In the light of recent polling that suggests the voting public has turned on the Democratic Party, we’re beginning to see the complete separation of the truly dedicated Obama kool-aid drinkers from reality. It’s both hilarious and kind of sad.

There’s an old saw that, amongst Republicans, Conservatism can’t fail; rather, you can only fail Conservatism. In other words, since the cause, the ideology, is perfect and right and just, any of its failures in the real world must be a symptom that you can ascribe to its imperfect followers.

A similar phenomenon can be witnessed with the Catholic Church, where its defenders will readily condemn individual, low-level offenders while holding the institution which shuttled pedophiles from one community to the next blameless. It’s not the Church’s fault, or the fault of its powerful leaders; they were merely coping as best they could with the failures of others. Catholicism can’t fail, you can only fail Catholicism.

Now, however, as we enter into Obama’s second year, and Democratic fortunes head for the basement, we can see the same phenomenon occuring amongst Obama supporters. Obama hasn’t failed, they argue; rather, considering the cruel and unjust universe he lives in, he’s doing a fantastic job. We, the inconstant, overly demanding liberals, have failed him, been too demanding and selfish.

Just take this recent example from John Cole:

When the President was elected and this congress took office, we were losing over half a million jobs a month. Now, we are gaining jobs.

In the past year and a half, they’ve stabilized the banks, the economy, and the major car companies, they passed health care reform that adds thirty million people and cuts the deficit long term while getting rid of the worst abuses of the insurance companies, extended the solvency of Medicare for a decade, we’re drawing down troops in Iraq, we are making progress with green energy, there has not been one successful terrorist attack on American soil, we’ve just signed a nuclear arms reduction treaty and re-examined our use of nuclear weapons and we are making great progress on the global stage. Hell, the DOW is up over 3,000 since we got rid of the bums. Personally, we’re getting a road paved near me that was a disaster, and it is being paid for with stimulus money. We’re gonna put some people to work and have a nice paved road! And Obama and company did it all without getting blowjobs from interns.

And we’re going to reward them by kicking a lot of them out of office. We’re a really stupid country.

It’s difficult to know where to begin with such a distorted view of reality.

First, we’re gaining jobs? Not really. We’re not even keeping pace with the growth of the population, and the job numbers are continually revised downward after being released because, as anyone who’s even trying to pay attention has noticed, the models used for unemployment have been off for some time, painting an overly rosy picture. (This is hardly an Obama administration failure alone, of course; all administrations share incentives to understate unemployment).

We’ve stabilized the banks, the economy, the car companies? Not a frikkin chance. The banks haven’t had any meaningful regulation applied to them over a year after they almost destroyed western civilization. Other than Bernie Madoff, whose fraud had nothing in particular to do with the economic collapse, nobody’s really gone to jail either. The CRE collapse is looming, and the FDIC is gobbling banks at a prodigious pace. That’s stable?

As for the economy, you’re shitting me. We have 9.7% unemployment; close to 20%, if you count those forced into part time work out of desperation, or those who’ve given up in despair. That’s not stable, that’s apocalyptic.

The car companies? Yeah. They’re doing just great. A private company is truly ‘stable’ when it’s mostly owned by the government and kept afloat largely as an inefficient public employment program. And an industry is in great shape when it depends on the government writing checks and trashing its older products to generate sales.

The health care thing is such a farce it doesn’t need to be covered much here. 30 million people don’t get healthcare, and anyone who says so is a twit or a liar; some get Medicaid, some are shoved onto a private insurance exchange and forced to buy coverage, whether they can afford it or not, from the same killers and parasites that crashed the system to start with, with or without subsidies which are in all cases too small.

Oh, and the Exchange they’re going on is a guaranteed failure at containing costs. Added bonus, the model for the national, Obamacare plan in Massachusetts just imploded. Even in better days, when it made for a Potempkin village of health care, 20% of the population had to go without medical care due to the costs. Yeah, that’s great health coverage there.

We’re ‘drawing down troops in Iraq’. Wow! If we weren’t escalating in Afghanistan that might mean something. Trading one hopeless war for another doesn’t strike me as significant progress.

Green energy progress is an interesting concept, since China has leapfrogged us completely in a lot of green tech, and now it looks like Chinese companies may get to build our limited high speed rail and a lot of our green power too. That’s change we can believe in.

