Patterico's Pontifications

11/16/2014

The Dog Trainer Finally Acknowledges Grubergate

Filed under: Dog Trainer,General — JVW @ 4:47 pm



[guest post by JVW]

The Los Angeles Times (affectionately known here as the Dog Trainer; this is Patterico’s first recorded use of the term for you site historians) has just this afternoon finally deigned to mention Jonathan Gruber’s interesting week:

MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act, made headlines recently for telling the truth or, to be more specific, telling the truth as he sees it.

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage and basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically, that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass,” Gruber said of “Obamacare,” in an unearthed 2013 video that went viral last week.

Transparency is generally the enemy of elites who believe in an end-justifies- the-means mentality. The general public, meanwhile, is supposed to sit quietly in the corner while the big boys talk and figure out what to do.

You can find this piece on the website in — um, let me see. . .

[checking]

. . . in the sports section, as the introduction to an opinion piece concerning the lack of transparency in the NFL.

Oh, and it’s an opinion piece that they picked up from a writer named John McMullan at a blog called SportsNetwork.com.

But don’t let it be said that the Gruber scandal went unremarked upon on the pages (well, webpages at least) of the Los Angeles Times.

– JVW

29 Responses to “The Dog Trainer Finally Acknowledges Grubergate”

  1. Dude, everybody knows about Gruber, it’s not news, it’s a cliche, it was like so forty-seven hours ago.

    nk (dbc370)

  2. made headlines recently for telling the truth

    But not in the LA Times, which didn’t have so much as a paragraph on page 17.

    Kevin M (d91a9f)

  3. The Times is still living in 2009, and The Onion Universe part of 2009 at that.

    http://www.theonion.com/articles/media-having-trouble-finding-right-angle-on-obamas,2703/

    Kevin M (d91a9f)

  4. I emailed the readers rep this morning to ask why they haven’t reported about it. And I also pointed out that cynics might assume they were giving cover to the administration or something crazy like that. I hope to hear back.

    Dana (8e74ce)

  5. Some sports-section editor is catching hell for this mistake.

    Beldar (fa637a)

  6. Ruff Ruff Ruff
    Hooded dogs
    coming home
    to roost

    mg (31009b)

  7. Probably ought to write some Dem concern troll letters to the Sports page, about publishing capitalist propaganda attacking our valiant President.

    Kevin M (d91a9f)

  8. Some sports-section editor is catching hell for this mistake.

    Perhaps not a mistake, but guerrilla action.

    Kevin M (d91a9f)

  9. Can’t you guys be a little bit less innocent? Nobody’s catching hell in the sports section; no editor let this slip by. The LAT made a decision not to cover the Gruber story. Now, if you call them on it, why they did not cover the story, it has become old news and a cliche that their sports writers use as an analogy to the NFL. It’s a slimmed down version of the Hillary strategy that she used to such good advantage with Bimbogate and the Obamites have been using for the last six years. Lie/obfuscate/stonewall — “It’s old news, let’s move on”.

    nk (dbc370)

  10. The McMullen article is actually decent. I thought the Gruber “transparency” meme fit in fine with the points the author was making with respect to the Goodell “elites know what’s best for us” situation. And the location of the piece, mentioning Gruber in the sports section (and taken from a sports blog) may actually reach some web readers who would not normally either read the Dog Trainer or necessarily make the connection. Both Peterson and Obamacare leave a bad taste in many mouths. So connecting them is OK by me.

    If this sports guy is way onto Gruber I think it’s safe to say these revelations may be reaching out into the general (non political junkie) public faster than we thought.

    elissa (df2de6)

  11. I saw a clip by Bob Shieffer where he was outraged by it, though he put it in the context of what is bad about “politics”, not what is bad about the Obama administration.

    MD in Philly (f9371b)

  12. Newspapers, as physical dead-tree publications are dying. No one under 40 (and few under 50) reads an actual newspaper. The habit is dying out. All these once-mighty publications have going for them is their added content, which they can attempt to sell online, and for almost all of them that is local coverage.

    There’s a lot you can say about this, but several things are clear: to survive a paper must be able to charge decent money for online access, and to do that it has to be perceived as valuable. This will force some of the national papers to widen their editorial stance — you can see this at the WaPo and the Journal, not so much at the NY Times, but they will get there eventually.

    It is hard to see, though, how the LA Times survives. Currently they sell access for $1/week (another 50 cents for the Sunday dead-tree delivered). If the continue to be outright liars and malefactors, even that will seem like too much. Perhaps the various buyers have seen what committed leftists make up the staff and have decided that a rescue isn’t in the cards.

    I wonder what will take its place?

    Kevin M (d91a9f)

  13. The people that were lied to are the Democrats.

    Republicans voted against Obamacare.

