Politics

Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik says in an interview that Osama bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda leaders are not in Pakistan, so US drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal region are futile. Malik says: “If Osama was in Pakistan we would know, with all the thousands of troops we have sent into the tribal areas in recent months.… If he and all these four or five top people were in our area they would have been caught, the way we are searching.… According to our information Osama is in Afghanistan, probably Kunar, as most of the activities against Pakistan are being directed from Kunar.” He adds that US drone strikes are hitting mid-level militants at best, and are “counterproductive because they are killing civilians and turning locals against our government. We try to win people’s hearts, then one drone attack drives them away.” [London Times, 7/12/2009] Malik’s statement about bin Laden not being in Pakistan is not consistent with the facts (see January 2005, Late 2005-Early 2006, August 2007, September 2008, and May 2, 2011).

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), speaking on the Washington Times’s America’s Morning News television broadcast, says the Democrats’ proposed government-run health care system—the so-called “public option”—will “absolutely” kill more people than it will save. Will “government-run health care… end up killing more people than it saves?” the interviewer asks Coburn. He responds, “Absolutely.” Coburn’s comments are echoed on the floor of the House by two Republicans. Steve King (R-IA) tells members that the government is “going to save money by rationing care, getting you in a long line. Places like Canada, United Kingdom, and Europe. People die when they’re in line.” And Louis Gohmert (R-TX) states: “One in five people have to die because they went to socialized medicine!… I would hate to think that among five women, one of ‘em is gonna die because we go to socialized care.” [Real Clear Politics, 7/16/2009; Think Progress, 7/16/2009]

Laura Ingraham. [Source: Pat Dollard]Fox News and radio talk show host Sean Hannity tells his radio audience of the op-ed published in the morning’s New York Post by health industry lobbyist Betsy McCaughey, claiming that the Democrats’ health care reform proposal would result in senior citizens being advised to end their lives prematurely (see July 16, 2009). Hannity says: “[I]t sounds to me like they’re actually encouraging seniors in the end, ‘Well, you may just want to consider packing it all in here, this is—’ what other way is there to describe this?… So that they don’t become a financial burden on the Obamacare system? I mean that’s how they intend to cut cost, by cutting down on the health care we can give and get at the end of our lives and dramatically cutting it down for senior citizens? You know, welcome to the brave new world of Obamacare. We’re going to encourage, you know, inconvenient people to consider ‘alternatives to living.’” The same day, conservative radio host Laura Ingraham tells her listeners: “Can you imagine—if I were doing Saturday Night Live, like, if I were producing it this weekend, and I was going to be fair about political humor, I would have a hospice chute—like a door, a trap door that goes into a chute where the elderly would just walk up—‘Oh, my hip hurts.’ And all of a sudden you see this leg kicking granny down the chute, and that’s Obamacare.” She continues by making a veiled reference to Nazi concentration camps: “[S]ome will call them death camps, but this is the way Obamacare is gonna go for America.” And on the same day, conservative radio hosts Jim Quinn and Rose Tennent echo Hannity and Ingraham’s claims. Quinn says, “[T]here’s a drop dead date, you should pardon the expression but a lot of us are going to—” Tennent interjects, “Are going to drop dead, yeah.” Quinn then adds, “For heaven’s sakes, this is the death-to-old-people plan.” [Media Matters, 7/17/2009]

The national tea party organization Tea Party Patriots (see August 24, 2010) holds a series of rallies and protests in locations throughout the nation to protest the Obama administration’s push to reform the nation’s health care system. Most of the protests take place outside the offices of US Congressional members. Don Mashak, a tea party activist writing for the Minnesota Examiner, accuses the national media and both the Democratic and Republican Parties of working together to deny media coverage to the protests, even lumping Fox News into the “conspiracy.” Mashak writes, “Apparently American News Reporters are a bunch of Political Cuckolds who prefer to nurse at the bitter teat of Tyranny.” Mashak estimates, “Hundreds, if not thousands,of protests like this occurred across the USA simultaneously”; a reporter in Atlanta notes definitively that 254 protests under the Tea Party Patriots banner take place. One protester in Atlanta tells the reporter that Canadian citizens routinely come to America to “pay regular prices” for health care “[b]ecause they cannot get that free stuff in Canada.” [WXIA-TV, 7/17/2009; Minneapolis Examiner, 7/18/2009]

Republicans intend to use the fight over health care reform to “break” President Obama, says at least one Republican senator. Jim DeMint (R-SC) joins other Republican lawmakers in a conference call with so-called “tea party” organizers (see April 14, 2009, April 15, 2009, May 29, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, and Before August 6, 2009) to plan how to use town hall confrontations with Democratic lawmakers to help stall any health care reform bill from being voted on in Congress until at least after the August recess. The call was organized by the lobbying organization Conservatives for Patients Rights (CPR). “I can almost guarantee you this thing won’t pass before August, and if we can hold it back until we go home for a month’s break in August,” members of Congress will hear from “outraged” constituents, DeMint says. “Senators and Congressmen will come back in September afraid to vote against the American people.… [T]his health care issue is D-Day for freedom in America. If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.” One of the talking points from CPR is to characterize the reform package as a “government takeover” of health care. [Politico, 7/17/2009] When Obama says on PBS that “[w]hat they [DeMint and other Republicans] don’t recognize is, this isn’t about me; it’s about the American people… [a]nd things have gotten worse since 1993,” DeMint takes to Fox News to say the argument is about “socialism versus freedom,” and challenge Obama to a debate. “So, I’m glad to have the debate with him,” DeMint says, “but frankly, I’ve been working on health care for over 10 years. I think I know a lot more about how it works than he does. So I’m ready.” [Think Progress, 7/22/2009]

Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele gives a very direct answer when asked if President Obama’s health care proposal constitutes socialism. During a presentation at the National Press Club, Steele is asked, “Does President Obama’s health care plan represent socialism?” He replies: “Yes. Next question.” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow notes that Steele is “very sure that reforming health care is socialism even if he’s not actually all that sure what health care policy is,” and plays a video clip of Steele saying at a recent press conference: “I don’t do policy. I’m not—I’m not a legislator.” Steele acknowledges that Republicans made similar assessments of Medicare when it was proposed in 1965, and says: “I think that there’s a legitimate debate there about the impact that Medicare and Medicaid are having on the overall fabric of our economy. I think, though, in this case, unlike 1965, the level of spending, the level of government control and intrusion is far greater and much more expansive than anything we’ve ever seen.… So I think that what we’re talking about here is something far beyond anything we’ve seen in 1965 or since 1965. This is unprecedented government intrusion into the private sector, period. And you can sweeten that any way you want, but it still tastes bitter. And I think the American people know that.” According to Steele, Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and other Democrats are part of a “cabal” that wants to implement government-run health care. “Obama-Pelosi want to start building a colossal, closed health care system where Washington decides. Republicans want and support an open health care system where patients and doctors make the decisions,” he says. Adding Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) into his statement, Steele continues: “Many Democrats outside of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Waxman cabal know that voters won’t stand for these kinds of foolish prescriptions for our health care. We do too. That’s why Republicans will stop at nothing to remind voters about the risky experimentation going on in Washington.” Obama and Congressional Democrats are moving too fast to try to enact health care reform, Steele says. “So slow down, Mr. President. We can’t afford to get health care wrong. Your experiment proposes too much, too soon, too fast. Your experiment with our health care could change everything we like about our health care, and our economy as well.” When asked why Republicans are not advancing their own health care proposals, Steele responds: “Now, you know, the Republicans can get up tomorrow and introduce its own bill, but you and I know how Washington works. The bill that matters is the one that the leadership puts in place. The Democrats have the leadership.” [Wall Street Journal, 7/20/2009; Associated Press, 7/20/2009; MSNBC, 7/27/2009]

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, following up on claims that the Obama health care reform proposal would encourage elderly Americans to die sooner (see November 23, 2008, January 27, 2009, February 9, 2009, February 11, 2009, February 18, 2009, May 13, 2009, June 24, 2009, June 25, 2009, July 10, 2009, July 16, 2009, and July 17, 2009), tells his listeners that the reform proposal includes “[m]andatory counseling for all seniors at a minimum of every five years, more often if the seasoned citizen is sick or in a nursing home.… That’s an invasion of the right to privacy. We can’t have counseling for mothers who are thinking of terminating their pregnancy, but we can go in there and counsel people about to die.” The claim will soon be debunked (see July 23, 2009). [St. Petersburg Times, 7/23/2009]

The American Thinker’s Don Parker makes the false claim that the Democrats’ health care reform proposal will mandate end of life, or advance planning, counseling for every American senior citizen “at a minimum of every five years, more often if the senior is sick or in a nursing home” (see July 21, 2009). Parker cites the provision as being on pages 425-430 of HR 3200, the current version of the health care legislation now pending in the House of Representatives. Parker asks: “Just how many government trained counselors will that put into the work force? With an over 65 population of 38,000,000 US (Census, 2007), four counseling sessions daily, over 37,000, at a minimum, that’s how many. Plus their supervisors, plus the report readers, plus the oversight agency. Don’t even think that anyone should receive mandatory counseling regarding the end of life issues surrounding abortion; that’s a invasion of the right of privacy! ‘Counsel’ a senior about their end of life ‘choices’ under Obama Care? Somehow that’s not the same, so just keep your mouth shut.” [American Thinker, 7/21/2009] As many sources note (see July 23, 2009, July 23, 2009, and Late July, 2009), Parker’s claims are false. Such advance planning counseling sessions would be entirely voluntary, and would not encourage seniors to “die early.”

Author Jerome Corsi, who has made a number of disproven and debunked claims concerning President Obama’s citizenship (see August 1, 2008 and After, August 15, 2008, October 8, 2008, and October 9, 2008), now claims that he has “proof” Obama’s attendance and exemplary performance at Harvard Law School were engineered by a Saudi prince through the auspices of an African-American Muslim radical. He points to Obama’s decision not to release his college transcripts as circumstantial evidence (see September 11, 2008), saying that decision “prevents resolution of a continuing controversy over whether radical Islamic influences promoted his admission and financed his legal education there.” The “continuing controversy” centers on a lawyer named Percy Sutton, who claims that Islamic radical Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour, “one of the world’s wealthiest men,” asked him to write a letter of recommendation to Harvard Law School for then relatively unknown Barack Obama. Sutton says al-Mansour, a Saudi citizen, introduced him to Obama, and says al-Mansour was raising money for Obama to attend Harvard. Sutton says al-Mansour was a “principal adviser” to Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who, Sutton says, actually engineered Obama’s acceptance to Harvard. According to Sutton, he was told in a letter from al-Mansour: “There’s a young man that has applied to Harvard. I know that you have a few friends left there because you used to go up there to speak. Would you please write a letter in support of him?” Sutton says he did write the letter, and told friends at Harvard, “I thought there was going to be a genius that was going to be available and I certainly hoped they would treat him kindly.” The Obama campaign denied the story during the 2008 presidential campaign. Sutton, who is in his 80s and apparently suffers from some sort of senile dementia or memory loss that precludes him being contacted by Corsi or other members of the press, has made his allegations in a YouTube video that Corsi cites as his “proof.” In 2008, Politico reporter Ben Smith contacted al-Mansour, who confirmed Sutton was “a dear friend, his health is not good” and said he’s sure Sutton wrote a letter for someone else, “and he got it confused.” Corsi has requested that the White House release all of Obama’s law school records to “resolve the issue.” Al-Mansour, Corsi claims, was originally Don Warden, a member of the 1960s Black Panthers. [WorldNetDaily, 7/21/2009]

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) says that the Republican Party must ensure the total failure of the Obama administration’s attempt to reform American health care for the good of the party’s electoral chances in 2010. Appearing on a radio show, Inhofe says: “They [President Obama and the Democrats] ought to know, they ought to know from history. This is a losing proposition for them. And for those out there who believe, that would like to have something optimistic to look at, we are plotting the demise on a week by week basis of where Bill Clinton was in 1993 and where Obama is today and his demise ratio is greater than Clinton’s was in 1993. So, he’s trying to do the same things, except more extreme.” On another talk radio show, Inhofe adds: “I just hope the president keeps talking about it, keeps trying to rush it through. We can stall it. And that’s going to be a huge gain for those of us who want to turn this thing over in the 2010 election.” [Town Hall (.com), 7/22/2009; Think Progress, 7/23/2009] Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) responds to Inhofe’s statements: “Slowly but surely the Republicans are revealing their true strategy on health care: partisans gamesmanship comes before getting something done. If Republicans believe doing nothing will ingratiate themselves with the American people, they have not learned a single lesson from the last two elections. Their do nothing approach is why health care costs have skyrocketed, and it’s why Republicans are in such a bad place today. This strategy is bad politics, but it is also a deeply troubling way to govern.” [Think Progress, 7/23/2009]

Reporter and columnist Philip Klein, writing for the conservative American Spectator, lambasts conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh for giving the “birther” conspiracy theory his support. Klein says he has refrained from writing about it up until now, “because I don’t want to give those who claim [President Obama] is not a US citizen the attention they so desperately seek. I don’t even want to describe the matter as a ‘controversy,’ because to do so suggests that there is a serious dispute over Obama’s place of birth. To any sane human being, there is no controversy. Obama has produced an authentic certificate of live birth from the state of Hawaii that clearly shows he was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, at 7:24 p.m. (see June 13, 2008). State officials have confirmed the document as legitimate (see October 30, 2008) and have stated that such facts would have to be verified by the state before they appear on the document. And if that isn’t enough, the fact is corroborated by a contemporaneous newspaper birth announcement” (see July 2008). Klein writes that instead of questioning Obama’s citizenship and demanding that he produce a “real” birth certificate, “Limbaugh should be using his perch to explain why this story is complete nonsense. Doing so would help to keep these citizenship conspiracy theorists in the fringe, where they belong. Instead, he’s just encouraging them. I’ve lost a ton of respect for Limbaugh this week.” Klein goes on to denounce Representative Bill Posey (R-FL), who with nine other Republican House members has sponsored a bill requiring presidential candidates to produce “official” birth certificates. All 10 “should be embarrassed,” he writes. It would be pointless for Obama to try to settle the issue by releasing a different version of the certificate, Klein writes, because “it would obviously not put the issue to rest… the conspiracy theorists have demonstrated that they do not care about facts.” Secondly, “there’s absolutely no reason for Obama to cave into these people. Doing so would set a standard in the future so that people can start whatever insane rumors they want about an elected official, and then the burden is on the official to dispute them. It’s no different than those calling for an investigation of whether 9/11 was an inside job.” [American Spectator, 7/22/2009]

Patients First bus featuring the “Hands Off Our Health Care” slogan and bloody handprint logo. [Source: Associated Press]The citizens’ organization Patients First, a subsidiary of the conservative lobbying group Americans for Prosperity (AFP—see April 14, 2009, April 15, 2009, and May 29, 2009), schedules a 13-state bus tour. The tour is aimed at bringing conservative protesters to rallies and “town hall” meetings where the White House’s controversial health care proposals are being discussed. AFP’s board includes James Miller, a Federal Trade Commission chairman and budget director during the Reagan administration. The tour begins with a “tea party” rally in Richmond. According to AFP official Ben Marchi, organizers will urge constituents to call or visit their senators and sign a petition that asks members of Congress to “oppose any legislation that imposes greater government control over my health care that would mean fewer choices for me and my family and even deny treatments to those in need.” The bus will make 26 stops in Virginia alone before journeying to North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Louisiana. Another bus will visit Nebraska, Colorado, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Iowa, Arkansas, and Missouri. “Virginians are fired up about health care and what they see as an overreaching federal government,” Marchi says. “We don’t want legislators to come between them and their doctor. The relationship that exists between doctors and patients is sacred and should not be interfered with.” [Richmond Times-Dispatch, 7/23/2009; Politico, 7/28/2009]

CNN reports that millions could be saved per year by the so-called “end of life” discussions that the Obama health care proposal would have Medicare pay for, without a loss in the quality or availability of care. According to a recent study cited by CNN, $76 million per year could be saved “if half of the people who die from cancer annually had end-of-life conversations with their doctors.… [P]atients who reported having those talks had 36 percent lower health care costs in the final week of life.” Most of the savings would come from patients who do not want extraordinary measures taken to preserve their lives, but because hospitals have no such instructions, when a dying patient “codes,” or lapses into a terminal state, hospital doctors by default will use extraordinary methods to resuscitate them. Dr. Arthur Kellerman, chairman of the emergency medicine department at Emory University, says that many aging parents and grandparents avoid such discussions because of the strain they might place on their children and grandchildren. And the younger relatives often avoid these discussions because they don’t want to appear ungrateful or grasping. As for doctors: “There are a lot of my colleagues who don’t bother having that conversation. They just intubate them, and ship them up to an ICU, and say ‘next,’” Kellerman says. “Ultimately, it drives up costs, it degrades their quality of life, and you have less money and less resources available for people who really are salvageable and have a whole lot more time left on Earth.” Kellerman says when his own mother was at the end of his life, he had to use his position as a doctor to ensure that “do not call 911, do not send her to the hospital” was written on her chart so that she would be able to die in her nursing home. “You end up with a daughter at two in the morning, and Grandma is in respiratory failure, and we’re having a conversation in a family room in the ER about what Grandma wants,” Kellerman adds. “That conversation should have been with that grandmother and her daughter and her doctor and should have happened two years earlier, and it would have been easier on everybody.” The study shows that 60 percent of elderly patients prefer that their doctors not use extraordinary measures to preserve their lives. “Everybody wants their parents to live forever, everyone wants to live forever,” says Kellerman. “But the fact is that won’t happen, and you do need to think and plan ahead.” [CNN, 7/23/2009]

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and Representative Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) issue a statement that warns the Obama administration’s health care reform proposal would provide for “government-encouraged euthanasia” of senior citizens. Boehner and McCotter’s statement reads: “Section 1233 of the House-drafted legislation [HR 3200, the most recent version of the reform proposal] encourages health care providers to provide their Medicare patients with counseling on ‘the use of artificially administered nutrition and hydration’ and other end of life treatments, and may place seniors in situations where they feel pressured to sign end of life directives they would not otherwise sign. This provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia if enacted into law. At a minimum this legislative language deserves a full and open public debate—the sort of debate that is impossible to have under the politically-driven deadlines Democratic leaders have arbitrarily set for enactment of a health care bill.” Boehner and McCotter also state that the reform bill would encourage state-assisted suicide: “With three states having legalized physician-assisted suicide, this provision could create a slippery slope for a more permissive environment for euthanasia, mercy-killing, and physician-assisted suicide because it does not clearly exclude counseling about the supposed benefits of killing oneself. Health care reform that fails to protect the sanctity and dignity of all human life is not reform at all.” [House Republican Leader, 7/23/2009] The next day, McCotter will add: “This is very dangerous. We, in Michigan, have already fought back in attempted assisted suicide several years ago. And yet you see that the people who support this are trying to use this bill to advance this agenda.” [MSNBC, 7/29/2009] The statement is quickly challenged by Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), who with Representative Charles Boustany (R-LA) introduced a separate bill that would provide for end-of-life consultations for senior citizens. Both bills propose nothing more than having Medicare pay for such consultations, if the patients or the patients’ families desire them. “I cannot tell you how disappointed I was to see this type of reaction to a carefully crafted piece of legislation we have been working on for more than six months that is bipartisan and that speaks to the needs of American families,” Blumenauer says. “The American public, especially our senior citizens, deserve our best efforts to meet their needs—not treat them like political footballs.” A Boustany spokesman says the congressman stands behind the measure he co-authored, but says it should include language stating that taxpayer money would not be used to counsel patients on physician-assisted suicide. Two states—Oregon and Washington—allow physician-assisted suicide in certain situations, and the Montana Supreme Court is considering a lower-court ruling that found physician-assisted suicide to be a right under Montana’s Constitution. [Politico, 7/28/2009] Liberal media watchdog organization Media Matters calls the statement’s analysis “repulsive.” [Media Matters, 7/24/2009] The characterization of the bill by Boehner and McCotter will be disproven by a St. Petersburg Times analysis (see July 23, 2009).

Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck says that President Obama supports health care reform as a form of “reparations” for African-Americans whose ancestors were held as slaves. Beck claims that a provision in the Congressional health care reform bill requires a medical school or other health-related institution applying for a federal grant or contract to prove its inclusiveness to minorities. Beck then tells his viewers: “[J]ust in case the universalness of the program doesn’t somehow or another quench his reparation appetite, he’s making sure to do his part to pay the debt in the other areas.… So. You got it? This isn’t preference to the best institutions that are going to be churning out our doctors, but the institutions with the most diversity. We shouldn’t be dishing out grants based on what hospital looks, you know, the most like an Old Navy commercial.… Obama is no dummy. He knows that you would never pass reparations. He knows you would never pass any of this stuff. This is all affirmative action.” On the same program, Beck and his guest, Fox contributor Linda Chavez, claim that the health care reform bill would mandate that minority patients be treated by doctors of their same race. Earlier in the day, Beck made many of the same claims about reparations on his radio show. He told his listeners: “This man [Obama] is putting through reparations times 10.… Who’d receive the money? All blacks, or just those directly descended from slaves? Would Barack Obama?… Wait a minute. His father was not a descendent of slaves, and his mother was white. So maybe Michelle Obama would be the only one that should be able to get the cash. Since Obama is half white and half black, would he pay and receive? See, these are the tricky questions, but then again, they have nothing to do with Obama’s objection to reparations. Obama is against direct reparations for one reason: He doesn’t ever want the victim card to be lost.” [Media Matters, 7/23/2009; Media Matters, 7/30/2009] Days later, Beck will accuse Obama of being a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred of white people” (see July 28-29, 2009).

