthiness Litmus Test…Or Does He?

/ Jack Marshall / 122 Comments

Bill Clinton

This is almost too much for my mind to handle, and any moment I might just have a cerebral meltdown, like those computers Captain Kirk used to destroy on “Star Trek” by feeding them paradoxes. Bill Clinton appears to have passed the integrity test.

There must be something in it for him.

Clinton, of all people, told an interviewer that President Obama should honor his oft-repeated pledge and allow people to hang on to health care plans that are being canceled as a result of the Affordable Care Act:

“I personally believe, even if it takes a change in the law, that the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they’ve got.” Continue reading →

Examining The President’s Non-Apology Obamacare Apology

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

sorry

Those of you who have emailed concern that my field, this blog and the task of exploring the depths of dishonesty in our national politics will make me cynical, I can officially assure you that so far, I am unsullied. Here’s the proof: I am actually surprised that the national news media so eagerly accepted whatever it was the President said in mitigation of his 3.5 year long Affordable Care Act lie as an “apology.”

It was clearly not an apology. Yet in a rare show of solidarity, reporters right and left rushed to their respective keyboards to dash out “President apologizes!”  The solidarity was illusory, of course: while the Right wanted to say the President apologized as proof that all the rationalizations, excuses and tortured explanations from Obama’s allies and enabler were as phony as his assurances, and now, by apologizing, the President had admitted it, the Left’s motive was to pronounce the scandal over so the President could “move on.” Okay, he’s apologized; what more do you want? This is confirmation bias, leading to different mistaken conclusions: both conservatives and liberals heard what they wanted to hear. What they should have heard was an incoherent expression of regret without accountability, retraction, admission, or contrition…in short, not an apology at all.

On the Ethics Alarms Apology Scale, I see no way to rank what the President actually said to NBC’s Chuck Todd as anything better than a 9 or 10 (I’d call it an ugly  hybrid of the two), on the scale, the Stygian realm where dishonest, manipulative, non-apology apologies dwell:

#9. Deceitful apologies, in which the wording of the apology is crafted to appear apologetic when it is not (“if my words offended, I am sorry”). Another variation: apologizing for a tangential matter other than the act or words that warranted an apology.

#10. An insincere and dishonest apology designed to allow the wrongdoer to escape accountability cheaply, and to deceive his or her victims into forgiveness and trust, so they are vulnerable to future wrongdoing.

Here is the section of the interview that generated the “apology.” Todd, who has said that he felt he had to pull an apology out of the President, began the “apology’ sequence (emphasis is mine): Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: Democratic Party Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz

/ Jack Marshall / 61 Comments

Please watch the above, and listen carefully.

How does someone like this become the spokesperson of a major political party, much less get elected to Congress?

  • Her response to Marco Rubio’s undeniably accurate statement was a pure ad hominem attack.
  • Her explanation for why the President’s intentional misrepresentation isn’t the lie that it obviously is consists of nothing but assertively delivered double-talk and irrelevant talking points that do not address the issue.
  • She thinks “misled” is pronounced “myzeld.” Let me repeat that…

She thinks “misled” is pronounced “myzeld!!!!”

I am not surprised at the first; the second is standard operating practice for this Congresswoman (and she has lots of company these days, on this topic), but the last is the canary dying in the mine. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month AND The Jumbo: President Barack Obama

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

“Now, if you had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really liked that plan, what we said was you can keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law passed.”

—–President Barack Obama this week, telling supporters of Organizing for Action what he should have said for three and a half years,  but representing the statement as if he had been saying it all along. A video is here.

Jumbo film“Elephant? What elephant?”

There’s not much more to write about this, except to debate whether we should weep, laugh, or take to the streets with torches and pitchforks. The President’s solution to the discovery that his repeated assurances that nobody would lose their doctor or their health plan under the Affordable Care Act were an intentional deception of the American public was not, as his various lackeys and underlings and media lapdogs have claimed in various devious ways, to deny that his statement was a lie (for it obviously was). Neither was it to justify lying, as others among his shameless enablers have done. He didn’t try to minimize the lie and say it was trivial, since only a relative few million Americans will be affected, like the New York Times did, to its eternal shame. No, President Obama is above such demeaning obfuscations and alibis. He simply re-wrote history, and claimed that he said (well, “we” said) words that he never said at all. Continue reading →