    So, the only benefit for lying is to give cover to the Dem congress hacks who voted for it. They were in on the lie too.

    AZ Bob (34bb80)

  14. ==So, the only benefit for lying is to give cover to the Dem congress hacks who voted for it. They were in on the lie too.==

    AZ Bob–Actually I think Gruber said “stupidity of the American voter” because he dared not say “stupidity of the Democrats in congress”. I am willing to bet that over 90% of the Democrats who voted for the bill were technically not “in on the lie” because they had no effing clue what they were voting on and simply relied on,and trusted the party leadership to tell them when to jump and how high with the ACA vote. When the hearings were televised and Paul Ryan tried to tell the world what was going to happen, the president of the United States was sitting there rolling his eyes with his fingers in his ears chanting “la-la-la” and so the rest of his party and party hacks in the media did too.

    elissa (df2de6)

  15. “I did not have healthcare relations with that man, Jonathan Gruber.”

    – Barack Obama

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0)

  16. People need to do hard time for all this hackery on the tax payer.

    mg (31009b)

  17. Excellent point elissa.

    Gazzer (cb9ee2)

  18. elissa is right; how else can you spin “we had to lie or it would not have passed”? Only Democrat votes were in play.

    There’s more that Gruber has not been caught saying yet, too. If you remember the last scramble for votes, a number of centrist Dems objected to abortion being covered under the Act and wanted an amendment barring such. The abortion lobby would have jumped ship at that, so they put in some whitewash language to seemingly make it hard to fund abortions.

    And, as we know, one of the first things they did was demand abortion coverage would be in every plan.

    Kevin M (d91a9f)

  19. GRONK!!!

    mg (31009b)

  20. This is apparently getting so much attention, it kind of slipped into the Los Angeles Times.

    No censorship is perfect, and the LA Times wasn’t actually censoring it really.

    Sammy Finkelman (ae0b12)

  21. The New York Times had a few items about this:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/us/politics/affordable-care-act-supporter-jonathan-gruber-ignites-fury-with-a-word-stupid.html (November 15, 2014, on page A12)

    And earlier an online semi-opinion piece or two about this a couple of days ago:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/upshot/the-jonathan-gruber-controversy-and-washingtons-dirty-little-secret.

    Essentially, Congress is obsessed with the government equivalent of financial accounting standards (with the C.B.O. as the rule maker) instead of cost accounting. It structures the laws in ways that might not be very efficient but sound good on the stump

    Also:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/upshot/the-policy-at-the-heart-of-the-jonathan-gruber-controversy.html?abt=0002&abg=0

    And an online semi-editorial mentions both Upshot articles:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/upshot/letter-from-the-editor-health-care-drama.html

    Also see: New York Times story on Gruber in 2012, at the time of the oral arguments in the Supreme Court case of National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/business/jonathan-gruber-health-cares-mr-mandate.html?pagewanted=all

    Sammy Finkelman (ae0b12)

  22. 21. That was the Bob Schieffer commentary I mentioned in the other thread. Thanks for finding it.

    Sammy Finkelman (ae0b12)

  23. I thought ACA stood for Arrogant Con Act.
    Am I wrong?

    jb (4e570e)

  24. now it’s not entirely implausible, parts of it, but consider the source:

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2837261/Saudi-prince-paid-9-11-pilots-learn-fly-Incredible-claims-20th-hijacker-serving-life-prison-terrorism-asks-testify-court.html

    had he actually known this, it would have been a major bargaining chip

    narciso (ee1f88)

  25. 25. Well, of course.

    There’s a reason the chief of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal, suddenly resigned on August 31 or September 1, 2001. Either he planned it or he let things happen. Saudi princes are pretty much above the law.

    In early September, 2001, it was too late to stop it without revealing more tahn they wnated to reveal.

    Sammy Finkelman (ae0b12)

  26. Maybe they didn’t know the full extent of the plot on August 31, 2001. Maybe they thought it was only the upcoming assassination in Afghanistan. But Prince Turki al-Faisal had done something, or not done something, which caused him to be fired after a quarter of a century as chief of intelligence.

    Sammy Finkelman (ae0b12)

  27. And, as we know, one of the first things they did was demand abortion coverage would be in every plan.

    Kevin M (d91a9f) — 11/16/2014 @ 8:03 pm

    Right down to making churches in California provide abortion coverage, even if the church believes abortion is murder and a sin.

    Tanny O'Haley (c674c7)

  28. Not at all nit-picking:
    “gate” is the wrong suffix. It implies the media are all over this. As somebody said a number of scandals ago, the proper suffix is “quiddick”.

    Richard Aubrey (f6d8de)


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