The truth is one of the first casualties of Obama Derangement Syndrome

Mark Twain once said "a lie will travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."  In the world of the conservative blogosphere, now the lie makes it way all the way around the world and back again in that same period of time.

The latest example of this is the rumor that the number for information on the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is 1800FUCKYOU.  Hold on to your seats Obama haters, it aint true.

Buzz and I were having breakfast this morning while discussing the hot draft prospects in the WNBA, when we overheard a few customers talking to a waitress.  They told her that the number for Obamacare information is 1800FUCKYOU.  The waitress was a bit incredulous, but decided to give it a try. 

She called the number, and lo and behold, she got a message that said "press one for Obamacare."  It was enough to convince her, but like most of the crap fed to us by the right wing and suffers of Obama Derangement Syndrome (ODS,)  it just isn't true.

Buzz looked up from his WNBA fantasy cheat sheet and said.  "Excuse me, what did they use the phrase Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act?'

"Obamacare," was her reply.

Buzz went on to explain that the federal government does not refer to the Affordable Care Act as Obamacare.  It refers to the Act by its real name --- The Affordable Care Act.  Obamacare is the shorthand name given to it by the media, the right wing, or who really knows who first termed the phrase. 

One of the customers thought for a minute, and said, "that handsome gentleman in the tweed jacket and turtle neck is right."  Since I was wearing a Nehru jacket, I realized she was referring to Buzz and his Obamacare comment and not my overall choice for first pick in the WNBA draft.

When we got back to the VW Microbus, Buzz powered up the Univac 3000 to do a little research.

He found a snopes.com article. Those who may be unfamiliar with snopes.com should know that snopes.com is a website dedicated to debunking or proving urban legends, myths, rumors, misinformation, and folklore

Here's what they found:

Although 800-318-2596 is the correct phone number for the Health Insurance Marketplace customer service line, and turning its digits into letters as they are found on telephone keypads does produce the phrase 800-FUCKYO (among many other possibilities.)  Of course, it only works by ignoring the "1," because standard keypads have no letters on the "1."

Technically, the 800-318-2596 phone number cannot correctly be rendered as 800-FUCKYO because that designation omits the essential '1' digit between the '3' and '8' and therefore does not represent an accurate phone number for the Health Insurance Marketplace hotline (or a valid phone number at all). A correct rendering of the phone number would be the somewhat less salacious 1-800-F1UCKYO.

Additionally, the 800-318-2596 phone number wasn't selected by the current administration, as it has been used as a toll-free government number for providing information about Medicare plans since at least as far back as 1999.

The current assignee of the 1-800-FUCKYOU number (a phone sex line) has now updated their initial recording greeting with a message asking callers to indicate whether or not they are calling about Obamacare.

Sorry we had to debunk this myth for our friends who suffer from ODS and all those innocent people who were duped by another ODS pipedream.

But, alas, there is still hope for ODS suffers, according to Buzz's research on the Univac 3000, the Obamacare death panels have decreed that ODS is a covered affliction under Obamacare, even if it is a pre-existing condition before you sign up for insurance.  There is one catch, however, treatment is long term "in-patient" at the FEMA internment camps.
 

Back in the 1980s

Buzz and I spent part of the Labor Day listening to historical speeches on the POTUS radio channel.  I won a 2 year subscription in a WNBA trivia contest (no purchase necessary.) We listened to a 1987 speech by President Ronald Reagan.  Reagan was touting 59 months of economic prosperity, so we decided to look back at some of the economic policies in place back in 1987 as compared to 2012.

Tax Rates

From 1982 to 1986, the highest marginal tax rate was 50 percent and 38.5 percent in 1987.  The capital gains tax rate was 20 percent from 1982 to 1985 and 28 percent from 1985 to 1990.

Republicans have fought tooth and nail to extend the Bush income tax cuts, especially when it came to the highest marginal rate.  They even went as far as voting against a bill in the United States Senate that extended all the tax cuts except the cut on the highest marginal rate.  (Bush's tax cuts reduced the highest marginal rate from 38.6 percent to 35.0 percent.)

The current highest marginal tax rate stands at 35.0 percent, and the capital gains tax rate is 15 percent and has not been about 16 percent since 2003.

Perhaps Republicans who worship everything Reagan should consider returning to the Reagan tax rates, particularly the capital gains rate, since after all, that's the tax that the job creators pay.

Welfare Queens

Reagan famously spoke of the "welfare queen."  He said, "(S)he has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000."

The welfare queen never really existed, a product of Reagan's speech writer's imagination, but welfare or public assistance was quite different in the Reagan years.  There was no work requirement, and there were no limits on the time a person could collect welfare.

