Plan B Forum

The Long Con
Mail-order conservatism
Rick Perlstein
[from The Baffler No. 21, 2012]
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Mitt Romney is a liar. Of course, in some sense, all politicians, even all human beings, are liars. Romney’s lying went so over-the-top extravagant by this summer, though, that the New York Times editorial board did something probably unprecedented in their polite gray precincts: they used the L-word itself. “Mr. Romney’s entire campaign rests on a foundation of short, utterly false sound bites,” they editorialized. He repeats them “so often that millions of Americans believe them to be the truth.” “It is hard to challenge these lies with a well-reasoned-but- overlong speech,” they concluded; and how. Romney’s lying, in fact, was so richly variegated that it can serve as a sort of grammar of mendacity.

Some Romney lies posit absences where there are obviously presences: his claim, for instance, that “President Obama doesn’t have a plan” to create jobs. Other Romney fabrications assert presences where there are absences. A clever bit of video editing can make it seem like Romney was enthusiastically received before the NAACP, when, in fact, he had been booed. There are lies, damned lies, statistics—like his assertion that his tax cut proposal won’t have any effect on the federal budget, which the Tax Policy Center called “not mathematically possible.” That frank dismissal vaulted the candidate into another category of lie, an attempt to bend time itself: Romney responded by calling that group “biased”; last year, he called them “objective.”

There are outsourced lies, like this one from deep in my files: in 2007, Ann Romney told the right-wing site Newsmax.com that her husband had “always personally been prolife,” though Mitt had said in his 1994 Senate race, “I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country.” And then Ann admitted a few sentence later, “They say he flip-flopped on abortion. Well, you know what? He did change his mind.”

And then there’s the most delicious kind of lie of them all, the kind that hoists the teller on his own petard as soon as a faintly curious auditor consults the record for occasions on which he’s said the opposite. Here the dossier of Mittdacity overfloweth. In 2012, for example, he said he took no more federal money for the Salt Lake City Olympic Games than previous games had taken; a decade earlier, however, he called the $410 million in federal money he bagged “a huge increase over anything ever done before.” ... "

Part of the problem is that the unthinking view of 'evenhandedness' is that you have so say something bad about both sides, even if both sides are not symmetrically bad. it leads to missing the big picture.

Mitt Romney is a liar.

If you like your doctors, you can keep your doctors....PERIOD.

If you like your healthplan, you can keep your health plan, PERIOD

My healthplan will save an average of $2500 per family

White House delays health insurance mandate for medium-sized employers until 2016

For the second time in a year, the Obama administration is giving certain employers extra time before they must offer health insurance to almost all their full-time workers.

Under new rules announced Monday by Treasury Department officials, employers with 50 to 99 workers will be given until 2016 — two years longer than originally envisioned under the Affordable Care Act — before they risk a federal penalty for not complying.

Companies with 100 workers or more are getting a different kind of one-year grace period. Instead of being required in 2015 to offer coverage to 95 percent of full-time workers, these bigger employers can avoid a fine by offering insurance to 70 percent of them next year.

How the administration would define employer requirements has been one of the biggest remaining questions about the way the 2010 health-care law will work in practice — and has sparked considerable lobbying. By providing the dual phase-ins for employers of different sizes, administration officials have sought to lighten the burden on the small share of affected employers that have not offered insurance in the past.

As word of the delays spread Monday, many across the ideological spectrum viewed them as an effort by the White House to defuse another health-care controversy before the fall midterm elections.[Really? Ya think?]The new postponements won over part, but not all, of the business community. And they caught consumer advocates, usually reliable White House allies, by surprise, particularly because administration officials had already announced in July that the employer requirements would be postponed from this year until 2015.

Congressional Republicans seized on the announcement as the latest justification for scrapping the health-care law. In particular, they renewed their opposition to the law’s requirement that most Americans have insurance, saying it is unfair to delay rules for businesses and not for individuals.

“If unilateral delays were an Olympic sport, the White House would sweep the gold, silver, and bronze,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said in a statement. “The White House is in full panic mode, and rather than putting politics ahead of the public, it is time for fairness for all.”

Originally, the employer mandate — which affects companies employing 72 percent of all Americans — was to have gone into effect Jan. 1, at the same time the law began requiring most Americans to have health insurance.

A senior administration official, who briefed reporters on the proposal on the condition of anonymity shortly before the rule became public, said the Treasury Department decided to allow medium-size businesses more latitude because they “need a little more time to adjust to providing coverage.”

The law says that anyone who works 30 hours or more is a full-time employee, and it compels many employers to offer affordable insurance to those workers and their dependents. It defines affordable as premiums of no more than 9.5 percent of an employee’s income, and employers must pay for the equivalent of 60 percent of the actuarial value of a worker’s coverage. Businesses that fail to do so will eventually face a fine of up to $2,000 for each employee not offered coverage, though workers are not required to sign up for the benefits.

Under the health-care law, small employers — those with fewer than 50 workers — do not have to offer insurance. Instead, they will be allowed to buy health plans through new marketplaces created under the law. Because of hardware and software problems, the federal small-business marketplace, which was supposed to open in October, will not become available until the fall.

But until now, the government had not spelled out important details. Nor had it defined exactly what insurance benefits must be covered by employer-sponsored health plans.

A senior administration official, who briefed reporters on the proposal on the condition of anonymity shortly before the rule became public, said the Treasury Department decided to allow medium-size businesses more latitude because they “need a little more time to adjust to providing coverage.”

Because of hardware and software problems, the federal small-business marketplace, which was supposed to open in October, will not become available until the fall.

But until now, the government had not spelled out important details. Nor had it defined exactly what insurance benefits must be covered by employer-sponsored health plans

Gob wrote:So when Obma quits/is pushed/runs out of time, as your barking mad system says he eventually must, what happens to "Obama care"?