Ezra Klein Thinks Bernies Medicare-For-All Bill Was Bad Timing

[Quixote1818]

[George II]

1. Many of us Democrats agree. There was no point in introducing it last week (well....one point....

....but....)

[Warpy]

2. Then he's got it wrong

like most other people around here.

It was a shot across the GOP's bow and they know it, even if Klein doesn't. That's why their trolls are spinning it so hard.

It is a warning of what they can expect from the next Democratic Congress if they overturn the ACA, which is really the best deal the bloodless bastards can expect.

It's a reminder of what screwing the pooch this badly will cost them.

[brush]

3. The guy in the video doesn't mention repug cheating and gerrymandering, just that...

Dems don't push our policies as the reason for repug wins.

We've heard this from media and pundit types since the election.

They rather talk about Hillary and Dems being bad candidates or not pushing their policies like repugs do.

WTF. The only policies repugs have pushed for eight years, besides cheating, is repeal and replace the ACA and they can't even do that while controlling all three branches of government.

And the not even subtle nuances of strategy escapes him, like Sanders waiting until Oct. 1 to push Medicare for all when there is no chance for trumpcare to rise from the dead AGAIN.

Not rocket science, just common sense.

[BigmanPigman]

4. I agree with him and several Dems have said so too.

Pelosi said that she didn't put a lot of energy into single payer since she said the focus needs to be on the emergency we are facing NOW! They should have made it known to the public at the beginning of Sept instead of waiting until the last minute and allowing people to be distracted. I found out that repeal was back through a DU post on Sept. 6. If I knew then they must have known but didn't tell the media and draw the necessary attention to the rapidly approaching deadline. I stayed vigilant all summer and do not trust them ever!!! Keep calling until Oct 1st [phone], please! McConnell is a sneaky, evil bastard and mega rich donors are really pressuring the GOP. They already paid out tons of their money to buy GOP votes for tax cuts. This is NOT about people and health at all and never was. It IS ALL about $$$$.

[Dustlawyer]

7. This guy got 80% right but blew it about Ezra Klein.

Ezra is a smart nerd, he knows what is going on. The problem is that he works FOR THE SAME ESTABLISHMENT that wants all of the money!

The Powers That Be control both Parties and the MSM! Jimmy Door, Young Turks etc. are out on the fringes because they do not have corporate backing! Think about it, TPTB have so much money that buying both Parties and the MSM outlets (or controlling them through ad dollars) buy our government and use the propaganda to control us. We are watching a never ending basketball game with the Harlem Globetrotters and the Washington Generals. It is totally rigged!

Until enough Americans realize this we will never really get anywhere, just steadily lose ground. When did you really see the militarization of the police? It was when OWS caught them off guard. TPTB realized they were pushing us very hard so they had to prepare to handle us.

We must stop fighting each other and start fighting for Publicly Funded Elections. They cannot control our political system if they cannot bribe the politicians. The number of people fed up is growing. Trump's followers were sick of the crap too, just tired of their Republican Establishment not living up to the propaganda the RW media was spewing.

The so-called Left Wing media still won't talk about Climate Change much. Still won't mention the problem with the money in our politics. Crap, they rate the candidates by how much they have raised in bribes (campaign "donations&quot !

[Honeycombe8]

9. The MSM is not told what to say by the oligarchs.

There are tens of thousands of reporters, journalists, pundits, political discussion shows, editors, writers. They are all scrambling for the latest story, there is an ethics and protocol for fact checking and reporting. (Broadcasters are different....they merely read the news given to them.)

It matters with Fox who owned it, but even at Fox, there have been, and are, reporters or talk show hosts who don't tow the station's meme.

There is no way for any story or fact not to get reported in this country. The reporters don't much care what the story is...just that they get it first and get it right.

There are as many opinions of reporters as there are reporters. They are for the most part free to express their opinions, if they are columnists. It occasionally happens that a columnist expresses opinions that get him or her fired. The National Review did that a few years ago, firing a Buckley, no less. But that's rare.

So give it a rest. There is not some big conspiracy out there preventing the "real" story from getting reported. If one entity doesn't do it, another will. And Elvis is not alive, either.

[Dustlawyer]

11. Wrong!

Big companies with big ad budgets routinely tell media outlets what to report on and what not to. I have seen this first hand so I know what I am talking about. While the journalist themselves may like to do the stories, the editors and producers understand things differently.

Prior to the BP oil spill my boss was frequently asked to appear on all of the media outlets nationally: CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, Fox, CNN, and all of the major newspapers and magazines, about various topics related to mass tort litigation. When the BP oil spill happened all of that changed overnight. The producers we know would tell us they were not allowed by their outlet to air, print anything derogatory about BP once the well was capped and the litigation started. BP was advertising heavily on the national stage and on the Gulf Coast.

I traveled up and down the Gulf Coast during this period and followed by private investigators who would periodically have me ambushed by local journalist, and in one instance, the NY Times. Their angle was always about fraudulent claims or dirt about the Plaintiffs Steering Committee members heading up the litigation behalf of the victims. In off the record conversations they would admit that they were not allowed to report on the plight of the victims or their outlet would be cut off of BP ad budget.

