When the White House claimed that Fox News wasn’t a news organization, and at best was an “arm of the Republican party,” I cheered. Anyone who’s watched Fox News at any time in the past several years knows full well that Fox News is anything but news and is essentially nothing more than a video version of many right-wing talk radio stations that claim to “say what everyone is thinking” and “not be a part of the liberal media” (you know, that liberal media that depends on things like facts and journalistic integrity) so the call won’t come as any surprise.

But some conservatives whined and complained that the White House was unfairly targeting Fox News, and in some cases accused them of trying to gag the news organization for trying to speak truth to power (you know, the same thing that every other news organization was stifled doing during the Bush Presidency). Now those of us in the reality-based community know that’s ludicrous, but Adele Stan, writing for AlterNet, has 8 great reasons why Fox News isn’t News at all:

Even before Barack Obama was elected to the presidency, Rupert Murdoch had declared war on him via the personalities of Fox News Channel, a subsidiary of Murdoch’s media conglomerate, News Corp.

Since Obama’s election, the cable channel’s hosts and paid analysts have launched a full frontal assault on the president, smearing his nominees, calling him a racist and suggesting that his administration was trying to persuade disabled veterans to off themselves.

Now the fearmongers at Fox are crying foul since the president and his aides declared Fox not to be a news organization. Earlier this month, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn called Fox an “arm” of the Republican Party. Obama went even further, suggesting this week that Fox “is operating basically as a talk-radio format,” and we know what that means: A format in which the most provocative opinions dominate the discourse and facts are optional.

Yet that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Setting Fox apart from the two other cable news networks is its ownership by a corporation whose CEO and major shareholder is a mogul with an ideological agenda — who operates his News Channel as a propaganda machine for his anti-government cause.

What follows is a primer on Rupert Murdoch and why you should be very wary when he moves in on your favorite media outlet, but let’s get to the reasons:

1. Glenn Beck, the community organizer
2. Fox’s alliance with the corporate-funded astroturf group Americans for Prosperity
3. On-air fundraising for Republican PACs
4. Bill O’Reilly, stalker of those whose opinions he doesn’t like
5. Sunday talk-show host who promotes Republican falsehoods
6. Fox News anchors, show hosts and pundits parrot GOP press releases, or just make up stuff
7. Fox News hosts urge viewers to join a particular political group
8. Glenn Beck, deranged inventor of paranoid conspiracies

Yes, I know Glenn Beck appears twice, but the full descriptions of each are more than worth reading.

[ 8 Reasons Fox Is Not a News Organization ]
Source: AlterNet

On October 22nd, 2009, Congress finally passed the Matthew Shepard Act, after many long years, obstruction by Republicans, threats of veto by the Bush Administration, scare tactics from the religious and evangelical right-wing, and even personal threats against the families fighting to make equal protection against hate crimes against actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability under federal law a reality.

I’ve been one of those people looking on from the sidelines and adding my voice whenever possible, but the dream is now a reality, and President Obama has promised to sign the bill before the end of the month, making it federal law.

If you’d like to send a personal message to the Shepard family and the Byrd family, use the link from the Human Rights Campaign below, or visit the project page to learn more about the bill and its long struggle to get here at Love Conquers Hate.

[ Thank the Families Who Stood Against Hate ]
Source: The Human Rights Campaign (HRC)

The beauty of the so-called “big government” is that it actually advocates for the people, and it’s accountable to the people, no matter what the far right and the “why should I pay taxes at all, much less for the common good when I could take the money and spend it on myself or shamelessly give it to the not-so-free market” libertarians claim. There is no other nation in the world that has seen or sees the prosperity that first world nations enjoy without having large federalized governments that see to the basic needs of the people, from the defense of the nation to the education of its children to the health and well being of its people.

And yet in America we have these roiling debates over how our government, which struggles with a huge population and a sprawling landmass, has trouble doing this and spends too much money doing it. Normally I would brush off the “too much money” squawkers – these people aren’t in favor of fiscal responsibility, they’re in favor of not paying taxes and cutting education budgets if it means they can afford a big-screen TV, but there’s a reason that the most prosperous, healthy, well lived, and well educated nations in the world are in many cases the most progressive socially, the ones with the highest citizen tax rates and the most just tax burdens (as in, the wealthiest pay more to the society they draw the most from in order to sustain their wealth), and the healthiest and happiest among us.

