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Let's begin the debunking of this shameless exercise in lying to the American public with this: the so-called 'cuts' to Medicare in the Affordable Care Act were really an end to the Bush-era effort to privatize it. Subsidies were eliminated and/or phased out over time, forcing insurers to compete with traditional Medicare. This means they don't get guaranteed profits, courtesy of the American taxpayer and so they have turned to their bought-and-paid-for senators to distort the truth and erode growing support for "Obamacare". In fact, they're so intent on perpetuating these mythical cuts that they have written a competing Medicare handbook to the official government version.

From the transcript:

VAN SUSTEREN: The government has Medicare new 2012 book out. And you guys have a competing Medicare 2012. This is your book. Is this a parody?

SEN. TOM COBURN, R-OKLA.: You might consider it. It's much more truthful than the other one.

VAN SUSTEREN: In what way?

COBURN: In terms of describing what the Obamacare legislation has done to Medicare patients.

BARRASSO: How they took $500 billion away from our seniors on Medicare not to save and strengthen Medicare but to start a whole new government program for other people, how they will have unelected bureaucrats decisions about who gets what care and how much the government pays for it. You can go item by item why Medicare is more at risk now in terms of going bankrupt than it was before Obamacare passed.

What follows is an effort to spark an inter generational war. In addition to being dishonest, it's nothing more than yet another cynical attempt to pit youngers against elders for votes and support, something Republicans can't find much of these days.

VAN SUSTEREN: So if I am clear, we were on an unsustainable path before President Obama's national health care. Then he shepherded through the national health care and we are still in the unsustainable path. But you say $530 billion was taken out of Medicare. Where -- what was it taken from? And where did it go?

COBURN: It's going to go for a innovation council, $10 billion. It will go to subsidize the state exchanges, mandated care that all of us will have to buy if we don't -- can't demonstrate that we have it. So there is a subsidy there.

So we are taking money that people have paid into Medicare, taking it out of Medicare and subsidizing the care for people who have not paid into Medicare.

COBURN: That's part of it. But the vast majority is going into other programs for other people for health care that Medicare dollars weren't paying for to begin with.

Got that? All the Medicare withholdings from your paychecks are counted as 'not paying' by Senator Coburn. Leave it to Greta to just let him go on and on over it too with no challenge.

The next statement is so outrageous he ought to be tried for it:

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If you've heard it once you've heard it a thousand times: states' rights. Along with "states' rights" goes the idea of "small government" which is actually "small federal government." Only this idea of a smaller government and states' rights is a formulated, poll tested, concept that means "no federal taxes" and the South doesn't have to be bossed around by Yankee Presidents any more.

What's rarely talked about is if these ideas were actualized. What would that mean for our country?

Rick Perry is the latest in a long line of rogue statesmen who shout the rallying cry of the 10th Amendment, but the New York Times questions if he's just opportunist.

"In one of his more well-publicized shifts, Mr. Perry proclaimed that gay marriage was an issue for individual states to decide, but backtracked in recent weeks and now says he supports a federal amendment banning gay marriage. He has also signaled support for various federal actions to restrict abortion rather than leaving the issue to states. And he used $17 billion in federal stimulus money to balance the state’s last two budgets."

the Texas Tribune similarly details the struggle Perry seems to have with women's reproductive choice, which, according to a true states rightsman, should be left up to the states to decide. Not according to Perry. The Tribune interviews an anti-choice advocate who, twelve years ago, couldn't get Perry to even push parental notification in the state legislature. Today, it's a different story as he advocates for "personhood" and the "preciousness of life" across the early primary and caucus states.

But Rick Perry isn't the only presidential candidate to advocate for a small federal government while conveniently ignoring social issues. Texas Congressman Ron Paul was the poster boy for libertarian politics, bringing about a movement within the GOP before the tea party was ever AstroTurf-ed.

In an astounding statement this past weekend Paul said he didn't believe natural disasters should fuel increased money to the states. If we lived under a Paul-pocracy these dollars wouldn't have left the states to begin with, and if the state ran out of money do to a preponderance of disaster - they would just file for bankruptcy. Paul doesn't just believe in states' rights; he proved that even when it's unpopular, he believes in states' rights. Except, of course, for the social issues.

Paul voted for the ban on late term abortions in 2003. Paul voted for Don't Ask Don't Tell in 1993 - but then voted to repeal in 2010, but then he condemned President Obama for not abandoning the Defense of Marriage Act. So much for states rights.

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After his role in the John Ensign scandal I'm not sure why he's still in Congress, but yesterday he turned into an AM hate talk radio host and attacked Congress, Obama and Medicare:

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) ripped his colleagues during a tour of northeast Oklahoma, calling them “career elitists,” “cowards” and said, “It’s just a good thing I can’t pack a gun on the Senate floor.”

Coburn’s gun-on-the-floor comment comes less than a month after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) made a triumphant return to the Capitol and the House floor following her shooting in the head in January outside a Tucson supermarket.

OK, threatening to shoot members of Congress is never a good thing. Maybe there should be a bill that forbids this kind of thing being said in DC. You know, if Louie Gohmert's crazy bill which wanted to arm these Congressman was passed maybe they could have had an old fashioned shoot out --OK Corral style right in the Capitol. But he was on a roll that Rush Limbaugh would have been proud of. Next up, he made up the claim that health care for seniors was better before Medicare ever came along.

He said the nation’s health care system was better before Medicare existed, even as he noted that some people received poor care at the time and doctors often accepted baked goods or chickens in partial payment.

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Multimillionaire Sen. Tom Coburn [net worth between $1M and $4.6M] really has a lot of damned nerve talking about "government fat", since his own plan, released this week, would privatize student loans for 15 million college students -- you know, the very wasteful and expensive thing we successfully stopped last year? Instead, he wants to put it back in the greedy hands of campaign contributors - and even fewer students will get the loans they need.