The nukes stuff… eh. I dunno. We still have silly plans for a ‘nuclear missile shield’, we’re still edging toward blowing the hell out of Iran for kinda, sorta, maybe someday being able to make a bomb. Our position on nuclear weapons is too schizophrenic for me to applaud. If we actually cut down on the number we have to pay to maintain, that’s ok. Hardly revolutionary, but ok. If we do so while continuing to stir up trouble and give every nation on the planet a really good REASON to build nukes (nothing else stops us from invading their countries at will, or killing their citizens with Predator drones, right?)… that’s not so hot.

The DOW being up is meaningless. It’s a casino, and they can play by whatever rules they want, create any result they please. If you tell me that your favorite blackjack table is really ‘lucky’ tonight, it’s the same thing. All an illusion designed so that the house, or in this case Wall Street, can take your money. The only way to ‘win’ is not to play.

(What ‘bums’ did we get ‘rid of’, anyway? The ones that retired on our life savings, or the ones that made a lifetime’s worth of money in one bonus payment for helping to con Grannies out of their homes?)

So the big list of Obama achievements cited by Cole really comes down to: a slightly saner nuclear policy, and a paved road.

Whee.

Seeing the glass as half-full is one thing, but this is ridiculous. We have an economy in utter and fantastic ruin, while the criminals, yes, criminals, who wrecked our nation walk rich and free. We have a broken military engaged in an endless game of whack-a-mole against the nebulous forces of ‘Terrorism’, being escalated in one country as we de-escalate in another. The DOW is up, which just means that more of our retirement money is going to line the pockets of Wall Street traders. An incredibly shitty, deeply flawed health INSURANCE bill was passed, which is guaranteed to fail, designed by the same fantastist/hack that designed the Massachusetts house of cards, though the actual legislation was written instead by a Wellpoint VP.

Oh, and we’re watering down the already too weak to work climate change bill in the fairy-tale hopes of getting a bipartisan bill. Instead of, you know, anything that might work.

None of these criticisms even remotely addresses Obama’s godawful record on human rights, on civil liberties, on allowing the many war criminals and torturers of the Bush administration to walk completely free. John Yoo is teaching classes instead of writing letters from prison, while Obama’s pitbull Rahm works to do away with two hundred years of due process so he can be BFF with Lindsey fucking Graham.

At times like these I’m reminded a lot of something Ian Welsh wrote for FDL, back in 2008, and revisited on his site recently:

Sometimes the world doesn’t grade us on a curve. You need to jump a fence, and you can’t. You need to climb a rock face, and you aren’t good enough. You’re running away from a bear, and you don’t run fast enough. And now you’re dead. You wanted to get into a good grad school, but you don’t have the grades or test scores. You’re in a fight, and the other guy wins, and you wind up on the ground and he puts the boots to you and you’re crippled for life. You tried “your best”, but you lost and you’re going to pay the price for losing for the rest of your life. Maybe you lost because he fought dirty, and you’d rather take a chance of being crippled for life than kick someone in the balls. Maybe you lost because he trained harder than you, and you’d rather go have a drink with your friends.

Or maybe you needed to pay for health care, and you didn’t have the money, and someone you loved died. And they died because you didn’t have the money, and because your country didn’t have universal health care. And maybe you always worked as hard as you could, and you campaigned for health care with all your heart. It doesn’t matter, your child, your wife, your husband—they’re still dead. Your best wasn’t good enough.

Now this is where America is. This is the real world.

…

That’s just the way it’s going to be. Because while there are no problems that America has that America can’t fix, there also appear to be no problems America has that America is willing to fix properly. And it doesn’t matter why. It just doesn’t matter. The bear doesn’t care why you couldn’t run fast enough when it mauls you to death. When the economy finally goes into full bore collapse, when all the bills come due and everyone decides to stop paying Americans to consume, it won’t matter why Americans thought they could suspend the economic laws of gravity forever and live beyond their means for decades.

It just won’t matter. You can either do what it takes to fix the problems or you can’t. If it’s true that you can’t, then I quite seriously, sadly, and with utmost sincerity suggest that you either start learning how to survive in a societal meltdown, or you get out, or you hope that your number comes up in the next few years so you don’t have to pay the bill that comes due when people think they can live in fantasy land, on credit, forever.

America elected Barack Obama. He’ll have, essentially, two chances to fix things. He’s failing the first one already, with his botched stimulus bill and that’s going to be disastrous. If he fails the second one, that’ll be catastrophe.

We’re witnessing that second failure now. This healthcare bill, and the entire year he spent slaving away on it, is a complete and utter loss. A blow to American values, to liberty, in favor of corporate rent-seeking private insurance scumbags. His political capital is mostly spent, his chance to do something dramatic to pull us out of our decline before the next wave of financial skullduggery buries us all but lost.

As Ian says, the ‘why’ doesn’t matter. Not one fucking bit. It doesn’t matter if he did it out of a naive, kumbaya, go-along-to-get-along strategy with the Republicans, trying to curry favor, to be civil, to win people over. It doesn’t matter if these mistakes were made out of some misguided neoliberal ideology, or if they were a calculated step toward some conception of progress, the ‘best’ we could achieve now. It doesn’t matter if the Democrat-run Senate is an utter cesspool of narcissism and graft, being paid very handsomely to thwart any real progrss. None of that matters.

Here’s what matters: We have a broken economy, a broken military, an utterly shattered health care system, a sickly, aging, exhausted population and a planet teetering on the verge of ecological collapse. We have obvious solutions to our problems that we have not, and perhaps cannot, take, and the reasons, aka the excuses for inaction, are both tedious and irrelevant. Obama inherited a ton of problems; no shit. He also helped create a ton of others, and has personally done more damage to the Constitution than Nixon ever dreamed.

The failure is manifest. Life isn’t grading us on a curve. We don’t get bonus points because 20-something percent of our country is clinically insane and would vote Sarah Palin for Empress of Conservaland.

And neither should President Obama.

A few weeks back I documented the strange double standard that exists in the mainstream (and much of the online) media’s treatment of the major (and unprecedented) recall of Toyota vehicles for a variety of accelerator/braking issues. Why, I asked, does Toyota get the rubber hose treatment when its cars have a problem, but Ford has a lengthy series of recalls involving far more vehicles that spontaneously burst into flames and we hear nary a peep?

Well, as time has gone on, the media circus only got worse, and a funny thing began to happen: as the media published breathless, nearly hysterical story after story, they came out less and less credible. Because, you see, they weren’t doing their jobs. Not even close.

Let’s start with the case of Professor Gilbert, the expert witness who testified before Congress about being able to induce artificial acceleration in Toyotas, immediately after he got 15 minutes of fame by appearing on ABC news in a rigged-up Avalon. While it made for very good television, and the testimony before Congress seems alarming, oddly little attention was paid to the METHOD Gilbert used to make the cars go wonky:

He sabotaged them.

As reported on Friday, Toyota went to an independent testing firm called Exponent to attempt to replicate the results from the Gilbert study. Dr. Shukri J. Souri of Exponent acknowledged that Gilbert did indeed create a scenario that produced what looked like a valid accelerator pedal signal to the electronic engine management system. But before demonstrating how the test was performed, Souri explained how the pedal sensor wiring works and showed how the connector is constructed. As we expected, Gilbert’s testing methods and ABC News’ report are very much in question.

…

The Toyota’s normal pedal sensor configuration consists of two independent sensors that produce voltages in different ranges, and there should always be a correlation between the voltages. One of the ways a fault in the sensor system can be detected is if the signals does not rise or fall in the correct relationship.

The wires in the connector are in-line, and Souri’s team actually sectioned a connector to show all the insulation between the six wires. Gilbert’s setup required breaching three of the six wires, attaching a 200 ohm resistor between two of them and then shorting the third line with full power to the resistance circuit.

This methodology provides a voltage input to the two circuits. The presence of the 200 ohm resistor ensures that the relationship between the two signals remains within the parameters the ECU is expecting. If there is more or less resistance, the relationship between the two signals will not be maintained and a fault should be detected.

Gilbert put a *foreign part* into the car to cause it to malfunction. To be more specific, he opened up the control system, stripped three wires, then shorted them together with a 200 ohm resistor to cause it to malfunction. 200 ohm resistors don’t grow on trees, and they certainly don’t place themselves inside your car without your knowledge. What Gilbert did bears no relation whatsoever to real world situations — it’s more akin to when the mob blows up your car by attaching a bomb to the starter.

I asked a friend of mine, currently studying electrical engineering in college, about Gilbert’s work. He stated, after he got done laughing, that while it was theoretically possible for a resistance of precisely 200 ohms to be introduced into the circuit, he’d be hard-pressed to think of how, in the real world. He explained that, maybe if the three wires were frayed AND shorted AND the control system was flooded with mud or salt water that was in just the right proportions to create an extra 200 ohms, MAYBE it could happen. But realistically? Not a bloody chance.

