The Wire has the story Lessons from the Obamacare ‘Horror Stories’.

At the root of every debunked, cancelled plan, Obamacare “horror story” is usually a person who isn’t as informed as he or she would like to believe. Usually that person is a journalist. Last week Maggie Mahar at HealthInsurance.org debunked yet another horror story, but she didn’t blame the misguided former policy holders so much as the journalist who wrote the story. “It appeared that no one at the Star-Telegram even attempted to run a background check on the sources, or fact check their stories,” Mahar wrote. “I couldn’t help but wonder: ‘Why?'”

The article goes on to detail some of the stories that may have started out as horror stories, but ended up actually being successes for Obamacare.

The Daily Kos reference to the above article in its post Obamacare horror story, chose the following quote:

What makes it a horror story is that when the Star Telegram learned that Johnson actually was able to get coverage, they did nothing to change their original report, even though it was at best incomplete. As Maggie Mahar, who wrote the post linked above, puts it:

This major daily’s nearly 200,000 daily readers saw the story that would lead them to believe that Americans who received cancellation notices were “left in limbo.” Most, it concluded, would wind up uninsured – or paying more than they could afford.  As I’ve pointed out many times – and as more and more coverage is revealing – the opposite is true.

You probably have to do your own research to see if the original story is right, the debunker is right, or there is some other choice I can’t imagine.

CNN has the article America’s real problem: Too much bipartisanship.  I like the article for what it has to say about bipartisanship, but most of all, I want to save the following paragraph from the article:

ious War on Poverty that aimed to provide tools for the poor to become self-sufficient. For over a decade, the program — which Johnson broadly defined to include all of his programs to help the poor — had a powerful effect. The poverty rate fell from 19% in 1964 to 11.2% in 1974. New government services, such as Head Start and Medicaid, have remained integral to those without economic means.

Keep this in mind the next time you see a cutesy bumper sticker that says “We fought the war on poverty, and we lost.”  By the numbers above, we seemed to have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in that war.

As for too much bipartisanship, that is not a new idea to my blog, here is a small sample of my posts on the subject.

Former Sen. Olympia Snowe: It’s Time for Voters to ‘Reward’ Bipartisanship, The Last Bipartisan, JOBS Act: The Dumbest “Bipartisan” Move Since Repealing Glass-Steagall, The Bipartisan Political Alliance That Will Turn The Fight Over Medicare On Its Head, and Target Fixation At The Fork In The Road.

Naked Capitalism has the post The Three Card Monte of Generational Warfare by Yves Smith.

Stock speculator Jay Gould remarked, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” That, sports fans, is the real foundation of the generational warfare propaganda effort.
.
.
.
We have two events happening that may simply be coincident in time in their genesis, but they are working synchronistically in a nasty way. And the driver of one is unquestionably class, not generational. I can’t get over the way young people are falling hook, line and sinker for the efforts to divert attention from the real perps, which are overwhelmingly the top wealthy and their allies and operatives, such as CEOs and C-level executives at large companies, and the large cohort of neoliberal pundits. (Not all are on board; for instance, I know a private equity firm head who loves annoying people in his industry by telling them they need to pay a ton more in taxes and donates generously to “progressive” candidates, but people like him are few in number).

The first is that a small group of audacious, visionary, committed, radical conservatives set in motion a plan in 1971 to undo the New Deal and cut social safety nets back. They did this via a concerted effort to change values and deeply inculcate pro-business thinking, to give economic “freedom” primacy over democracy, and to train lawyers to think like economists (which is at odds with foundational legal concepts like equity) and over time, pack the courts with corporate-friendly judges. The key figures of this movement and its intellectual leaders were all born well before or during the Depression: former Nixon Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell, Henry Manne (founder of the law and economics movement), and of course, Milton Friedman. Its major funders included Birchers like the Coors family (which provided a large donation to help found the Heritage Foundation in 1973) and the Koch family.

You may find a number of familiar names in the list of people in that last paragraph.  I thought I would make my blog post so I can have a permanent link to the Yves Smith post.  It might come in handy some day.

Naked Capitalism has featured the article Death By A Thousand Cuts: The Silent Assassination Of European Democracy By Don Quijones.

As is gradually dawning on more and more people across the old continent, the European Union is riddled with fatal flaws and defects. Chief among them is the single currency which, rather than serving as the Union’s springboard to global dominance, could well be its ultimate undoing.

Another huge problem with the EU is its acute lack of transparency. Staggering as it may seem, in the last 20 years the Union has not passed a single audit. Indeed, so opaque is the state of its finances that in 2002 Marta Andreasen, the first ever professional accountant to serve as the Commission’s Chief Accountant, refused to sign off the organization’s 2001 accounts, citing concerns that the EU’s accounting system was “open to fraud.” After taking her concerns public, Andreasen was suspended and then later sacked by the Commission.

However, by far the EU’s greatest — and certainly most dangerous — structural flaw is its gaping democratic deficit. To paraphrase Nigel Farage, the stridently anti-EU British MEP, not only is the EU undemocratic, it is fundamentally anti-democratic.
.
.
.
The inevitable result is that decisions that viscerally affect the lives of 500 million voters are now taken by anonymous, unaccountable bureaucrats rather than politicians responsible to their voters. As Obourne points out, “by a hideous paradox the European Union, set up as a way of avoiding a return to fascism in the post-war epoch, has since mutated into a way of avoiding democracy itself.”

How much of the 1930s/1940s experience are we going to repeat?  If we have a second dip recession, will WW III follow?

Interestingly, this topic did not appear in the 155 answers to the question 2013 : WHAT *SHOULD* WE BE WORRIED ABOUT?