Conservative radio host Glenn Beck accuses the Obama administration of colluding with ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and SEIU (the Service Employees International Union) to construct a “modern-day slave state” in the US. Beck tells his listeners: “So, now, inside the health care bill is an organization where your tax dollars are going to go to go find information out about minority health. It creates a group of slaves to the government—a group of people working for the government—most likely minorities, working for the government, under the auspices of community organizers, going door to door to find out information about people’s health. This is a modern-day slave state that is being created.” [Media Matters, 7/23/2009]

Right-wing talk show host and convicted felon G. Gordon Liddy (see March 23, 1974) claims to have evidence that President Obama was born in Kenya and not in the US. MSNBC host Chris Matthews interviews Liddy about the claim, which rests on long-discredited statements purporting to be from Obama’s “grandmother” Sarah Obama. Liddy says that Sarah Obama, who is not Obama’s biological grandmother but the second wife of Obama’s grandfather and a woman the president calls “Granny Sarah,” filed “a deposition, which is a sworn statement, from the step-grandmother, who says, ‘I was present and saw him born in Mombasa, Kenya.’” The “deposition” claim comes from street preacher Ron McRae, who interviewed Sarah Obama in her Kenyan home via telephone. Through a translator, Vitalis Akech Ogombe, Sarah Obama apparently misspoke and told McRae that she saw Barack Obama born in Mombasa; when McRae pressed for details, Ogombe and other family members present quickly corrected Sarah Obama’s error and repeatedly affirmed Obama’s birth in Hawaii. McRae, however, continued to press for what he considered a blurted-out truth the family was trying to hide (see October 16, 2008 and After). Salon columnist Alex Koppelman writes: “No matter, though, because people who believe in a conspiracy theory simply hear what they want to hear. So some birther sites have posted transcripts and YouTube clips that end abruptly with the mistranslation and don’t include the corrections. McRae, for his part, included the full translation in his affidavit—he thinks it’s all just part of the conspiracy.” McRae then filed a deposition claiming that Ogombe and the other family members he interviewed “have obviously been versed to counter such facts with the common purported information from the American news media that Obama was born in Hawaii.” Though Matthews attempts to elicit this material during his interview with Liddy, the radio host will continue to promulgate the claim that “Obama’s grandmother” watched his birth in a Mombasa hospital. [Chicago Tribune, 12/3/2008; Salon, 7/23/2009] Obama’s presidential campaign released a verified copy of Obama’s birth certificate (see June 13, 2008), and a number of non-partisan organizations have subsequently verified its validity (see June 27, 2008 and August 21, 2008).

Betsy McCaughey, the former lieutenant governor of New York and a lobbyist for the health care industry, writes two frightening op-eds, one for the Wall Street Journal and one for the New York Post, that make false claims about the Democrats’ health care reform package. In the Journal, she claims that the bill contains a provision that would “pressure the elderly to end their lives prematurely,” a claim she has made before (see July 16, 2009). In the Post, she goes much farther, claiming that two of President Obama’s top health care advisers favor denying expensive health care treatments to senior citizens, the mentally disabled, and other “less productive” members of American society. She names Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist, the health care adviser at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and a member of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. She cites a 2008 article by Emanuel in the American Medical Association’s journal, where he wrote that some doctors sometimes go too far, construing the Hippocratic Oath “as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others.” McCaughey takes Emanuel’s words and accuses him of wanting “doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else. Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they’ll tell you that a doctor’s job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time.” McCaughey states that Emanuel believes “medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those ‘who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens…’ Translation: Don’t give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson’s or a child with cerebral palsy.” She also claims that Emanuel “explicitly” advocated denying health care to senior citizens in favor of providing treatment to younger patients. McCaughey claims that both Emanuel and Dr. David Blumenthal, the White House’s national coordinator of health information technology, favor “slowing medical innovation to control health spending” and denying patients access to advanced medical technology. According to McCaughey, Blumenthal also favors letting “computers tell… doctors what to do.” She concludes: “No one has leveled with the public about these dangerous views.… Do we want a ‘reform’ that empowers people like this to decide for us?” [Wall Street Journal, 7/23/2009; New York Post, 7/24/2009] A White House official later notes that McCaughey misrepresented Emanuel’s writings, and that Emanuel was describing positions and beliefs that he opposed in the same articles. ABC News’s Jake Tapper will note that Emanuel’s fellow doctors and medical ethicists know him as a fervent advocate of the rights of dying patients. [ABC News, 7/28/2009] And Emanuel himself will rebut McCaughey’s claims (see August 12, 2009). McCaughey’s previous claims about the dangers of health care reform, including her assertion that reform would encourage doctors to let senior citizens die, have been roundly debunked (see July 23, 2009).

Conservatives for Patients’ Rights (CPR), an anti-health care reform lobbying organization owned by former health care industry executive Rick Scott (see August 4, 2009), sends an e-mail to a listserv called the Tea Party Patriots Health Care Reform Committee detailing over 100 “town hall” meetings to take place during the August recess. All are to be hosted by Democratic members of Congress, and most will feature discussions of the White House/Congressional Democrats’ health care reform proposals. [TPMDC, 8/3/2009] The Tea Party Patriots Health Care Reform Committee has hundreds of members on its mailing list, and cross-connects to other, larger mailing lists for anti-reform groups such as Conservatives for Patients Rights (CPR), Patients First, Patients United Now (an affiliate of Americans for Prosperity), and FreedomWorks (see April 14, 2009). CPR features the same list of town hall meetings on its own Web site. The liberal news site TPMDC notes that the same listservs have featured blatantly racist messages such as pictures of President Obama with a bone through his nose (see July 28, 2009). [Conservatives for Patients' Rights, 7/2009; TPMDC, 8/3/2009]

Rep. Louis Gohmert. [Source: Associated Press / Washington Blade]Representative Louis Gohmert (R-TX) lays out a skein of theories on radical radio host Alex Jones’s broadcast. During his interview with Jones, Gohmert accuses the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats of trying to implement socialism and kill senior citizens; Jones and Gohmert compare Obama to a number of foreign despots. Gohmert tells Jones and his listeners: “We’ve been battling this socialist health care, the nationalization of health care, that is going to absolutely kill senior citizens. They’ll put them on lists and force them to die early because they won’t get the treatment as early as they need.… I would rather stop this socialization of health care because once the government pays for your health care, they have every right to tell you what you eat, what you drink, how you exercise, where you live.… But if we’re going to pay 700 million dollars like we voted last Friday to put condoms on wild horses, and I know it just says an un-permanent enhanced contraception whatever the heck that is. I guess it follows that they’re eventually get around to doing it to us.” Gohmert is echoing claims by Republican lawmakers and industry lobbyists that the Democrats’ health care reform proposal will kill senior citizens (see November 23, 2008, January 27, 2009, February 9, 2009, February 11, 2009, February 18, 2009, May 13, 2009, June 24, 2009, June 25, 2009, July 10, 2009, July 16, 2009, July 17, 2009, July 21, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23, 2009, and July 23-24, 2009). Jones ups the ante by accusing the White House “science czar” of planning to “put… stuff in the water to sterilize us,” and then goes on to accuse the White House of, among other things, implementing a “eugenics control grid over us” and implementing “youth brigades, national service compulsory in a group outside the military under the Democratic Party control in the city year in the red and black uniforms.” Gohmert agrees with Jones, and says these kinds of policies were “done in the 1930s,” a plain reference to Nazi Germany, “and it’s not the only place its been done. It has been done throughout history.” Jones says, “Mao did it,” referring to Communist China’s Mao Zedong. Gohmert agrees: “Well, that’s exactly what I was thinking of. This is the kind of the thing we got to stop. We got to get back to the roots, the basics.” Gohmert praises Jones for his rhetoric and accusations: “That shows how on top of things you are, Alex.” For his part, Jones effusively thanks Gohmert and reminds him that “you’re there fighting and we’re supporting you.” [Think Progress, 7/27/2009] Progressive MSNBC host Rachel Maddow says of Gohmert and Jones: “You know, the Democrats may be fighting it out about whether they’re going to be beholden to the insurance companies and whether there’s going to be a public option in health care reform. But when it comes to the Republicans, this is the kind of thing they are bringing to the table: Hitler, Mao, and secret plots to kill old people.” [MSNBC, 7/29/2009]

Anti-health care reform protesters displays sign with swastika prominently featured. [Source: Paul Rhea]The Democratic National Committee and several national and local unions stage a rally in Austin, Texas, to support the White House’s health care reform proposals. Anti-health care protesters also appear, one of whom carries a sign with a Nazi symbol prominently displayed. The sign warns that anti-reform advocates want “no repeats” of Nazi Germany, apparently in reference to the reform proposals. [TX 912 Candidates, 8/5/2009; Philip Martin, 8/6/2009]

The conservative lobbying group Americans for Prosperity (AFP—see April 15, 2009 and May 29, 2009), in conjunction with the St. Louis Tea Party Coalition, organizes a large protest at a town hall meeting organized by Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO). Michelle Sherrod, a McCaskill aide, intends to discuss the senator’s opinion on the Obama administration’s health care reform proposals with the protesters, but AFP volunteers and associated protesters have a different agenda. The AFP Web alert says, “We hope we can have a vigorous yet courteous exchange Monday evening,” but according to liberal blog OpenLeft, whose contributors videotape part of the proceedings for YouTube, the conservative protesters—numbering somewhere around 1,000—are disruptive, often preventing Sherrod and other citizens from asking or answering questions. AFP later calls the protest a “smashing success.” The Fox News blog, Fox Nation, celebrates the protest with the headline, “Tea Party Protest Erupts During Senator’s Town Hall!” [Americans for Prosperity, 7/24/2009; Open Left, 7/27/2009; St. Louis Business Journal, 7/27/2009; Americans for Prosperity, 7/28/2009; Fox Nation, 7/29/2009]

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, discussing the idea of allowing China and India to be exempt from certain restrictions on pollution that causes global warming, mocks American liberals and Democrats for claiming to have a level of compassion for the world’s poor that, Limbaugh says, they do not have. Limbaugh says: “And yet these are the people on the left, the liberals, who tell us that they have all the compassion and they, they want people freed from whatever bondage they’re in. And yet when you listen to people like Barney Frank [D-MA] and Barack Obama, you understand that they have a different idea of bondage, and that’s us [conservatives] in it.… I had, I had a dream, I had a dream that I was a slave building a Sphinx in a desert that looked like Obama. I woke at four o’clock in the morning.” [Media Matters, 7/27/2009]

Fox News host Glenn Beck accuses President Obama of “hav[ing] real issues with race.” Beck, discussing the matter with psychiatrist and regular Fox contributor Keith Ablow, says of Obama, “I just see this ACORN [Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a citizen advocacy group accused of mismanaging funds and promoting prostitution by conservatives] thing and also the thing at the White House as a sign—this guy has real issues with race, real issues.” Ablow responds, in part, “I think we get a transparent president in this case whose feelings about white America are coming forward again.” Beck adds, “I think he’s one of the more arrogant people I have ever witnessed in the office.” [Media Matters, 7/27/2009] During the same broadcast, Beck says: “We have demonstrated President Obama’s desire for racial justice, but how is he setting out to achieve it? Exactly the way a community organizer would: through intimidation, vilification, bullying, a system, an underground shell game.” [Media Matters, 7/27/2009] The next day, Beck will accuse Obama of being a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred of white people” (see July 28-29, 2009).

US Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) attempts to delay a Congressional resolution introduced by Representative Neil Abercrombie (D-HI) to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Hawaii’s statehood. Bachmann, who has publicly expressed support for so-called “birther” claims that President Obama is not a real US citizen (see June 13, 2008, June 27, 2008, and August 21, 2008), apparently opposes a line in Abercrombie’s resolution that states, “Whereas the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama, was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961” (see June 13, 2008, June 27, 2008, October 30, 2008 and July 28, 2009). According to Abercrombie spokesperson Dave Helfert, “birthers” have claimed that the line is an attempt to get Congress to affirm Obama’s citizenship. Bachmann objects to the resolution coming to a vote, saying a quorum is not present. The House later votes 378-0 to approve the resolution; Bachmann votes in favor. [Honolulu Advertiser, 7/28/2009]

Frank Kratovil hung in effigy by a conservative protester. [Source: Joe Albero / Salisbury News]An angry conservative protester hangs Representative Frank Kratovil (D-MD) in effigy in front of his office. Other conservative protesters rally around the effigy, waving signs and chanting anti-health care reform slogans. Conservative lobbying organization Americans for Prosperity (AFP—see April 15, 2009 and May 29, 2009) quickly distances itself from the incident, saying that it had nothing to do with the protest and disapproved of the tactic. AFP is helping organize raucous, disruptive anti-health care protests around the country. The next day, AFP spokeswoman Amy Menefee will write: “We held an event the previous night, where this man passed out flyers asking people to join him the next day at the office for a protest. That is how some AFP members ended up coming, but they were disgusted by his behavior. I repeat, this gathering WAS NOT an AFP event or sponsored by us in any way.” Conservative blogger Joe Albero, who took the picture featured in many news articles, calls the effigy “despicable” and accuses Democrats of “turn[ing] it around to be something it wasn’t.” [Washington Post, 7/28/2009] The liberal news and advocacy site Think Progress later identifies the protesters as members of Patients First, a subsidiary of AFP. [Think Progress, 7/28/2009] Reporter Glenn Thrush opines, “If this is the face of anti-health care reform protest, the GOP has a serious problem.” He also confirms that although AFP claims not to have sanctioned the protest, AFP members were in attendance. [Politico, 7/28/2009] Think Progress notes that Menefee, before joining AFP in the beginning of 2009, worked for the Galen Institute, a conservative think tank funded by medical-device and pharmaceutical corporations. [Think Progress, 7/31/2009] One of Kratovil’s colleagues, Representative Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), calls the hanging a “shocking and despicable act of hate,” and says “Republicans must condemn it.” [Think Progress, 7/29/2009] The Democratic National Committee will use the photograph of Kratovil being hung in effigy in ads claiming that the “anti-reform mobs” are being “organized and largely paid for by Washington special interests and insurance companies who are desperate to block reform.” [Baltimore Sun, 8/6/2009]

Lewin Group logo. [Source: WNY Media]The Republican National Committee plans to spend a million dollars in August on television ads opposing health care reform. One of the key elements of the ad campaign is a study released today by the Lewin Group that finds 119 million Americans would lose the coverage they currently have under the Obama administration’s health care reform proposal. MSNBC’s progressive talk show host Rachel Maddow airs video clips of Senators John Barrasso (R-WY) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Representatives John Boehner (R-OH), Tom Price (R-GA), Paul Ryan (R-WI), and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) all citing the Lewin study as evidence that health care reform is bad for Americans. The Lewin Group is a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, a health insurance provider. United Health operates a subsidiary called Ingenix, which in turn operates a consulting firm, the Lewin Group. Maddow notes that Republicans call the Lewin Group “nonpartisan and independent” when in fact it is a branch of a health care insurer. In January 2009, United Health agreed to pay $400 million to the State of New York after being charged with defrauding customers—manipulating data in order to shift medical expenses onto consumers. Former Vermont governor and Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, himself a doctor, says the issue is “not… about Democrats versus Republicans. This is about the health insurance agency versus the American people.” [Ingenix, 7/27/2009; MSNBC, 7/28/2009]

Virginia Foxx. [Source: Watauga Watch]Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC) says that the Obama administration’s health care proposals will put millions of elderly Americans at risk of being killed by the government. “Republicans have a better solution that won’t put the government in charge of people’s health care, that will make sure we bring down the cost of health care for all Americans, and that insures affordable access for all Americans, and is pro-life because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.” Huffington Post’s Jason Linkins notes that the Republican leadership in Congress has not actually proposed any alternatives to the Obama health care proposals. Liberal media watchdog site Media Matters writes, “Democratic legislation actually provides professional guidance for seniors’ difficult decisions—NOT to encourage euthanasia.” [Huffington Post, 7/28/2009; MSNBC, 7/29/2009]

Following up on arguments that Congressional Democrats’ health care reform proposal would encourage senior citizens to die sooner (see November 23, 2008, January 27, 2009, February 9, 2009, February 11, 2009, February 18, 2009, May 13, 2009, June 24, 2009, June 25, 2009, July 10, 2009, July 16, 2009, July 17, 2009, July 21, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23-24, 2009, and July 24, 2009), conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh tells his listeners, “People at a certain age with certain diseases will be deemed not worth the investment, and they will just—as Obama said—they’ll give them some pain pills and let them loop out until they die and they don’t even know what’s happened.” During a phone-in town hall on health care the same day as Limbaugh’s broadcast, President Obama will say something quite different from Limbaugh’s characterization (see July 28, 2009). MSNBC host Rachel Maddow says of Limbaugh’s allegations later that evening: “‘Democrats want to reform health care because it’s a secret plan to kill people.’ This is the kind of thing that when it shows up on the floor of the House or in a town hall with the president, you get a little glimpse of crazy. But the nest for this kind of crazy, where this stuff is hatched, it’s among the conservative base and in the conservative media. Conservative talk radio is really where they let it all hang out.” [MSNBC, 7/29/2009]

MacKilip’s altered photograph of Obama as a witch doctor. [Source: TPM Muckraker]Dr. David McKalip, a neurosurgeon, resigns as president-elect of the Pinellas County (Florida) Medical Association after circulating a graphic of President Obama dressed as a witch doctor with a bone through his nose. On July 23, he sent the graphic as an e-mail with the heading “Funny stuff,” and said that he thought the artist who created the graphic “was expressing concerns that the health care proposals [made by President Obama] would make the quality of medical care worse in our country.” McKalip is an outspoken opponent of the White House’s proposed health care reform package. He later apologized and denied he is a racist, and called the graphic merely a “satire.” In an e-mail to the members of the association, he writes, “For now, in the interest of protecting this movement from any collateral damage, I am withdrawing from making media appearances on health system reform.” But in an e-mail to fellow anti-reform protesters, he writes: “Here they come. The first of what likely will be many e-mails accusing me of being a rascist [sic] for forwarding this e-mail of Obama as a witch doctor. Almost like Hillary [Clinton] and the Obama photo form [sic] the presidential campaign.… This may be worth doing a story on about how these ultra-liberal groups like to race bait and avoid the issue.… Lesson learned: Any attempt to discuss politics will lead to a race-baiting war.… Don’t let them bait you. I will choose to ignore them and always talk about the issues.” In a previous e-mail defending his choice to send the Obama picture, McKalip cited his participation in a “career counseling day several years ago for African-American Boy Scouts.” [TPM Muckraker, 7/23/2009; Connexion, 7/28/2009] After learning of McKalip’s action, the association called the e-mail “inflammatory,” said it “denounced” McKalip’s act, demanded a public apology, and called itself “appalled by the statements and act” of McKalip. [Pinellas County Medical Association, 7/24/2009]

