ELO’s Jeff Lynne sings “Give Me Love” at Concert For George. We threw in three others for good measure.
Jeff Lynne Sings “Give Me Love,” Concert For George
Category: The News From Around The World
7 Stocks That Will Get Higher Off Legalized Marijuana
Have some pennies to waste? Here are 7 stocks that stand to gain from Americans getting wasted.
Public Access Goodness: Stairway to Stardom
George Zornick On Obamacare
Originally broadcast on January 10, 2014:
George Zornick covers Washington for The Nation.
Republicans want you to believe that millions of Americans are losing their health insurance due to Obamacare, and that President Obama lied when he said “if you like your plan, you can keep it.”
George Zornick writes for The Nation magazine. He’s been looking into this for the Washington Post and writes that when all is said and done, only ten thousand Americans will lose their coverage, not the five million that conservative pundits would want us to believe. He joins us from Washington, DC.
David: George, Republicans want us to believe that Americans are losing their health insurance because of Obamacare. Let’s deal with anecdotal evidence first. These victims of Obamacare Republicans keep introducing us to, do any of their stories ever pan out?
George: You know, I don’t want to absolutely say that not a single one has, but a lot of the ones that we’ve been looking into and certainly some of the ones that have been featured in a lot of these ads that are hitting Democrats for supporting Obamacare have not panned out, or at least they haven’t given us the complete story so that we can’t know if what they’re saying is actually true.
10,000 Americans will lose their coverage not the 5 million Republicans want you to believe, according to our guest George Zornick.
So, you know, a lot people may end up losing a health insurance plan because as the President has been extremely open and well publicized about is that if a health care plan, say, for example, doesn’t cover mammograms or is allowed to discriminate based on preexisting conditions or is basically what you would call a junk health insurance plan, that it wouldn’t be allowed to be sold on the new health insurance exchanges, and this is sort of . . . that was a big piece, that was a big virtue of the law that they were very public about. So obviously reading between the lines, what that means is if you have one of these plans, you’re going to have to change it. Now that’s different than losing it.
So a lot of the people that they’ve trotted out will be someone whose plan was changed, who their company writes them and says “we can no longer offer you this plan.” But, of course, there’s always a part B which is “however, we can offer you this plan or that plan.” So a lot of times when you actually pull the thread and look at these people who say “oh, I lost my plan,” there’s a second half of the story which is “oh, I got this other one, and by the way, it might actually have been cheaper than the one I was using and certainly offered better coverage.”
David: George, what is the difference between losing your insurance coverage and losing your insurance plan?
George: Yeah, you know, if you watch Fox News long enough, you’ll notice a very slippery sleight of hand happening between losing health insurance plans and losing health insurance coverage. So if you had a plan that is ineligible to have been sold on the exchanges because it didn’t cover enough or it was a plan that was extremely cheap because the company was denying people who had preexisting conditions, even things like heartburn or something like that, well, then that plan has to kind of go by the wayside. But that doesn’t mean, and we’ll stipulate-although there isn’t a central repository of data-we’ll stipulate for a moment that five million people perhaps got a notice like that, that the plan they were on had to be changed. So technically speaking, did they lose that plan? Yes. But whether they lost coverage is another story entirely.
President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law on March 23, 2010.
First of all, the White House passed a rule that said for all of 2014, people will actually be able to renew in their old bad plan even if, you know, they got a notice saying they couldn’t, just to ease the transition for people and give them more time to find a new one. So that immediately wipes out about half of the five million figure. A lot of the rest of the people when the health insurance company says “we can’t give you this plan anymore,” they say “well, but we can give you this plan.” And almost by definition, that plan has better coverage because, you know, it meets the standards of the health insurance exchanges. And then that person is also, unless they’re wealthy, also likely eligible to get subsidies on the exchanges to help pay for that plan.
So in the end what you have is people who lose their plan but then get a plan that certainly has better coverage and may be cheaper. And when you boil it all down, and the Democrats in Congress have done an interesting study that shows that when you boil it all down, there’s actually only, of that five million, there’s only ten thousand people who got a notice that their plan was changing and were not able to find another one. So that’s certainly a problem, but ten thousand is a lot different than five million.
David: I want to get to that in a second. Would President Obama have served Obamacare better if he said: “Five million Americans are losing their plans because those plans are now illegal. We’ve outlawed these plans. They’re junk plans”? Did he not clarify that properly?
Calling the mandate a “tax” the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare on June 28, 2012 by a vote of 5-4.
George: He, no doubt, could have been more clear about that. But I think Republicans here are kind of playing dumb because he did also at the same time say, you know, a lot of these junk plans are not going to be allowed on the insurance markets if they don’t cover mammograms or if they don’t cover x, y, and z, or we’re going to make sure that the plans offered on the exchanges are up to those standards. And he also said if there are companies that are keeping their plans cheap because they’re denying people based on preexisting conditions, well, we’re going to put an end to that.
So it’s not that he said no plan will ever, ever change or be taken away, and he could have, I suppose, been more forthright about that, but the point is that Republicans knew and have known for three years that this is exactly what was going to happen. And if they want to sort of grandstand on the inconvenience of people having to change their plans, which I’m sure for some is an inconvenience, then they should always be sure to tell the second half of the story which is-what is the new plan that this person got and are they better served by the new plan than they were under the old plan?
David: Right.
