If you haven’t read it yet, check out this story about a man who survived for three days in an air pocket in a sunken ship on the Atlantic seafloor just off the coast of Nigeria. He was discovered and rescued by a diving team that was there simply to recover bodies. There’s a extraordinary moment when one of the divers sees the hand of what he assumes is a corpse, grabs it and then feels it grab back. It’s a classic feel good story. The video is amazing. But reading the piece, marveling at this guy’s amazing luck, I kept thinking of the countless people who have been in some similar position and met the totally predictable, close to inevitable conclusion of the story – with plenty of time to grasp the sheer hopelessness of their predicament.
Who knows whether Healthcare.gov is “fixed”. That’s a semantic and polemical point. But it seems to be working dramatically better than it did in the initial weeks of the Obamacare roll out. If that’s true, does this open a new chapter in the roll out of health care reform and the politics surrounding it? Or will the press narrative stay the same and we’re still basically on the hard, brutal slog we’ve been on for two months. We’re discussing that question now at The Hive (sub. req.).
From TPM Reader SF …
I’ve an Obamacare story – a happy one! – I thought I’d share with you, because I suspect I’m representative of a demographic that’s not getting a lot of ink.
I’ve bought health insurance on the individual market for a decade. Since 2007, when my youngest was born, I’ve had the same BC&BS policy to cover the whole family (me, wife, two kids, no major health issues). It’s roughly equivalent to a silver plan, albeit a fairly tarnished silver—no maternity, for instance—and it’s more than doubled in the past six years, from $684 a month in ’07 to $1,457 now. Our plan is grandfathered, so we could keep it, a fact BC&BS reminded us of in a cheery mailer. If we did nothing, we’d be rolled over onJanuary 1 with a new premium of $1,549 a month for our same silvery plan.
Maybe a small hint here that Speaker Boehner wants to make a real move on immigration reform.
We’re pleased to welcome award-winning NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik for TPM Cafe’s Book Club this week. His book, Murdoch’s World: The Last of the Old Media Empires, is a fascinating look inside the media conglomerate Rupert Murdoch built. Folkenflik kicks things off today with an original essay on how Murdoch sees his legacy, part of which is on trial these days in London, and how he hopes to rewrite it.
TPM Prime subscribers should join us for a chat on Friday at noon with Folkenflik about his book.
Edie Windsor’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, the woman who argued the case that overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, looks at the Cheney family feud and has some advice for Liz Cheney.
It had to happen. Rob Ford brings his crack-smoking, binge-drinking, over-the-top ways south of the border to America. Well, not the real Rob Ford, if you want to be really technical about it. But Rob Ford, a crack smoker from Canada has now appeared in the first American attack ad.
The times they are a changin’ when a Croat group can sue Bob Dylan in France for inciting racism.
I’ve told you many times that reader emails are at the heart of makes TPM TPM. Some of it is news tips, which have been at the heart of some of our biggest stories. More often it’s just a constant stream of pointers to out of the way news reports we wouldn’t have known about otherwise. But more than anything it’s a never ending stream of commentary, opinion, story ideas, reactions and critiques that have become so deeply woven into my mental life that it’s hard to fully convey. What’s a treat after 13 years of doing this is that I still have every single one that was ever sent in.