President Obama holds a “town hall” meeting on health care reform, sponsored by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). The meeting is conducted by telephone at AARP’s Washington headquarters, where a small studio audience and approximately 180,000 callers from around the country listen and take part.
Rumor Control - In his introduction, AARP CEO A. Barry Rand tells the participants: “There’s a lot of misinformation about health care reform—even on what AARP stands for, and what AARP supports. This town hall is part of our ongoing effort to debunk myths and provide accurate information.… I want to make it clear that AARP has not endorsed any particular bill or any of the bills being debated in Congress today. We continue to work with members of Congress on both sides of the aisle and with the administration to achieve what is right for health care reform.” AARP president Jennie Chin Hansen notes some of the most prevalent myths and misinformation about health care reform as expressed in previous AARP-sponsored town halls: “Like, will the government tell my doctor how to practice medicine?” For his part, Obama says: “Nobody’s trying to change what does work in the system. We are trying to change what doesn’t work in the system.” He reassures the participants that “Nobody is talking about cutting Medicare benefits. I just want to make that absolutely clear.… [W]e do want to eliminate some of the waste that is being paid for out of the Medicare trust fund that could be used more effectively to cover more people and strengthen the system.”
Opposition Profiting from Status Quo - Of the anti-reform opposition, Obama says: “I know there are folks who will oppose any kind of reform because they profit from the way the system is right now. They’ll run all sorts of ads that will make people scared.… Back when President Kennedy and then President Johnson were trying to pass Medicare, opponents claimed it was socialized medicine. When you look at the Medicare debate, it is almost exactly the same as the debate we’re having right now. Everybody who was in favor of the status quo was trying to scare the American people saying that government is going to take over your health care, you won’t be able to choose your own doctor, they’re going to ration care.… You know what? Medicare has been extraordinarily popular. It has worked. It has made people a lot healthier, given them security. And we can do the same this time.” If nothing is done to change the status quo, Obama says, the cost of health care coverage will rise dramatically. “Health care costs are going up much faster than inflation,” he says, “and your premiums will probably double again over the next 10 years.… We’re already seeing 14,000 people lose their health insurance every day. So the costs of doing nothing are trillions of dollars over the next couple of decades—trillions, not billions… without anybody getting any better care.” Controlling health care inflation will allow the government to stabilize the Medicare trust fund: “[N]ot only can we stabilize the Medicare trust fund, not only can we help save families money on their premiums, but we can actually afford to provide coverage to the people who currently don’t have health care.”
End-of-Life Rumors - One caller is concerned about rumors surrounding end-of-life care. “I have been told there is a clause in there that everyone that’s Medicare age will be visited and told to decide how they wish to die,” she says. “This bothers me greatly, and I’d like for you to promise me that this is not in this bill.” The host elaborates: “As I read the bill, it’s saying that Medicare will, for the first time, cover consultation about end-of-life care, and that they will not pay for such a consultation more than once every five years. This is being read as saying every five years you’ll be told how you can die.” Obama replies, “Well, that would be kind of morbid,” and reassures the caller that the rumors are not true, adding, “Nobody is going to be knocking on your door.” He explains that one proposal would have Medicare pay for consultations between doctor and patients about living wills, hospice care, and other information critical to end-of-life decisions. “The intent here is to simply make sure that you’ve got more information, and that Medicare will pay for it,” he says. “The problem right now is that most of us don’t give direction to our family members, so when we get really badly sick… the [doctors] are making decisions in consultation with your kids or your grandkids and nobody knows what you would have preferred.” Obama is refuting rumors that claim under his reform proposal, elderly Americans would be encouraged to die sooner (see July 16, 2009 and July 23, 2009).
Pre-Existing Conditions - Insurers will no longer be able to deny care to people with so-called “pre-existing conditions.” Obama reflects on his mother, who died of cancer: “She had to spend weeks fighting with insurance companies while she’s in the hospital bed, writing letters back and forth just to get coverage for insurance she’d already paid premiums on. And that happens all across the country. We’re going to put a stop to that.… We’re going to reform the insurance system so that they can’t just drop you if you get too sick. They won’t be able to drop you if you change jobs or lose your job.… We want clear, easy-to-understand, straightforward insurance that people can purchase.”
Keeping Existing Coverage - Obama reassures another caller that she will not have to drop the coverage she has. “Here’s a guarantee that I’ve made: If you have insurance that you like, then you’ll be able to keep that insurance. If you’ve got a doctor that you like, you’ll be able to keep your doctor. Nobody is going to say you’ve got to change your health care plan. This is not like Canada where suddenly we are dismantling the system and everybody’s signed up under some government program. If you’ve already got health care, the only thing we’re going to do for you is, we’re going to reform the insurance companies so that they can’t cheat you.… If you don’t have health insurance, we’re going to make it a little bit easier for you to be able to obtain health care.” Those dissatisfied with their coverage, or who have no coverage at all, would have a wider array of choices, including, perhaps, a government-run plan (the “public option”).
Rationing Health Care? - One caller asks, “Even if I decide when I’m 80 that I want a hip replacement, am I going to be able to get that?” Obama responds: “My interest is not in getting between you and your doctor—although keep in mind that right now insurance companies are often getting between you and your doctor. [Decisions] are being made by private insurance companies without any guidance as to whether [they] are good decisions to make people healthier or not. So we just want to provide some guidelines to Medicare, and by extension the private sector, about what [treatments] work and what doesn’t.… We don’t want to ration by dictating to somebody [that] we don’t think this senior should get a hip replacement. We do want to provide information to [you and your doctor about what] is going to be most helpful to you in dealing with your condition.” He gives the following analogy: “If you figure out a way to reduce your heating bill by insulating your windows… you’re still warm inside. [But] you’re not wasting all that energy and sending it in the form of higher bills to the electric or gas company. And that’s then money you can use to save for your retirement or help your kid go to college. Well, it’s the same principle within the health system.” Obama is refuting claims by health care opponents that the government intends to ration health care and deny elderly patients needed treatment (see November 23, 2008, January 27, 2009, February 9, 2009, February 11, 2009, February 18, 2009, May 13, 2009, June 24, 2009, June 25, 2009, July 10, 2009, July 16, 2009, July 17, 2009, July 21, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23-24, 2009, July 24, 2009, July 28, 2009, July 28, 2009, and July 28, 2009).
Reform Not 'Socialized Medicine' - Obama assures the participants that his vision of health care reform is not socialism under any guise. “A lot of people have heard this phrase ‘socialized medicine,’” he says. “And they say, ‘We don’t want government-run health care. We don’t want a Canadian-style plan.’ Nobody is talking about that. We’re saying, let’s give you a choice.” He recalls: “I got a letter from a woman the other day. She said, ‘I don’t want government-run health care. I don’t want socialized medicine. And don’t touch my Medicare.‘… I wanted to say, ‘That’s what Medicare is. It’s a government-run health care plan that people are very happy with.’”
Conclusion - Obama says he doesn’t expect a perfect health care system. “But we could be doing a lot better than we’re doing right now,” he says. “We shouldn’t have people who are working really hard every day without health care or with $8,000 deductibles—which means basically they don’t have health insurance unless they get in an accident or they get really sick. That just doesn’t make sense. So we’ve got to have the courage to be willing to change things.” After the town hall ends, AARP board chair Bonnie Cramer says she believes Obama “really made it very clear that Medicare beneficiaries will not see cuts in Medicare services.” By speaking directly to older Americans, Cramer says, “He put to rest a lot of their concerns.” [Slate, 7/28/2009; AARP Bulletin Today, 7/29/2009; McKnights, 7/29/2009]

Bernie Sanders. [Source: Down With Tyranny (.com)]Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a progressive independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats, explains to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow why Democrats are having so much difficulty winning broad support for their health care reform proposal. “There seems to be a gap between the seriousness of what’s actually being fought over in Washington right now and the level of discourse about it,” Maddow asks (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, and July 27, 2009). “Why do you think it is that there’s so much sideshow craziness about this issue?” Sanders responds that Democrats “have not been as clear as we should be in what, in fact, we are fighting for.” Sanders, a proponent of government-led “single-payer” health care, which would in essence supplement private health care and health insurance, says that because single-payer “is off of the table because of the power of the insurance companies and the drug companies,” the resulting proposals have become “pretty complicated… [opening] up opportunities for the extreme right-wing to come up with their crazy ideas.” Maddow says, “They’re sort of filling the vacuum of the lack of details that people don’t understand with craziness that people are willing to [believe].” The health care crisis is real, Sanders says, with thousands of Americans dying every year because of lack of access to doctors, and 1 million American families predicted to go bankrupt over staggering health care bills. But the discussion has been derailed, he says, into discussing “killing Grandma” and “rationing health care.” Sanders believes that the insurance companies, and their Republican and Democratic allies in Congress, are battling the so-called “public option”—providing a government-run health care alternative for people who can’t afford health care from the private providers—because they “are very afraid and rightfully so, that if given the choice, the people would gravitate towards a public plan because a public plan will not have the administrative costs, the huge CEO compensation costs, and the general bureaucracy that a [private] plan will have.” Besides, Sanders notes, “if you want to do any kind of cost containment, you need to have the competition from a public plan because without that, the private insurance companies will be out there on their own, being able to raise rates as much as they have in the past.” Health care corporations are spending $1.3 million per day lobbying lawmakers and other influential government officials, Sanders says, and health insurance and drug companies are spending millions on negative advertising. That kind of money has a powerful impact. “[W]ith all of that money coming into Capitol Hill,” he says, “I’m afraid that too many of my colleagues look at the world from the perspective of the insurance companies, from the drug companies who are charging us the highest prices for medicine in the entire world, rather than from the needs of ordinary Americans.” [MSNBC, 7/29/2009]

Slate reporter and columnist Christopher Beam coins a new term, “deathers,” to label conservatives who are spreading the debunked rumors that President Barack Obama’s health care proposals would kill old people (see July 16, 2009 and July 23, 2009). Beam publishes his article on the same day that Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC) claims that under Obama’s reforms, seniors would be “put to death” (see July 28, 2009), and that Obama holds a “town hall” meeting where he debunks this and other rumors surrounding his proposals (see July 28, 2009). The claim apparently originated with lobbyist and lawyer Betsy McCaughey (see November 23, 2008, January 27, 2009, February 9, 2009, February 11, 2009, February 18, 2009, May 13, 2009, June 24, 2009, June 25, 2009, July 16, 2009, and July 23-24, 2009), who used similarly questionable claims to derail the 1994 reform proposals by the Clinton administration (see Mid-January - February 4, 1994). Others have made similar assertions; Representative Paul Broun (R-GA) recently warned that Obama’s reform proposals would “kill people” (see July 10, 2009), and conservative commentator and author Charlotte Allen says: “Obama’s not going to say, ‘Let’s kill them.’ But he seems to be perfectly comfortable with the idea that a lot more old people are going to die a lot sooner.”
End-of-Life Consultations - Beam shows that the language of the bill, as it stands in Congress at this time, provides for “end-of-life consultations” between patients and doctors, if the patients wish them. In those consultations, doctors would explain what kind of services are available to those patients—palliative care and hospices, in-home care, more intensive treatments in a hospital, etc.—but would not tell patients that they had to restrict themselves to less intensive treatments that would shorten their lives. Some “deathers” have also insisted that the bill provides for the withholding of “artificially administered nutrition and hydration.” McCaughey is a vocal proponent of this claim. However, such a choice would have to be made by the patient and/or the family, specifically not a doctor.
Shared Decision-Making - Opponents of health care reform such as McCaughey claim that the House bill would “coerce” seniors into taking part in a program that forces them into making decisions about “trade-offs among treatment options,” or takes the final decision-making power away from them and places it in the hands of doctors or government officials. In reality, the bill would provide an informational tool for patients and families to make informed decisions. No coercion could legally be applied.
Obama Staffers Cause Concern - Some of Obama’s staffers have said and written things that cause consternation among reform opponents (see July 23-24, 2009). One of Obama’s senior health care advisers, Ezekiel Emanuel, who serves as health policy adviser at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), wrote in 2008 that doctors too often interpret the Hippocratic oath “as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others,” leading some to wonder if Emanuel would put cost concerns over patients’ needs; others have gone farther, comparing Emanuel to Nazi doctors and of advocating “eugenics.” In 1977, Obama’s “science czar,” John Holdren, joined two other authors in writing about possible methods of population control, including a speculative bit about sterilizing people by introducing chemicals into the water supply. (ABC News later reports that the controversial passage was from a textbook in which various methods of population control were considered and rejected. Holdren recently released a statement saying that population control is not the government’s job; his statements on the matter passed muster in the Senate Commerce Committee, whose Republican members joined Democrats in unanimously approving his nomination as the director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.) And some worry that the proposed Independent Medicare Advisory Council, which would oversee cost containment for Medicare, would be staffed, in Allen’s words, with “a certain class of secularized intellectuals” who might put cost concerns over quality of life. [Slate, 7/28/2009; ABC News, 7/28/2009]

Melissa Harris-Lacewell. [Source: Melissa Harris-Lacewell]Melissa Harris-Lacewell, professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton, attempts to explain the increasingly overt and virulent racism being promulgated by some conservative lawmakers, talk show hosts, and anti-health care protesters (see February 1, 2008, August 1, 2008 and After, August 4, 2008, August 19, 2008, November 18, 2008, February 24-26, 2009, April 7-8, 2009, July 24, 2009, July 25, 2009, and July 28, 2009). “[A]s a political scientist, you always want to start with the assumption that a political party, whatever choices it’s making are trying to seek office,” she says. She says one must assume that the racist rhetoric “is somehow a strategy of the right or strategy of an element of the GOP to somehow gain office either in the mid-term elections or more long term for the presidential race.” However, that is not the entirety of the reasons behind the rhetoric: “[T]he other part, I think, that I have maybe not been thinking about as carefully is that when we think about the history of race in America, sometimes we have to put aside the notion of strategy and just embrace the reality that race in this country has often brought out irrational anger, fear, anxiety, emotionalism. So it is possible that this is not actually a GOP or a conservative strategy but is instead really kind of an emotional tantrum on the part of some members of the conservative wing who really just are floundering as they look at a world that is changing so dramatically around questions of race.” MSNBC host Rachel Maddow expands on Harris-Lacewell’s point, saying: “I was with you on it being an irrational tantrum until I started to see the same very specific tactic used in very different venues about very different subjects, this idea of the person who is not white being the problem racist, being used against [Supreme Court nominee Sonia] Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009, May 26, 2009, May 28, 2009, May 28, 2009, May 29, 2009, May 29, 2009, June 5, 2009, and June 12, 2009)… being used against the president now, inexplicably, unrelated to any policy issue but just as a free floating critique of the president. And it does make me wonder about this as an overt political strategy.” Harris-Lacewell replies: “President Obama paused in the middle of the primary race to speak in Philadelphia about the question of race in America. And he set up sort of two possibilities, black anger rooted in a history of African-American inequality and white resentment rooted in a sense of kind of a loss of racial privilege. Now, I think in many ways it’s a very accurate assessment of sort of the ways that blacks and whites, not completely and not perfectly, but often perceive things quite differently. So I spent the month in New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina is a perfect example of this. Everybody in the country was mad but African-Americans saw the failures of the federal government around Katrina as a race issue. White Americans who were still angry about the failures of the government saw it primarily as a bureaucratic issue rather than a race issue. So here, you have these two groups with very different perspectives. Now, that made all the difference in being able to make policy. So I think that they’re hoping that these differences in how blacks and whites often see the world can be a perfect kind of wedge to use on health care, to use on education, to use on a wide variety of issues that, in fact, really—if we don’t fix health care, it is bad for all Americans. But if we can somehow kind of suggest that the president is just trying to do things that are good for black people and bad for white people, then it opens up that kind of possibility of anxiety, distrust, and different perceptions.” [MSNBC, 7/30/2009]

Fox News actively promotes the September 12, 2009 march on Washington, the central focus of Fox host Glenn Beck’s “9/12 Project” (see March 13, 2009 and After). Beck and Fox News have promoted the event before now, and will continue doing so, as a “nonpartisan” rally that is not “about parties or politics or the president.” However, the Fox promotions routinely feature attacks on Democratic lawmakers (see October 13, 2009). One of the organizing groups for the rally, the Tea Party Express, provides a list of 28 congressmen and women, all Democrats, targeted for defeat in 2010, “who have betrayed their constituents by pushing through massive deficits, higher taxes, and government intervention into the private sector and private lives of American families.” One of the organization’s funders, the Our Country Deserves Better political action committee (OCDBPAC), was created to promote Republican candidates and oppose the Obama administration’s agenda. In 2008, OCDBPAC stated that its only objective was “to defeat [Barack] Obama,” and hosted numerous rallies for Republican candidates John McCain and Sarah Palin. OCDBPAC’s vice chairman Mark Williams has frequently challenged Obama’s citizenship, calling him a “Kenyan” by birth, and once called Obama “the former Barry Soetoro (see October 8-10, 2008), Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug turned anointed.” [Media Matters, 7/29/2009]

The editors of the conservative National Review criticize the “birther” movement, which has for years claimed that President Obama is not a US citizen despite all evidence to the contrary (see July 20, 2008, August 15, 2008, October 8-10, 2008, October 16, 2008 and After, November 10, 2008, and December 3, 2008). Although the editorial mocks Obama’s character and political stances, it asserts that Obama is, indeed, a US citizen, and the evidence presented by the Obama campaign in 2008 is enough for anyone to accept that as fact (see June 13, 2008, June 27, 2008, July 2008, August 21, 2008, October 30, 2008, July 1, 2009, and July 28, 2009). “Much foolishness has become attached to the question of President Obama’s place of birth, and a few misguided souls among the Right have indulged it,” the editors write. They call the idea that Obama is not a citizen a “myth” that “represents the hunt for a magic bullet that will make all the unpleasant complications of his election and presidency disappear.” The editors say that conspiracy theories such as “birtherism” are usually promulgated by liberals and progressives, citing the “9/11 truther” movement and the various arguments made against the Iraq invasion and occupation as “left-wing” conspiracy theories. The editors believe that the White House, while probably not actually encouraging “birther” speculation, certainly takes advantage of it, because, they write, “[t]here is nothing that President Obama’s coterie would enjoy more than to see the responsible Right become a mirror image of the loopy Left circa 2003.” The editors write: “The fundamental fiction is that Obama has refused to release his ‘real’ birth certificate. This is untrue. The document that Obama has made available is the document that Hawaiian authorities issue when they are asked for a birth certificate. There is no secondary document cloaked in darkness, only the state records that are used to generate birth certificates when they are requested. If one applies for a United States passport, the passport office will demand a birth certificate. It defines this as an official document bearing ‘your full name, the full name of your parent(s), date and place of birth, sex, date the birth record was filed, and the seal or other certification of the official custodian of such records.’ The Hawaiian birth certificate President Obama has produced—the document is formally known as a ‘certificate of live birth’—bears that information. It has been inspected by reporters, and several state officials have confirmed that the information in permanent state records is identical to that on the president’s birth certificate—which is precisely what one expects, of course, since the state records are used to generate those documents when they are requested. In other words, what President Obama has produced is the ‘real’ birth certificate of myth and lore. The director of Hawaii’s health department and the registrar of records each has personally verified that the information on Obama’s birth certificate is identical to that in the state’s records, the so-called vault copy. Given that fact, we are loath even to engage the fanciful notion that President Obama was born elsewhere, contrary to the information on his birth certificate, but we note for the record that his mother was a native of Kansas, whose residents have been citizens of the United States for a very long time, and whose children are citizens of the United States as well.” However, the editors note, “[t]he hallmark of a conspiracy theory is that a lack of evidence for the theory is taken as yet more evidence for the theory. Indeed, the maddening thing about dealing with conspiracy hobbyists of this or any sort is the ever-shifting nature of their argument and their alleged evidence: Never mind the birth certificate, his step-grandmother said he was born in Kenya (see October 16, 2008 and After)! (No, she didn’t.)” [National Review, 7/28/2009]

Hawaii’s health director, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, releases a second statement that verifies President Obama was indeed born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961, and therefore is a valid US citizen. Fukino is responding to persistent rumors that Obama is not a valid US citizen and therefore is ineligible to serve as president. The statement reads: “I, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawaii State Department of Health, have seen the original vital records maintained on file by the Hawaii State Department of Health verifying Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii and is a natural-born American citizen. I have nothing further to add to this statement or my original statement issued in October 2008 over eight months ago.” Fukino released a similar statement before the 2008 presidential election (see October 30, 2008), which was derided by “birthers” who are convinced Obama is not a true American citizen. CNN’s Lou Dobbs has demanded to see Obama’s “long form” birth certificate, even though Hawaiian law states that all such documents remain under lock and key and are not publicly released; Dobbs continues to push the “birther” story on his nightly talk show, even though CNN’s US president Jon Klein has told Dobbs’s staffers that the issue is a “dead” story. Birthers dispute the fact that Obama was born in Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu on August 4, 1961, despite the release of a verified copy of the certificate (see June 13, 2008, June 27, 2008, and August 21, 2008), court rulings, and statements by Fukino and Hawaiian Governor Linda Lingle (R-HI). [Honolulu Advertiser, 7/28/2009]

Glenn Beck and the hosts of Fox & Friends. Brian Kilmeade is on the far right. [Source: Media Matters]Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck, appearing as a guest on Fox News’s morning show Fox & Friends, tells viewers that President Obama is a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred of white people.” During a discussion of a recent incident involving black professor Henry Gates and a white policeman, Beck says, “This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture, I don’t know what it is.” Host Brian Kilmeade notes that Obama has many people in his administration who are white, so “you can’t say he doesn’t like white people.” Beck continues making his point: “I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.” [Media Matters, 7/28/2009; Huffington Post, 7/28/2009; Chicago Tribune, 7/29/2009] Though Beck says nothing about the comments on his own show in the afternoon, the next day he reiterates his statements on his radio show. “I said yesterday on Fox News & Friends that the president is a racist; I think he has race issues.… Well, I stand by that—I deem him a racist, really, by his own standard of racism—the standard of the left.” [Daily Mail, 7/30/2009] Fox News vice president Bill Shine says of Beck’s comment: “During Fox & Friends this morning, Glenn Beck expressed a personal opinion which represented his own views, not those of the Fox News Channel. And as with all commentators in the cable news arena, he is given the freedom to express his opinions.” The Chicago Tribune’s Mark Silva will write, “The remarks may say more about Beck than Obama, and perhaps something about the level of political discourse that Fox is sponsoring in Beck.” [Chicago Tribune, 7/29/2009] Politico’s Michael Calderone calls Beck’s remarks “ridiculous,” but notes that Beck is in line with at least one other conservative commentator: Rush Limbaugh has recently called Gates, a scholar, author, and documentary maker, “an angry racist.” [Politico, 7/28/2009] MSNBC talk show host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, calls Beck’s comments little more than an attempt to garner attention. The White House declines to make a statement on Beck’s comments. [Daily Mail, 7/30/2009] In part because of Beck’s comments, a number of advertisers, including Proctor & Gamble, will soon remove their ads from his show. [Huffington Post, 8/6/2009] The African-American advocacy organization Color Of Change uses Beck’s comments to mount a call for more advertisers to drop their sponsorship of his shows. The organization calls his comments “repulsive” and “divisive.” [Color of Change, 7/29/2009]

Governor Tim Kaine (D-VA), chairman of the Democratic Party, defends his party’s difficulties in moving its health care reform proposals through Congress. Interviewed by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Kaine says: “This is a heavy lift. Every president since President Truman has said, we need to find a health care future where we have a competitive insurance market and all Americans receive coverage. What we’ve seen happen in the last month or so is we now have bills that have passed through three different committees in the Senate and House. Two other committees are expected to take action very soon. We’re farther than we’ve ever been. It’s heavy lifting. It ain’t easy. We’re going to have to take the various bills and then make them into a workable plan.” Part of the reason why the legislation is moving so slowly is that Democrats are ideologically diverse, Kaine says. “[A]n awful lot of this debate is ultimately getting the Democrats to pull together and be results-focused rather than what has to be my plan or I’m not getting onboard.” The situation in the Republican Party is quite different, he continues: “What I’m looking for among Republicans is, you know, are there any Republicans who are going to stand up and say, ‘You’re right, this system needs fundamental reform and change?’ A system where 15 years ago, more than 60 percent of small businesses provided health insurance to their employees, and today, 38 percent do, and that number is dropping like a stone while the percentage of GDP that we spend on health care is going up. That system is broken. You don’t hear a single voice really among Republican leadership standing up and acknowledging that and saying we’ve got to make some changes.” [MSNBC, 7/30/2009]

The press learns that in the final months of the 2008 presidential campaign, the McCain-Palin campaign investigated claims that then-Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) may not be a legitimate US citizen. The campaign investigation was spurred by reports of a court filing in Pennsylvania (see August 21-24, 2008). A lawyer contacted by the McCain-Palin campaign called the court filing “idiotic,” but the filing prompted the campaign to do some investigating of its own. Trevor Potter, a Washington attorney who served as general counsel to the 2008 McCain campaign, recalls: “We monitored the progress of these lawsuits against the Obama campaign. The McCain campaign faced a series of lawsuits like this, too, alleging that he could not be president because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone. Both campaigns took the position that these plaintiffs lacked standing.” Potter and other McCain legal experts quickly ruled out any chance of those lawsuits holding up in court. They also investigated the claims underlying the lawsuits. “To the extent that we could, we looked into the substantive side of these allegations,” Potter recalls. “We never saw any evidence that then-Senator Obama had been born outside of the United States. We saw rumors, but nothing that could be sourced to evidence. There were no statements and no documents that suggested he was born somewhere else. On the other side, there was proof that he was born in Hawaii. There was a certificate issued by the state’s Department of Health (see June 13, 2008), and the responsible official in the state saying that he had personally seen the original certificate (see October 30, 2008 and July 28, 2009). There was a birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser, which would be very difficult to invent or plant 47 years in advance” (see July 2008). [Washington Independent, 7/24/2009] McCain’s own citizenship has also been unsuccessfully challenged in court (see March 14 - July 24, 2008).

