"According to recent reports, a group of death panels organized under Obamacare ordered their first execution." 11NOV14

MORE from the voluntarily ignorant, the stupid, those blinded by their hatred and racism, basically from the extreme right wing of the gop / tea-bagger party. This satirical piece is originally from the +The Daily Currant  "Daily Currant is a satirical website with a mission "to ridicule the timid ignorance which obstructs our progress and promote intelligence," This from +PolitiFact .....

"According to recent reports, a group of death panels organized under Obamacare ordered their first execution."

— AmericanNews.com on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2014 in an article

First execution under Obamacare death panels? Pants on Fire!

By Lauren Burns on Tuesday, November 11th, 2014 at 10:12 a.m.

A report on the Internet claimed that Dorothy Zborknak was the first victim of Obamacare death panels.

An old piece of Affordable Care Act mythology has come back from the dead: death panels.
A reader sent us a link to a September American News article that claims an 86-year-old woman was ordered executed after a panel established by the Affordable Care Act determined that "she is no longer useful."

"According to recent reports, a group of death panels organized under Obamacare ordered their first execution.

"Following a hearing by the president’s Patient Resource Efficiency Board (PREB), 86-year-old Dorothy Zborknak has been ordered to death. The reason? According to the administration, she is no longer useful.

"Zborknak worked at Fleur de Lis Florist in Chicago for nearly forty years, before she made the decision to retire in 1998. Since that time, she has struggled with a host of health problems, including diabetes, high blood pressure, and kidney failure.

" ‘Unfortunately, the cost of her care just became too expensive,’ claims Peter Johnston, a member of the Chicago PREB. ‘Under the Affordable Care Act, we have the power to make choices about end of life care and I stand by our ruling. I know it will be hard for the family to accept what’s going to happen…But from a financial standpoint, this was a very easy decision.’

We’ll offer a quick diagnosis: This claim is not accurate. Back in 2009, the myth of death panels was our inaugural Lie of the Year. Almost five years later, death panels are still not a part of U.S. health care law.
Our first clue that the American News article was not real was the name of the woman who was supposedly sentenced to execution: Dorothy Zborknak. That’s the name of  Bea Arthur’s character on the TV show The Golden Girls.
It turns out that the story is ripped from an article posted on The Daily Currant in January. The Daily Currant is a satirical website with a mission "to ridicule the timid ignorance which obstructs our progress and promote intelligence," according to the website. Other headlines include things like "Obama Announces Two-Year Golfing Trip" and "Al-Qaeda Member Elected to California City Council." The debunkers at Snopes.com caught this case of copying back in September.
As for the American News site, its "About Us" and "Privacy Policy" pages have no information on them besides ads. Stories are posted without attribution or bylines. We attempted to contact them through a form on the site, but did not receive a response.
The article was posted on The Patriot Facebook page in September and quickly spread. It has 6,019 likes and was shared 4,906 times.
For those who don’t recall it, the death panel discussion stemmed from a post on former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Facebook page on August 7, 2009.
"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care," she wrote.
There is no mention of such a system in the massive Affordable Care Act.  Instead, the idea originated from changes to Medicare to cover appointments on end-of-life planning, such as living wills and do-not-resuscitate orders. The appointments were not required, and AARP backed the addition. The change wasn’t implemented after the controversy over Palin’s comments.
Our ruling
The chain email claimed that Dorothy Zborknak was ordered executed by an Obamacare death panel. We ruled on this topic five years ago, but we’ll repeat it again:  Death squads are not a part of the Affordable Care Act, and you can still catch Dorothy on Golden Girls reruns most nights. We rate this claim Pants on Fire!

