The Naked Truth

There are times where being in the media is both exciting and terrifying, as we must keep our attention on an incredibly broad range of rapidly changing - and sometimes shocking - stories in the short term, while we continue to keep our collective focus on stories that take months or even years to see through.

For example, over the last twenty four hours, the big headlines included both the NBA and NHL finals. They also included more discussion about the NSA's spying, and writer Glenn Greenwald. The great majority of that chatter still hasn't focused on the truly important debate on security and privacy - though there have been notable exceptions like the piece in the Washington Post on Tuesday from Katrina Vanden Heuvel. The headlines have also included more wrangling on the immigration reform bill currently working it's way through the U.S. House, including some amazingly good news about the immigration reform bill from the CBO.

There was even a ridiculous story centering on Republican Congressman Michael Burgess from Texas, who appears to have some seriously warped ideas about fetuses. The U.S. House also passed a pointless attempt to limit abortion to twenty weeks or less. We suppose we should be grateful that the Republican-led House didn't generate yet another pointless story by tossing in their 38th ultimately pointless vote to try and retroactively kill President Obama's health care reform law.

Obamacare has been one of those stories that's taken years to see through, and it's still not a finished product yet.

Like a new suit that doesn't quite fit yet, the President's signature legislation of his first term still needs to have a few alterations - though not quite the fantasy redesigns some Republicans would like to see.

For all the promises to unveil a GOP alternative to Obamacare, and the internal party battles over the law,  Republicans still have yet to put together any replacement plan for health care. Most have begun to accept it's not going anywhere. As Ezra Klein's Wonktalk with Avik Roy showed on Tuesday, even some of Obamacare's greatest critics have now effectively accepted most of the main points of the law.

Whether or not anyone has truly accepted the reality that the Affordable Care Act is now etched in legal stone, you'll likely begin to see and hear a lot more about it soon. Groups like Enroll America, alongside many private insurance companies, are beginning to step up their grassroots campaigns, It's in the best interest of both the insurance companies and Americans to make sure everyone is registered for and able to take advantage of the new health care benefits available to all next year.

In states like California and Oregon, where Obamacare has been implemented as fully as possible at this stage, premiums and rates are not only dropping. Insurers are competing to drop their rates lower and faster than either the insurance companies or many health care experts expected.

Obamacare will also get another chance to become a campaign issue in 2014, though likely a very positive one. Dr. Donald Berwick, a Democrat, former Obama administration official,  and a key figure in the roll out of Obamacare announced on Tuesday the start of his 2014 campaign to become the Governor of Massachusetts.

For a government program that's been in the process of rolling out for more than two years, it may seem a little counterintuitive when we note that the naked truth about Obamacare is that its actually pretty simple to understand.

Obamacare may not fit perfectly at first for you and your family - and there are adjustments that will need to be made, both to individual plans and the system as a whole. That said, when states work WITH the Federal government, Obamacare appears to be better than the tattered old health care system Americans have been using, if and when they could afford to.

Obamacare, as it stands isn't a bad plan - And it's certainly better than the GOP's non-existent plan.

Missing The Boat

In American politics right now, those who are in charge are missing the proverbial boat on a whole host of issues - a fact that appears to be more obvious to a wider cross section of the American people every day.

As we noted Monday, a nascent debate on Syria appeared to be on the horizon as the week began. But with two separate polls from both the Pew Center and Gallup, it's already clear what the opinion of the American people is on Syria - America should stay out of it. Unfortunately, President Obama has already missed the boat on that one, after authorizing a small number of arms to be sent to Syrian rebels. Still, the President may not be sunk yet on his minor Syrian decision, though as Washington Monthly's Ed Kilgore noted yesterday, the hopes of neo-con chicken hawks like Senators McCain and Graham - and their military contractor donors - may be completely underwater with public disapproval of more U.S. war involvement being so high.

On immigration, any sane person looking at the demographic realities facing the GOP might logically believe there's a course that should allow immigration reform to sail through Congress. Not surprisingly to us, however, is the torpedoing by extremist tea party Republicans of any immigration plan that might pass the Senate and be signed by the President. The attempt to tie immigration to Obamacare and the latest plan by Sen. Ted Cruz to override the Supreme Court's Voter ID ruling are both examples of the GOP being effectively dead in the water on the issue of immigration reform.

