Random Acts Of Journalism At NPR

When you’ve lost NPR, …..

cosmoscon

For the past few days NPR has run 3 separate stories on Obamacare and all of them have clearly shown the wake of destruction that this massive takeover of healthcare has left.

The first story was about a Cleveland, Ohio bar owner who is frustrated with his hike in insurance costs.

“They just seemed to keep going up every year,” he says. “One year we got a 38 percent increase; another year we got 11. One year we got 3.”

“This year, under the Affordable Care Act, he saw another hike — this one about 20 percent.”

“It just seems odd that we get such a drastic price increase when nothing has really changed with us as far as our employees and health issues,” he says.

“I always thought that health reform was needed of some type,” he says. “It just seems like … they botched it.”

The next day…

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Stop with all the %@!*#&^! Warnings, would ya’??!?

We’re being warned to death.

Product warnings. Tool Warnings. Ride Warnings. Viewer Warnings. Warnings on everything from coffee to cough drops, and from matches to mattresses. Warnings in every single set of instructions for anything we’ve ever bought, and ever WILL buy. Warnings at work, Warnings at home, and Warnings the entirety of our commute between.

“Warning: there’s another Warning ahead! 

You have been Warned…”

Yet now, even as we are several orders of magnitude past merely being replete with warnings, the state of California wants to drop still another warning into our lives. Any guesses what new “danger” has been uncovered by our duly-elected Wizards of Smart, and which now (naturally) requires a warning label to protect us from its fearsome wrath?

Give up?

It’s SODA.

Yes, the drink.

As in “Soda Pop”.

Thanks to the Census Bureau, #Obamacare has a shiny new yardstick

Over the weekend, Politico said that Conservatives were “suspicious” of the White House over the following issue. But that’s wrong: we’re not “suspicious” in the slightest.

Suspicion indicates doubt, …and anyone with two synapses still firing should have zero doubts about this White House.

We mentioned the topic in a post last week, but with the Easter Holiday and vacation days, etc…, I’m guessing you might have missed at least part of this. So in addition to Eric’s perfect cartoon, we’ll also include a few links to what he’s referring.

Specifically:

If #Obamacare was Fast Food…

From the brilliantly twisted mind of Glenn McCoy:

And to catch you up-to-speed about what Glenn is so expertly skewering, please refer to the links below:

If #Obamacare’s NOT a laughing matter, why is its spokesman such a clown?

Early in Barack Obama’s presidency, I remember seeing a creepy picture someone had photo-shopped to make him look like the Joker from The Dark Knight, portending sinister things to come. Fast-forward five years. I’m afraid they were giving the president way too much credit.

Rather than appearing as some conniving genius mad for power, Obama looks like a fool frantically trying to keep his whole façade of power from crumbling.

Between Barack and a Hard Place

Our POTUS still doesn’t seem to grasp how image shapes perception, especially in the media. For example, he recently appeared on Zach Galifianakis’ Web comedy show, “Between Two Ferns.”  Galifianakis’ purpose in this show is to get laughs by asking extremely awkward questions and putting his guests in the worst light possible. That’s the joke: everyone gets to look either rude or foolish.

Obama managed to look both.

“Unexpectedly”: #Obamacare costs to double, …or triple

There’s a reason that the Affordable Care Act was named such: it was purported to make health care more affordable for one and all. Cost and affordability was its entire raison d’être, and naysayers were either shouted down or called bold-faced liars. 

But reality doesn’t much care about someone’s preferred talking points, and it was a foregone conclusion that costs for this legislative Golem-on-steroids were going to skyrocket far beyond the benign assurances of Obamacare’s most vocal proponents.

Tellingly, that hasn’t been just the opinion of various wild-eyed conservative pundits like yours truly, but also that of a living liberal saint in American political history:

With Change like THIS, perhaps there IS Hope:

(***courtesy of Gary Varvel)

There may still be hope for the upcoming generation… Below are two articles VERY much worth examining, each of which backs-up the sentiment so clearly expressed in the cartoon.

The first one’s by Michael Barone and is from several weeks back. However, it’s just as pertinent today as it was then, I promise:

This just in: Obama lied to you. Again.

Seriously, who could be surprised about this anymore?

(via National Review Online) – President Obama is going back on another chief promise he made regarding Obamacare. In a recent interview, he said that people may have to change their doctors because of the health-care law.

In 2009, during debate about the Affordable Care Act, the president claimed that, along with being able to keep your current plans, “if you like the doctor you have, you can keep your doctor, too.”

But in a WebMD interview that aired on Friday, President Obama reneged on that assurance. “For the average person, many folks who don’t have health insurance initially, they’re going to have to make some choices and they might end up having to switch doctors, in part because they’re saving money,” he said.

Video of the exchange is below: