GOP: Oozing a Trail of Slime Wherever They Go

I received an email about how the GOP in California has put up a phony Obamacare web site to dissuade Californians from signing up for health insurance coverage. I thought, at first, that nah, even they could not be so sleazy as to resort to the tricks of Internet con artists and pirates.

Well, I was wrong. They are that sleazy.

Opponents of the Affordable Care Act never stop producing new tricks to undermine the reform's effectiveness. But leave it to California Republicans to reach for the bottom. Their goal appears to be to discredit the act by highlighting its costs and penalties rather than its potential benefits.

The device chosen by the Assembly's GOP caucus is a website at the address coveringhealthcareca.com. If that sounds suspiciously like coveredca.com, which is the real website for the California insurance exchange, it may not be a coincidence. Bogus insurance websites have sprung up all over, aiming to steer consumers away from legitimate enrollment services. Just a couple of weeks ago California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris shut down 10 bogus insurance sites, some of them with names very similar to the real thing. She must have overlooked the GOP's entry.

But once they got found out, first they tried to say "we're only educating consumers" and when that bald-faced lie fell flat, they ended up adding in links to the real California health insurance exchange website.

Here's a tip, GOP: When you have to resort to false-flag web sites, utter fabrications and bald-faced lies, then it is becoming clear is that what you are really doing is losing the argument. And you fucking know it.