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly provides harsh criticism towards CNN talk show host Lou Dobbs for promoting the “birther” conspiracy theory, which claims that President Obama is not a US citizen (see July 20, 2008, August 15, 2008, October 8-10, 2008, October 16, 2008 and After, November 10, 2008, and December 3, 2008). O’Reilly says he and his staff have investigated the claims and found them groundless. He questions Dobbs’s choice to continue promoting the idea on his show, but in an interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Richard Cohen, defends Dobbs’s right to make the statements. O’Reilly says: “That theory has been around for a while. The Factor [O’Reilly’s talk show The O’Reilly Factor] investigated, found out it’s bogus. But Mr. Dobbs is still engaged.… Again, we found out that President Obama was born in Hawaii… we were sent the documents. And what are you gonna do? I don’t know why it’s still around.” When Cohen says that CNN should remove Dobbs from the airwaves, O’Reilly disagrees, saying: “Why are you guys overreacting?… It’s not true. Mr. Dobbs is, is trying to get ratings, trying to be provocative.” Cohen calls O’Reilly’s explanation a “poor excuse” and accuses Dobbs of “trading in right-wing baseless conspiracies for years.” [Huffington Post, 7/27/2009]

Representative Anthony Weiner (D-NY), a progressive Democrat who favors single-payer (government-provided) health care and is one of the strongest voices from the Democratic left in favor of the “public option” in health care reform, introduces an amendment to the pending health care reform legislation, HR 3200, that would eliminate Medicare. Weiner has no intention of actually trying to eliminate Medicare, instead he wants to get Republicans, who have repeatedly said they don’t want “government health care” (see November 23, 2008, January 27, 2009, February 9, 2009, February 11, 2009, February 18, 2009, May 13, 2009, June 24, 2009, June 25, 2009, July 10, 2009, July 16, 2009, July 17, 2009, July 21, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23-24, 2009, July 24, 2009, July 28, 2009, July 28, 2009, and July 28, 2009) to go on record as supporting Medicare, a government-run health care provider. Weiner tells interviewer Rachel Maddow: “I guess Republicans don’t like publicly funded, publicly administered health plans except for Medicare, and, I guess, except for the Veterans Administration and except for the health care that our military gets from the Department of Defense. The fact of the matter is, what we’ve learned is that government administered health care works pretty darn well. It’s got lower overhead and people like it. So, when my Republican colleagues pound the drum and pound the podium about how they hate government-run health care, I guess they haven’t looked at what they get.” Weiner says he introduced the amendment in part to embarrass House Republicans whose rhetoric on public health care he thinks has become quite harsh. [MSNBC, 7/31/2009]

Jon Kyl (R-AZ), the Senate minority whip, says that the health care industry needs no further regulation or government intervention: “The health insurance industry is the most regulated or one of the most regulated industries in America. They don’t need to be kept honest by a competitor from the government.” Kyl is referring to the proposed “public option” in the Democrats’ pending health care reform legislation, which would provide a government-run alternative to private health care for millions of Americans. [MSNBC, 7/31/2009]

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) says of the corporate-led resistance to health care reform (see April 14, 2009, April 15, 2009, May 29, 2009, July 27, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, Before August 6, 2009, and August 6-7, 2009): “Insurance companies are out there in full force, carpet bombing, shock and awe against the public option. These are initiatives that are very important in this legislation, and they are to correct what the insurance companies have done to America and to the health of our people over the years.” Afterwards, Pelosi is equally blunt, telling reporters: “It is somewhat immoral what they are doing. Of course, they have been immoral all along how they have treated the people they insure. They are the villains in this. They have been part of the problem in a major way. The public has to know that.” [MSNBC, 7/31/2009]

Gregg Jarrett, guest host of Fox News’s “straight news” broadcast The Live Desk (see October 13, 2009), tells viewers that the Obama Justice Department “thinks it’s okay to intimidate white people, not okay to intimidate black people at the polls.” Jarrett and others are discussing the Justice Department’s decision to dismiss a case against the New Black Panthers, who had been accused of intimidating white voters during the November 2008 elections. Jarrett interviews Washington Times editor John Solomon, whose paper implied, without proof, that the decision to drop the case may have come from “senior elected or politically appointed” White House officials and not from career prosecutors who felt the case lacked merit, as the Justice Department says. Solomon says that during the Bush administration, Congressional Democrats “very strongly raised questions about the politicization of the Justice Department—political people, or career people answering to political people, overruling the front lines of the Justice Department, and this fits that debate right now in the Justice Department. And I think Congress, the Republicans and some Democrats, are asking questions now about whether career people got their say here and whether they were really listened to, or whether some other agenda had been carried out.” Jarrett then notes: “Well, the other message may be that this is a Department of Justice who thinks it’s okay to intimidate white people, not okay to intimidate black people at the polls. That could be one conclusion that people may reach here by their decision.” [Media Matters, 7/30/2009]

Stars and Stripes, the official news outlet for the US military, publishes an analysis of a lawsuit filed by Army reservist Major Stefan Cook, who asked a court to stop his deployment to Afghanistan because of his doubt that President Obama is a US citizen and therefore lacks the authority of commander in chief. The lawsuit was dismissed after the Army rescinded its deployment orders for Cook (see July 8-16, 2009). Stars and Stripes reporter Megan McCloskey writes: “[T]he Army reservist’s intention appeared not so much to fight for America as to fight against President Barack Obama, in furtherance of a bizarre conspiracy theory.… Cook is one of the so-called ‘birthers,’ a small group of activists who subscribe to a fringe conspiracy theory alleging that Obama was not born in the United States and therefore cannot legally serve as president. The conspiracy theory, proven false by numerous media investigations as well as officials in the state of Hawaii where Obama was born (see June 13, 2008, August 21, 2008, October 30, 2008, and July 28, 2009), first surfaced early in the presidential campaign, but in recent months it has continued to fester on the Internet.” McCloskey theorizes that the lawsuit was engendered by Cook’s attorney, “birther” lawyer Orly Taitz (see November 12, 2008 and After and March 13, 2009), in order to “gain [her] a few more minutes of screen time on the cable news networks. Taitz, a Russian-born dentist who got her law degree online, is the public face of the birthers. She has been trying to get the conspiracy theory heard in court since before the election. So far, all of the lawsuits brought by the birthers have been summarily dismissed.” The Army, McCloskey writes, “refused to be baited” by this lawsuit. Lieutenant Colonel Holly Silkman, a spokesperson for SOCCENT (US Special Operations Central Command), says Cook’s critical engineer billet could not be “hijacked by further legal wrangling.” Cook was scheduled to deploy on July 15, and his position cannot sit empty. The officer Cook was supposed to replace “is going to have to remain in Afghanistan a while longer,” Silkman says, and adds that the Army is working to find a replacement: “No one has been identified yet, but it is a priority fill, so we’re working on it and expect to fill it soon. Engineers are in high demand.” Taitz, interviewed by McCloskey, tells the reporter: “I have one question: Why would any member of the US military risk his life or take any orders… from someone who is refusing to prove he is the legitimate president? We can’t stand for the arrogant, obnoxious behavior of Obama. He wants to defraud the whole nation.” Taitz refuses to allow McCloskey to interview Cook. Brandon Friedman of VoteVets (.org), a political action committee seeking to elect veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to public office, says of Cook: “That’s not leadership. That’s not the way Major Cook was trained and brought up in the Army. You don’t leave a unit like that, and you certainly don’t do it because you’re trying to make a political statement.” [Stars and Stripes, 7/30/2009]

Anti-health care reform proponents claim that the Democrats’ reform package will allow the government direct access to US citizens’ bank accounts. In some variants of the claim, the government will steal money from those accounts to fund the reform package. The claim is quickly disproven.
From an E-mailed 'Clearinghouse of Bad Information' - Apparently the claim originates in a “chain e-mail” sent out by an anonymous anti-reformer. The e-mail, which references its claims by page numbers from HR 3200, the pending House version of the reform legislation, is characterized by the St. Petersburg Times’s “PolitiFact” team as a hugely long e-mail that they call “a clearinghouse of bad information circulating around the Web about proposed health care changes.” The e-mail is apparently based in part on the work of Peter Fleckenstein, who sends frequent and regular commentaries on Twitter under the name “Fleckman,” and posts his analyses on his blog. Fleckenstein identifies his Twitter comments with the tag #tcot, which stands for “top conservatives on Twitter.” A health care analyst with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, Jennifer Tolbert, calls the e-mail “awful.… It’s flat-out, blatant lies. It’s unbelievable to me how they can claim to reference the legislation and then make claims that are blatantly false.” Tolbert is particularly offended by the e-mail’s claim that ordinary citizens will suffer a lack of health care in order to provide free care for illegal immigrants. Many of the e-mail’s other claims are equally wrong.
Based on Provision for Electronic Health Records - The claim that “[t]he federal government will have direct, real-time access to all individual bank accounts for electronic funds transfer” is based on a portion of the legislation that provides for electronic health records, including the enabling of “electronic funds transfers in order to allow automated reconciliation” between payment and billing. However, the government will not have access to citizens’ bank accounts and will not be able to make unauthorized withdrawals. [St. Petersburg Times, 7/30/2009; TPM Muckraker, 8/11/2009]
Quick Promulgation - However, the lie quickly makes the rounds of conservative anti-reformers. Talk show host Rush Limbaugh cites the false claim numerous times on his radio broadcast; on August 6, he calls the program “[d]irect deposit access to every individual’s bank account,” and says: “That is in the House bill. You think that’s the worst thing in it. I’m not arguing with you, but there are things that are a greater abomination than that. I mean, this bill determines, the government’s going to determine who lives and dies. They are going to fund abortions and they are going to be for euthanasia on the back end” (see November 23, 2008, January 27, 2009, February 9, 2009, February 11, 2009, February 18, 2009, May 13, 2009, June 24, 2009, June 25, 2009, July 10, 2009, July 16, 2009, July 17, 2009, July 21, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23-24, 2009, July 24, 2009, July 28, 2009, July 28, 2009, July 28, 2009, July 31, 2009 - August 12, 2009, August 6, 2009, August 7, 2009, August 10, 2009, and August 10, 2009). On a local conservative radio show in early August, Representatative John Shadegg (R-AZ) calls the supposed provision “pretty Orwellian.” On August 11, a participant in a “town hall” forum hosted by Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA) asks about the claim. [KFYI, 8/2009; Rush Limbaugh, 8/6/2009; TPM Muckraker, 8/11/2009]
Similar to Automatic Bill Payment - Progressive media watchdog Web site Media Matters notes: “[I]f you’re paying back a student loan from the government (like we are) and you’ve set up automatic bill pay online, this is the same thing. Completely uncontroversial, and totally not scary—unless if you’re trying to fearmonger.” [Media Matters, 8/6/2009]

Afghan President Hamid Karzai attempts to cut a secret deal with one of his presidential election rivals in a bid to knock his strongest challenger from the race, to ensure a clear victory and, ostensibly, the minimization of sectarian violence a tight result might provoke in the hyper-armed country. In the proposed deal, Karzai asks former Afghan finance minister Ashraf Ghani, a candidate currently running third in the polls, to give up his election bid in exchange for a job as “chief executive”—a post described as similar to prime minister—in a Karzai government. Such an agreement would likely unite the Pashtun vote and knock Karzai’s main contender, Abdullah Abdullah, out of the race. Karzai’s offer will be confirmed by several sources, including Ghani himself, and may have backing from top US officials. “If Ghani agrees to the terms, Karzai will dump his team and move forward, with Karzai as president and Ghani as chief executive,” one campaign official will tell The Independent. During the election campaign, Karzai has made deals with tribal leaders and various warlords, promising them positions and patronage in exchange for the votes they control. The Independent cites international officials who believe that as many as 20 cabinet positions have already been pledged.
Karzai's Offer Confirmed - President Karzai’s brother, Qayum Karzai, is the first to approach Ghani with the proposal according to sources close to Karzai’s inner circle. Karzai presents Ghani with the argument that Ghani can’t win the election anyway, and even if he did, he wouldn’t be able to hold on to power. Ghani’s staff will also confirm that Karzai emissaries make an offer, but they say that Ghani has no plans to pull out of the race and will continue his campaign. Ghani himself will later confirm Karzai’s overture. “I’ve been approached repeatedly, the offer is on the table. I have not accepted it. The issue is the extent of crisis. We are in a very difficult moment in our history,” he will tell reporters in the province of Faryab (see August 8, 2009).
Top US Diplomats Holbrooke and Eikenberry Back the Proposal - Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Karl Eikenberry, the US ambassador, are understood to have discussed the proposal with Ghani, according to the Independent report. “It makes sense,” a policy analyst with close links to the US administration says. “Holbrooke likes Ghani, and he has come round to the fact that Karzai will probably win.” Furthermore, The Independent notes that the idea of a chief executive was originally devised in Washington as a way of handing the responsibility of running the government to a skilled technocrat, a profile that certainly fits Ghani. The Washington Post will later report that according to Afghan Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta, US officials back the idea of a new chief executive position under Karzai. The Post also reports that US officials have discussed the “chief executive” proposal with Ghani. US embassy officials, however, deny any involvement in back-room deals. [Independent, 8/7/2009; Washington Post, 8/14/2009]
Threats of Post-Election Armed Protests, Civil War - Analysts and journalists suggest that Afghanistan’s coming elections threaten to split the country along ethnic and sectarian lines, possibly igniting a civil war reminiscent of the 1990s (see March 13, 1994). “The whole country is armed. Everybody has weapons. You have to keep everyone happy,” one Afghan analyst says. Anticipating fraudulent results, Abdullah’s campaign staff have threatened to hold demonstrations if Karzai wins. Abdullah’s supporters, who are largely Tajik, have warned of Iranian-style protests, but “with Kalashnikovs,” should Karzai win a second term. [Independent, 8/7/2009; Reuters, 8/8/2009]

Progressive author and columnist Joe Conason writes that if the Democrats’ attempt to reform health care fails, “much of the blame rests on our political culture’s empowerment of deception and ignorance. Fake erudition is revered, every hoax is deemed brilliant, and prejudice is presented as knowledge—while actual expertise is disregarded or devalued.” Conason points to two conservative commentators as primary founts of destructive misinformation: neoconservative publisher and cable news pundit William Kristol, and health industry lobbyist Betsy McCaughey (see January 27, 2009, February 9, 2009, February 11, 2009, February 18, 2009, July 16, 2009, and July 23-24, 2009), whom Conason names as “the right-wing celebrities who worked so hard to kill the Clinton reform plan” in 1994 (see Mid-January - February 4, 1994). Conason labels McCaughey as “the source of the ‘elderly euthanasia’ hoax now circulating on the Internet, talk radio, and in right-wing media, which claims that Democratic health bills will force old, ill Medicare recipients into making plans for their own deaths” (see July 28, 2009). A thorough debunking of her claims by a variety of Congressional and media sources (see July 23, 2009, July 23, 2009, and Late July, 2009) has done little to derail the impact on the media, and on the citizenry, that McCaughey’s claims are having. McCaughey’s falsehoods are being heavily, and effectively, promoted by Kristol and other conservative pundits (see July 17, 2009) on Fox News and other media outlets. Conason notes that Kristol, interviewed by Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, admitted that the government provides “first-class” healthcare to American soldiers and senior citizens (in the form of the Veterans Administration and Medicare) before trying, and failing, to back away from the admission. [Salon, 7/31/2009]

Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), who co-authored the provision in the House health care reform legislation mandating that Medicare would pay for periodic “end-of-life” counseling sessions between patients and doctors, releases a fact sheet called “Myth vs. Fact: Advance Planning Consultations in HR 3200” (see November 23, 2008, January 27, 2009, February 9, 2009, February 11, 2009, February 18, 2009, May 13, 2009, June 24, 2009, June 25, 2009, July 10, 2009, July 16, 2009, July 17, 2009, July 21, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23-24, 2009, July 24, 2009, July 28, 2009, July 28, 2009, July 28, 2009, and July 31, 2009 - August 12, 2009). Blumenauer writes: “Few areas are more vital for honest discussion and careful consideration than end-of-life care for America’s seniors. Unfortunately, families often do not know their loved ones’ preferences for end-of-life care and are not confronted with these difficult decisions until an emergency arises. This leaves spouses, sons, daughters, and grandchildren unprepared; as a result families struggle to make decisions in the midst of turmoil. The House health care legislation includes a provision (Sec. 1233) that provides seniors with better care as they grapple with these hard questions. This provision extends Medicare coverage to cover the cost of patients voluntarily speaking with their doctors about their values and preferences regarding end-of-life care. These are deeply personal decisions that take thoughtful consideration, and it is only appropriate that doctors be compensated for their time.” He then corrects three “myths” surrounding the provision:
Myth: Patients will be forced to have this consultation once every five years. In reality, he writes, such advance planning consultations are entirely voluntary; the provision mandates that Medicare will pay for one such consultation every five years if the patient chooses. Under certain circumstances, Medicare will pay for more frequent consultations.
Myth: Patients will be forced to sign an advance care directive (or living will). Blumenauer writes that no such mandate exists in the legislation, or is being contemplated. Like the advance planning consultations, living wills are entirely voluntary.
Myth: Patients will have to see a health care professional chosen by the government. The government will not choose any health care professionals for anyone. If a patient chooses to have an advance planning consultation, it will be with a doctor of his or her choosing.
Blumenauer notes that the following organizations have endorsed his provision: the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, the American College of Physicians, the American Hospice Foundation, the Center to Advance Palliative Care, Consumers Union, Gundersen Lutheran Health System, the Hospice and Palliative Nursing Association, Medicare Rights Center, the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, the National Palliative Care Research Center, Providence Health and Services, and the Supportive Care Coalition. [US House of Representatives, 7/2009 ; Politico, 7/28/2009]

The Internet news site Politico reports on the quickly escalating confrontations occurring at “town hall” meetings held around the country, featuring conservative protesters agitating against the White House’s health care reform proposals (see Late July, 2009). Reporter Alex Isenstadt writes: “Screaming constituents, protesters dragged out by the cops, congressmen fearful for their safety—welcome to the new town hall-style meeting, the once-staid forum that is rapidly turning into a house of horrors for members of Congress.” The meetings, held by Democratic House members attempting to discuss the health care proposals with their constituents, have quickly devolved into confrontational events disrupted by shouting, cursing protesters waving signs and shouting down speakers, often before they can begin speaking.
Other Methods to Discuss Issue with Constituents - After one such meeting (see June 22, 2009), House member Tim Bishop (D-NY) says he will not hold more town halls until late August. “I had felt they would be pointless,” he says. “There is no point in meeting with my constituents and [to] listen to them and have them listen to you if what is basically an unruly mob prevents you from having an intelligent conversation.” He adds: “I have no problem with someone disagreeing with positions I hold. But I also believe no one is served if you can’t talk through differences.” Other Democrats such as Bruce Braley (D-IA), Allen Boyd (D-FL), and Thomas Perriello (D-VA) have experienced similar incidents at their own town hall meetings. Isenstadt characterizes the meetings as plagued by “boiling anger and rising incivility.” Braley explains the heated protests by saying, “I think it’s just the fact that we are dealing with some of the most important public policy issues in a generation.” Bishop notes: “I think in general what is going on is we are tackling issues that have been ignored for a long time, and I think that is disruptive to a lot of people. We are trying, one by one, to deal with a set of issues that can’t be ignored, and I think that’s unsettling to a lot of people.” Dan Maffei (D-NY), whose July 12 meeting at a Syracuse middle school was disrupted, says he is considering other options to avoid the confrontations. “I think you’ve got to communicate through a variety of different ways,” he says. “You should do the telephone town hall meetings. You should do the town hall meetings. You should do the smaller group meetings. It’s important to do things in a variety of ways, so you don’t have one mode of communication. You’re going to have people of varying views, and in this case, you’ve got the two extremes who were the most vocal.” Russ Carnahan (D-MO) says he enjoys the town hall meetings, and will not let disruptions stop him from holding them. Perriello agrees. “I enjoy it, and people have a chance to speak their mind,” he says.
Countering the Protesters - Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), has planned countermethods for the spate of meetings to be held during the August recess. According to sources familiar with the meetings Van Hollen has held, Van Hollen advised his fellow Democrats to “Go on offense. Stay on the offense. It’s really important that your constituents hear directly from you. You shouldn’t let a day go by [that] your constituents don’t hear from you.”
Continuing the Protests - Van Hollen’s Republican counterpart, Pete Sessions (R-TX), who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), says the protests will continue. “We’ve seen Russ Carnahan, we’ve seen Tim Bishop, we’ve seen some other people face some very different crowds back home,” he says. “The days of you having a town hall meeting where maybe 15 or 20 of your friends show up—they’re over. You’ve now got real people who are showing up—and that’s going to be a factor.” Asked if the Republicans would use the confrontations against Democrats, Sessions says, “Wait till next year.”
Possible Backlash? - Democrats warn that Republicans will likely face a backlash in public opinion if the public perceives the party as being too closly aligned with tea party activists or other radical-right protesters. Former DCCC political director Brian Smoot says: “It’s a risk that they align themselves with such a small minority in the party. They risk alienating moderates.” [Politico, 7/31/2009]