Unlike Kobe’s, Bill Clinton’s Accuser Never Pressed Rape Charges
The NBA’s Kobe Bryant and former President Bill Clinton will appear together on January 13, 2014 at a special conference on children’s health. Kobe was cleared of his rape charge. Bill Clinton’s accuser never took him to court. Watch this hard to find Dateline report from 1999 and you decide if President Clinton raped this woman.
Mort Sahl (11.22.13)
We kick off our series of printed highlights from the radio show with the father of modern standup comedy Mort Sahl. On the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination Mort Sahl talked to us from his home in Northern California.
David: Mort Sahl, thank you so much for joining us.
Mort: Well, it’s a pleasure, David.
David: All right so November 22nd, 1963. When you first heard that President Kennedy was shot, what was your first suspicion?
Mort: I wanted to know the detail. I didn’t like the communal crying.
David: What do you mean you didn’t like the “communal crying?”
Mort: There was a lot of sobbing, and it’s a terrible thing that happened and they all can’t stop crying. But there were a lot of questions. For example where was the presidential security detail? They were at Fort Hood, they were told to “stand down.” Oswald shot from the window, but why didn’t the Secret Service nail down those windows and the manhole covers? Where’s the detail? They say, “Well, we’ll know more when we get Oswald.”
Then they questioned Oswald for 10 hours, there’s no record of the interrogation. Then Jack Ruby comes in there and they say, “This patriot shot Oswald.” But the patriot turns out to be a bagman for the mob in Chicago. It started to fall apart right away.
After Mort Sahl stopped touring in order to join Jim Garrison’s investigation into JFK’s murder his income plummeted from $400,000 a year to $19,000.
David: You couldn’t stand the communal sobbing?
Mort: Yeah.
David: That’s a distraction, the tears and the patriotism.
Mort: It’s an indulgence. The Hungry i closed when that happened. The second time when Bobby got it and Enrico (Owner of The Hungry i) said, “We’re going to close” I said, “No we’re not. We’re not going to be lead in communal mourning by Walter Cronkite. We are going to ask, ‘Who did it?’”
David: So by making something sacred, it enables the cover-up, doesn’t it?
Mort: Oh, yeah, sure! That’s the whole thing. Then you can’t say, “The movie was lousy.” “What are you talking about? Oprah Winfrey made this movie. Are you a bigot?” It’s that thing again. The liberals. They are all on the side of the angels. So how come I ain’t happy?
David: Conservatives do it with the American flag, and patriotism, they hide behind our soldiers, they hid behind 9/11. I mean, both sides do it.
Mort: That’s one of the reasons the liberals should have unmasked 9/11 if they were really liberals.
David: They should unmask 9/11? What do you mean by that?
Mort: In other words, why is the 9/11 Report incomprehensible? And I saw the hearings. They still don’t know if they used thermite in that building and there are no answers. Incidentally, the only book that really took 911 on was a book by a Republican professor from Claremont College.
Mort Sahl on the cover of Time magazine.
David: Okay, so when did you go to work for Jim Garrison in New Orleans?
Mort: About 1965.
David: You were at the height of your popularity as a comedian and you gave it all up to pursue the prosecution of Clay Shaw?
Mort: Well, I didn’t think there was going to be any America; I thought it was going to be a fascist country. If they can do that and not give an explanation, you have got to oppose them, you can’t go along with that madness. Look who they got to go along, Earl Warren. They targeted everybody. They’re still lying. PBS by the way contributed Wednesday night, they said Oswald turned out to be a “lonely looser, a degenerate Marxist.” That’s an awful lot for one guy to accomplish at that age. There’s no evidence of any of that. What happened was that Garrison followed everybody in the case, and he found out that they all worked for the federal government, that’s how he got started. Then we began to get a lot of resistance. Why aren’t the archives open? Why was Allen Dulles on the Warren Commission? Where is the president’s brain?
David: Obama’s brain or JFK’s brain?
Mort: JFK’s brain is missing. They can’t find it in the archives.
David: Didn’t Bobby Kennedy take it?
Mort: No, that’s a contrived story. We had that whole thing for several years too, that the Kennedy family believes these investigations are gruesome and so forth. Until they killed Bobby. Nobody believes Sirhan Sirhan killed Bobby. The fatal wound is behind his right mastoid. There were 22 bullets in that board behind him and Sirhan had a 6 shooter. And the LA police took the board down. And then you get the coroner in the case Thomas Noguchi. I don’t believe them. The guy who wrote the book that the conspiracy is all hokum is Vincent Bugliosi. Who of course with the LAPD and Noguchi solved the Manson case. Notice how they solved it, they scare you more. But that’s the last time the D.A.’s office won a case in LA by the way. You know, Garrison never lost a capital case in eight years.
Mort Sahl invented modern standup comedy.
David: Do you believe it was the CIA working with the Cosa Nostra?
Mort: No. As Jim used to say, “The guys at the CIA make the Cosa Nostra look like Shirley Temple.” They’ll do anything as you can see from Snowden’s revelation. And they did. And it was out of the Western hemisphere of the CIA, with David Atlee Phillips.
And of course our witnesses kept getting killed remember? George de Mohrenschildt.
Terrible casualty list of potential witnesses, people are being beaten and threatened, but the fact wouldn’t go away. The president was gone and this country went to perpetual war, perpetual.
David: Thank you Mort Sahl.
Mort Sahl is the father of modern standup comedy. You can follow him on Twitter.