About this statement:

Published: Tuesday, November 11th, 2014 at 10:12 a.m.
Researched by: Lauren Burns
Edited by: Angie Drobnic Holan
Subjects: Health Care

Sources:

American News, BREAKING: Obamacare Death Panels Have Arrived, First Patient Executed Today, Sept. 2, 2014
Politico, Will proposal promote euthanasia? July 28, 2009
Sarah Palin, Statement on the Current Health Care Debate, August 7, 2009
The Patriot, Obamacare Death Panels Have Arrived With First Patient Execution, Sept. 2, 2014
Snopes.com, Surrender Dorothy, Sept. 22, 2014
IMDB, Dorothy Zbornak, (accessed Nov. 10, 2014)
PolitiFact, PolitiFact's Lie of the Year: 'Death panels', Dec. 18, 2009

Kaiser Health News, Medicare Sets 2015 Provider Rates, Weighs Payment For End-Of-Life Counseling, Nov.3. 2014

Here Are 5 Infuriating Examples of Facts Making People Dumber & Study: You Can't Change an Anti-Vaxxer's Mind 5&3MAR14

I have to admit I am guilty of the behaviour outlined below, most recently following the Russia-Ukraine story (political junkie that I am). I saw it as Russian aggression against Ukraine, but after reading and listening to an interview on TRNN I have a very different take on the story. Now I see it as the struggle by the common people of Ukraine against the corruption of the oligarchs that were ruling them in cooperation with the oligarchs controlling Russia with putin. putin's Russia and the corporate / bank-financial cabals of the West have escalated this from a national revolution holding out the promise of freedom and democracy to a dangerous geopolitical crisis. This from Mother Jones.....

—By Chris Mooney

| Wed Mar. 5, 2014 3:00 AM GMT

Alex E. Proimos/Wikimedia Commons

On Monday, I reported on the latest study to take a bite out of the idea of human rationality. In a paper just published in Pediatrics, Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth University and his colleagues showed that presenting people with information confirming the safety of vaccines triggered a "backfire effect," in which people who already distrusted vaccines actually became less likely to say they would vaccinate their kids.
Unfortunately, this is hardly the only example of such a frustrating response being documented by researchers. Nyhan and his coauthor, Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter, have captured several others, as have other researchers. Here are some examples:
1. Tax cuts increase revenue? In a 2010 study, Nyhan and Reifler asked people to read a fake newspaper article containing a real quotation of George W. Bush, in which the former president asserted that his tax cuts "helped increase revenues to the Treasury." In some versions of the article, this false claim was then debunked by economic evidence: A correction appended to the end of the article stated that in fact, the Bush tax cuts "were followed by an unprecedented three-year decline in nominal tax revenues, from $2 trillion in 2000 to $1.8 trillion in 2003." The study found that conservatives who read the correction were twice as likely to believe Bush's claim was true as were conservatives who did not read the correction.
2. Death panels! Another notorious political falsehood is Sarah Palin's claim that Obamacare would create "death panels." To test whether they could undo the damage caused by this highly influential morsel of misinformation, Nyhan and his colleagues had study subjects read an article about the "death panels" claim, which in some cases ended with a factual correction explaining that "nonpartisan health care experts have concluded that Palin is wrong." Among survey respondents who were very pro-Palin and who had a high level of political knowledge, the correction actually made them more likely to wrongly embrace the false "death panels" theory.
3. Obama is a Muslim! And if that's still not enough, yet another Nyhan and Reifler study examined the persistence of the "President Obama is a Muslim" myth. In this case, respondents watched a video of President Obama denying that he is a Muslim or even stating affirmatively, "I am a Christian." Once again, the correction—uttered in this case by the president himself—often backfired in the study, making belief in the falsehood that Obama is a Muslim worse among certain study participants. What's more, the backfire effect was particularly notable when the researchers administering the study were white. When they were nonwhite, subjects were more willing to change their minds, an effect the researchers explained by noting that "social desirability concerns may affect how respondents behave when asked about sensitive topics." In other words, in the company of someone from a different race than their own, people tend to shift their responses based upon what they think that person's worldview might be.
4. The alleged Iraq-Al Qaeda link. In a 2009 study, Monica Prasad of Northwestern University and her colleagues directly challenged Republican partisans about their false belief that Iraq and Al Qaeda collaborated in the 9/11 attacks, a common charge during the Bush years. The so-called challenge interviews included citing the findings of the 9/11 Commission and even a statement by George W. Bush, asserting that his administration had "never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and Al Qaeda." Despite these facts, only 1 out of 49 partisans changed his or her mind after the factual correction. Forty-one of the partisans "deflected" the information in a variety of ways, and seven actually denied holding the belief in the first place (although they clearly had).
5. Global warming. On the climate issue, there does not appear to be any study that clearly documents a backfire effect. However, in a 2011 study, researchers at American and Ohio State universities found a closely related "boomerang effect." In the experiment, research subjects from upstate New York read news articles about how climate change might increase the spread of West Nile Virus, which were accompanied by the pictures of the faces of farmers who might be affected. But in one case, the people were said to be farmers in upstate New York (in other words, victims who were quite socially similar to the research subjects); in the other, they were described as farmers from either Georgia or from France (much more distant victims). The intent of the article was to raise concern about the health consequences of climate change, but when Republicans read the article about the more distant farmers, their support for action on climate change decreased, a pattern that was stronger as their Republican partisanship increased. (When Republicans read about the proximate New York farmers, there was no boomerang effect, but they did not become more supportive of climate action either.)
Together, all of these studies support the theory of "motivated reasoning": The idea that our prior beliefs, commitments, and emotions drive our responses to new information, such that when we are faced with facts that deeply challenge these commitments, we fight back against them to defend our identities. So next time you feel the urge to argue back against some idiot on the internet…pause, take a deep breath, and realize not only that arguing might not do any good, but that in fact, it might very well backfire.