In fact, this dual sensor design isn’t a Toyota idiosyncrasy, it’s an industry standard (though different automakers use different resistances). Toyota’s hired testers Exponent, in fact, were able to rig a number of its competitors cars to do the same thing, using Gilbert’s method:

During the webcast, Toyota and Exponent demonstrated the same scenario on a Ford Fusion, BMW 325i and Subaru Legacy (they also had a host of other vehicles on hand) and each vehicle replicated the racing engine condition without signaling a fault code, although each one required a different resistance value. Like pretty much every modern vehicle available, these vehicles use a similar type of gas pedal architecture.

Toyota is also angry, as documented in their letter complaining to ABC News, that no mention was made of Gilbert’s work for an anti-Toyota litigant; Toyota says that Gilbert is, in fact, a hired gun, and that he was on commission by anti-Toyota lawyers to do this, ahem, ‘testing’. Oopsie. That probably should have come up.

It’s not in his prepared Congressional testimony either, which seems like something of an oversight.

More glaring, not to mention bizarre, was that even with their rigged, distorted story, ABC felt the need to go one step further. The footage they had shot with Dr. Gilbert in the car wasn’t exciting enough; so they rigged that too:

It’s also pointed out in Toyota’s four-page letter, which you can see in its entirety below, that ABC News faked at least one shot of a tachometer shooting from 1,000 to 6,200 RPM, insinuating that the vehicle was speeding out of control with Brian Ross behind the wheel when it was actually sitting in a parking lot with the transmission firmly in Park.

Ouch. Here’s what I don’t understand, though: Gilbert hacked the car. He could have made it do whatever he wanted; they could have gotten that shot ‘legitimately’. Sure, it’s on the level of movie special effects, but they didn’t have to resort to Final Cut Pro trickery. The only thing I can think of is laziness; that, or Brian Ross was too chickenshit to ride in a car accelerating that fast.

Way to put the story first, Brian.

CBS wasn’t content to let ABC ride the Toyota-bashing gravy train alone, however, so when they saw their chance to hop on the bandwagon they took it; fact-checking be damned.

Leading the Monday, March 9th CBS Evening News with Katie Couric was a chilling story: Just hours earlier Jim Sikes, a California Realtor, had lost control of his Toyota Prius, accelerating at times to 94 mph – even while, he claimed, he was standing on the brake pedal with both feet. But in this original story CBS reported that a California Highway Patrol officer put his car in front of the Prius, using the brakes on his larger and more powerful Ford Crown Vic to stop the Prius and save Sikes’ life.

That story was still running on CBS through its Up to the Minute news broadcast with Michelle Geilan at 4 a.m. the next morning. Only by then there was a serious problem with what they were reporting. Now CBS had aerial video of the stopped Prius behind the police cruiser. And, although the cruiser had reportedly gotten in front of Sikes’ car and physically stopped it, the video showed no evidence of that interaction whatsoever on the front bumper of the Prius. No damage, not even a scratch.

Oops again. Seems like they might have asked the cops about the incident, or checked out the police car themselves, or waited to see that helicopter footage, before running a major scare story on the national news, doesn’t it?

Guess not. But wait, it gets better:

Moreover, the evidence didn’t bear out Sikes’ story when his car’s braking system was examined. No, the wear patterns showed that only moderate braking had been applied intermittently. The damage that would have been done had both of his feet been “firmly planted on the brake pedal in an attempt to stop his car” was nowhere to be found.

He also claimed he reached down to pull the gas pedal up, but that is physically impossible to do and keep one’s eyes on the road. Not to mention the fact he said he was afraid to put the car into neutral because it “might flip.”

Wowser, right? So not only did the police not have to stop his car with theirs, he didn’t slam on the brakes either. Seems like CBS got the story completely wrong. But this seems a little fishy, I wonder if there’s more to it… And say, could we get another major network to utterly betray their journalistic standards on this one too, while we’re at it?

What did NBC report?

During over 20 harrowing minutes, according to NBC’s report, Sikes “did everything he could to try to slow down that Prius.” Others said, “Radio traffic indicated the driver was unable to turn off the engine or shift the car into neutral.”

…

Well, the patrol car didn’t slow down the Prius; the bumpers never touched. The officers used a loudspeaker to tell Sikes to use the brakes and emergency brake together. He did; the car slowed to about 55 mph. Sikes turned off the engine and coasted to a halt. He stopped the car on his own.

There wasn’t anything wrong with the transmission or the Prius engine button either.

Over a 23-minute period the 911 dispatcher repeatedly pleaded with Sikes to shift into neutral. He simply refused and then essentially stopped talking to her except to say that he thought he could smell his brakes burning.

