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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alighieri who wrote (719171)	6/3/2013 11:39:53 AM
From: tejek	1 Recommendation Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1580731

Rs and R pols waste their time and our tax money chasing ghosts in the wind. Meanwhile the serious business of this country does not get done. That is the picture of a nation in decline. How not to connect the IRS dots By Steve Benen - Mon Jun 3, 2013 10:57 AM EDT Associated Press Former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman Last week, the Daily Caller and Fox News thought they'd identified a " smoking gun" in the IRS controversy -- relying on publicly available visitors logs, the outlets reported late last week that former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman visited the White House 157 times between 2009 and 2012. This was clear evidence of ... something. Except, it wasn't. Not only was the total uninteresting, it was also wrong -- The Atlantic's Garance Franke-Ruta found that Shulman had been cleared for a series of routine White House gatherings, but only attended 11 events. The Daily Caller and Fox News got Politico to bite, but everyone else quickly realized this story was a dud. But that's the funny thing about Republican media chasing bogus stories: there's always another one right around the corner. The controversy over IRS targeting of conservative groups took a new turn this weekend when right-leaning websites drew a connection between the agency's former head and his wife's employment at a liberal group. The conservative website Breitbart posted that "the goal of Public Campaign is to target political groups like the conservative non-profits at issue in the IRS scandal," naming the campaign finance reform group where Doug Shulman's wife, Susan Anderson, is the senior program adviser. Hmm. So, in this new story, the man Bush/Cheney appointed to lead the IRS secretly targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status because he's married to a woman who works for a group opposed to said organizations. You're probably already rolling your eyes -- it's the appropriate reaction -- because as conspiracy theories go, this one's awfully silly. For one thing, there's no evidence the IRS targeted conservative groups. For another, there's no reason to believe Doug Shulman had anything to do with the bureaucratic errors that created the controversy in the first place. As for his wife, Susan Anderson does work at Public Campaign, but the group's "goal" has nothing to do with targeting far-right organizations. Rather, it's a non-partisan group that works on campaign-finance reform. After the controversy first arose, Public Campaign endorsed an investigation into the IRS's activities, but said, "There are legitimate questions to be asked about political groups that are hiding behind a 501(c)4 status. It's unfortunate a few bad apples at the IRS will make it harder for those questions to be asked without claims of bias." For the Daily Caller, this is proof of nefarious motivations that somehow connect back to the former IRS chief. Josh Marshall said something last week that resonated with me: "[A]s a group, the standards of most institutional right wing journalism are just so appallingly bad that their stories simply aren't credible.... f you wonder why conservative scandal mongers can't have nice things, look at the conservative media." Examples to reinforce this keep popping up. As we've discussed before, the point isn't that one news organization or another will not sometimes make mistakes -- I've run my share of corrections myself over the last decade -- but rather, the point is that there are serious institutional flaws in conservative media that encourage and perpetuate ideologically driven mistakes and reports that no serious person would find credible. I'd encourage those involved in conservative media -- or just as importantly, those who rely on conservative media as reliable sources of accurate news and analysis -- to start asking some basic questions. How many of you took "Skewed Polls" seriously? How about "Friends of Hamas"? How many felt embarrassed running with Bob Woodward's claims about White House threats? How many ran paid propaganda from the Malaysian government? How many ran reports about Obama's non-existent library using Reagan's childhood home as a parking lot? How many said Hillary Clinton may have been faking a concussion? How many bought into the reports about Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.)? How many uncritically ran with strange conspiracy theories about Benghazi, Fast & Furious, imaginary voter fraud, birth certificates, ACORN, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics? And yet, the machine just keeps going. Doug Shulman visited the White House 157 times! He didn't? Never mind, let's talk about his wife! That didn't pan out? Let's move on to something new! This is pointless and counter-productive.

To: Alighieri who wrote (719171)	6/3/2013 11:42:31 AM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1580731

If you look at the actual report, CBO does not provide any analysis to indicate how they arrived at the two incidental mentions in the report. Looks like they've just regurgitated the same old stuff. The following is from an article on Politifact that came out shortly after the report. Not necessarily. As the insurance industry often says -- and independent experts generally agree -- the right kind of administrative expenses may actually lead to cost savings and improved outcomes. These include disease management, wellness programs and quality improvement programs. CBO notes that a heavily managed insurance plan may spend more on overhead but may end up with lower premiums and better outcomes, whereas a lightly managed program may spend less on overhead but end up charging its policyholders more, with less positive results. By this logic, a higher-overhead plan might actually be preferable. In addition, Henry Aaron, a health care specialist at the centrist-to-liberal Brookings Institution, suggested that over the long run, Medicare could benefit financially from having higher administrative costs in at least one area -- anti-fraud enforcement. In other words, measuring overhead is worthwhile, but it has its limitations. You have to take all this stuff into account as part of administrative costs and you have to recognize that the estimated $100B/year in waste, fraud & abuse in Medicare is actually part of administrative cost -- a cost that commercial insurance has little, if any, of. I think CBO's comments in this paper were designed to mislead, however. As has so much of their commentary during the process.