A screenshot from a Democratic National Committee ad highlighting phrases from the memo. [Source: Weekly Standard]The conservative Web site and political action committee (PAC) Right Principles releases a memo entitled “Rocking the Town Halls: Best Practices,” written by Bob MacGuffie, a founder of the organization and a volunteer with the “Tea Party Patriots,” a subsidiary of the conservative lobbying group FreedomWorks (see April 14, 2009). [Think Progress, 7/31/2009; Tea Party Patriots, 8/6/2009] The organization is very small—basically MacGuffie and four friends—and although MacGuffie volunteers with the aforementioned tea party group, he insists he and his organization have no connections to the much larger and well-funded FreedomWorks or other lobbying organizations that support anti-health care protests. “We are recommending with that memo that other grassroots groups that share our view should go to the town halls of their members and use the strategy that we did,” MacGuffie says. “We are trying to get into that town halls to make them understand that they do not have the unanimous support from people in their communities.” [TPMDC, 8/3/2009] Although the site either never posts the memo or takes it down shortly after, it quickly circulates throughout the conservative community (see July 23, 2009), and will be used to disrupt “town hall” meetings by Democratic House members, who intend to spend time during the August recess holding such meetings to discuss the Obama administration’s health care proposals. [Right Principles, 2009; Think Progress, 7/31/2009] MacGuffie later claims to have first e-mailed the memo to “8-10 community activists” in June. [Weekly Standard, 8/5/2009]
'Best Practices' - The memo advises conservative activists and protesters of the best ways to dominate and disrupt the town hall meetings. Basing the memo on actions conducted by Right Principles members and supporters during a May 2009 town hall meeting held by Congressman Jim Himes (D-CT), MacGuffie writes, “We believe there are some best practices which emerged from the event and our experience, which could be useful to activists in just about any district where their congressperson has supported the socialist agenda of the Democrat leadership in Washington.” Some of the steps include:
Artificially inflating numbers. “Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The objective is to put the rep on the defensive with your questions and follow-up. The rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington.”
Being disruptive from the outset. “You need to rock the boat early in the rep’s presentation. Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the rep’s statements early.” The memo also advises, “Don’t carry on and make a scene, just short, intermittent shout-outs.”
Attempt to rattle or goad the speaker. “The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right back down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions.”
The memo also attaches some possible questions for the representatives, “which apply to most any Democrat that is supporting the socialist agenda,” it says. [Bob MacGuffie, 7/2009 ; Think Progress, 7/31/2009] Progressive news and advocacy Web site Think Progress will note that the questions closely resemble talking points handed out in July by FreedomWorks. [Think Progress, 7/31/2009] Liberal MSNBC host Rachel Maddow will accuse Right Principles of crafting a “how-to” manual for disruptive “rent-a-mob” activities. [Washington Times, 8/6/2009] The conservative Weekly Standard will accuse “liberal media” outlets such as Think Progress and MSNBC of “manufacturing outrage” over the memo, and prints MacGuffie’s denials of having any connections to FreedomWorks. “There is no formal connection,” he says. “I don’t know anyone from FreedomWorks.” [Weekly Standard, 8/5/2009]

Professor Stephen Hawking. [Source: Quarkscrew (.com)]The conservative publication Investors’ Business Daily (IBD) writes an editorial harshly criticizing the Democrats’ health care reform package. The editorial repeats the debunked canard that the reform proposal will mandate allowing elderly, less “productive” citizens to die rather than pay to keep them alive (see November 23, 2008, January 27, 2009, February 9, 2009, February 11, 2009, February 18, 2009, May 13, 2009, June 24, 2009, June 25, 2009, July 10, 2009, July 16, 2009, July 17, 2009, July 21, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23, 2009, July 23-24, 2009, July 24, 2009, July 28, 2009, July 28, 2009, and July 28, 2009). The IBD compares the US health care system to Britain’s government-run National Health Service (NHS), claiming that in Britain health care is strictly rationed and routinely allows people to die if they don’t meet up with the criteria for paying for their care. “The British have succeeded in putting a price tag on human life, as we are about to,” the editorial claims. In the original version of the editorial, the editors write, “People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.” The IBD editors are apparently unaware that Hawking was born in Oxford, England, lives in Britain, teaches at the University of Cambridge, and has been supported by Britain’s health care system for his entire life. The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein writes: “You could write some long response to the rest of the lies and distortions in that IBD editorial, but the more appropriate reply is to just warn people against ever reading the editorial page in Investor’s Business Daily. It’s not just that they didn’t know that Stephen Hawking was born in England. It’s that the underlying point was wrong, as you’ll note from the continued existence of Stephen Hawking. They didn’t choose an unfortunate example for an accurate point. They simply lied.” Hawking himself tells Guardian columnist Hugh Muir: “I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.” After the corrections, IBD alters the editorial to omit the Hawking reference, but does not acknowledge that Hawking has remained alive due to NHS medical interventions. [Investor's Business Daily, 7/31/2009; Washington Post, 8/10/2009; Guardian, 8/11/2009; Huffington Post, 8/13/2009]

Congressman Patrick Murphy (D-PA) holds a session designed to allow him to discuss the proposed health care reform package with his constituents on a one-on-one basis. The event, held at a restaurant in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, draws so many would-be participants, many of whom are unruly and volatile, that Murphy agrees to change the format and discuss health care and other issues with the entire group. Murphy’s remarks are received with shouts, screams, curses, and repeated attempts to interrupt Murphy with slogans and chanting, mostly from conservative anti-reform protesters. According to a local reporter, Murphy “kept his cool, listening to people’s concerns and defending his plans while occasionally asking hecklers ‘to be respectful.’” Murphy holds a second, equally contentious meeting at a local grocery store, although, a reporter notes, “the crowd seemed more evenly divided politically at the supermarket than the restaurant.” Murphy says: “The great thing about Bucks County is that people really can be very passionate. So that’s why I don’t flinch and give them their chance to talk while most of my colleagues are putting their heads in the sand.” At both meetings, Murphy draws an extended session of boos and catcalls when he tells the crowds, “I happen to think [President Obama is] doing a pretty great job.” He repeatedly calls the present health care system “unsustainable,” and stresses that he supports the so-called “public option,” which would allow people to choose between a private and government-supervised health care plan. He also says that if the public option becomes available, he and his family will use it. He is repeatedly asked whether the various health care proposals contain provisions for mandating the “euthanasia” of elderly people, which none of the proposals feature. And he insists that the reform package will benefit small business owners and will not raise taxes for ordinary Americans. One anti-reform protester shouts, “A national health care bill would rob us of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” to which a pro-reform advocate retorts: “You’ve had your say. Now shut your mouth.” Murphy intervenes: “Let him speak,” he says. One resident says after the meetings: “Deciding to open up the question to the full crowd was a good idea, but I think many people are still confused as to what the bill is trying to accomplish. The question is, what type of health care will be available to citizens, and at what price?” Another audience member praises Murphy’s calm in the face of sometimes-ugly opprobrium. “If I was in his shoes, I don’t think I could have done it,” he says. “He was very respectful and did a good job trying to keep tempers down.” [Bucks County Courier Times, 8/2/2009]

Anti-reform protesters carry signs depicting Doggett with ‘devil horns’ and a sign featuring Nazi SS lettering. [Source: Raw Story]Congressman Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) receives a hostile reception in a town hall meeting in an Austin grocery store. The meeting is to discuss the controversial Democratic health care reform proposal. The crowd is much larger than some had anticipated, and apparently packed with anti-health care reform protesters; anti-reform and anti-Obama signs are prominently displayed, including signs that read, “No Socialized Health Care.” Protesters also wave signs with Doggett depicted with devil horns, of a marble tombstone with Doggett’s name on it, and with slogans alleging Democrats are Nazis. When Doggett tells the crowd that he will support the reform plan even if his constituents oppose it, many in the crowd begin chanting “Just say no!” and, according to news reports, “overwhelm… the congressman as he move[s] through the crowd and into the parking lot.” One resident says of the meeting: “The folks there thought their voices weren’t being heard. They were angry, but they were respectful. There wasn’t any violence.” Another says, laughing: “He jumped in [his car] and fled. It was like he was tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. It was a beautiful thing.” Doggett later notes that because of the disruption, he is unable to engage in discussion with constituents who have other issues, including a father who wants his help in getting his son into a military academy. [Austin American-Statesman, 8/3/2009; New York Times, 8/3/2009; Atlantic Monthly, 8/4/2009]
Congressman: Protesters a 'Mob' - Doggett will later characterize the anti-reform protesters as a “mob.” In a statement, he says: “This mob, sent by the local Republican and Libertarian parties, did not come just to be heard, but to deny others the right to be heard. And this appears to be part of a coordinated, nationwide effort. What could be more appropriate for the ‘party of no’ than having its stalwarts drowning out the voices of their neighbors by screaming ‘just say no!‘… Their fanatical insistence on repealing Social Security and Medicare is not just about halting health care reform but rolling back 75 years of progress. I am more committed than ever to win approval of legislation to offer more individual choice to access affordable health care. An effective public plan is essential to achieve that goal.” [Politico, 8/3/2009; CBS News, 8/3/2009]
Coordinated by Local Republicans, Washington Lobbyist Firm, 'Tea Party' Group - The protest is coordinated by Heather Liggett, a local Republican Party operative, and by officials with the lobbying firm Americans for Prosperity (AFP), which has organized numerous anti-tax “tea party” demonstrations (see April 15, 2009 and May 29, 2009). Liggett confirms she is part of a national network of conservative organizers putting together anti-reform protests. Doggett says: “This is not a grassroots effort. This is a very coordinated effort where the local Republican Party, the local conservative meet-up groups sent people to my event.” Of the event itself, he says: “In Texas, not only with the weather but with the politics, it is pretty hardball around here. I have a pretty thick skin about all of this. But this really goes over the line.” And Jennifer Crider, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), adds: “Conservative activists don’t want to have a conversation. They want to disrupt.” [New York Times, 8/3/2009] Democratic National Committee (DNC) spokesman Brad Woodhouse says, “The right-wing extremists’ use of things like devil horns on pictures of our elected officials, hanging members of Congress in effigy, breathlessly questioning the president’s citizenship, and the use of Nazi SS symbols and the like just shows how outside of the mainstream the Republican Party and their allies are.” Another group with connections to the “tea party” movement, “Operation Embarrass Your Congressman,” helped organize the protest. It says on its Web site: “These arrogant, ignorant, and insolent [Congress members] have embarrassed America, trampled the Constitution, and ignored their constituents for far too long. Attend their townhall meetings during recess and press them with intelligent questions (unlike the mainstream media), asked in an intelligent manner to see if they are really in touch and on board with ‘the will of the people.’” [CBS News, 8/3/2009] After the meeting, FreedomWorks, a conservative lobbying organization that actively promotes disruptive behavior at Congressional town halls (see April 14, 2009), posts video from the meeting, and exhorts its members, “If you know of a town hall meeting your Congressman is having, be sure to show up, bring some friends, and them know what you think.” [FreedomWorks, 8/3/2009]

Mary Patrice Brown. [Source: Allgov (.com)]The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) recommends reversing a Bush-era policy and reopening nearly a dozen prisoner abuse investigations, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan. The decision could potentially expose CIA employees and contractors to prosecution for crimes involving brutalizing and torturing prisoners in US custody, particularly as some detainees died in custody and others were physically and mentally abused. The OPR makes the recommendation in early August, but the information is not reported in the media until later in the month. The decision comes as the Justice Department is ready to disclose new information on prisoner abuse from a 2004 report by the CIA’s inspector general that has never before been released (see May 7, 2004). The Bush-era Justice Department chose not to pursue investigations into any of the allegations, deciding that none of them warranted further inquiry. However, Attorney General Eric Holder reconsidered that decision after he saw the allegations and the accompanying evidence, much of which is contained in the 2004 CIA report. The OPR gives Holder additional leverage to reopen the investigations. The OPR report is primarily authored by the office’s new chief, Mary Patrice Brown, a federal prosecutor picked to replace the office’s former head, H. Marshall Jarrett, who is working elsewhere in the Justice Department. One case under review is that of Iraqi citizen Manadel al-Jamadi, who died in 2003 at Abu Ghraib prison (see Between 4:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. November 4, 2003) after being captured by a team of Navy SEALs. Prosecutors believe he received his fatal injuries from his captors, but lawyers for the SEALs deny the charge. During President Bush’s tenure, the Justice Department responded to inquiries about the incidents from Democratic lawmakers with little more than summaries of the numbers of cases under scrutiny, and provided virtually no details about individual cases or explanations as to why the department chose not to prosecute. [New York Times, 8/24/2009]

The fraudulent birth certificate presented by California lawyer Orly Taitz ‘proving’ that Barack Obama was born in a Kenyan hospital. [Source: Snopes (.com)]California attorney Orly Taitz posts an image of what she says is President Obama’s “true” birth certificate, this one issued in Kenya (see June 13, 2008). Taitz then files a motion in federal court to prove its authenticity. The conservative news blog WorldNetDaily (WND) quickly publishes an article repeating Taitz’s claim. WND notes that the Kenyan document lists Obama’s parents as “Barack Hussein Obama and Stanley Ann Obama, formerly Stanley Ann Dunham.” The birth date is August 4, 1961, and the hospital of birth is Coast General Hospital in Mombasa, Kenya. The document lists no attending doctor. It does list the signature of the deputy registrar of Coast Province, Joshua Simon Oduya. According to the document, it was issued as a certified copy of the original in February 1964. WND claims that it has compared the Taitz document to other Kenyan birth certificates, and, it concludes, “the form of the documents appear to be identical.” WND admits that other fraudulent Kenyan birth certificates have recently been posted on the Internet, but, it says, “[t]he new document released by Taitz bears none of the obvious traits of a hoax.” Critics note that the Taitz document was certified as being issued by the Republic of Kenya on February 17, 1964, though the Republic of Kenya did not come into existence until December 1964. However, WND says, “Kenya’s official independence was in 1963, and any number of labels could have been applied to government documents during that time period.” According to WND, Taitz says she received the document “from an anonymous source who doesn’t want his name known because ‘he’s afraid for his life.’” Taitz’s court filing, in the US District Court for the Central District of California, requests the purported evidence of Obama’s birth—both the alleged birth certificate and foreign records not yet obtained—be preserved from destruction, asks for permission to legally request documents from Kenya, and seeks a subpoena for deposition from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Taitz tells WND: “I filed the motion with the court asking for expedited discovery, which would allow me to start subpoenas and depositions even before Obama and the government responds. I am asking the judge to give me the power to subpoena the documents from the Kenyan embassy and to require a deposition from Hillary Clinton so they will be forced to authenticate [the birth certificate]. I’m forcing the issue, where Obama will have to respond.… Before, they said, ‘You don’t have anything backing your claims.’ Now I have something. In fact, I have posted on the Internet more than Obama has (see June 13, 2008). My birth certificate actually has signatures.” Taitz says she plans to file more documents with the court in the following days. [St. Petersburg Times, 8/2/2009; WorldNetDaily, 8/2/2009]
Forgery - PolitiFact, the nonpartisan, political fact-checking organization sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times, asks for clarification from Salim Lone, the spokesman for Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga. Lone says via email: “It’s a forgery. Kenya only became a republic in December, 1964. Other arguments could also be marshaled, but they are not needed.” Blogger Steve Eddy then finds a nearly-identical document on the Internet using Google Search, posted on a genealogy Web site by an Australian, David Jeffrey Bomford. Eddy compares the two and, according to PolitiFact: “Same format. Same book and page number in the birth registry. Some of the officials’ last names were even the same.” Eddy tells PolitiFact, “At that point, it was pretty obvious the Kenyan one was a fake, that someone had used this real one from Australia to make their version.” An ABC affiliate in Australia asks Bomford, a public service clerk in Adelaide, about the controversy, and Bomford replies: “That is ridiculous. Little old person in Adelaide, the president of the United States. I don’t know whether to laugh about it or not, be worried about it.” Bomford says he had nothing to do with the hoax. “It’s little old me and my mum and everything else up there,” he says. The birth certificate he posted online is his own, he says. “Oh, I definitely confirm that the birth certificate was mine. That was quite easy to see—my address, even the style of the birth certificate was an old South Australian one. So it’s quite easy to identify that it’s mine.… It’s definitely a copy of my certificate. It’s so laughable it’s ridiculous.” [St. Petersburg Times, 8/2/2009] The Washington Independent’s David Weigel notes , “The image is part of the extremely ill-informed conspiracy theory that Obama was born in Mombasa—conveniently, one of the more Muslim parts of the country.” The Obama family lives in an entirely different part of Kenya, over a thousand miles from Mombasa. Moreover, at the time of Obama’s birth, Mombasa was not a part of Kenya, but part of Zanzibar. [Washington Independent, 8/3/2009]
Rebuttal - Taitz posts on her Web site that Bomford’s certificate, not her own, is the fake, and says Bomford or someone else altered that certificate from the “original” Obama certificate to discredit her. Eddy says of Taitz’s claim, “There’s no reasoning with some of these people.” A blogger from “Obama Not Qualified” writes a long screed detailing his or her belief that the Taitz document is real, though noting his or her belief that the photo Taitz originally posted may not be real, and giving a step-by-step walkthrough of how to create a falsified document. PolitiFact receives a response from Val Edyvean, registrar of births, deaths and marriages for South Australia, saying: “It appears that a South Australian loaded an image of his own birth certificate onto a family history Web site and that the format was used by others to ‘create’ a document which purported to be a Kenyan birth certificate for Barack Obama. As the South Australian man has now removed this image, and the date of his birth is in the period of certificates which are restricted from public access, I do not intend to add to speculation by commenting on details of either that certificate or any aspects of it.” [Obama Not Qualified, 2008; St. Petersburg Times, 8/2/2009]
Conclusion - WND publisher Joseph Farah publishes a column expressing his feeling that the Taitz certificate is “probably” a forgery, and claims that WND never made any assertion of its validity. (Farah also says that the State of Hawaii has “steadfastly refused” to state that the birth certificate posted by the Obama campaign in 2008 is valid, a false statement—see October 30, 2008 and July 28, 2009). “The Kenyan document could be real. I haven’t seen a single disqualifying error pointed out in the last 24 hours. But I still strongly suspect it is not,” he writes. Instead, he says, WND posted the certificate and the accompanying article so that it could be fact-checked. He then claims that Obama has “hidden” his real birth certificate and “virtually every other meaningful document in his life” from public scrutiny. [WorldNetDaily, 8/4/2009] PolitiFact concludes that the Taitz certificate “is a fake.” However, “we have no delusions this changes anyone’s mind in the birther movement.” [St. Petersburg Times, 8/2/2009]

Conservative blogger and commentator Michelle Malkin, on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” calls the “tea party movement” opposing taxes and health care reform “counterinsurgencies.” Malkin says there is a growing “tea party movement—these counterinsurgencies amongst taxpayer rights groups,” that is fomenting opposition to health care reform. She claims that these “counterinsurgencies” will escalate their confrontation behaviors in what she calls “town halls-gone-wild.” And, Malkin says, the “counterinsurgents” are members of true “grassroots” organizations (see April 14, 2009, April 15, 2009, May 29, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, and Before August 6, 2009). [Think Progress, 8/2/2009]

Fox News covers the Sebelius/Specter town hall meeting. [Source: Eyeblast (.org)]Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA) hold a meeting at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia to discuss the White House’s health care reform proposals. A large and vocal crowd of anti-reform protesters attempts to shout over, or shout down, both Sebelius and Specter during the event. Over 400 people attend the meeting, and many “cheered, jeered, and booed” the two, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Sebelius’s response to the crowd: “I’m happy to see democracy is at work.” The Inquirer reports, “Sebelius and Specter managed, barely, to impose a tenuous civility on the hour-long meeting titled ‘Health Insurance Reform—What’s in it for You.’” At one point, the booing and screaming become so pervasive that Sebelius informs the crowd, “We can shout at one another, or we can leave the stage.” Audience members verbally engage with each other as well: one, a self-identified Republican “political junkie,” says the nation cannot afford to insure 47 million uninsured Americans, and is countered by a rheumatologist who works with underinsured and uninsured patients, and who describes the horrific situations many of them face. One anti-reform participant tells the pair, “The American people don’t want rationed health care,” winning cheers from many in the audience. When Sebelius retorts that health care is already rationed for the 12,000 people a day whose insurance disappears when they lose their jobs, she wins applause from other audience members. About a dozen members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) are there to support Sebelius and Specter, and some members of the pro-reform group Physicians for Obama are also in attendance. Countering them are numerous audience members with “Tell Washington No” bumper stickers plastered to their chests. One anti-reform organization, the Philadelphia Tea Party Patriots, will later claim to have around 40 members in attendance. Outside the hall, dozens of anti-reform protesters picket with signs saying, among other slogans, “Government Health Care: Dangerous to Your Health,” “Welcome to the United States Socialist Republic,” and various anti-abortion signs. After the meeting, Sebelius says: “Health care touches everybody personally.… I find it difficult, because so much misinformation gets repeated in questions at town hall meetings. We have a challenge to get the message out.” [Philadelphia Inquirer, 8/3/2009] After the meeting, FreedomWorks (see April 14, 2009), a lobbying organization that actively promotes the town hall disruptions by conservative protesters, calls the event “a must emulate at town halls across the country over the next month.” [FreedomWorks, 8/3/2009]