…

The dispatcher also pleaded with him repeatedly to hit the ignition button. Again, he says he was simply afraid to.

Ahh, 911 calls. Boon to actual journalists and William Shatner alike. I wonder why NBC and CBS couldn’t wait to listen to them before running off at the mouth?

Why indeed. So now we know that CBS and NBC decided to join ABC in the fake news fraternity.

An actual federal investigation was conducted, and more evidence piled up against Mr. Sikes and his, ahem, claims:

A federal safety investigation of the Toyota Prius that was involved in a dramatic incident on a California highway last week found a particular pattern of wear on the car’s brakes that raises questions about the driver’s version of the event, three people familiar with the investigation told the Wall Street Journal.

…

During and after the incident, Sikes said he was using heavy pressure on his brake pedal at high speeds.

But the investigation of the vehicle, carried out jointly by safety officials from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Toyota engineers, didn’t find signs the brakes had been applied at full force at high speeds over a sustained period of time, the three people familiar with the investigation said.

The brakes were discolored and showed wear, but the pattern of friction suggested the driver had intermittently applied moderate pressure on the brakes, these people said, adding the investigation didn’t find indicators of the heavy pressure described by Sikes.

…

The report says that, according to Toyota’s “residential Hybrid expert,” the Prius is designed to shut down if the brakes are applied while the gas pedal is pressed to the floor. If it doesn’t, the engine would “completely seize.”

My friend confirms and elaborates on that last point:

also the prius does have a shutdown in the controls. if it sees hard braking during requested acceleration for more than about 3 sec, it shits the bed and shuts off the engine and motors

‘Shits the bed’ is probably not the way Toyota would put it when speaking to Congress, but I think you get the drift.

So why did Sikes do it? Well, as it turns out, he had 700,000 very good reasons:

Sleuth work at the Web sites Jalopnik.com and Gawker.com reveals that Sikes and his wife Patty in 2008 filed for bankruptcy and are over $700,000 in debt. Among their creditors is Toyota Financial Services for a lease on a 2008 Toyota Prius, with value at time of bankruptcy of $20,494. The Jalopnik Web site shows a copy of Toyota’s secured claims form, though when Jalopnik questioned Sikes by e-mail he denied being behind on his Prius payments.

Damn, Katie, that has to sting.

So, to recap: an expert Toyota alleges is a hired gun for anti-Toyota litigation goes to Congress and tells them a harrowing tale of how he can hack cars to behave oddly. To be fair to Gilbert, his testimony does make it clear that he was introducing abnormal resistances to the car’s circuitry, though he conveniently leaves out that he did so in such an elaborate and obviously unrealistic manner. ABC was eager to get in on that so immediately before he testified they went out to see his dog and pony show with a heavily hacked car. Only the footage wasn’t jazzy enough, so they faked a better shot.

CBS and NBC didn’t want to be left behind so they both mortgaged their credibility to the hilt to get in early on what turned out to be a ridiculously obvious hoax by a man in desperate need of money. In order to do so they both scrupulously avoided looking at the actual evidence or investigating the case themselves, until after Katie Couric had the chance to blather about it on the nightly news.

But why? Why does the mainstream press want this Toyota story so badly that, in the absence of evidence, they make it true themselves? What’s the motivation?

Perhaps a clue can be found in another Toyota story that has been relentlessly promoted over the past month and seems a little, shall we say, fact-lite: namely, tha Toyota resale values are plummeting in the wake of these engineering scandals.

Other news outlets, citing sources such as the Kelley Blue Book or the Automotive Lease Guide, keep saying that Toyota’s vaunted resale values are plummeting in the market. In case you’re not familiar with how this works, to dealers KBB is not the most respected source for resale values of automobiles, but ALG is. The problem with saying that these media events are slashing Toyota resale values is the fact that they haven’t been compared to the resale values of any comparable model made by another manufacturer.

Let’s do that.

The National Auto Research Black Book is the publication that most dealers use when bidding on a customer’s trade-in. In the Black Book, which derives automobile values from researching recent auctions in local markets, we find that a used Toyota Camry CE has fallen in value by $550 since its January 11th book. But during the same period the Honda Accord LX has fallen by $200. So, if the Camry and Accord have both gone down in value, why report only about Toyota’s drop?

Hmm. Interesting. So they also want THIS story to be true, namely, that Toyota’s taken a hit from their courageous reporting.

