Brian Beutler on the media’s continued unwillingness to debunk Sen. Mitch McConnell’s ongoing misrepresentations over Kynect and Obamacare.
What’s particularly frustrating about McConnell’s irreconcilable ACA claims is that they would be politically damaging if the political press corps understood the nature of the deception. But unlike Grimes’ comments, which are just plainly absurd, laying McConnell bare requires a somewhat confident understanding of health policy and the system Obamacare promulgated in Kentucky. […]
[P]rior to Obamacare, the non-group market was dysfunctional. It excluded and priced out the sick and poor. It offered decent plans to young people who posed minimal health risks, but also sold junk policies that left people who believed they were doing the responsible thing exposed to medical bankruptcy.
It took Obamacare (and, thus, Kynect) to transform that market into something that proved inviting to half of Kentucky’s uninsured population almost overnight. Take away Obamacare, and Kynect might still exist as a website. But it’d be about as useful to Kentuckians as ehealthinsurance was prior to last year. Not totally useless, perhaps, but dramatically diminished and completely superfluous. […]
Once you grasp it all, then it becomes obvious why McConnell’s contradiction is theoretically so dangerous. He isn’t just painting a shiny gloss on a controversial position. He’s exploiting the public’s confusion over it, playing voters for fools by peddling absurdities. Something that can come to define a campaign just as easily as Grimes’ political cowardice might ultimately come to define hers.
This isn’t quite as simple as pillorying a candidate who won’t say whom she voted for in the last presidential election. But it isn’t that hard either. And it’s unfathomable to me that more campaign nerds can’t be bothered to take a moment and figure it out.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—Race-Mixing? Oh! Think of the Children!!:
| Since the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 1967 in the case of Loving v. Virginia, it’s been against the law to keep interracial couples from marrying the way Virginia did with its Racial Integrity Act of 1924. The ruling also knocked down the anti-miscegenation laws of 15 other states still on the books in the late ’60s. But Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell of Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana, didn’t get the memo, or rather, he did but won’t obey the law. He recently refused to marry an interracial couple, just as he has done on at least three previous occasions.
Bardwell, whose elected term of office runs until 2014, told the Associated Press: “I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way. I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.” As long, apparently, as they don’t try to marry his sister. […] The American Civil Liberties Union and local NAACP are looking into the matter. But how long before certain denizens of the national pundithuggery start braying that stopping Bardwell’s outlawry would violate his principles? We can hear Glenn now: “Denying him his right to deny other people their rights is denying his rights!” |
— @TheTweetOfGod
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, the morning buzz on KY-SEN rehashes Grimes vote dodge, ignores McConnell’s astounding Obamacare dodge. Greg Dworkin rounded up today’s Ebola stories, plus one oddball piece about how your dentist might be ripping you off. Speaking of Ebola, it seems there are some folks who think quarantines are for the little people. Two oceans covered by gigantic storms. Snapchat is worth $10B even though it apparently can’t & doesn’t fulfill even its most basic premise. An exploration of why successes in marriage equality, marijuana laws, etc. aren’t as easy to replicate in climate change. Gun ban at the NC State Fair survives court challenge.