Study: You Can't Change an Anti-Vaxxer's Mind

A new study examined multiple strategies for communicating about the safety and importance of vaccines. None of them worked.

—By Chris Mooney

| Mon Mar. 3, 2014 10:50 AM GMT

Everett Collection/Shutterstock

Vaccine denial is dangerous. We know this for many reasons, but just consider one of them: In California in 2010, 10 children died in a whooping cough outbreak that was later linked, in part, to the presence of 39 separate clusters of unvaccinated children in the state. It's that simple: When too many children go unvaccinated, vaccine-preventable diseases spread more easily, and sometimes children die. Nonetheless, as scientifically unfounded fears about childhood vaccines causing autism have proliferated over the past decade or more, a minority of parents are turning to "personal belief exemptions," so-called "alternative vaccine schedules," and other ways to dodge or delay vaccinating their kids.
So as a rational person, you might think it would be of the utmost importance to try to talk some sense into these people. But there's a problem: According to a major new study in the journal Pediatrics, trying to do so may actually make the problem worse. The paper tested the effectiveness of four separate pro-vaccine messages, three of which were based very closely on how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) itself talks about vaccines. The results can only be called grim: Not a single one of the messages was successful when it came to increasing parents' professed intent to vaccinate their children. And in several cases the messages actually backfired, either increasing the ill-founded belief that vaccines cause autism or even, in one case, apparently reducing parents' intent to vaccinate.

Click here for more on vaccine-dodging parents.

The study, by political scientist Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College* and three colleagues, adds to a large body of frustrating research on how hard it is to correct false information and get people to accept indisputable facts. Nyhan and one of his coauthors, Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, are actually the coauthors of a much discussed previous study showing that when politically conservative test subjects read a fake newspaper article containing a quotation of George W. Bush asserting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, followed by a factual correction stating that this was not actually true, they believed Bush's falsehood more strongly afterwards—an outcome that Nyhan and Reifler dubbed a "backfire effect."
Unfortunately, the vaccine issue is prime terrain for such biased and motivated reasoning; recent research even suggests that a conspiratorial, paranoid mindset prevails among some vaccine rejectionists. To try to figure out how to persuade them, in the new study researchers surveyed a representative sample of 1,759 Americans with at least one child living in their home. A first phase of the study determined their beliefs about vaccines; then, in a follow-up, respondents were asked to consider one of four messages (or a control message) about vaccine effectiveness and the importance of kids getting the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine.
The first message, dubbed "Autism correction," was a factual, science-heavy correction of false claims that the MMR vaccine causes autism, assuring parents that the vaccine is "safe and effective" and citing multiple studies that disprove claims of an autism link. The second message, dubbed "Disease risks," simply listed the many risks of contracting the measles, the mumps, or rubella, describing the nasty complications that can come with these diseases. The third message, dubbed "Disease narrative," told a "true story" about a 10-month-old whose temperature shot up to a terrifying 106 degrees after he contracted measles from another child in a pediatrician's waiting room.

Child with measles CDC/llinois Department of Public Health

All three of these messages are closely based on messages (here, here, and here) that appear on the CDC website. And then there was a final message that was not directly based on CDC communications, dubbed "Disease images." In this case, as a way of emphasizing the importance of vaccines, test subjects were asked to examine three fairly disturbing images of children afflicted with measles, mumps, and rubella. One of those images used is at right.
The results showed that by far, the least successful messages were "Disease narrative" and "Disease images." Hearing the frightening narrative actually increased respondents' likelihood of thinking that getting the MMR vaccine will cause serious side effects, from 7.7 percent to 13.8 percent. Similarly, looking at the disturbing images increased test subjects' belief that vaccines cause autism. In other words, both of these messages backfired.
Why did that happen? Dartmouth's Nyhan isn't sure, but he comments that "if people read about or see sick children, it may be easier to imagine other kinds of health risks to children, including possibly side effects of vaccines that are actually quite rare." (When it comes to side effects, Nyhan is referring not to autism but to the small minority of cases in which vaccines cause adverse reactions.)
The two more straightforward text-only messages, "Austism correction" and "Disease risks," had more mixed effects. "Disease risks" didn't cause any harm, but it didn't really produce any benefits either.
As for "Autism correction," it actually worked, among survey respondents as a whole, to somewhat reduce belief in the falsehood that vaccines cause autism. But at the same time, the message had an unexpected negative effect, decreasing the percentage of parents saying that they would be likely to vaccinate their children.
Looking more closely, the researchers found that this occurred because of a strong backfire effect among the minority of test subjects who were the most distrustful of vaccines. In this group, the likelihood of saying they would give their kids the MMR vaccine decreased to 45 percent (versus 70 percent in the control group) after they received factual, scientific information debunking the vaccines-autism link. Indeed, the study therefore concluded that "no intervention increased intent to vaccinate among parents who are the least favorable toward vaccines."
Nyhan carefully emphasizes that the study cannot say anything about the effectiveness of other possible messages beyond the ones that were tested. So there may be winners out there that simply weren't in the experiment—although as Nyhan added, "I don't have a good candidate." In any event, given results like these, any new messages ought to be tested as well.
"I don't think our results imply that they shouldn't communicate why vaccines are a good idea," adds Nyhan. "But they do suggest that we should be more careful to test the messages that we use, and to question the intuition that countering misinformation is likely to be the most effective strategy."
Finally, Nyhan adds that in order to protect public health by encouraging widespread vaccinations, public communication efforts aren't the only tools at our disposal. "Other policy measures might be more effective," he notes. For instance, recently we reported on how easy it is for parents to dodge getting their kids vaccinated in some states; in some cases, it requires little more than a onetime signature on a form. Tightening these policies might be considerably more helpful than trying to win hearts and minds. That wasn't really working out anyway, and thanks to the new study, we now know that vaccine deniers' imperviousness to facts may be a key part of the reason why.
* This article previously referred to Dartmouth College as Dartmouth University. We regret the error.

Chris Mooney

Correspondent

Chris Mooney is a science and political journalist, podcaster, and the host of Climate Desk Live. He is the author of four books, including the New York Times bestselling The Republican War on Science. RSS | Twitter

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 http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/03/brendan-nyhan-backfire-effects-facts

Mitt Romney: Lying to victory (DEBATE ANALYSIS) 4OKT12

LIES, lies and more lies is how mitt robme romney won the first debate with Pres Obama. From The Daily Kos, and check this out by Bob Cesca on HuffPost Mitt Romney Won the Debate. But Why? 4OKT12

by Barbara MorrillFollow 

attribution: REUTERS

"How much did I lie?"