Writing for the Campaign for America’s Future, Jeff Madrick agrees:

America had been living a free-market myth for a generation until the credit crisis of 2008 and 2009 descended on the nation—and the world. One expression of that myth, found frequently on the editorial pages of the popular media, was that government does not grow economies, business does. In other words, government, don’t meddle where you’re not needed. Politicians are even easier to belittle than government itself.

I have spent much of my professional life making the opposite point. Government does indeed grow economies. It creates jobs and it produces prosperity. When politicians make correct decisions, they indeed make economies grow. There is no example of a major rich nation in the world whose government does not educate its children and teenagers; build its roads, bridges, superhighways, and airports; establish regulatory bodies to minimize financial busts; develop sanitation and water systems, and health care standards; support those who are temporarily unemployed; and provide a public pension to the elderly and a subsidy to the poor.

This is the call of big government. Label it proportional government if the words “big government” bother you. It is people getting together to do what they believe they must. And, yes, this is what good politicians do. Let’s call it like it is.

As economies grow larger, societies more populous, scientific and social knowledge deeper, and interconnections more complex, government grows as well—at least in societies that succeed. And when government works as it should, it is also typically the leading agent of change. As economies progress, societies learn more, and expectations rise, government’s main purpose is to manage, foster, and adapt to this change. It is a profound task.

Our own government has a history of managing and adapting, often radically, to change, looking ahead, not backward. It did so in the face of influential forces, fearing the future and aiming to protect established interests, which invariably opposed new obligations for government: financing the canals in the 1820s; building free primary schools starting in the 1830s and high schools in the late 1800s; developing government-built sanitation and water systems in the early 1900s that made the cities possible; creating a central bank to mitigate the disruption of boom-and-bust cycles and regulate unstable financial markets; enforcing labor rights such as hours worked, job safety, and a minimum wage; implementing vaccination programs and health research.

Madrick goes on to debunk the myths of why so-called “big government” is a bad thing in the rest of the piece, but this is the most poignant. For America to survive, it needs to retain, foster, and grow a strong large, representative government that’s accountable to the will of the people. Corporate boardrooms and companies wheeling in the “free market” are accountable to no one, and have even pressed legislation that wouldn’t even make them accountable to their own shareholders – the people contributing money to keep them afloat.

So who else can you trust, but the people whose names you put in the ballot box? And if you can’t trust them, don’t vote for them, and if you don’t know about them, learn. If after learning you still can’t trust any of them, it sounds like Mr. Smith needs to go to Washington, or at least speak to the point outside of the Capitol. Take responsibility, instead of whining and complaining and assuming someone’s taken it from you in the form of your tax dollars.

[ The Case for Big Government ]
Source: The Campaign for America’s Future

We’ve been hearing more and more about these kinds of stories lately, and while I think that part of the reason they make headlines is because there’s an ongoing debate about health care in Congress, I’m also glad that such issues are coming to the forefront because there are more people who are being abused by health insurers that are seeing those insurers backtrack on their behaviors as a result of being publicly shamed.

Like this story for example:

Yet another deep, deep disconnect is on the issue of women–the people, their lives, their reproductive needs–being considered either irrelevant a la Senator “Who-Needs-Maternity-Care” Kyl of Arizona (home of the Sheriff who wanted female inmates to pay extra transportation costs to procure abortions) or in the form of Senator “You-Can’t-Pay-For-Your-Abortion-With-Your-Private-Insurance-Policy” Hatch (R-Utah), or the insurance companies and the Catholic Bishops for whom women’s health is a pre-existing condition or a condition of original sin.

Out of all of this is an increasing string of stories of individual women who’ve been denied insurance because their wombs, breasts, rapes (pick one) or simply their sex makes them a “pre-existing condition.”

Among the most recent examples is a woman who spoke at the launch of NWLC’s “Being A Woman Is Not A Pre-Existing Condition” campaign on October 20th, 2009.

Writing at Womenstake.org, Amanda Stone recounts the tale of the speaker, Chris Turner:

“Nope, we won’t take her.” This is what insurance companies in Florida said when asked whether they would provide insurance coverage to a hypothetical applicant who had survived rape. Let’s back up a few steps. First, who was asking the question? Second, why was the applicant’s history posed as a hypothetical? Third, what can we do to change this dire situation?

Turner is a health insurance agent from Tampa Florida, and a rape survivor who spoke of her survival story. She was the person, in Stone’s frame, who was asking the question.