Democratic Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) says that Democrats and supporters of health care reform should not be swayed by the numerous instances of outrage and disruption effected by conservative and anti-health care reform protesters (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, and August 3, 2009). Durbin says he believes Congressional Democrats should continue “speaking with the public, meeting with people who are the health care professionals, and talking about the current situation. I’ve done it and I’ll continue to do it. But you know, I hope my colleagues won’t fall for a sucker punch like this. These health insurance companies and people like them are trying to load these town halls for visual impact on television. They want to show thousands of people screaming ‘socialism’ and try to overcome the public sentiment which now favors health care reform. That’s almost like flooding the switchboards on Capitol Hill. It doesn’t prove much other than the switchboards have limited capacity. So, we need to have a much more balanced approach that really allows members of Congress to hear both sides of the story, rather than being sucker-punched or side-tracked by these types of tactics.” [Think Progress, 8/3/2009]

On Fox News’s early morning show “Fox & Friends,” co-host Peter Johnson thanks the group of conservatives engaging in orchestrated protests against health care reform (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, and August 4, 2009). Johnson says, “[W]e thank you for representing Americans, and we hope that other Americans get out there.” [Media Matters, 8/6/2009]

Anti-health care reform protesters sound off at a health care forum in Hartford, Connecticut, featuring Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT). Many of the protesters identify themselves as either belonging to a “tea party” protest organization or a related group calling itself “Dump Dodd.” One protester seems to suggest that Dodd, who has been diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer, either commit suicide or be forced to die: “How come we don’t just give Chris Dodd painkillers? Like a handful of them at a time! He can wash it down with Ted Kennedy’s whiskey!” The protester is apparently referring to a claim by Rush Limbaugh that the reform proposal would deny senior citizens needed treatment, and would instead force them to rely on pain medications while waiting to die (see July 28, 2009). One reform advocate, who later posts his impressions of the event on the liberal blogs Daily Kos and My Left Nutmeg, writes that the “Dump Dodd” protesters rail about communism and socialism taking over American democracy, and notes, “Never mind that they were essentially calling Medicare, the VA, and the military’s Tricare communist and socialist.” [My Left Nutmeg, 8/4/2009; Stephen Herron, 8/5/2009; Washington Post, 8/6/2009]

Conservative anti-health care reform protesters disrupt a “listening session” held by House member Steve Kagen (D-WI) in a Green Bay, Wisconsin, library. The library quickly fills with 300 participants, leaving some 50 to listen and protest outside the venue. According to the Green Bay Press-Gazette, “[t]he vast majority of people attending the event appeared to come in protest of the health care legislation, and they repeatedly disrupted the event by shouting.” Green Bay police soon appear at the library in response to reports of disruption, and they stay throughout the event to keep order. No one is arrested. Local reports say Kagen keeps his calm throughout the event, and does not try to shout over the protesters, but several times speaks about the attitude on display. “You can talk, but I can’t listen to 100 people at the same time,” he says. “This is not a shouting contest. This should be a discussion.” According to the Press-Gazette: “If the event were a shouting match, the mob won. Kagen tried talking about the health care bill, but the roaring chants deafened his attempts. Several elderly people covered their ears and grimaced at the level of noise.” The Press-Gazette calls many of the shouts and screams “incomprehensible.” In the last half hour of the session, the crowd calms somewhat, and Kagen is able to engage in a more active discussion. One participant will later explain the crowd’s behavior: “We are scared and when we get scared, we get angry,” she says. “We sit back here [in Wisconsin] and we have no control.” [Green Bay Press-Gazette, 8/4/2009; Think Progress, 8/4/2009]

Fox News host Sean Hannity tells the conservative protesters engaging in orchestrated protests of health care reform (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, and August 4, 2009), “Now, so far at these town hall meetings, you’re doing terrific.” He adds: “This is what’s going to stop this. You are. You’re gonna make it happen.… You’re standing up to these bureaucrats. You’re standing up to their phony platitudes, talking points, and bumper stickers. The polls are now turning against [President] Obama, [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi, and [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid, so now they’re bringing out their own pollster to lie to you and find out a way how they can win the PR battle, and they’re telling them that they’ve got to attack the insurance companies.” [Media Matters, 8/6/2009]

The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder says that the Democrats are, in part, being beaten in the public perception battle over health care reform because they were caught flat-footed by the wave of angry, if orchestrated, conservative opposition manifesting itself at town hall meetings across America (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, and August 4, 2009). Ambinder writes: “Democrats know the rulebook. The tactics being used against them by Republican and conservative groups were perfected by the party when it set out to defeat President Bush’s Social Security privatization proposals. They also know that it’s easier to gin up noise against a major legislative initiative than it is to sell an initiative that isn’t fully formed yet.… As a Democratic strategist said to me: ‘I think as Dems we learned a lot of lessons from beating Bush on privatization—we know and perfected all the tricks and tactics so we know what to expect from the tea baggers, the insurance companies, and other opponents.’” But because the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats have not yet created a cohesive, easily explained health care reform package, conservatives are finding it easy to attack the various proposals while Democrats flounder in attempting to explain that not-yet-perfected package. It is also easy for conservatives to allege horrific elements of that package which do not exist, but succeed in inflaming public opinion and raising the “fear level” among ordinary citizens. Ambinder concludes: “The press will be complicit in telling the story, as the louder voices at town hall meetings will ultimately get more coverage. As the Democratic National Committee has learned, it’s not easy to engineer a massive national congressional switchboard campaign unless there is a defined target.… The goal of the opposition—of FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity (see April 15, 2009)—isn’t to change minds; their activists know what they believe already: it’s to make noise. Making noise scares members of Congress. And Democrats are vulnerable to panics.” [Atlantic Monthly, 8/3/2009]

House Representative Gene Green (D-TX) holds a “town hall” meeting in North Houston to discuss a number of issues, including the economic stimulus and health care reform. Anti-health care reform activists attempt to disrupt the meeting, as has happened at previous events (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, and August 4, 2009). However, according to local reporter David Jennings, although Green “had to struggle to keep his town meeting in order,” he “did not lose control of his meeting.” Jennings writes that Green was prepared for the disruptions. He chose a small venue for the meeting and allows people to “vent a little.” The disruption is limited, with one protester repeatedly shouting and catcalling (and eventually being upbraided by another audience member outside the venue). Health care reform is the dominant topic of discussion in the meeting. [Lone Star Times, 8/4/2009] Local Fox News reporter Duarte Geraldino interviews many of the conservative anti-reform protesters and reports, “some attendees admit they don’t live in the district.” Geraldino finds that many came as a result of “an internet campaign” by right-wing activists (see April 14, 2009, April 15, 2009, May 29, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, and Before August 6, 2009) urging their members and supporters to attend town hall meetings and heckle Democratic Congress members. Geraldino hosts a video clip of one protester and notes, “Pay close attention to the man behind the congressman, he seems to have forgotten the part about respect.” The crowd is reportedly so raucous and disrespectful that another attendee says he came to give Green “a really hard time” but decides not to after being annoyed by the constant screaming and heckling from his fellows. “This is a free country, but I think there’s a certain degree of respect” required. [My Fox Houston, 8/4/2009; Think Progress, 8/4/2009] One conservative protester asks the audience to raise their hands if they “oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care.” Almost all raise their hands. Green quickly responds, “How many of you have Medicare?” About half the attendees raise their hands. Think Progress reporter Faiz Shakir later writes that they apparently “fail[ed] to note the irony.” Later in the discussion, a small business owner who supports health care asks how many people “do not have health insurance of some kind.” When only one person raises their hand, she says, “I think the people who are objecting are the people who have insurance.” [Think Progress, 8/4/2009]

Progressive columnist Eugene Robinson, an associate editor for the Washington Post, calls the efforts by anti-health care reform protesters to disrupt and block debate “shocking.” Robinson tells interviewer Rachel Maddow: “This seems extreme, extraordinary—you could almost say shocking. It’s hard to be shocked in politics, but this is so clearly an organized campaign of intimidation, of theater. I mean, it’s not theater in ‘all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players’ metaphorical sense, but theater in a, you know, ‘let’s put on a show’ kind of sense to, not just to shout down any individual congressman or congresswoman who happens to be holding a town meeting, but to create this videotape that gets posted on Web sites, that gets on television that creates this sort of atmosphere of health reform—the very idea of health reform being on the defensive. [T]his is something that strikes me as particularly noxious and out of bounds.” Robinson says that the original anti-tax, anti-Obama “tea parties” had little effect, partly because they were not focused on a single issue. Now that the “tea party” organizers have focused their groups on opposing health care, they are much more effective, Robinson says. “[T]here’s a definite aim here, which is to stop in its tracks the most serious attempt at actual health care reform that could make a difference in millions of people’s lives and also make a difference to the bottom lines of insurance companies and others that make money off the health care industry as it is.… [T]his is a tactic that’s sort of almost mob intimidation at these meetings—you never know where they’re going to pop up, when they’re going to pop up—that I don’t think anyone quite knows how to respond to at this point. I mean, do you bring in your own side to shout down the shouters down? Do you bring in the… police to enforce the disorderly conduct laws? I’m not quite sure what you do.” Maddow wonders if there may not be a political cost to the conservatives over “being associated with this kind of raw thuggishness,” and continues: “I’m all in favor of rabble rousers and people even being disruptive and using their First Amendment rights, even if it is an untoward, unfriendly way. But when it is part of a corporate strategy organized by lobbyists who are sort of astroturfed (see April 14, 2009, April 15, 2009, May 29, 2009, July 27, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, Before August 6, 2009, and August 6-7, 2009), do they ultimately get in trouble when that is exposed?” Robinson says while that may well be the case, in the short term pro-reform advocates “have to find a way to go on the offense in this debate and not be caught on the defensive—and there is a sense that this new tactic has put health care reformers on the defensive or at least wondering exactly how to respond.” [MSNBC, 8/4/2009]

A town hall meeting to discuss the White House’s proposed health care reform package is disrupted by a volatile crowd of anti-reform protesters. The event is hosted by Representative Steve Driehaus (D-OH), and takes place at a Unitarian church. The event draws so many participants that it is moved to a larger room, but many still are forced to remain outside. Driehaus opens the meeting by saying, “I know that there are those with the tea party group and I welcome you and I welcome them to my office.” The protesters respond by screaming and shouting over Driehaus as he tries to outline his reasons for supporting reform. “Tell the truth!” one participant screams as Driehaus tries to explain what is and is not in the proposal. Another shouts, “Move to Europe!” Driehaus says he understands there are dramatically different points of view surrounding the reform proposals. “I know some people would like a single-payer system and some would like no change at all,” he says. “I get that.… We have the most expensive health care system in the world. We’ve got the best medical system in the world, if you can afford to pay for it.” One protester outside the church, Sue Hardenbergh, holds a sign opposing what she believes will be “nationalized health care,” and tells reporters she doesn’t believe assurances from the Obama administration that citizens will be able to keep their same doctor and private insurance plans under the new program. “I am in favor of reform. I am in favor of fiscal responsibility,” she says. “I think the bill as presented is going to eliminate a competitive market and the private insurance industry.” [Cincinnati Enquirer, 8/3/2009; Think Progress, 8/4/2009]

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh says that if the recent spate of disruptive and violent protests against health care reform (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, and August 4, 2009) are, in fact, orchestrated (see April 14, 2009, April 15, 2009, May 29, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, and Before August 6, 2009), then it is “about damn time.” He continues: “We have had groups like ACORN [the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now] and Democrat rent-a-mobs making up excuses and lying about things they oppose to affect public policy for years, while people like me haven’t had time because we work. We do not protest for a living. We do not rent ourselves out to be part of mobs. So, if this is actually an orchestrated event, then I’m glad somebody on our side’s getting in gear.… It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other [if the protests are coordinated]. The people who are showing up are genuinely angry. And if their transportation is being facilitated—about damn time. You’ve got to take these people on the way they play the game. The aggressor sets the rules in a conflict.” [Media Matters, 8/6/2009]

Two House Representatives, James McGovern (D-MA) and Richard Neal (D-MA), are booed and heckled during a contentious town hall meeting at the University of Massachusetts to discuss health care reform. Like so many other such forums and meetings, the discussion is disrupted by anti-health care reform protesters, who shout, scream, boo, catcall, and chant throughout the meeting (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, and August 4, 2009). Both McGovern and Neal support the Obama administration’s health care reform proposals. University officials threaten several times to shut down the meeting because of the behavior. One protester shouts that McGovern is like Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who performed horrific experiments on concentration camp prisoners during World War II. According to local media reports, protesters outnumber supporters at the meeting. They argue that health care would be strictly rationed and elderly citizens would be denied care altogether, points vehemently disputed by the two congressmen. After the meeting, McGovern says it is plain that health care reform opponents had planned to dominate the meeting with their tactics, but adds: “This is still the United States of America and people have the right to be heard. The meeting wasn’t perfect and it wasn’t always polite but I got the opportunity to express my view on the subject.” [Worcester Telegram & Gazette, 8/4/2009]

Conservatives for Patients’ Rights logo. [Source: Conservatives for Patients? Rights]An organization called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights (CPR) publicly takes credit for orchestrating the disruptive and sometimes-violent protests against the White House’s health care reform proposals (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, and August 4, 2009). Washington Post reporter Greg Sargent says the admission “rais[es] questions about [the protests’] spontaneity.” CPR is headed by Rick Scott, a former health industry CEO who once ran Columbia/HCA before being ousted for malfeasance in 1997. (Columbia/HCA subsequently paid the US government $1.7 billion dollars in fines due to fraud that occured during Scott’s tenure.) Scott, who was once a part owner of the Texas Rangers with George W. Bush, now owns an investment firm that primarily traffics in health care, and owns a chain of Florida urgent care clinics called Solantic. [Washington Post, 5/10/2009; Plum Line, 8/4/2009] (Solantic also boasts former Bush administration official Thomas Scully as a member of its board. In 2004, Scully deliberately withheld information from Congress that the Bush administration’s Medicare reforms would cost $200 billion more than acknowledged.) [MSNBC, 8/7/2009]
Contracting with 'Swift Boat' PR Firm - Scott is spending millions on CPR’s public relations effort, and has contracted with CRC Public Relations, the group that masterminded the “swift boat” attacks against 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. He is also coordinating his efforts with Grover Norquist, the conservative advocate and influential Washington insider. CPR spokesman Brian Burgess confirms that CPR is e-mailing “town hall alert” flyers and schedules of town hall meetings to its mailing list. CPR is also actively recruiting members for the “tea party,” a loosely organized group of conservative protesters (see April 8, 2009). Scott says, “We have invested a lot of time, energy, and resources into educating Americans over the past several months about the dangers of government-run health care and I think we’re seeing some of the fruits of that campaign.” Doug Thornell, a House Democratic staff member, says: “The more you dig the more you learn that this is a carefully orchestrated effort by special interest lobbyists and the Republican Party, who are using fringe elements on the right to protect insurance company profits and defeat health care reform. The anger at these events looks very similar to what we saw at McCain/Palin rallies in the fall.” [Washington Post, 5/10/2009; Plum Line, 8/4/2009]
Group Interested in Protecting Industry Profits, Critics Say - Richard Kirsch of Health Care for America Now, a pro-reform group, says of Scott: “Those attacking reform are really looking to protect their own profits, and he’s a perfect messenger for that. His history of making a fortune by destroying quality in the health care system and ripping off the government is a great example of what’s really going on.” CPR plans on spending over $1 million a month in anti-reform television and radio ads. [Washington Post, 5/10/2009] White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, learning of CPR’s admission, says the organization is led by a “CEO that used to run a health care company that was fined by the federal government $1.7 billion for fraud. I think that’s a lot of what you need to know about the motives of that group.” Scott retorts, “It is a shame that Mr. Gibbs chooses to dismiss these Americans and their very real concerns, instead opting to level personal attacks.” [San Francisco Chronicle, 8/4/2009]

Christopher Murphy (D-CT) holds a town hall in Meriden, Connecticut, to discuss the Democrats’ attempt to reform health care. Unlike many other town hall meetings in other areas (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, and August 4, 2009), Murphy’s meeting, held at a local library, is peaceful and relatively undisturbed by orchestrated groups of angry anti-reform protesters. Instead, Murphy hears one story after another of constituents denied health care by their insurers, or having life-saving treatments delayed by those insurance providers. “I really feel we can get a system of health care in this country that covers everybody and costs less than what we have now,” Murphy tells the audience. [Meriden Record-Journal, 8/4/2009] Local bloggers express disappointment in the lack of protests at the Murphy town hall, and exhort conservatives and anti-reform proponents to take part in Murphy’s future meetings, as well as other Connecticut Democrats’ meetings. Blogger Chris Healy writes: “One’s [sic] perrson’s [sic] mob is another person’s concerned citizen’s group. People should be vocal, direct, but polite and respectful. Most of the yourtube [sic] tapes show that. If Members of Congress get upset because people are shouting at them, maybe they should listen.” [Chris Healy, 8/5/2009]

House Representative Todd Akin (R-MO), holding a forum on health care reform at Maryville University, tells audience members that he opposes the Obama administration’s health care reform proposals. “Why do we want to turn over all of our health care to the government?” he asks. Akin, who bills his meeting as a “Freedom Conference,” also lambasts the Obama administration’s environmental and economic moves. Contrary to many health care discussions with Democratic lawmakers (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, and August 4, 2009), the crowd at Akin’s forum is largely friendly and supportive. The forum also features speakers from conservative organizations and industry lobbying firms such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA)‘s Center for Health Transformation. [St. Louis Beacon, 8/4/2009] During the meeting, Akin jokes about his Democratic colleagues being lynched, a crack that receives cheers and applause. Akin remarks, “Different people from Washington, DC, have come back to their districts and had town hall meetings, and they almost got lynched.” After an outburst of cheers and laughter, Akin, grinning, says, “I assume you’re not approving lynchings, because we don’t want to do that.” As he says this, he mockingly imitates being strangled, presumably by a noose. [Think Progress, 8/6/2009; TPMDC, 8/6/2009]

Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh defends the lobbyist-funded conservative agitators and their raucous protests against health care reform (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, and August 4, 2009). Protesting characterizations of the protesters as “unruly mobs,” he says, “These are orderly people… geniune voting American citizens.” Limbaugh says that President Obama is the “community agitator” who taught liberal protesters “how to show up at events like this over and over again and rip ‘em apart, and tear ‘em down, disrupt them, and make sure they don’t happen.… This time it’s not ginned up, it’s genuine. It’s real. People do not want [health care reform].” [Media Matters, 8/4/2009] The day before, Limbaugh defended the protests’ orchestration, saying if they are orchestrated, it is “about damn time” (see August 3, 2009).

Progressive reporter and columnnist Steve Benen writes that the Republicans and conservatives orchestrating (see April 14, 2009, April 15, 2009, May 29, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, and Before August 6, 2009) the raucous anti-health care reform protests (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, and August 4, 2009) must be careful to avoid a backlash among moderate and independent Americans. Noting that the media has reported multiple instances of protesters’ comparisons of President Obama and his administration to Nazis, and their stated opposition to Social Security, Medicare, and other popular government programs, Benen writes: “It’s probably the one angle the corporate interests and their lobbyists haven’t considered: the unintended consequences of rallying confused right-wing activists to shout down policymakers who’ll improve their health care coverage. Once you wind up the fanatics and point them in the direction of a town hall meeting, you never really know what they’re going to say, do, wear, or hold.… This is not to say all opponents of reform are radical extremists. The point, though, is that conservatives run a risk of convincing the American mainstream that the only people worked up in opposition to health care reform are nutjobs.… Obviously, those concerned about the reform proposals go beyond fringe, unhinged activists. But if and when the anti-reform campaign becomes synonymous with right-wing lunatics, organized by insurance companies, it becomes far easier for the political mainstream to dismiss their legitimacy, while regular Americans think, ‘Well, I don’t want to be on their side.’” [Washington Monthly, 8/4/2009]

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) tells a San Francisco reporter that she does not believe the recent spate of conservative anti-health care reform protests at local “town hall” meetings between Congress members and constituents (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, and August 4, 2009) are spontaneous. They are, she says, organized by “Astroturf” groups purporting to be founded and run by ordinary citizens, but in fact are organized by corporate lobbying firms to serve industry interests (see April 14, 2009, April 15, 2009, May 29, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, and Before August 6, 2009). “I think they’re Astroturf,” she says. “You be the judge. There is no question that people want to know what’s in the legislation, want to know how it is paid for, and know what it means to them. And that is why we have town meetings, either electronically or personally. Just because someone opposes their understanding of what this health care is, that’s not a bad thing. But some of what is orchestrated to prevent the opportunity of presenting the plan, that’s a different story.” [San Francisco Chronicle, 8/4/2009] In the same interview, Pelosi says that she has seen some protesters “carrying swastikas and symbols like that” to the meetings. Pelosi has distributed a memo to her fellow House Democrats that provides them talking points to rebut some of the harsher anti-reform claims, short, finely crafted answers informing citizens what health care reform will provide for them, and accusing health insurance companies of leading a “carpet bombing, slash-and-burn, shock and awe” effort to defeat the “public option” plan. [NewsMax, 8/6/2009]