The results of Wednesday night's first presidential debate are in and it's official: Mitt Romney won round one. He was aggressive, he was decisive, he delivered. Of course he also lied through his teeth for most of the debate. Romney lied:

• When he claimed that "pre-existing conditions are covered under my plan." They're not.
• When he said that President Obama had "cut Medicare by $716 billion to pay for Obamacare." Obama didn't.
• When he denied proposing a $5 trillion tax cut. He did.
• When he said President Obama had "added almost as much to the federal debt as all the prior presidents combined." Not even close.
• When he resurrected "death panels." That was called "one of the biggest whoppers of the night."
• When he stated that half the green energy companies given stimulus funds had failed. Only if three out of nearly three dozen is half.

Stay tuned. These just scratch the surface.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/04/1139793/-Mitt-Romney-Lying-to-victory?detail=email

2011's Last Viral Lie About Health Reform 29DEZ11

MORE from the gop / tea-baggers opposed to the Affordable Care Act and anything from Pres Obama. They are consistent, continuing to fight facts with lies.....This from HuffPost
When so many good things have happened as the result of health care reform, I hate to end this year with a rebuttal to a viral lie about the Affordable Care Act. However, this one seems to come from a credible source but is so wrong that I can't resist.
This is how the email reads:

MUST LISTEN This needs to go viral. A brain surgeon called into the Mark Levin show. If you are over 70 years of age and you go to the ER and you are on government supported care, you will get comfort care instead of surgery. A government panel (a group of people that know absolutely nothing about medicine) will decide if you can have surgery and it has been decided that it will be denied if you are over 70. Patients will also be called "units" instead of "patients". Sarah Palin was correct--DEATH PANELS!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wsnHGI5K-E&feature=player_embedded

The video shows the radio host, Mark Levin, listening to this so-called brain surgeon call into his show. The surgeon claims that he has just been to a meeting of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons in Washington, D.C., where he learned something shocking! Obamacare will require only "comfort care" for people over 70. If you read the comments below the YouTube video, you are directed to the AANS site itself, where the Society blasts this person and his claim as a complete hoax. This disclaimer is on the AANS site under the "AANS news" subtitle:

On November 22, 2011, an individual claiming to be a "brain surgeon" made several statements referencing neurosurgical care on a Mark Levin radio show segment. The American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) and the Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS) reviewed this segment and found that it contained several factual inaccuracies. Please read the following statement regarding this matter. Should you have additional questions, contact Alison Dye, AANS/CNS Senior Manager of Communications, at 202-446-2028.

The statement continues:

The AANS and CNS are unaware of any federal government document directing that advanced neurosurgery for patients over 70 years of age will not be indicated and only supportive care treatment will be provided. Furthermore, in conducting our own due diligence, it appears that the caller who identified himself as a brain surgeon may not actually be a neurosurgeon, nor was there any session at the recent Congress of Neurological Surgeons' scientific meeting in Washington, DC at which a purported government document calling for the rationing of neurosurgical care was discussed.

Neurosurgeons are committed to providing timely, compassionate, and state of the art treatment for all patients -- regardless of age -- who have neurosurgical conditions. As such, we have requested that this podcast be removed from Mark Levin's website as it portrays inaccurate information which could potentially be harmful to the patients that we serve.

What motivates a person to misrepresent themselves while also blatantly lying about health care reform? Money? Anger? Ignorance? Hard to say. But as we say goodbye to 2011 and anticipate even more kooky and mean-spirited accusations about health care reform, I hope you will all bookmark and consult websites like politifact.org, factcheck.org, or snopes.com before you pass along any of these lies and distortions.

Follow Linda Bergthold on Twitter: www.twitter.com/lab08