World News Korner

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Author: By Sasha Bogursky

The fear from of Texas gubernatorial hopeful Wendy Davis coming form the Right Wing has reached almost hysteric proportions.

She is under constant attack from Rush Limbaugh and Red State's Eric Erickson has taken to referring to her as "Abortion Barbie."

There is even a Right Wing website dedicated to attacking her.

Oh yeah there is definitely some panic taking place over on the conservative side of the aisle.

So the other day Wendy Davis visited the University of Texas at Brownsville, and had this to say:

“The battle over reproductive rights and women’s health care that was waged on June 25 was not a battle I chose,” she said. “When I believe women’s health is in danger, I’m going to stand and fight to protect that.”

Davis said that battle had beginnings in 2011, when the reduction of funding for women’s health care led to a decrease in women’s health care access for more than 160,000 women – services that included family planning and sexual education along with abortions in some instances.

“This isn’t about protecting abortion. It’s about protecting women,” she said. “It’s about trusting women to make good decisions for themselves and empowering them with the tools to do that.”

Davis does not want to portray herself as a one-issue candidate, noting that her job on the campaign trail is to allow voters to see who she really is.

“(I’m) a woman who wants desperately for others who are coming up in poverty to receive the same kind of partnership from the state that I once received so that they too can become a part of the success of Texas,” she said.

Davis suggested that her views on abortion access do not mean she does not care about life.

“I am pro-life,” she said, borrowing from the label anti-abortion activists assign themselves. “I care about the life of every child: every child that goes to bed hungry, every child that goes to bed without a proper education, every child that goes to bed without being able to be a part of the Texas dream, every woman and man who worry about their children’s future and their ability to provide for that future. I care about life and I have a record of fighting for people above all else.”

That is very well put. And it is put in a way that is especially effective coming from a female candidate.

Calling herself "pro-life" and laying out what that means to her, is a VERY powerful, and aggressive stance to take that reminds me of Hillary's 2009 statement more than just a little bit.

The Right can go after Wendy Davis all day every day if they want to, and attack her on everything from her looks, to her mental health, to her stance on abortion. But if she stands up to that kind of bullying, and states her case as clearly as she did above, then she will still be standing long after they have slunk off to lick their wounds in response to having their asses handed to them after the 2014 election.

And the Right better get very comfortable with wound licking, because I think they will need plenty of tongue baths after 2016. (Okay that came out kind of icky, but you know what I mean.)

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"I'm back!"

Courtesy of Breitbart:

Breitbart News Network is pleased to announce that it will be the new home of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul's editorial column.

Did you guess?

Of COURSE Breitbart is willing to take Rand Paul! After all where else are journalistic ethics and the use of facts as frowned upon as much as over at Andrew Breitbart's stillborn hate child?

I swear I don't know how sites like the Onion can stay in business with reality being so much like parody these days.

Update: This could be Paul's header for his pieces in Breitbart.


Seems fitting.

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Courtesy of The Cagle Post

So on Sunday there was an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal. The author was a reporter who had survived stage-4 cancer, Edie Littlefield Sundby, who claimed that she was kicked off of her plan becasue of Obamacare:

What happened to the president's promise, "You can keep your health plan"? Or to the promise that "You can keep your doctor"? Thanks to the law, I have been forced to give up a world-class health plan. The exchange would force me to give up a world-class physician.

For a cancer patient, medical coverage is a matter of life and death. Take away people's ability to control their medical-coverage choices and they may die. I guess that's a highly effective way to control medical costs. Perhaps that's the point.

Journalist Bob Cesca decided enough was enough and wrote this:

As you probably recall from the days before the ACA was passed, scores of customers were stripped of their insurance policies, many while suffering from life-threatening illnesses. The difference back then was once they’d lose their insurance, they were unable to qualify for a new policy due to rules against pre-existing conditions. That’s thankfully not the case with Sundby — not after the passage of the ACA, not any more. While she might be forced to switch emergency care facilities or to a new team of oncologists, she will absolutely be able to sign up for a new policy with better benefits thanks to the ACA. Conversely, four years ago, when UnitedHealthcare and others were pulling these exact same kinds of profit-making stunts, she would’ve faced bankruptcy or death or both, unable to sign up for a replacement policy.

These are details not mentioned in context of the “Obama lied” story.

Indeed, going back to 2009, the president continuously reassured individual policy holders that if they liked their current insurance, they could keep it. On Monday’s edition of Morning Joe, they aired a series of clips of the president saying in various forms, “If you like your plan you can keep it.” This promise hasn’t actually panned out exactly as originally conceived, forcing Mika Brzezinski to literally smack herself in the face with a stack of paper. Brzezinski continued by shouting at panelist Chris Matthews, “Why would you let your president go out and say that?!” During the ensuing melee, Scarborough held up Sundby’s WSJ op/ed, “There’s this story in the Wall Street Journal about a lady with stage-4 cancer that’s been kicked off her plan!”

Once again, no. The ACA didn’t force Sundby off her plan. UnitedHealthcare’s profit margin was the culprit here. But regarding this alleged lie, the president was actually correct given the language of the law.

The Affordable Care Act, as signed by the president in 2010, states quite clearly that if your individual health insurance plan was in effect prior to March 23, 2010, your plan would be grandfathered as-is, despite new rules that expand mandatory benefits and ban practices such as lifetime limits. In other words, if you signed up for an insurance policy before March of 2010, and if you like that policy, you could ostensibly keep it. It’s in the law.