Local ‘tea party’ protesters at the Arcuri/Hoyer town hall. [Source: WKTV]Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), taking part in a town hall meeting in upstate New York hosted by House member Michael Arcuri (D-NY), is browbeaten and verbally assaulted by conservative protesters who are against health care reform. The meeting is to discuss a proposal for a high-speed rail system for the area. “You’re lying to me!” one protester, local conservative activist Don Jeror, screams during the assemblage. “Just because I don’t have sophisticated language, I can recognize a liar when I see one!” Jeror adds, “Why would you guys try to stuff a health care bill down our throats in three to four weeks, when the president took six months to pick a dog for his kids?!” Jeror and many of the activists, who continue to scream and shout over Hoyer during his entire presentation, belong to a group called the “Fort Stanwix Tea Party ‘Patriots.’” House Member Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), who was recently accosted by conservative protesters during a town hall meeting in his district (see August 1, 2009), says the protests are anything but spontaneous and citizen-driven. “This notion of a grass-roots campaign is totally and completely phony,” he says. “The Republican Party has coordinated this apparent outrage and stirred it up.” While he and fellow Democrats welcome dialogue, he says, “there’s no way you can change the legislation to satisfy any of these Republicans and their insurance allies.” Doggett is referring to allegations that corporate lobbying groups such as Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks (see April 14, 2009, April 15, 2009, May 29, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, and Before August 6, 2009) are behind the protests. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs agrees, saying, “I think what you’ve seen is they have bragged about manufacturing, to some degree, that anger.” Bob MacGuffie, a Connecticut conservative activists who recently wrote a strategy memo directing fellow conservatives in methods to disrupt and dominate town hall meetings (see Late July, 2009), says that while there is organization, the anger and resistance to reform is “most assuredly real.… We’re organizing those voices, but it’s a real emotion, coast to coast.” ABC News reports that polls show the “protesters are not representative of the public at large, which overwhelmingly supports provisions such as ‘requiring insurance companies to sell health coverage to people, even if they have pre-existing medical conditions’ and ‘requiring that all Americans have health insurance, with the government providing financial help for those who can’t afford it.’” [ABC News, 8/4/2009; TPMDC, 8/4/2009; WKTV, 8/4/2009]

A group of right-wing organizations, including Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (ATAH) and the Liberty Counsel, warns that the Democrats’ health care reform proposal would mandate government funding of transsexual surgery. “Say NO to Tax-Funded ‘Tranny Care,’” ATAH proclaims on its Web site, and writes: “No American should be forced to pay for these nature-rejecting procedures with his or her tax dollars. Homosexual groups like Human Rights Campaign boast of their support for taxpayer-funded ‘sex-change’ operations in cities like San Francisco.… Folks, you don’t have to be very politically sophisticated to predict that GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) activists and their liberal allies are going to demand ‘Tranny-Care’ under a federal health insurance system, in the name of ‘fairness’ and ‘inclusion’—even if it’s not passed initially as a ‘benefit.’ And yes, the idea of subsidizing body-disfiguring ‘operations’ surely would be considered ‘queer’ by the average tax paying American.” The site goes on to note that the House version of reform legislation, HR 3200, provides for “standards, as appropriate, for the collection of accurate data on health and health care” based on “sex, sexual orientation, [and] gender identity.” The Senate version of the bill says that the government will “detect and monitor trends in health disparities,” which ATAH says would require “the Department of Health and Human Services to ‘develop standards for the measurement of gender’ (i.e., officially recognize subjectively self-determined ‘transgender’ or ‘transsexual’ gender identities). It further mandates ‘participation in the institutions’ programs of individuals and groups from… different genders and sexual orientations.’” The Liberty Counsel’s Matt Barber writes: “There’s a gulf of difference between what [President] Obama and liberals in Congress, and the American people deem ‘medically appropriate’; especially when it’s ‘we the people’ footing the bill. To force Americans, against their conscience, to fund abortion on demand and to facilitate gender confusion by subsidizing the elective practice of genital ‘sex-change’ mutilation is unconscionable.” Barber demands that citizens oppose reform legislation “unless taxpayer funding for both abortion and sex change surgeries are expressly excluded.” [Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, 8/4/2009; MSNBC, 8/5/2009]
Critics: Controversy a 'Red Herring' Based on 'Misinformation' - Autumn Sandeen, a transsexual whose photo is prominently featured in the ATAH post, writes that the entire controversy is a “red herring” enabling conservatives to mount an attack on health care reform over a non-existent issue. Sandeen writes, “Let’s keep in mind what those who are bringing up ‘sex change operations’ don’t really care that much about whether or not I personally get genital reconstruction surgery paid for by the government; what these folk really want to do is derail all health care reform—and if badmouthing trans people like me is how they believe they can derail it, then they’re going to badmouth trans people like me.” [Autumn Sandeen, 8/5/2009] Liberal blogger Pam Spaulding accuses Barber and ATAH of “shilling misinformation and twisting facts to frighten people,” and says of Barber, “It’s no surprise he wants to fixate on something he believes is fertile ground for generating heat on Obama’s health reform.” [Pam's House Blend, 8/4/2009]

Representative Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) appears on an MSNBC talk show hosted by progressive Rachel Maddow. Three days before, Doggett was accosted in a Texas grocery store by an angry, shouting mob of anti-health care reform protesters (see August 1, 2009). Doggett says opposition such as this just bolsters his commitment to battle for reform. He says that the anti-reform protests are “staged” (see April 14, 2009, April 15, 2009, May 29, 2009, July 27, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, Before August 6, 2009, and August 6-7, 2009). “[M]y real complaint is not their cameras or their taunts or their silly signs saying I was a traitor to Texas and a devil to all people—my complaint is that when other neighbors show up, they should not be silenced. And that’s what this crowd did. After I listened to their taunts and questions and discussed the bill with them for an hour, they insisted on yelling, ‘just say no,’ any time anyone else wanted to speak.”
Countering the Anti-Reform Protesters - Doggett says that pro-reform advocates need to counter the anti-reform protesters: “[P]eople need to not sit back and think that President Obama and a Democratic Congress can solve all of these problems. They have to be engaged and involved. We cannot turn over the agenda to folks that really remind me, Rachel, like that crowd of Republican staffers that showed up for Bush against Gore down in Florida. It’s the same kind of approach.” Maddow reminds viewers that Doggett is referring to the “Brooks Brothers” mob riot from the 2000 presidential recounts in Florida, where the “spontaneous” riot was created by Republican aides and operatives brought down from Washington. She notes that House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and the National Republican Congressional Committee “have sent out the footage of what was done to you at this town hall meeting. They’re bragging about it. They’re publicizing it. They’re implicitly calling for more of this sort of thing.” Doggett says of his Republican colleagues: “No, nothing surprises me about these people. They’ll do anything they can to block health care reform just as they have for six decades.… [The protesters are inflating their numbers] because they’re under-numbered at the people that have been being abused by the health insurers come out [sic] and tell their story.” Doggett gives his fellow Democrats the folliwing advice: “Don’t give up or give in. This is too important. We have few more important issues in America today, and we need to be steadfast in our commitment to learn from those who have legitimate concerns and criticisms. But there’s no way you can rewrite this bill to satisfy this mob. We need to be firm and committed to a strong, public plan that will give that nudge to the insurers.”
Obama 'Judo' - After Doggett’s interview is completed, Maddow interviews Chris Hayes, an editor for The Nation magazine, who adds to Doggett’s statements by saying he believes the Obama administration and the Democratic Party are trying to use the excesses of the anti-reform rhetoric against reform opponents. Maddow says: “I think the lesson that the Obama folks took from the—this past year’s presidential campaign, where they didn’t try to organize people to go to McCain-Palin rallies, to shout down the ‘kill them all’ rhetoric that they were hearing from their crowds.… They publicized it, essentially… they used those displays of extremism to try to splinter the people who were on the right… who were either tolerating that stuff or denouncing it.” Hayes says he believes the same thing is beginning to happen now. “I mean, this is sort of signature Obama political strategy, which is a kind of judo, right? To kind of use the excesses of your enemy against them. And I think that you’re already seeing that DNC [Democratic National Committee] and other people sending the message out showing the signs of swastikas that are showing up at these rallies. The images of Stalin, the screaming, the sort of red-face spittle-flecked anger that is coming out in these town halls to show that, look, this is isn’t just, you know, some kind of middle-of-the-road, undecided independent voter who’s having some reservations about the possible cost of the health care bill. These are radicals. These are extremists. These are zealots.… They should just be called out for what they are.” [MSNBC, 8/5/2009]

Glenn Beck, who hosts a daily radio show along with his Fox News talk show, attacks “birthers” who believe President Obama is not a citizen (see see July 20, 2008, August 15, 2008, October 8-10, 2008, October 16, 2008 and After, November 10, 2008, December 3, 2008, and August 1-4, 2009). He says: “Everybody says, everybody says, ‘why is Barack Obama not just producing the birth certificate?’ Okay, first of all, he did (see June 13, 2008). And you’re never going to get, you’re never going to get a conspiracy theory to stop. You’re never.… One of the reasons why he doesn’t just come out is because it is so great for him because it immediately marginalizes anybody who says that kind of stuff. It makes them immediately look like they’re flat earthers.” [Media Matters, 3/24/2011]

Pamela Geller, who owns and operates the far-right blog Atlas Shrugs, continues to claim that “forensic analysis” performed on President Obama’s birth certificate by a blogger on her site she calls “Techdude” proves the certificate is forged, even though independent analysis has long since proven that “Techdude’s” analysis was fraudulent (see July 20, 2008). She claims that the analysis was never subjected to “peer review,” ignoring a review and analysis by an actual computer forensics expert, Dr. Neal Krawetz, who showed how cunningly “Techdude” manipulated the data to produce his fraudulent results. Nevertheless, Geller continues to say that her blog’s analysis “proves” Obama’s birth certificate, as posted on his Web site (see June 13, 2008), confirmed by Hawaiian officials (see October 30, 2008), and independently analyzed and verified as accurate (see June 27, 2008 and August 21, 2008), is “an altered document.” Geller claims that a year after her blog “exposed” the birth certificate, the “birther” issue “is on fire. Why? Perhaps because the American people, in their sudden desperation at having made a shotgun wedding, are looking for an annulment. And just as you couldn’t get Al Capone on his heinous crimes of murder and racketeering, but got him on tax evasion, so they hope they can get Obama on this technicality regarding eligibility. Obama’s refusal to release the vault copy has only increased interest, with the speculation now creating a veritable birth certificate circus.” Geller speculates that the recent release of an obviously fraudulent “Kenyan birth certificate” (see August 1-4, 2009) is the result of “something more sinister at work,” perhaps a “psyop” by either Obama administration officials or Obama’s supporters “to smear the Republicans in general as ‘birthers,’ conspiracy nuts who have given themselves over to right-wing nuttery.” Conservatives, she writes, are the victim of the birth certificate conspiracy, and Obama is entirely to blame for not releasing what she calls the “vault copy” (see July 1, 2009), “whether because it contains something damaging or simply because it enables him to wield the weapon of ridicule against the right. At this point, the effect is the same regardless of which of those possibilities is true. This carnival of conspiracy has become a deliberate distraction from the real issues and the real destruction being wrought by the Obama administration.” [NewsMax, 8/4/2009]

Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), says the outcry and dissension over health care reform as demonstrated by protesters in town hall meetings across the US (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, and August 5, 2009) will help the Republican Party elect more people to Congress. Democrats say Cornyn, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), and other Republican lawmakers are actively encouraging the sometimes-explosive town hall confrontations. Inciting fear and anger among conservative voters is a perfectly defensible strategy for a party that has been soundly defeated in two straight elections, Cornyn says. “Fear, I would say, precedes anger, and I think there are a lot of people who tell me they are scared of what they see coming out of Washington in terms of spending and the debt and muscular federal intervention on everything from financial institutions to healthcare,” he says. “It’s almost like a part of the grieving process.… I see real opportunities for us.” [The Hill, 8/5/2009] In July, Cornyn’s colleague James Inhofe (R-OK) said that for the GOP to succeed in 2010, it must “stall” health care reform (see July 22, 2009).

A protester at a health care forum wears a shirt from Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, a prominent area health care provider. [Source: My Left Nutmeg (.com)]Representative Chris Murphy (D-CT) holds a forum in Simsbury, Connecticut, to discuss health care reform. Like many other forums in this and other states (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, and August 5, 2009), Murphy’s meeting is disrupted by loud and angry protesters who oppose reforming health care. An African-American supporter of health care is accosted by one protester who, on camera, shouts: “You and your asinine friends say that we’re paid by big insurance—you’re paid by ACORN [a grassroots vote-registration organization] and our tax dollars. Yeah, that’s me, hello, get the f_ck out of my face and go back where you come from.” Another protester is caught on camera by a local blogger wearing an Anthem Blue Cross & Blue Shield shirt. [My Left Nutmeg, 8/5/2009; My Left Nutmeg, 8/6/2009] Anthem, like most corporations involved in health care, is opposed to reform of the health care industry. In recent days, it has asked to be allowed to raise rates on Connecticut members anywhere between 20 and 32 percent. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal called the request “a rate increase that will be catastrophic, not only for our consumers but for our economy.” [Associated Press, 7/30/2009]

Democratic Representative Brad Miller (D-NC) says that his office has received a very credible and disturbing death threat over his support for the Obama administration’s health care reform proposals. Miller, unlike many of his colleagues, has not scheduled any “town hall” events to discuss health care reform with his constituents (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, and August 5, 2009). “We have received a threatening phone call in the DC office, there have been calls to the Raleigh office,” says Miller’s communications director, LuAnn Canipe. “The call to the DC office was, ‘Miller could lose his life over this,’” she says. “Our staffer took it so seriously, he confirmed what the guy was saying. He said, ‘Sir is that a threat?’ and at that time our staffer was getting the phone number off caller ID and turning it over to the Capitol Police.” Canipe says the police have not yet reported back to them what, if anything, they have found. She says Miller was not planning on holding any town hall meetings anyway, and would not schedule any now: “Our point is, we’re not gonna be bullied into having a town hall so it can then be interrupted by the fake grassroots folks.… We don’t want to people to think we’re shutting out our constituents. We’re meeting with them one on one to discuss health care reform.” [TPMDC, 8/5/2009; MSNBC, 8/13/2009] Afterwards, Miller expounds on his reasoning for not desiring to hold town hall meetings during the remainder of the summer recess: there is, he says, “a lynch-mob mentality out there. There is an ugliness to it.” [MSNBC, 8/7/2009]

Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) hosts a “town hall” meeting to discuss the Democrats’ health care reform proposal in Douglas, Arizona. As with so many other town halls of this nature, Giffords’s is repeatedly disrupted by shouting, screaming, and chanting audience members protesting the reform package (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, and August 3, 2009). Unlike the others, this event takes on a more sinister overtone when a pistol is found on the floor of the grocery store after the event. Giffords’s aides report the dropped pistol to local police. Giffords says she will not be intimidated by either guns or rhetoric. “Yelling and screaming is counterproductive,” she says. Trent Humphries, the leader of the local anti-reform movement in nearby Tucson, accuses Giffords of lying about the gun, and says none of his fellow protesters would hurt her. “Nobody is threatening Gabby,” he says. “But she does need to get in front of her constituents and answer to her constituents.” Giffords is a member of the so-called “Blue Dog” caucus of conservative Democrats who are balking at supporting the health care reform package in its current form. [Arizona Daily Star, 8/10/2009] Police investigating the incident will decide not to press charges. Officer Marcus Gonzalez will tell the press: “Apparently, there was no police report taken, the reason being that it was an accidental drop of a gun. Apparently, a male gentleman that went to the meeting had a gun holstered on his side. And when he sat down, it fell out of his holster.” The “male gentleman” owns the gun and was legally carrying it pursuant to Arizona’s “open-carry” law. “We’re not really conducting an investigation on this, because there’s not really an investigation to conduct,” Gonzalez says. [TPMDC, 8/11/2009] A conservative blogger will post a video from the event, and call it “tightly scripted.” [Gila Courier, 8/6/2009]

Charles (“Chuck”) Grassley addresses an AARP meeting in early 2009. [Source: AARP]Republican Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), one of the GOP senators counted on by the Obama administration to help pass the Democrats’ health care reform package, tells a radio audience that under that reform package, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) would be allowed to die. Kennedy is in the final stages of terminal brain cancer. Under the proposal, Grassley says, Kennedy would be denied care; instead, a younger patient would receive that care because they could “contribute more to the economy.” On Iowa City radio station KCJJ-AM, Grassley says: “In countries that have government-run health care, just to give you an example, I’ve been told that the brain tumor that Senator Kennedy has—because he’s 77 years old—would not be treated the way it’s treated in the United States. In other words, he would not get the care he gets here because of his age. In other words, they’d say ‘well, he doesn’t have long to live even if he lived another four to five years.’ They’d say ‘well, we gotta spend money on people who can contribute more to economy.’ It’s a little like people saying when somebody gets to be 85 their life is worth less than when they were 35 and you pull the tubes on them.” The Iowa Independent notes that the health care reform proposal has no provisions for “rationed care” of any kind, as Grassley asserts, much less a provision to deny care to elderly patients in favor of younger, more potentially productive patients. [Think Progress, 8/5/2009; Iowa Independent, 8/5/2009] Adam Lioz, a correspondent to the liberal Huffington Post, writes: “My first thought after watching video of Grassley’s statements is that he has now disqualified himself from participation in further Senate Finance Committee negotiations. How can someone act as a good-faith negotiator on a critical and complex issue while simultaneously stoking fear and spreading bald-faced lies about the content of the leading legislation on the topic? And why should Democratic senators take him seriously and continue to engage him? Bipartisanship is helpful; but at what cost?” [Huffington Post, 8/13/2009]

Representative Gerry Connolly (D-VA) says that a House member has been physically assaulted during a town hall meeting by anti-health care protesters (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, and August 4, 2009). He refuses to identify the representative in question. Instead, he warns that the increasingly riotous confrontations at town hall meetings by conservative protesters are rising to “a dangerous level.” He blames misinformation disseminated by conservative lobbying organizations who are helping orchestrate the town hall disruptions (see April 14, 2009, April 15, 2009, May 29, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, and Before August 6, 2009) and on Fox News (see August 3, 2009 and August 3, 2009). “When you look at the fervor of some of these people who are all being whipped up by the right-wing talking heads on Fox, to me, you’re crossing a line,” he says. “They’re inciting people to riot with just total distortions of facts. They think we’re going to euthanize Grandma and the government is going to take over.” Another Democratic staffer says flatly, “These people are crazy.” Connolly notes that many of the more elderly protesters receive Medicare, but are seemingly unaware that Medicare is a government program. Steve Driehaus (D-OH), who recently held a contentious health care discussion (see August 3, 2009), says: “We’re not going to say we’re no longer going to listen to constituents because of a few angry protesters. We have no intentions of changing our plan based on any extracurricular nonsense.” Grover Norquist, president of the conservative advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform, says the protests are nothing more than spontaneous outbursts of real public anger. He also says his organization encourages its members to attend town halls, and gives them talking points, suggested questions to ask, and slogans to chant (see August 5, 2009). “People are pissed,” he says. “They’ve been lied to.” [Roll Call, 8/5/2009]

Salisbury Post masthead. [Source: Echo Media]An op-ed in the Salisbury (North Carolina) Post criticizes the current wave of disruptive protests that are derailing health care forums around the nation (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, and August 5, 2009). “With funding and staff support from advocacy groups opposed to health care reform and to the Obama administration,” the Post writes, “organized groups have been showing up at Congressional town hall meetings held mostly by Democrats in favor of health care reform. The protesters jeer, heckle, wave placards, shout over the speaker, and carry on much like the student radicals of yore. Memos that have cropped up on the Web show that these protests are not intended to be any kind of dialogue but purely disruptive, preferably ending with the member of Congress forced to retreat. Videos of the demonstrations almost immediately appear on the Internet. The idea is to make opposition to health care reform seem more widespread than it really is.… [I]t is impossible to dismiss the large quotient of manufactured outrage in these disruptions. The campaign smacks of what political operatives call ‘Astroturf’—fake grass roots” (see April 14, 2009, April 15, 2009, May 29, 2009, July 27, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, Before August 6, 2009, August 6, 2009, and August 6-7, 2009). [Salisbury Post, 8/5/2009]

Reporter and media critic Howard Kurtz writes of the difficulties in discerning perceptions from reality in the debate over health care reform, and the increasingly contentious town hall meetings across America (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, and August 5, 2009). “Is there a rising tide of anger in America against Barack Obama’s health plan and big-government programs?” he asks. “Or are the media just making it seem that way?” It has long been common practice to use footage of “one person… screaming, or us[ing] incendiary rhetoric” to add interest to an otherwise “dull and routine story,” he notes. In the modern age of YouTube, “instant” viral videos of protests and near-riots at town halls are subsequently played and replayed on cable news shows “in an endless loop.” Kurtz notes the controversial “strategy memo” for disrupting and dominating discussion at town halls, originally released by a small conservative Connecticut organization and picked up and redistributed by larger Washington lobbying firms (see Late July, 2009). He writes, “I have no idea how widely this memo has been distributed, but the language is revealing.” He also notes that some lobbying firms have taken credit for “helping gin up the sometimes-rowdy outbursts targeting House Dems at town hall meetings around the country, raising questions about their spontaneity” (see August 4, 2009). [Washington Post, 8/5/2009]

America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the health care industry’s trade association, distributes “talking points” for use by opponents of health care reform that specifically target the so-called “public option” for alternative government-provided health care. AHIP has been heavily involved in orchestrating and facilitating the recent spate of raucous anti-reform protests (see July 10, 2009 and August 2, 2009). The talking points, entitled “August Recess Talking Points,” include the following: “Health plans strongly believe that now is the time for comprehensive, bipartisan health care reform that enhances affordability, improves quality, covers all Americans, and puts the health care system on a sustainable path. However, we also share the concerns that employers, providers, and patients have raised about the significant unintended consequences of a new government-run plan. A government-run plan would dismantle employer-based coverage, thereby violating the shared commitment to ensure that those who like their current coverage can keep it. The government-run plan would also add significant liabilities to the federal budget.” Reporter Greg Sargent notes that like any other lobbying group or citizens’ organization, AHIP has the right to “encourage… participation and distribut[e] talking points.” However, he notes that the industry AHIP represents “has a tremendous financial stake in whether a public plan becomes a reality. And the industry is not only telling people to go to town meetings, but also telling them how to voice their opposition to a public option. Bottom line: It’s indisputable that the industry is orchestrating public opposition to one of health care reform’s most important components.” [Plum Line, 8/6/2009]

