it really is just a ratcheting system

[solarbird]

Remember that illegal domestic propaganda campaign the Bush administration ran - funding military analysts to spread the administration's war message to the public while posting as non-affiliated, independent soruces? Looks like Mr. Obama's administration has been doing the same thing w.r.t health care, albeit on a smaller scale. (At least, it's smaller as far as we know.) I guess Cass Sunstein's influence - he wants the government to use domestic agents to secretly infiltrate online groups for propaganda purposes, all for Good Reasons, of course - is showing.

Comments

[epawtows.livejournal.com]

Technically, the article is stating that an influential person inside the administration is advocating such schemes, Glenn notes there isn't any evidence one way or the other that this has been implemented.

But I'll agree that it's a bad thing for anyone to be taking such proposals seriously.

[solarbird]

The internet part, yes. The domestic propaganda on a smaller scale but following the exact Bush template, however, no:

the Obama administration has been making very large, undisclosed payments to MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber to provide consultation on the President's health care plan. With this lucrative arrangement in place, Gruber spent the entire year offering public justifications for Obama's health care plan, typically without disclosing these payments, and far worse, was repeatedly held out by the White House -- falsely -- as an "independent" or "objective" authority. Obama allies in the media constantly cited Gruber's analysis to support their defenses of the President's plan, and the White House, in turn, then cited those media reports as proof that their plan would succeed.

(Mostly noted to clarify for anyone else reading comments. This part is not alleged, it's fact.)

[epawtows.livejournal.com]

Oops. Didn't read it carefully. Thanks.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

The payments to Gruber's consulting business come from HHS, not from the Administration and are of the type and amount commonly paid for such specialist consultancy work. The monies are not paid to him personally; the business has a staff and expenses separate from Gruber's office in MIT. The monies were publicly acknowledged by Professor Gruber during the summer when the HCR legislative process started and his consultancy's work was first being reported in the press. The insinuation that he has been bought off by the Administration with secret undisclosed payments directly from the Administration to distort his evidence is lies and innuendo from HCR opponents dropped into the media to spread its poison through inadequately-verified repostings of the fabrications in blogs and other places.

This part is not alleged, it's fact.

[solarbird]

One:

Gruber received $780,713 in government contracts in 2009. In addition to the HHS contracts, he was hired by the Department of Justice, the NIH and the State Department for work this year. Krugman is right to say that the government awards these kinds of contracts to academics on a regular basis. But there is a fundamental difference between the HHS contract and the others.

Krugman says “Gruber’s grant is from HHS, not the West Wing.” But in point of fact, he was hired expressly to advise the West Wing.

Two:

People can characterize the magnitude of the failings here however they want ("huge" or otherwise), but the indisputable fact is that Gruber was running around publicly and favorably commenting on the President's health care plan -- while the White House and its allies were centrally relying on him and characterizing him as an "objective" analyst -- at exactly the same time that the administration, unbeknownst to virtually everyone, was paying Gruber many hundreds of thousands of dollars. The DNC alone sent out 71 emails touting Gruber's analysis without even once mentioning the payments. Those are just facts.

Nobody suggests that there's anything wrong with hiring Gruber to perform modeling analyses and paying him to do so. That's all perfectly appropriate; I'm all in favor of the Government's retaining genuine experts (as Gruber is) for analysis. Nor has anyone claimed that Gruber changed his views because of these payments. The issue is the non-disclosure, and -- most serious of all -- the misleading attempts by the White House and others to depict him as being "objective" and independent rather than disclosing that he was being paid a significant amount of money by the very party whose interests his advocacy was advancing (which happens to be one of the misleading schemes Sunstein explicitly advocated in his 2008 paper).

[maellenkleth]

Exactly. The lack of transparency here is what is so disquieting; it's so ancien regime in its intensity.

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

This.

Greenwald appears to be deliberately misleading his readers in an effort to kill a bill he doesn't like, or to give a black eye to a president who he hates for other reasons.

Furthermore, there's no parallel to be made between propagandizing for an illegal war and getting advise from experts to improve domestic legislation, even if they are simultaneously advocating in public. Obama has some very Bush-like tendencies on some issues; there's no reason to make things up in other areas.