You Can't Blame Obama for American StubbornnessWilliam Pfaff, Truthdig: The American public is intolerant and too many know little more than what they are told by Fox News and by talk radio, which means that they haven't a clue as to what really is going on in the world...
The final great obstacle to reform of national health care is the stubborn belief of Americans, whatever the evidence, that the American system is superior to all others on Earth, that Americans live better and richer lives than anyone else, and that if employment, working conditions, wages and health care are bad in the United States they must be worse everywhere else. If not, why does everyone in the world want to come to live in the United States?
Can anything be done about this? I doubt it. The combination of prejudices concerning socialism and the supremacy of the American system that Americans seem to acquire in the womb, with Republican electoral nihilism, is probably impossible to overcome.
ThinkProgress: Conservatives have frequently obscured the fact that Medicare is a government-run single-payer program. Constituents appearing at health care town halls have even demanded that their members of Congress keep their 'government hands off Medicare.'
Now, a new Public Policy Polling poll (.pdf) finds that millions of Americans do not realize that the federal government runs Medicare: 'One poll question indicative of how difficult it is to gain public understanding on a complicated issue asked if respondents thought the government should 'stay out of Medicare,' something inherently impossible. 39% said yes.'
The poll also shows that an additional 15% of respondents were 'not sure' if the government should be involved in Medicare. Only 46% of respondents disagreed with the proposition that the government should stay out of the government-run program.
The poll also finds that only 62 percent of respondents believe that President Obama was born in America. Of the 38 percent who either don't believe or are unsure, some think he was born in Indonesia, Kenya, the Philippines, or France. Six percent of the total poll respondents also don't think Hawaii is a US state.
