by Jonathan Cohn for Kaiser Health News
The news about health care is a little confusing these days. While polls show that Americans still support the key elements of health care reform that President Obama and his allies are trying to enact, there have been numerous reports of conservative activists showing up at congressional town halls across the country, protesting those same plans with an energy not matched by the other side.
The imbalance may simply reflect the media's preoccupation with conflict and confrontation. Liberal rallies in favor of reform have garnered no similar attention, although they've attracted hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of people. But I suspect the enthusiasm gap is at least partly real--that the hate for the plans moving through Congress runs much stronger than the love, that the people fighting to stop these bills feel more intensely, and have more determination, than those fighting to pass them.
If so, this ambivalence probably reflects a growing awareness of what the reform bills will do--or, more precisely, what they won't do.
Behind the "Birther Movement"
By Sam Fulwood III, Center for American Progress
Poor Rep. Mike Castle never saw it coming and had nothing to say. The Delaware moderate Republican congressman fixed a Bambi-in-the-headlights gaze on his face when the flag-waving woman in red whipped an otherwise unremarkable town hall meeting into a display of mass insanity.
Like others sharing her corner of the far-far-right lunatic fringe, the woman in red belongs to the “birther movement,” an ad hoc group of skeptics who passionately believe that President Barack Obama isn’t a “natural born citizen,” and as such, is constitutionally unqualified to sit in the Oval Office. Or, as this sad and misguided woman shouted to Castle, “He’s not an American citizen; he’s a citizen of Kenya.”
Watching Castle try to retain his dignity and set the woman straight made me feel sorry for him because he completely lost control of the situation. Truth be told, it was his own fault because Castle clearly isn’t monitoring the avatars of the right—the entertainers posing as authoritative journalists on radio and cable television chat shows.
And that’s why Castle was blindsided. None of this would have happened if Castle paid more attention to right-wing taking heads such as Liz Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, and, most significantly, CNN’s daily afternoon talker Lou Dobbs—all of whom have given the birther movement a media-endorsed fig leaf to hide its naked ignorance.
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