Breaking News! Breaking News! My Ass!
I watch MSNBC with great frequency (pretty much all the time). Okay, it can get a bit repetitious with all the anchors chewing on the same story. But I am sick of the anchors’ fetish for “BREAKING NEWS!” That is a banner they use a great deal.
That news may be,and often is, just another minor twist in the seemingly endless story of Deadbeat Donald’s, his family’s, and his friends’ perfidity. While they use a microscope on their BREAKING NEWS, the real story of the effects of the Trump administration on Americans, especially vulnerable populations, slips along as unseen as a venomous snake in high grass.
While MSNBC anchors are telling us the most recent piddling tidbit about Deadbeat Donald and his troubles, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services just ignored regulations related to Medicaid waivers. When a state requests a waiver to “experiment” with Medicaid policy, it is required to indicate what the effect of that change on Medicaid’s main goal to provide coverage to vulnerable populations. A federal court ruled that approval of the Kentucky waiver was “arbitrary and capricious” because it failed to consider the loss of eligibility and health services to 95,000 vulnerable Kentuckian in the first five years of the waiver.1
Also, remember that Idaho and Utah approved Medicaid Expansion via a ballot measure? Well governmental officials (the legislatures or governors) in both states are working on legislation that ignores that vote. They are working on keeping people off the Medicaid roles whom the majority of voters in their state wanted enrolled in Medicaid.2
Both above are major issues slipped beneath the radar of the BREAKING NEWS hounds. Though these examples are directly related to health policy, I am sure any subject area expert can provide a list of administrative malfeasance, under Deadbeat Donald’s administration, in their area of public policy.
If each of MSNBC’s anchors would give just 10 (or even five, maybe) minutes of their show to addressing policy issues, they would be providing potential voters with important information that might affect their vote or their level of activism or that they might share with others more enamored of Deadbeat Donald they the viewers of MSNBC.
I am afraid that my “campaign” about this issue” may be analogous to the advice Jim Croce (may he rest in peace) give to the folks on 42nd Street.
You don’t tug on Superman’s cape
You don’t spit into the wind
You don’t pull the mask of the old Long Ranger
And you don’t mess around with Jim.3
The dynamics of the 24-hour news cycle would be “Jim,” and I don’t, realistically, think I’m a modern version of that country boy named Willie McCoy who down home they call Slim.
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