NBC Get’s A Bad Case Of The Glitches On Bombshell ObamaCare Story

Last night at The Conversation, I reported that NBC had disappeared their devastating ObamaCare story, Obama administration knew millions could not keep their health insurance, (after being linked by Drudge and practically every conservative new outlet in the blogosphere),  and updated before I went to bed to report that the story had reappeared at a different web address.

This morning it was discovered that stealth edits had also taken place, particularly with the removal of a key paragraph:

Then, late at night, the story was pulled, the link was changed thereby breaking the Drudge link, and stealth edits were made to the piece. In particular, one key paragraph met the cutting room floor:

None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration. The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be “grandfathered,” meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don’t meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date — the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example — the policy would not be grandfathered.

That paragraph has since mysteriously reappeared, with NBC blaming the issues on a “publishing glitch”. This  prompted one Twitter user to quip, “ I looked at my birth certificate. I was right, I wasn’t born yesterday.”

It’s more like Lisa Myers had made the capital mistake of publishing the story without letting the White House press office, proofread it first. After the stealth edits were (easily) discovered, NBC had no choice but to put the paragraph back in the story.

But that’s not all folks, there’s more:

When NBC News changed the url for the first story, it killed more than 3,000 mostly adversarial comments. It appears that NBC has purged the comments again; after Drudge changed the link back, there were another 3,000 comments. At the time of this update, there are 1,156 comments.

As John Hayward dryly noted, tis the “season of the glitch.”

Which is entirely appropriate in the “Democratic People’s Republic of Glitchistan”, formerly known as the USA.

SEE ALSO:

AoSHQ: Under Pressure From The White House, NBC Throws Its Reporter Under the Bus and Censors News That Obama Wrote Regs to Disqualify and Terminate Health Insurance Policies:

But why was it deleted in the first place? Why did NBC decide to trust the Obama Administration on this — obviously a party that stinks of self-interest and potential deceit — over its own reporter, who got it right?

I really want to stress this to everybody, because no one seems to get this yet:

These regulations, being a creature of the Executive branch, can be rewritten by the executive branch at any time. We don’t need a law for this (though one would be useful, to force Obama to do the right thing).

Obama has it within his power to call up the HHS reg-writers and instruct them to honor the promise he made time and again for two years. And he doesn’t want people to know this, because he is determined to break that promise.

That promise was always a lie, and not a meaningless lie at the periphery, but a central lie propping up the political campaign for ObamaCare. Had he told Americans that they would be losing their current health care in order to be dumped into what is effectively a high-risk pool, so that they could subsidize high-risk clients, the public would have rejected the law even more strongly than he did.

So he lied. And lied. And lied. And lied some more.

And even at this late date, he could still choose to honor his promise.

But he won’t, because he can’t — he always intended to take people’s insurance away from them. Always. And he’s not going to undo, short of a veto-proof act of Congress.

Obama would like to tell the American people that he must do this, or that he didn’t do it at all. That the law requires it (it doesn’t), that he can’t instruct his employees to give a more generous reading of the law in their regulations (he can), that his hands are tied (they’re not), that it’s the GOP’s fault (what?) or perhaps a fall-guy’s like Kathleen Sebelius.

But Sebelius, the HHS, and all executive employees answer to Barack Obama. He is in fact their boss.

They are executing his will.