SWOPblogger

Normally I don't do this, but instead of posting the beginning of the article first. I'm putting the end before the beginning. Why? Because its probably the most important piece of information.

I try REALLY hard to read as much news as my brain can take...daily. But sometimes its too much. 1 line is usually what I read and decide from that line if I should continue reading it or not. Not a good habit and one I am trying to break. But don't we all do it.

How can we sit there and read every single sentence and minutia of every single article on a daily basis? It's too much. What's scary is that I always trust the 1st line. I like to consider myself a conscious person. But even still, I trust.

We need to get better at reading more and learning more about the actual issues at hand. But that's difficult to do. As the left we are way behind on the 1 liners. If you go to the Washington Post and read their headlines, you can pretty much get the gist of what is being said. If you go to the Common Dreams website....well there are many more articles that have "cool" titles, but no information.

So with that I give you the end.....and then the beginning. (in hopes that you will read it all....to get the facts.)

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...this debate isn't really about making good use of federal funds. It's about using immigration as a weapon against at-risk Democrats -- and assuming voters won't bother to learn the truth.

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Attack Ads You'll Be Seeing

By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, August 8, 2007; Page A15

Here's an emerging line of attack you can expect to hear more of in the 2008 congressional campaigns -- especially if you live near a vulnerable Democratic incumbent: Democrats vote to give welfare benefits to illegal aliens.

Or, even better: Democrats vote to take benefits away from deserving senior citizens to pay for welfare for illegal aliens.

Ugly? Absolutely. Devastating? So Republicans hope. True? No.

Bashing Democrats on immigration -- accusing them of doing everything but carrying illegals' luggage across the border -- is a GOP mainstay. But the accusations that Republicans started to peddle last week reached a new low in dishonest nativism.

The first salvo involved the House version of the measure to extend the children's health insurance plan, SCHIP.

"What we do is take, at the cost of seniors who get . . . choices of their own health-care plans, we take it away," former speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) claimed during the House debate. "We wipe it out, and we give it to people who are illegal aliens."

"That bill, if it becomes law, would take $197 billion out of the Medicare trust fund, from our seniors, to give to illegal aliens," charged Rep. Ron Lewis (R-Ky.).

Leave aside the inflated numbers. Leave aside the scare talk about "our seniors." (AARP, the seniors' lobby, supports the bill.)

The provision at issue would repeal a 2006 requirement that everyone applying for Medicaid provide proof of citizenship -- passports or original birth certificates. That might sound sensible, but it has been a cumbersome, expensive solution to a non-problem.

In 2005, when he was overseeing the Medicaid program for the Bush administration, Mark McClellan noted that an inspector general's investigation did "not find particular problems regarding false allegations of citizenship, nor are we aware of any."

Read the rest of the article here.

Labels: Media, Media Bias, SCHIP