The Mercatus Center report on Bernie Sanders’ latest Medicare For All bill finding that M4A could save Americans up to 2 trillion dollars in healthcare spending is in the news again. Wouldn’t you know, it’s because the thing Matt Breunig cautioned might happen in his Jacobin piece on the report, actually happened.
Enter Jake Tapper, who over the last few days has been digging his heels deeper after being called out for shitty, erroneous reporting from his newsdesk over the Koch-funded think-tank’s actual findings. As predicted, the study’s author released the study with every intention of dangling the shiny object that is its 32.6 trillion dollar price tag in MSM journalists’ faces and watching them act accordingly.
Understandably, you may not have been following this whole saga as it unfolded so here’s a tweet thread from the author of the bill himself pointing out the ways in which Tapper and the other fact-checkers he cites to bolster his terrible reporting actually got it wrong by relying on the Koch-funded author of the study rather than just looking at the study itself:
I thank @jaketapper for admitting his “fact check” on Medicare for All was not factual and editing his video.
Sadly, Tapper's video on Medicare for All along with other “fact checks” is riddled with errors peddled by the Koch-funded Mercatus Center. Let's go through them: https://t.co/NHAOR6YNLG
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) August 20, 2018
2) Tapper says, “The study’s author says that that $2 trillion drop is not actually his conclusion. He says that’s based on assumptions by Senator Sanders.” Wrong. Provider payment rates in our plan are not assumptions, they are written into the bill…
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) August 20, 2018
3) What Tapper and others have done is say we're wrong because Blahous didn't actually intend to find that Medicare for All would be a great deal for Americans. The problem is: Blahous did find it would save $2 trillion – he just doesn't like that people are celebrating it.
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) August 20, 2018
7) Harold Pollack at the University of Chicago said: "Over the long run, the Sanders people are very correct that you could implement a system like this that would be more disciplined, more economical and more fair than the current U.S. health system." https://t.co/VJukz9EmUp
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) August 20, 2018
11) So, the question that must be asked is why would the corporate media would put their blind faith in a far right-wing economist whose past reports have been so thoroughly discredited by mainstream economists and experts?
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) August 20, 2018
Click through any of the tweets for the full thread as well as another attempt by Tapper to excuse his mistake by basically throwing his hands up and going, “everyone else fell for it, don’t pick on just me.”
And, Jake, to talk about the fact-checkers as if they are separate evaluations is nonsense. Each one of them got the same spin from the same Mercatus author who has been doing intentional outreach to get people like you to say this stuff. It's the same poisoned source.
— Matt Bruenig (@MattBruenig) August 20, 2018
Other Items this week (just tweets mostly, that kind of week):
Amy Siskind’s mask finally slid off last week, revealing behind it… Amy Siskind. The type of resister who turned a blind eye to fascism until Trump became president, who voted McCain in 2008 and encouraged a Palin presidential run in 2012, who openly admires Michele Bachmann, who now smears black women as Russian assets and sends her followers after them for getting smart to her grift. Imani Gandy (who’s has her own litany of issues, let-them-fight.gif, etc etc) and the other #resistance figures just finding this out would have known this long ago if they didn’t shut off their ears to everyone who could’ve pointed it out to them.
There’s a name for this particular brand of white liberal feminism – Party Unity My Ass (PUMA) – and Siskind has been at the forefront of the movement as far back as 2008 when a notable number (about 20%, compared to the 12% of Bernie voters who deflected to Trump) of democrats deflected after Hillary lost the primary and chose to support McCain instead in the general:
From Clinton to Palin to Bachmann: Why some Dems now support GOP women
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez held a town hall to give her community’s most vulnerable members a chance to voice their concerns. Journalists didn’t particularly like being excluded even after it was pointed out that ICE has in the past used a news report to track down an immigrant who spoke to the media.
Turns out the nazi grandpa guy was catfishing other online nazis in effort to own libs
As someone who’s still a fan, this is honestly more devastating to me than the Krass Bros’ weird FBI erotica/children’s book:
🤔🤔🤔 pic.twitter.com/HNIgnCFa7E
— George Ciccariello-Maher (@ciccmaher) August 17, 2018
Michael Shannon had the only good take from an actor on Trump this week (thread)
No lies detected:
doctor: you have 6 seconds to live
me: pic.twitter.com/I9N46LCIl8
— ⵢⵓⵏⵙ (@Crumble_Dust) August 17, 2018
Elsewhere on the Leftorium
Rest in peace Aretha Franklin!
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