However, an implementation rule was added later by Health & Human Services which narrowed the grandfathering parameters. If the benefits of a policy were altered after that date, those policies would lose grandfathered status. Meanwhile, HHS determined that up to 67 percent of customers would lose their plans, but only as a reflection of normal trends in the system — not as the result of a sudden drop off due to the ACA.

So when the president said, “If you like your insurance you can keep it,” he meant that the law itself wouldn’t force you to call up your insurance provider and cancel your policy if you liked it. Nor was he suggesting that an insurance company would be compelled by the law to keep you as a customer for life, irrespective of circumstances. While the law in fact prohibits the cancellation of a plan if you’re suddenly sick or injured, or if you make a mistake on your application — two common occurrences before the ACA — you can still lose your plan if you fail to pay your premium or if you lie on your paperwork.

Here’s the kicker. The law absolutely prohibits arbitrary cancellations — except for grandfathered plans like Sundby’s UnitedHealthcare plan. Frankly, switching to a Cover California plan might be the best thing for Sundby because her grandfathered plan likely included lifetime and annual limits on coverage (bad news for cancer patients); it wasn’t required to comply with government audits to prevent excessive premium hikes; and it could’ve randomly forced her to change doctors anyway.

Did you catch that last part? Obamacare absolutely forbids insurance companies from kicking you off of newer plans, so before somebody ruins all of their fun they are working overtime to frighten their customers into signing up for newer more expensive policies now while they still can.

I feel that this is going to continue on for some time. Bad reporting, with misleading information, gets published and spread far and wide by Fox News and Right Wing radio and then more honest reporters are left trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube.

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Courtesy of Wausau Daily Herald:

Former Alaska governor and GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin will be in the Wausau area next week to promote her new Christmas book, exactly one month after she took to Facebook to weigh in on the Wausau School District’s religious music controversy.

Palin will be at Walmart, 4300 Rib Mountain Drive, from 10 a.m. to noon Nov. 14 to sign copies of “Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas.”

Rib Mountain will be Palin’s fourth stop on her national book tour, she announced Wednesday on her Facebook page, and her first visit to the Wausau area.

In the book, Palin calls for people to publicly celebrate Jesus Christ during Christmas and say “Merry Christmas” to one another.

In October, Wausau School District administrators placed new limits on religious music performances by school groups, including an elite choral group at Wausau West High School called the Master Singers. Many in the community said the school district’s religious-music restrictions were akin to an attack on Christianity.

Last month, Palin posted the following to her Facebook page: “Thank you to all the Wausau, Wisconsin, residents who showed up to protest a wrongheaded school directive against Christmas carols. Wausau showed that there is power in unity as we battle against Scrooges who want Christ out of Christmas. My new book tackles issues like this one. It explains the steps we can take to combat the Scrooges so that we may forever protect the heart of Christmas from those who seek to diminish its true meaning.”

More than 41,600 people have “liked” that post since Oct. 14. (Many of them bots paid for by money from SarahPAC no doubt.)

Of course Palin has recently posted about a number of incidences which she has classified as attacks on Christmas, Christianity, and family values in preparation for this book tour. Including the textbook "controversy" in Florida, the cemetery grave marker "controversy" in Colorado, the military "controversy" concerning Evangelicals, and so on.

Many of these places are near book stop tours, and I have little doubt that Palin will use them to help attract interest in her newest ghostwritten toilet paper dispenser.

Essentially if seems that Palin has structured her book tour to take her to places which she believes she can identify as ground zero for the "War on Christmas," and thereby a "War on Christians."

It seems obvious to me that she is openly courting religious zealotry and hoping to anger Christians to the point that they will buy her book as some kind of statement against what she identifies as an attack on their faith and "their" holiday.

Much like Palin it is ugly, it is ignorant, and it will more than likely be a failure.

Later in the Wausau article they suggest that the local Wal-Mart is prepared for large crowds, but I have a feeling that will not be necessary. There will be a few looky-loos but for the most part nobody really cares.



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This kind of thing just makes me sick to my stomach.

The idea that this young woman would throw away her dreams simply due to superstitious nonsense is ridiculous.

Not only that the number 666 is not even the real number of the beast.

Remind me someday to relate the story of the born again Christian girl in my self defense class who quit because I talked about focusing Chi. That was a real eye opener.

(Source.)

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Courtesy of Los Angeles Daily News:

The health care overhaul will be getting a Hollywood rewrite.

The California Endowment, a private foundation spending millions to promote President Barack Obama’s signature law, recently provided a $500,000 grant to ensure TV writers and producers have information about the Affordable Care Act that can be stitched into plot lines watched by millions.

The aim is to produce compelling prime-time narratives that encourage Americans to enroll — especially the young and healthy, Hispanics and other key demographic groups needed to make the overhaul a success.

“We know from research that when people watch entertainment television, even if they know it’s fiction, they tend to believe that the factual stuff is actually factual,” said Martin Kaplan of USC’s Norman Lear Center, which received the grant.

The public typically gets as much, if not more, information about current events from favorite TV programs as mainstream news outlets, Kaplan said, so “people learn from these shows.”

Could this help? Well Republican strategists don;t think so, which probably means yes.

One thing for sure, it certainly cannot hurt. And SOMETHING needs to be done to out maneuver the GOP message that the ACA is a train wreck and should be repealed.

Besides if Hollywood knows anything at all, it is how to educate and entertain all at the same time.

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