All of this changed with the Welfare Reform Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.   As Bill Clinton said the act "ended welfare as we know it."

The new law required persons to work after receiving two years of benefits and placed a five year lifetime limit on welfare benefits.  Despite Romney claims that President Barack Obama has gutted the work requirement, he hasn't.  So welfare today does have those restrictions from 1996.

Maybe nostalgic Republicans would like to go back to the Reagan era welfare for life with no work requirement.

Investment Banks

Until 1999, there was a clear dividing line between what banks could and couldn't do when it came to investments.  As a result of the excesses of the 1920, the federal government passed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.  This Act prohibited depository banks from gambling on investments in the stock market.

Glass-Steagall survived until 1999, when Congress decided there was no need to separate these banking practices.  Republican Senator Phil Gramm (TX) and Republican Representatives Jim Leach (IA) and Thomas Bliley (VA) sponsored legislation that tore down the barrier.  There was no longer a distinction between depository and investment banks.

Depository banks could now play the market, and play the market they did.  After 8 years of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley law, banks had invested in so many toxic and risky investments that they almost brought the world to economic disaster.  The situation was so dire that even President George W. Bush, a self-professed free market lover, pushed for an $800 billion bailout of the Wall Street banks.

Most of the economic woes we are still experiencing in 2012 can be traced back to the banking debacle of 2008.  Even Ronald Reagan realized that banks gambling in the stock market was not a good idea.

Back to the Future

So the next time someone tells you about the glory years of Ronald Reagan and his great economic recovery, tell them you agree that it was a great time --- higher taxes, particularly on investments, no limits on welfare, and highly regulated banks.

The Persuadables

Buzz and I have come to a saddening conclusion.  This year's Presidential election will be decided by people who really don't give a damn about Barack Obama or Mitt Romney.

Unlike Buzz, me, and all of our readers, the people who will decide this election just aren't engaged in politics now or probably ever. 

Buzz begins his day by pouring over all the latest polls and punching that data into the Univac 3000, checking for subtle changes which might give him even the smallest insight into electoral trends.   He then takes this material and produces a multitude of charts, diagrams, and graphs to supplement the OVC Daily Briefing memo.  All of this is presented at the morning staff meeting.

I begin my day by checking the latest WNBA news and setting my lineup for my WNBA Fantasy Basketball team.  I don't mean to brag, but I've won the league seven years in a row, but I digress.

Poll after poll in the last few months have consistently shown two things - each candidate has a floor percentage of which they seldom, if ever drop below, and a ceiling, of which they never rise above.  Most changes in the individual polls can be attributed to statistical sampling variations.  In other words, poll results vary greatly depending on who you sample.

The trick to good polling is to tailor your sample to represent the voting public as a whole.  If you have too many Democrats in your sample, your poll win inflate Democratic numbers, and vice versa if you include too many Republicans.  So what the pollsters do is massage the numbers to reflect past voting trends and put forth a calculated guess as to how the raw data collected translates into the numbers they release in the poll.

Some polling outfits are run by Democrats or liberal leaning folks, and some are run by Republican or conservative folks.  These polls may favor the political leanings of the folks conducting them, or contrary to what would seem to be common sense, may tend to overcompensate for the pollsters' biases and lean in the opposite direction of the pollster. 

After all, pollsters do not make money from the general public on their polling, they make money by the candidates or organizations who commission the polls.  The more accurate the polling results are, the more chance the pollster has of getting work.

With all of this said, Buzz tells me that if we averaged out all of the polls, a sort of poll of the polls, we'd be able to minimize the individual prejudices and biases of the pollsters.  I told Buzz that RealClearPolitics has already done this.

The RCP average of polls is an excellent source of information, and believe it or not, it has been a very accurate predictor of election results over the past ten years.  RCP does include what the pollsters refer to as an outlier (a poll that seems to be out of whack with all the others,) but do to the averaging of all the recent polls, an outlier won't throw the numbers off that much.

Over the past few months, there has been very little variation in the numbers.  Obama's numbers have ebbed and flowed, as have Romney's. Neither has dropped below the middle to low forties, and neither has jumped above the mid to high forties. 

What this means is that both of the major party candidates are guaranteed to get somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 percent of the vote come November. The trick is getting at least 51 percent of the remainder.

These undecideds are what this election is all about.  They are referred to as the swing voters, but Buzz and I like to call them the Persuadables.  Whoever wins the majority of these voters will win the election.

This presents two issues as Buzz and I see it.  First, you gotta identify these voters, and number two, you gotta convince them that you deserve their vote. 

We'll talk more about how this works later.  Gotta get to the morning meeting.