I’m not going to go out on a limb and try to deduce the cause of their now patently obvious anti-Toyota bias. Maybe it’s sensationalism. Maybe the fact that Toyota normally doesn’t have screwups like these made the story more interesting, made it front page news. Maybe it’s a nationalism thing, a chance for the so-called liberal media to stand up and yell, ‘America, FUCK YEAH!’. Perhaps they need to feel important, and the damage they think they’ve done to Toyota is reason enough… or maybe Toyota hasn’t been putting enough ads on the major networks.

Regardless of their motivations, it’s now abundantly clear, you simply cannot trust the MSM’s reporting on Toyota. That’s a shame, because they are imperfect, like all corporations, and they do make mistakes. You just can’t trust most of the American press to report on them accurately.

Unlike many of the remaining few on what I’d call the Rational Left, or the Reality-Based Community if you like, I haven’t unsubscribed to the various Obamabot mailing lists in the wake of HCR; I think of it as a cheap way to watch the enemy camp. For the same reason I still read some of the especially egregious kool-aid drinking O-blogs, and I’m on a bunch of Dem party mass mailing lists.

So I got an email from ‘Barack Obama’ today. I’m not naive enough to think he wrote the mass spam, or even read it before it was sent in his name.. but his name is attached, so he’s ultimately responsible.

Responsible for a bunch of lies winding up in my inbox.

Let’s take a look:

John –

I’m writing to you on a great day for America.

This morning, I gathered with members of Congress, my administration, and hardworking volunteers from every part of the country to sign comprehensive health care reform into law. Thanks to the immeasurable efforts of so many, the dream of reform is now a reality.

So far, nothing factually untrue. “Reform” is a meaningless term, and I suppose you can call handing over the IRS as a bill collector to Wellpoint and Aetna a kind of “reform”.

I’m sure knowing that they can sic IRS agents on people who don’t get with the program warms corporate hearts in insurance land, at any rate.

The bill I just signed puts Americans in charge of our own health care by enacting three key changes:

It establishes the toughest patient protections in history.

It guarantees all Americans affordable health insurance options, extending coverage to 32 million who are currently uninsured.

And it reduces the cost of care — cutting over 1 trillion dollars from the federal deficit over the next two decades.

Ah, here we go. Deep in lie territory.

First, ‘toughest protections in history’ is a bald-faced lie, taken literally. Every other developed nation on Earth has more and tougher protections for their citizens than we get in this bill. Being charitable, our Wordsmith-in-Chief forgot the adjective ‘American’ before ‘history’. Which should then be capitalized. So perhaps it’s not a bald-faced lie so much as sloppy parochialism. Let’s give him that one for free.

Second, this bill absolutely does not guarantee affordable coverage for 32 million Americans. That is absolutely factually untrue. Millions more get Medicaid, and yes, that’s guaranteed. The rest get, instead of coverage, orders from the government to go out and buy it. If they’re lucky, they get some money to help them buy that. If not, they’re on their own. If they can’t afford coverage after the subsidies, they’re also on their own. If they have to choose between food and insurance, well, I guess it depends on how much they like the IRS visiting their homes. So this is definitely a lie.

Plus there’s the delightfully high out of pocket limits in the bill. Up to 11,900 dollars for a family. Yeah, that won’t drive anyone into bankruptcy. Truly “affordable”.

In addition to lying about coverage, Obama neglects to mention that, per the CBO, 4 million people will lose the employer provided coverage they have now under his plan, and be forced into buying pricier junk insurance on the Exchange. Oopsie.

As for the ‘reducing the cost of care’ and saving the American people line… the specific figure quoted is a lie, unless you believe in fairy tales. The bill relies partially on an insurance excise tax for funding. A tax that, on paper, generates a lot of revenue… and in practice, nobody expects many people to pay. It will either be pushed back in perpetuity, ala the Alternative Minimum Tax, or it will be avoided by employers forcing their employees onto shitty, high deductible plans.

In fact, that’s the entire idea.

Given the reality of the tax, the billions they expect to collect are a fantasy, and the ‘savings’ number up in the air at this point.

The rest of the email is spent touting the minimal immediate benefits of the legislation, like allowing people to try to afford high risk insurance pools with astronomical premiums until the state level Exchanges, of a type shown in the past incapable of bringing down costs come on line, or letting kids stay on their parents insurance until 26. (Because when the youngest and healthiest people can’t get decent coverage on their own you must be doing something right) There’s a cute cheerleady bit at the end, asking me to ‘co-sign’ this historic piece of dreck.

I managed, with effort, to avoid signing it ‘Get Bent’.

Barely.