As recounted by Stone:

In November 2002, [Chris Turner] was drugged and raped while on a business trip. She sought medical help from her physician, who put her on preventative anti-HIV medication, since there was no way of knowing whether the person who raped her used a condom. Following her assault, Chris was afraid to leave her house for some time. About a month after the assault, Chris gathered the courage to seek counseling to deal with her fears-counseling which continued for about a year. She took the steps she needed to take care of herself, and the steps she now encourages other rape survivors to take as a volunteer at a Florida organization called SOAR-Speaking Out About Rape. As a volunteer, she warns rape survivors about a harm which she faced-she tells them, “if you lose your insurance, you might not be able to get it back.” This is exactly what happened to Chris.

A few months following her rape, Chris needed to find new health insurance on the individual market.

Conservatives would argue that this was somehow her fault for a variety of reasons and find some way to blame her for her insurance company’s decision, or at best would claim that her attacker should be the one responsible for the medical costs she’s incurred (if they had some shred of decency), but I’d take things a step further than that even: that Turner shouldn’t be victimized again by an insurance company that sees her as a liability now that she needs medical care, and preventative care, at that.

It absolutely floors me that any medical organization that claims that “health care” is its business would see fit to treat someone this way – but, contrary to the assumptions and disconnections of the far right and their libertarian allies, this is the America we live in, where we’re too scared to see a doctor for preventative care, much less get sick, even if we do have quality health insurance, for fear of being abused, mistreated, and eventually given the boot, only to find out that we don’t have the right or the privilege of being so abused again – even if we need insurance to be.

[ Insurance Company Tells Rape Victim Her Assault Would be a Pre-Existing Condition ]
Source: RH Reality Check (via AlterNet)

I would probably stretch this title out a bit to claim that not just Republicans are irrelevant to health reform, but Republicans and libertarians are irrelevant to health reform. The latter are the people who stare blankly at the price tag and then start wailing and gnashing their teeth at how much the whole thing will cost and the deficits and the debts and on and on without thinking about the cost savings that will arise from a more structured, less abusive system. The former on the other hand has no idea what they’re opposing as long as they can oppose it – it’s wasn’t their idea, they’re against it, and as long as they can drum up some talking points, even if they’re outright lies, they’re good to grab their flags out of the corner and start waving them and their guns (that you’ll only pry out of their cold, dead, hands, mind you) about.

But there’s a greater fear at play, says Scott Galindez, writing for TruthOut:

Democrats can cry foul all they want when the insurance industry threatens to raise rates, but if the final bill looks like the Finance Committee bill, higher premiums are inevitable.

Why? It is simple economics. Many of the reforms, such as covering people with pre-existing conditions, could cost the insurance companies more money. The insurance companies will say that if they have to insure people that are already sick, they will need more revenue. Without competition, the insurance companies will continue to fudge the numbers and control insurance costs.

Let’s face it, the Republican Party is afraid that they will be irrelevant for a long time if the Democrats deliver anything close to universal health care; the best case for them is a bill that has reforms, but doesn’t cut costs. They then get to say “we told you so” to the millions of Americans who will be angry because their premiums went up. They will be able to say “we told you so” to the young people who are forced to pay fines because they choose not to purchase a health care plan because they can’t afford one.

So in the end, the libertarians are just idiotically misguided, but the Republicans are actually afraid for their own futures. We’ve seen their party melt down in recent years to a seething mass of racist and hate-filled far-right-wingers who claim to speak for the whole, but the problem with someone who’s left without options is that they start to do drastic and crazy things to get back on top. And sometimes they work.

Crazy things like assuming the current health care status quo in this country is okay and nothing should be done to fix it – huddling up with their business buddies and claiming that it’s not that health care reform is bad, it’s that THIS health care is bad, and then sticking their fingers in their ears and whistling Dixie when asked for their proposals or alternatives.

I’m with Galindez on what he considers “the solution” to be:

It’s simple really, and most Democrats get it: provide real competition with a strong “Public Option.” The ideal plan would be to let everyone buy into Medicare. Since this is not in any of the five bills that passed committee, it will not happen.

The next best option is for the House to pass the strongest public option possible, and for the Senate to pass a bill that includes the public option that is in the HELP Committee bill. When they go to conference, let the House negotiators prevail and use the reconciliation route to get the conference report through the Senate.

Using this route will require no Republican support, and leave the “party of no” on the wrong side of history once again. It will benefit the American people and will be smart politics for the Democratic Party.

If they choose to be irrelevant, let them be. The rest of the country will march on without them.

[ Republicans Are Irrelevant to Health Care Reform ]
Source: TruthOut