Barton is the same shameless whore that apologized to BP after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Republicans should be apologizing for throwing $24 billion down the toilet thanks to the government shutdown, as well as blocking affordable healthcare at every opportunity.

Lol @ the troll. We know who the pathetic failure is. Have you checked a mirror lately or does it frighten you too much?

The fucking media and their bullshit lies, Chuck Todd being an example, is also a part of the problem.

IOKIYAR

no one consuming conservative media will ever hear about this, or remember it on their own.

if they do happen to hear of it through their angry liberal children, they'll fall back on "all politicians are like this".

this is where we are. you can lead a horse to water, etc.

This truly must be what it was like in the former Soviet Union, with the media openly spreading insane lies and propaganda, and everyday people having to seek out alternative news sources and international journalists to suss out what's really going on. We just have better tech.

Wasn't there a law that prevented corporations from owning too many types of media at one time? It seems to me there was and Republicans managed to trash it, thus making today's media unreliably biased in serving their corporate and political interests.

The wingnut echo chamber would not function properly without the essential cog of corporate media. From one manufactured crisis to the next, we march on.

A glitchy (or even a completely fucked up) website is not the same thing as a failed medical insurance program. It's just a glitchy website.

Let's say you're online, trying to buy tickets for a concert, and the website is slow, or has the wrong information,
or won't take your credit card. Does that tell you anything about the concert itself? No, it doesn't. It just tells you that the ticket promoter has a fucked-up website. The concert will be good or bad entirely on its own merits.

The main difference here is that the insurance you're trying to buy doesn't start this Friday night at 8pm and you're shit out of luck because the website is down. You've still got a couple of months to sign up before the start date. The insurance will be good or bad entirely on its own merits, regardless of how good or bad the website for buying it is.

By the way, in those states that set up their own websites, people have been signing up with a lot less trouble. The federal website is trying to cover 30-odd states, with separate insurers, a bunch of other differing parameters, and sometimes quite uncooperative ("Republican") state officials.

haters gonna hate

"have you tried to get on the website?" i heard a GOP douche ask accusingly on Maher recently.

have you tried staying OFF the website if you don't need insurance, asshole? there's not enough room for looky lous.

i wouldn't be surprised if there's a deliberate VRWC effort to gum up the website and gin up this "controversy".

@9 not to mention a giant well-funded State security apparatus keeping an eye on citizens.

@14 - fuck Maher, that brogressive shit-stain.

But that was a big government giveaway to the pharmaceutical companies.

@8: It was just discussed on Fox News. But of course those that bash Fox don't watch Fox, so the hope is that at least some of the bashing sticks. A tactic of course, that the democrats are blaming the republicans of using in their bashing of Obamacare.

@10 I think that a lot of repealing of media consolidation laws actually took place under the Clinton administration.

also, this is all good but what were the democrats saying during the Part D roll out. Do they sound like the Republicans do now?

@19 - Whatever Democrats said, I doubt that was front page news for several days in a row. You know how it works: 1) some R pol says something mildly relevant, 2) some pundit says what R said but with some outrageous spin, 3) some Rs repeat what pundit said, 4) more pundits repeat what Rs said, etc for several days until outrageous spin become crisis out of proportion with actual happening while the country is going over the cliff.

Both the PPACA Exchanges and MPD had "glitches" for the same reasons: the regulations they implemented were fiendishly complex. And as an added bonus, the PPACA regs are similar in some respects to the MPD regs.

These problems are going to be with us for a while. Obama should do himself a favor and set realistic expectations rather than announcing all the problems will be cleared up in a month. They won't.

@20 agree and unfortunately I do know how it works. I think it could make for an interesting part of the conversation though.

You are absolutely right about the lack of coverage they would have got if they were screaming bloody murder. BS