Some Democratic politicians accuse Republicans of organizing “angry mobs” to disrupt town hall meetings around the country (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, and August 5, 2009). Conservatives retort that the protests are spontaneous outbursts of anger and concern from ordinary citizens who oppose the White House’s health care reform proposals. According to a Democratic National Committee (DNC) ad, Republicans “have no plan for moving our country forward, so they’ve called out the mob.… [D]esperate Republicans and their well-funded allies” are trying to “destroy President Obama.” Senator Arlen Specter, who took part in a contentious town hall three days ago (see August 2, 2009), says: “I think that a fair amount of the activity was orchestrated. I think a fair amount of it was involved individuals who came without being orchestrated. But it was a battleground.” And White House press secretary Robert Gibbs says some of the anger from the crowds is manufactured: “In fact, I think you’ve had groups today, Conservatives for Patients Rights [CPR], that have bragged about organizing and manufacturing that anger” (see August 4, 2009). In return, CPR spokesman Brian Burgess says, “The White House is desperate for a scapegoat to blame for their failure to convince Americans to let the government take over health care.” A Democratic organization with connections to the Obama administration, Organizing for America, is planning strategy for upcoming events, including a Michigan appearance by Vice President Joe Biden. An e-mail from the organization encourages Michigan Democrats to “stand with the vice president and against the angry mobs being directed by Republican operatives in Washington to disrupt events throughout the month of August.” DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse says that mobs of right-wing activists are being transported from one rally to another by “well-funded, highly organized groups run by Republican operatives and funded by the special interests who are desperately trying to stop the agenda for change the president was elected to bring to Washington.… This type of anger and discord did not serve Republicans well in 2008—and it is bound to backfire again.” Republican National Committee (RNC) spokeswoman Gail Gitcho responds: “In a remarkable example of callousness, the White House and Democrats have reduced the concerns and opinions of millions of Americans to ‘manufactured’ and have labeled them as ‘angry extremists,’ for voicing their opposition to President Obama’s government-run health care experiment.… Are Democrats so out of touch that they are shocked to learn that Americans are concerned about their $1.6 trillion government-run health care experiment?” CNN political analyst Bill Schneider observes: “On issues like this, intensity of opinion matters as much as numbers. Opponents of the president’s health care reform seem to feel more intensely about it than Obama’s supporters.” [CNN, 8/5/2009] Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, says he believes the use of intimidation and extreme tactics—including displays of overtly Nazi symbols and hanging representatives in effigy—will “backfire in a big way” because their aim is to keep people from talking about health care. “When you’ve got people shouting and hanging members of Congress in effigy,” he says, “most people are going to react badly to that. I think most people want to have a civil discussion.” Van Hollen says that House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and other Republican leaders “are actively involved in sort of fueling the fire of these disruptions. They’ve got to be careful what they ask for here.… If Republicans want to continue to ally themselves with these fringe groups, it will continue to discredit them.” National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Ken Spain counters: “Democrats have gone from blaming Republican obstruction, to the insurance industry, to Matt Drudge, and now they are even blaming the voters who are registering their opposition at town halls across the country. At what point are they going to get the message that people simply don’t want a government takeover of health care?” [Roll Call, 8/5/2009]

Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Michael Steele tells a Washington Times reporter that his organization had no role in the recent spate of raucous and near-riotous confrontations by conservative anti-health care reform advocates (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, and August 5, 2009). “I had nothing to do with that, I did not encourage that,” Steele says. “And we’re not encouraging people to be angry, I mean to the point of being nasty and brutish and ugly. That’s not what this is about. There’s no upside for the Republican Party or the people involved to do that. Now some people, you know, that’s how they express their frustration, that’s how they express their frustration. But that’s not something deliberately coordinated by me or any one state party.” Steele’s statement is at odds with recent exhortations and statements of support from House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), who has just issued a press release that celebrates the “success” of the town hall disruptions, and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), which has celebrated the disruptions with a “Recess Roast” e-mail urging more disruptions. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) is another Republican who disagrees with the angry, confrontational tactics: hours before Steele’s statement, he sent out a Twitter message that said, “Town hall meetings are an American tradition—we should allow everyone to express their views without disruption—even if we disagree!” [Think Progress, 8/5/2009]

Screenshot of Texas GOP Web site featuring Doggett protest video, from August 5, 2009. [Source: Think Progress (.com)]Though Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Michael Steele says that the Republican Party has no ties to, or involvement with, the recent spate of raucous and near-riotous protests against health care reform (seeAugust 5, 2009, June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, and August 5, 2009), the Web site of the Republican Party of Texas features a front page celebration of the recent disruption at a town hall hosted by Texas Democrat Lloyd Doggett (see August 1, 2009). A photo of Doggett on the site links to a YouTube video of protesters screaming and shouting at him, hosted on the Texas Republican Party’s official YouTube account, txgoptv. The video concludesd with the words, “Produced by the Republican Party of Texas,” and features a legal disclaimer that proclaims the video was paid for the by the Republican Party of Texas. [Republican Party of Texas, 8/2009; Think Progress, 8/6/2009]

Grover Norquist, the highly influential leader of the conservative activist group Americans for Tax Reform, acknowledges that his group, along with Americans for Prosperity and the National Conservative Union among others, has encouraged its members to attend town hall meetings to protest health care reform proposals (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, and August 5, 2009). Norquist also admits that his organization provides talking points, suggested questions to ask, and slogans to chant at the meetings. However, he says his group does not endorse the raucous, sometimes riotous discussions that are taking place. “The more civilly you ask the question, the more powerful it is,” he says. “Nobody says go and scream. That’s the least effective thing you can do.” But a former Republican aide notes, “If you are going to town-hall, you understand the potential pitfalls.” [Roll Call, 8/5/2009]

Representative Brian Baird (D-WA) tells MSNBC host Rachel Maddow that there is a real danger of violence being fomented by anti-health care protesters (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 6, 2009, August 6, 2009, and August 6-8, 2009). “[T]he first violence that’s happening is violence in the democratic process,” he says. “If people set out to disrupt town hall meetings, to intimidate people who sincerely want to discuss important issue, the first victim is the democracy itself. But beyond that, some of the rhetoric that we’re hearing is vaguely—not vaguely, but eerily reminiscent of the thing that drove Tim McVeigh to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995).… [W]hen a concerted effort is made to intimidate, to suppress discussion, to threaten people, that crosses the line and it actually blocks the democratic process and informed debate.”
Says Constituents Intimidated, Unwilling to Participate - Baird acknowledges that he has not held any in-person town hall meetings, though he has scheduled so-called “telephone town halls” conducted via telephone and Internet connections. “What I’m opting not do is create a venue where people can purposefully intimidate other members of the community who want to be heard and want to express their views,” he says. “You know, when you read these Web sites, Rachel, it’s all about attack early, intimidate, shout them down, don’t get them have a word in edgewise. I’ve had town halls where that kind of thing has happened and average citizens have said: ‘This is frightening to me. This is not what my country is about. I’m not coming to these anymore.’ So, if you get a point where the only purpose to have a town hall is to have it disrupted and reasonable people who want to have a debate can’t be there, what’s the point of having the town hall?”
GOP Must Call for Restraint - Baird says that the Republican Party has a direct responsibility to “call for civility, because this is a question of our democratic process itself. Remember, they will have town halls as well. And we don’t really want a situation where our side decides, well, we’ve got to show up and scream and shout them down—because then you basically resort to mob rule. And that’s not what a constitutional democratic republic is about. It’s not enough for them to say, ‘We’re not coordinating it, we’re not condoning it.’ They must do as John McCain did (see August 5, 2009), and vigorously—vigorously oppose this.” [MSNBC, 8/7/2009]
'Death to All Marxists' - The next day, Baird receives a fax at his office. The fax depicts President Obama with a Communist hammer and sickle drawn on his forehead, and the message “Death to all Marxists, foreign and domestic” written underneath. [MSNBC, 8/13/2009]

The logo used for the Obama administration’s health care proposal on the White House Web site. The logo combines the Obama presidential campaign’s ‘sunrise’ emblem with a stylized version of the medical caduceus. [Source: White House]After denouncing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for claiming that anti-health care protesters had used Nazi symbols and rhetoric in their protests (see August 6, 2009), conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh also makes a comparison between the Obama administration and Nazis. “Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate,” he says. Like Obama, Limbaugh asserts, Hitler “was called the Messiah” and did not need the advice of a cabinet or other advisers to make decisions. “The people spoke through” Hitler, as Limbaugh says Obama believes is the case for himself. Hitler’s decisions “sound like the things liberals are doing all over this country.” To Pelosi, he says, “You look much more like [a swastika] than any of us [conservatives] ever will.” [Media Matters, 8/6/2009; Boston Globe, 8/6/2009] Limbaugh also says that the Obama administration’s health care logo looks very much like the “Nazi swastika logo.” He adds: “It reminded me of Germany. Something about it reminded me of Germany, 1942. The shape of the logo, the people.… The Obama health care logo is damn close to a Nazi swastika logo.… Ms. Pelosi has some major apologizing to do.” He says perhaps Pelosi’s supposed “repeated botox injections” have caused her to have “blurry vision” that may have prevented her from seeing the similarities he noticed. [Media Matters, 8/6/2009; Boston Globe, 8/6/2009] Limbaugh apparently gets much of his information, including the Botox joke, from a right-wing blog, “Sweetness and Light,” which he credits in his statement. [Sweetness and Light, 8/6/2009] The next day, Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center says, “It is preposterous to try and make a connection between the president’s health care logo and the Nazi Party symbol, the Reichsadler.” [New York Times, 8/7/2009] Jennifer Crider of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) responds to Limbaugh’s assertions: “Rush Limbaugh’s comparison of the Democratic Party to the Nazi Party in World War II is as disgusting as it is shocking. Limbaugh’s use of the Nazi swastika in attempting to make a tasteless political comparison has no place in the public discourse. At a time when families need real solutions to rebuild the economy and make health care more affordable, Rush Limbaugh is attempting to sidetrack the important debate through his use of symbols that are synonymous with murder and intolerance. Americans deserve better.” [Boston Globe, 8/6/2009] Conservative columnist David Brooks of the New York Times calls Limbaugh’s rhetoric “insane.” [Media Matters, 8/10/2009]

An anti-health care reform protester carries a poster depicting President Obama as Adolf Hitler. [Source: The New Republic]An anti-health care reform organization, Patients First—a subsidiary of industry lobbyist group Americans for Prosperity (see May 29, 2009 and August 6, 2009)—holds an anti-reform rally in Pueblo, Colorado.
Obama's 'Final Solution' - The keynote speaker tells the assembled crowd that Democratic health care reform will mandate physician-assisted suicide: “If this new Obama-care program comes to fruition, when you reach 65 and every five years thereafter, you’re going to have a counseling session with some federal airhead. Part of this process is called end-of-life counseling and part of the end-of-life counseling can be an end-of-life order. Adolf Hitler issued six million end of life orders. He called his program the final solution. I kind of wonder what we’re going to call ours.” The speaker compares the Obama administration to the regimes of despots Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Pol Pot, and then tells the audience to “go to offices of members of Congress and put the fear of God in them.” [TPMDC, 8/7/2009; ColoradoPols (.com), 8/7/2009; MSNBC, 8/10/2009]
Commentator Blasts Nazi Comparisons - MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow later says: “Put the fear of God in them—because what Obama is doing with killing all these people like Sarah Palin said, that’s like what Hitler did and you know what Hitler deserved. This is the rhetoric that corporate-funded, GOP-allied groups like Americans for Prosperity are funneling through which they set up to look like grassroots organizations to get people to go ‘put the fear of God’ into elected officials.… What has started as rowdy and rude and mean-spirited disruptions has turned, in some cases, into actual violence, with several hospitalizations for minor injuries and some arrests being reported at health care town halls last night (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 6, 2009, August 6, 2009, and August 6-8, 2009). What’s also evident is that the anti-reform rhetoric increasingly is invoking specific references to Nazis and specific comparison of President Obama to Adolf Hitler.… You know, there are people alive today who barely survived the Holocaust. And there are many people alive today whose whole families were killed in the Holocaust. Nazism is not a metaphor for a political policy you disagree with. Used deliberately as a strategy to characterize a political opponent, it has a very specific resonance with people looking to justify violence. The implication of conjuring up the Third Reich is that, in the case of someone who’s identified as a Nazi, as a modern day Hitler, violence against that person, even murder, would not only be seen as justified, it might be celebrated. This rhetorical strategy sets the stage for political violence that the perpetrator could hope would be praised. As such the idea of assassination, other kinds of political violence are always in the subtext. And you know, sometimes assassination isn’t even in the subtext. Sometimes it just bubbles right up to the surface.” [MSNBC, 8/10/2009]

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) lambasts the organizers of the raucous and sometimes-violent protests against the Democrats’ proposed reforms to health care (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 6, 2009, August 6, 2009, and August 6-8, 2009). The protesters are attempting to “sabotage” the democratic process, Reid tells reporters. Using a piece of artificial turf—Astroturf—as a prop (see April 14, 2009 and April 15, 2009), Reid accuses conservative and industry lobbying groups of fomenting fake grassroots outrage to further the health care industry’s goal to prevent reform. “These are nothing more than destructive efforts to interrupt a debate that we should have, and are having,” Reid says. “They are doing this because they don’t have any better ideas. They have no interest in letting the negotiators, even though few in number, negotiate. It’s really simple: they’re taking their cues from talk show hosts, Internet rumor-mongerers… and insurance rackets.” In turn, Republicans accuse Democrats of “ginning up this cynical shell game.” In recent days, President Obama’s top political adviser, David Axelrod, has given advice to Democratic lawmakers on how to handle the raucous protests. “It’s a challenge, no question about it, and you’ve got to get out there and make the case,” says Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT). “This is not the time for the faint-hearted.” [Associated Press, 8/6/2009]

An anti-reform protester displays a large sign depicting President Obama as Adolf Hitler. [Source: Daily Kos]House Representative John Dingell (D-MI), an 83-year-old advocate of health care reform, hosts a “town hall” meeting in Romulus, Michigan, to discuss the Obama administration’s plans to reform health care. The forum has so many people attempting to participate that its organizer, the local chapter of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), says it will sponsor a second forum at a later date. Like many other forums where health care is a primary topic of discussion, anti-health care protesters attempt to disrupt and dominate the discussion by shouting down and chanting over Dingell and other audience members (see June 30, 2009, July 6, 2009, July 25, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 31, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 6, 2009, and August 6-8, 2009).
Louder and Angrier Participants Garner More Media Coverage - One audience participant, health care reform supporter Chris Savage, writes about the forum on the liberal blog Daily Kos. Savage also takes a photograph of an anti-health care reform protester carrying a large sign depicting President Obama as Adolf Hitler. He says that anti-reform protesters outnumber supporters approximately five to one. In the Huffington Post, Savage later writes: “Typically, the more hysterical the person’s message was or the more angrily they shouted, the more likely they were to get attention from the press. The young black man with the Obama-as-Hitler poster was the busiest one of them all.”
Shouting Down Participants from Outset - Even before the event begins, protesters are shouting and catcalling, with one woman yelling to an elderly reform supporter: “You may be dead in five years! They may euthanize you!” AARP official Erick Schneidewind is shouted down with calls of “Traitor!” and “Liar!” before he can even introduce himself. One disabled woman, Marcia Boehm, attempts to tell her story—how she lost her health care in December 2008 and her pre-existing conditions make it difficult for her to get new coverage—but is shouted down by protesters who scream, “I shouldn’t have to pay for your healthcare!” and “Get government healthcare!” After Dingell takes the podium, another protester, Mike Sola, approaches him, pushing his son before him in a wheelchair. The man accuses Dingell of participating in a government plan to kill his son, who has cerebral palsy, by denying him health care. When Dingell denies the charge, the man begins shouting “Liar!” over and over, and trying to push forward into Dingell’s personal space with his wheelchair-bound son. He is prevented from getting within touching distance by Dingell staffers; he is soon escorted out by police officers. The Daily Kos blogger writes that no matter what Dingell attempts to say, he is countered and sometimes drowned out by screams and chants of “Liar!” “Traitor!” “Bullsh_t!” “Did you even read the bill?” (Dingell helped write the House version of the bill.) “The goverment is going to kill us when we are older!” “The goverment is providing abortion money!” and other shouts, boos, catcalls, and chants. One protester in the second session, Matt McCormack, is particularly noticeable; after the first few minutes of the meeting, where he repeatedly shouts phrases like “Look at me! Look at me! You are being used!” he begins a loud conversation on his cell phone, looking up periodically to scream “Liar!” at inappropriate moments, like when questions are being asked. McCormack later stands up, launches a spate of invective towards Dingell, and storms towards the podium, but is intercepted by police and escorted outside. On his blog, McCormack later claims to have been arrested.
Attempts at Confrontation Outside Hall - Savage reports that outside the hall, anti-reform protesters attempt to provoke a physical confrontation with him, apparently in an attempt to create a disturbance for the media. One protester tells the blogger’s son, “Your dad is a coward!” for refusing to argue with him. [Daily Kos, 8/6/2009; Detroit Free Press, 8/6/2009; Huffington Post, 8/10/2009]
Many from Outside District - Almost half of the attendees who sign in to the event put down addresses outside of Dingell’s district. The Huffington Post will note, “In short, the sign-in sheets lend credence to the accusation that the protests are the product of Washington-based ‘Astroturf’ organizations, rather than evidence of a groundswell of popular resistance to health care reform.” [Huffington Post, 8/11/2009]
Refusing Offer to Meet One-on-One, Claims Intimidation - Dingell later offers Sola the chance to meet with him one-on-one to discuss his concerns over his son’s health care coverage, but Sola refuses. Dingell writes: “The offer still stands.… I have served in Congress and I have seen enough in my lifetime to know that the cause before us is too vital, too necessary, and too timely to allow it to fail. I remember many times in my career and in my life when powerful forces tried to stop progress. We cannot let this happen and we cannot allow this opportunity to go by without providing that each and every American has health care. As long as I have a vote, I will not let shouting, intimidation, or misinformation deter me from fighting for this cause.” [US House of Representatives, 8/7/2009] Sola will later tell a Fox News interviewer that one or more “liberal thugs” visit his house later in the evening to attempt to intimidate him. These “thugs” are supporters of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Sola claims, and says that if he experiences a second such visit, he will use “lethal force” to protect his family. [Hispanic Business (.com), 8/10/2009]

Tim Phillips (r) being interviewed by Rachel Maddow (l). [Source: YouTube]Tim Phillips, the president of the corporate lobbying firm Americans for Prosperity (AFP), is interviewed by progressive MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. AFP, like FreedomWorks, Conservatives for Patients Rights (CPR), and other organizations, is responsible for what Maddow calls “astroturfing” the health care reform debate—creating “fake grassroots organizations” such as Patients First and Patients United Now that purport to represent ordinary citizens, but are in fact entities created and controlled by corporate and/or political interests (see April 14, 2009, April 15, 2009, May 29, 2009, July 27, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, Before August 6, 2009, and August 6-7, 2009).
Representing 'Real Folks' - Phillips is jovial with Maddow, insisting that AFP merely represents the interests of “real folks.” When asked who funds AFP’s “grassroots” offshoot, Patients First, instead of answering, Phillips tells Maddow that the organization is made up of patients “just like us. I’m a patient. Rachel, you’re a parent. So I think we’re all patients in this issue. And we all have something at stake here.” Phillips even denies being a Washington lobbyist, but instead calls himself “a community organizer” similar to the position once held by President Obama. “What do you think about that?” he asks. “Maybe I’m qualified to be president.” He finally claims that AFP is funded by citizen donors, though he admits that the bulk of its money comes from foundations such as the Koch Industries Foundations, the grant-giving arm of Koch Industries, the largest privately held oil company in the US. Maddow says, “[I]t seems odd to just call yourself patients like us when you’re a huge recipient of funding from a big company, and you’re trying to distinguish yourself from lobbyists and big companies.” Phillips in turn says that to label groups like AFP anything but citizen organizations is “demeaning” to the ordinary citizens who turn out at the rallies and forums. Maddow responds: “I’m not calling anybody, any individual American, a front group. I’m calling Americans for Prosperity’s subgroups a front group for the corporate interest that funds you, guys. Honestly, I mean, that’s the allegation that we’re making here.”
'We Would Love to Have More Corporate Funding' - Phillips says: “[C]orporate interests are a minuscule part of our funding.… And by the way, we would love to have more corporate funding. So if there’s more corporations watching us, feel free to give to us. We’ll be happy to have their support as well. We will get the message out on this health care issue.” He denies ever taking money from Exxon, but says AFP would be more than happy to accept Exxon and other such funding. Maddow notes that Exxon has listed AFP as a recipient of large amounts of money, and Phillips qualifies his statement: “This year, we haven’t had any Exxon money.… But again, though, we’re happy to take corporate money.” Maddow says that she isn’t sure the protesters showing up at the town halls at the behest of AFP know that the organization is funded by oil and health care corporations.
'Gotcha Politics' - After Maddow notes Phillips’s involvement with several Republican political and lobbying campaigns, Phillips accuses her of playing “gotcha politics.” Maddow retorts that Americans “want to know who the players are in this fight and who’s organizing what are being maintained as if they’re just spontaneous efforts happening organically by Americans who are angry and they’re aren’t being coordinated by industry and by lobbyists and by political campaign groups associated with the Republican Party. And that’s why I want to talk about who you are, because you have such an important role in coordinating these events and I think the American people are curious.” In his turn, Phillips says that it is “gotcha politics” that is helping the anti-reform movement win the issue. Before Maddow ends the interview, Phillips invites her to join AFP on the bus tour “as my guest to see these real Americans. Would you do that?” Maddow replies, “I can’t bear the conflict of interest with your corporate funders.” [MSNBC, 8/7/2009]