Of course, if members of Congress were sane, they also wouldn't follow the example of Rep. Eric Cantor, who's been trying to trash the President, as weeks of overblown scandals and fake outrage have caused a dip in Obama's poll numbers. As Steve Benen at Maddowblog pointed out, Cantor - and frankly anyone in Congress - should really keep their political stones in their pockets, since Congress now has its lowest approval ratings EVER. Even with a slight dip in his poll numbers, Americans still like and trust President Obama five times more than they do Congress.

The plunge into stupidity doesn't stop there.

As Jonathan Bernstein noted over at The Plum Line, and as our staffers have said for years, the almost slavish devotion to the extreme right-wing of the Republican Party also now appears to be costing the GOP to lose some of the moderate religious right. Indeed, Bernstein cites a story by Anne Kim and Ed Kilgore at Washington Monthly that details how some moderate religious Republicans have been trying to find solutions to their problems with Obamacare. Instead of the GOP supporting and helping out their natural constituents, these religious Republicans looking for a healthcare solution have found two champions in Democratic senators Mark Pryor and Chris Coons.

What Americans really want doesn't take a deep dive into policy or partisanship to understand.

They want more jobs, better pay, healthcare for all, and a government that works efficiently and effectively. They want policies that make sense, like not getting involved in civil wars of other nations - especially in the Middle East - and not having their government spy on them.

They also want an immigration policy that keeps families together and rewards hard-working immigrants, while punishing corporations that try to abuse those immigrants.

That so many people in American politics seem to be missing the boat so often these days makes us wonder exactly what they're really thinking - or if those at some of the highest levels of politics are even capable of floating a cogent thought on their own anymore.

The Silence Of The Sheeple

As a new week begins, there is both a new debate on American involvement in Syria, and the debate that remains to be truly addressed, over security and privacy. Today, we'll try to finish what we started a week and a half ago, since - unlike Congress - we don't like to fall asleep on the job.

Over the weekend, more muddled information from Barton Gellman in the Washington Post, and Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian were released about the NSA's spying programs.

While the new info is interesting, much of the mainstream media is still avoiding addressing the truly important debate, of security versus privacy. What's more, Congress - the ones who are truly responsible for making this NSA mess such a disaster - appear to have been sleeping while the wolves of the military/industrial/spying class fleeced the sheeple of America.

Adam Serwer noted back in 2012 that members of Congress who reauthorized these programs didn't even understand what they did. That obviously didn't keep someone like Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner from feigning shock over the NSA's programs last Friday, as Serwer also reported. We say "feigning" because if Sensenbrenner had actually attended the meetings he was supposed to, he'd already have been well-versed in what the NSA was doing.

It's a good thing a handful of writers and journalists - like Serwer and the Washington Post's Greg Sargent - have thankfully stayed focused on the real debate over privacy and security that President Obama recently said he welcomed.

Sargent, in fact, engaged in a serious Twitter conversation with our own staffer Shawn Peirce on Friday, after Greg spoke with the ACLU's legislative counsel, Michelle Richardson. As Greg noted, Richardson claims that the Obama administration could declassify enough information about the NSA programs so that Congress and the American people could have that debate over privacy and security.

The problem, as both Greg and Shawn noted in their discussion on Friday, is that if President Obama or members of his administration declassified the NSA material without any action from Congress, with the adversarial addiction of the mainstream media, it would almost certainly lead to further partisan political attacks that would likely bring America no closer to solving the problem.

As Sargent said in that discussion on Friday, "…obviously the best way for this to happen is for Congress to compel it". That would mean our Congressmembers would have to wake from their legislative slumber, so they might actually protect the American people. Frankly, we're not sure some of them are willing to wake up.

There are a few in Congress who aren't completely asleep, as Greg noted last week, like Sen. Jeff Merkley, a progressive Democrat, and Sen. Mike Lee, a Tea Party Republican. Still - Congress can't do this alone.

To truly neuter the NSA's wolfish habits will require a full court press from both the Congress and the Obama Administration, working together, with an assist from the judicial branch.

Of course, to get the debate to generate a policy change will also require the American people to refuse to remain quiet on this issue. In that respect at least, both Gellman and Greenwald are keeping parts of this debate at the top of the minds of the mainstream American media, and therefore, the American people. That may not seem like much, but it's better than the willfully ignorant silence on this issue that Americans have been sounding since 2001.