BP went so far as to buy up all of the many documentaries that were about to come out regarding the spill. I know this because we were in several of these which were purchased right before they were to be released. Eventually they let some of the last ones air instead of buying them as the spill was old news by that point and the rest of America believed the victims were resolved with a bogus $20 billion dollar fund. Google the stories on this fund and you will be hard pressed to find any that admit there was never a fund with $20 billion in it, but I assure you there was not. Why would there be a need for a subsequent "Class Settlement" if the fund actually existed and had paid all of the victims? They did this to get the rest of the outlets to leave the story alone and have the country believing that BP stepped up and took care of this!

Oil companies advertise a lot and thus not much talk of Climate Change over the last few years until recently with the hurricanes. Same thing with the money in our politics, the networks, cable outlets, radio and print journalism stand to lose if we ever truly addressed campaign finance reform. They do not wish to jeopardize the campaign ad money they receive.

You obviously have no concept of how much money is at stake and what these companies can do with it! They have power you do not believe in and that is how they want it to stay.

[Honeycombe8]

13. You are uninformed on this topic.

I'll return the compliment that you gave me: "You obviously have no concept" of how journalism and media work.

Recommended viewings:
All the President's Men
Fox News (not just Hannity....ALL of the programs)
MSNBC
NBC News
CBS News
ABC News

Recommend courses:
Journalism 101
American History, the founding fathers

Recommended readings:
Benjamin Franklin writings and history
The New York Times
Washington Post
The Dallas Morning News (a very Republican newspaper, from the top down, ALWAYS endorses Republican, until it endorsed Hillary Clinton)

I know what I know. I've been around a while. I've seen a lot. I worked in the very conservative legal for decades, with political connections. I know how things work. The facts ALWAYS get reported in this country. Tens of thousands of media and journalists, all scrambling for a story. It's a great system and works very well. It has little to do with the board at the top. They just wanna make money.

I'm not into the conspiracy theories. I believe in evidence. There is no evidence that Elvis is alive, that Bush 44 arranged the 9/11 terrorist attack, that the Holocaust did not occur, that LBJ killed Kennedy, or that reporters and other media persons are told what to say by their Republican entity owners. The evidence for such conspiracy theories is quite the opposite, actually. We can PROVE that entity owners don't tell Rachel Maddow what to say, or Lawrence O'Donnell, or myriad WaPo writers, or NYT journalists.

Journalists deal in who, what, when, where, why, and how. No one, not even oligarch bosses, have any problem with reporting facts.

[Dustlawyer]

14. I am speaking from personal experience so I don't know what to tell you.

Multiple outlets and journalist told me the same thing.

Was there a 100% blackout, No, but I would say at least 85%. Ed Schultz said the same thing when he did a story a day for a week with us that the network asked him not to (his contract allowed him the freedom to do it). He said his days were already numbered so he wanted to do it (He was canceled 2 months later, not because of our story though).

[Tarheel_Dem]

5. Joy Reid & Jonathan Capehart pretty much said the same thing. Makes you wonder if it's really....

about healthcare, or is there some other agenda at play?

[PatrickforO]

6. I don't.

The timing to force power to do the right thing is ALWAYS FOREVER AND AT ALL TIMES INCONVENIENT.

Some of the most inspiring words ever penned in the English language were written by Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Birmingham Jail. This is why I do NOT think pressuring power to grant the just cause of using OUR tax money that WE pay into OUR government, which is supposed to be OF, BY and FOR the people for something that would genuinely benefit every American and virtually every American business is bad timing.

Here are the words of the Reverend King:

"One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: "Why didn't you give the new city administration time to act?" The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

That's why Bernie's bill is NOT a case of 'bad timing.'

[Honeycombe8]

8. This guy misses the point. The goal of the Repubs is to pass the bill, not to please the public.

They are seeking to please their donors. Their donors have made it clear that they want two things: tax reform, the ACA repealed.

Recently a big donor made this clear, refusing to give any more money until those 2 things are done.

Also, Trump has said that if Repubs don't get this done, they will pay for it. A thinly veiled threat that he'll see to it that they are primaried.

The Repubs, like most people, KNOW that the public favors single payer. They don't care. They need to pass something they can call repeal of Obamacare. The Repub constituents will accept what they are told (the ones who pay attention). They are reliable Republican voters. Who are they going to vote for? Democrats? Never. And Trump supporters will believe anything Trump tells them. If he says it's a good bill, they'll blindly believe it.

Bernie's single payer proposal was badly timed. I thought it was a good idea. I didn't see this coming, that it would be a call to arms for the Repubs. Neither did Bernie.

But thanks to McCain, it looks like it may not pass. Phew. I hope. But it hasn't been voted on yet.

[Quixote1818]

10. Sanders will be very clear that ACA needs to stay in place for now.

He has already said this over and over. It's not like he is going to say fuck ACA, lets dump it now for single payer. He is going to be quite clear ACA HAS to stay in place for the time being.

[Nitram]

12. I agree. Health insurance is too important to risk repeal of Obamacare.

Fix Obamacare, get as many Americans covered as possible, and then you have time to work on single payer. Don't risk losing it all by losing focus on what is immediately important.