"Sucking off the programs"? Look in a mirror, fat cat:

This week, the so-called Gang of Six — composed of Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) [worth less than $446K], [multimillionaire] Mark Warner (D-VA) [net work between $65-284M], Dick Durbin (D-IL) [net worth $258,038 to $1,700,998], Mike Crapo (R-ID) [net worth -$245,427 to $988,566], and [millionaire] Kent Conrad (D-ND) [net worth $1,456,035 to $3,376,000] — released the outline of a plan that would reduce deficits by about $3.7 trillion over the next 10 years, with about $3 trillion of that coming from spending cuts. The plan closely mirrors that of the Bowles-Simpson fiscal commission.

The plan includes many odious measures, including changes to Social Security that would cut benefits by $1,300 per year. It would institute caps on discretionary spending through 2015, and lays out the amount by which individual agencies need to reduce their budgets (without identifying particular programs).

But according to Coburn, it doesn’t really matter which programs get cut, because, as he told Al-Jazeera English, it’s only people who are “sucking off the program” that are going to feel any change:

COBURN: The point is, where’s the efficiency in that? The actual service going to people isn’t going to decline, the people sucking off the program are going to be the ones that lose.

*All net worth information from OpenSecrets. As I've stated previously, we sometimes forget that the agendas of the very wealthy members of Congress may not intersect with our own.

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If nothing else, the Republicans’ hostage taking over the U.S. debt ceiling is full of ironies. After all, Republicans voted seven times to boost the borrowing limit and double the national debt under George W. Bush. The biggest deficit drivers going forward - the Bush tax cuts, two unfunded wars, and the Medicare prescription drug plan – all enjoyed GOP support. And as it turns out, simply by doing nothing and leaving current laws (most of all, the 2013 expiration of those Bush tax cuts) on the books, annual deficits will disappear well before 2020. Regardless, despite all their grandstanding, every GOP budget proposal, including the draconian Paul Ryan spending cuts backed by 98% of Congressional Republicans, will require the United States to raise the debt ceiling repeatedly in the years to come.

All of which means that the GOP’s threats of national economic suicide over the looming August 2 default deadline are about slashing government spending and gutting the social safety net.

Appearing on the Charlie Rose show, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn provided a case in point. Coburn, as you may recall, walked out on the so-called Gang of Six deficit negotiations. At a time when the federal tax burden is at its lowest since 1950, Coburn like his GOP colleagues refused to countenance raising new tax revenue. And when fellow Gangsta Dick Durbin balked at Coburn’s demand to slash another $150 billion from Medicare on top of the $400 billion pledged by President Obama, Coburn stormed out.

Now, Coburn is back, pushing his plan co-authored by Joe Lieberman to drain $600 billion from Medicare over the next decade. Those savings come from raising the eligibility age from 65 to 67, means-testing wealthier beneficiaries, adding new co-pays and a $550 deductible, and instituting a new $7,500 maximum for “out of pocket” expenses. On Monday, Dr. Coburn tried to explain why his plan is necessary:

ROSE: You resigned from the Gang of Six because there was an impasse. What happened?

COBURN: Well, look, the whole purpose for bringing three on each side together was to actually come up with a plan that we could sell to an equal number of Senators on each side that would actually fix the problem. And we got to a point where we could not get to a point at which we could actually fix the problem…

ROSE: In the end are we talking about Medicare?

COBURN: We're talking about Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. A lot of people want to discount Social Security, but we're going to have to borrow $2.6 trillion to fund Social Security over the next thirty years. And that's what we've stolen from it and spent on other things.

And even if you have all that money and even if you have the capability of borrowing it, which I doubt seriously we have the capability to borrow right now, even if you've done that you still have to reform it because our life expectancy has gotten longer and the number of people supporting each person on Social Security has gotten much smaller. And so it doesn't work.

There are so many problems with Coburn’s sales job, it’s hard to know where to begin.

For openers, it’s worth noting that since its inception in 1965, Medicare has been the major factor in the dramatic reduction of poverty among the elderly. But raising the eligibility for Medicare threatens to reverse some of those gains. For starters, life expectancy varies significantly by income, by geography and for minorities. Worse still, as the Incidental Economist noted in a review of studies of the topic, “Those without insurance prior to Medicare eligibility spent much more money on health care after they became Medicare eligible. In other words, people wait to get care until their Medicare kicks in. This is bad both for health and for the federal government’s bottom line.”

And the federal government’s bottom line will be impacted for another reason: private insurance simply costs more. As Paul Krugman lamented in reviewing the Coburn-Lieberman proposal:

The idea of Medicare as a money-saving program may seem hard to grasp. After all, hasn’t Medicare spending risen dramatically over time? Yes, it has: adjusting for overall inflation, Medicare spending per beneficiary rose more than 400 percent from 1969 to 2009.

But inflation-adjusted premiums on private health insurance rose more than 700 percent over the same period. So while it’s true that Medicare has done an inadequate job of controlling costs, the private sector has done much worse. And if we deny Medicare to 65- and 66-year-olds, we’ll be forcing them to get private insurance — if they can — that will cost much more than it would have cost to provide the same coverage through Medicare.

(It’s worth noting that Coburn’s plan is only made possible by the Affordable Care Act, which makes it possible for older Americans to qualify for and afford private health insurance.)

Sadly for Coburn, the math and the market belie his assertions regarding the Social Security trust fund.

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I hardly know where to begin. First of all, it's clear that the Democrats plan to implement the recommendations of the Catfood Commission, the same recommendations that couldn't muster enough of the votes it allegedly had to get before it would be presented to the House for a vote. So that's one really big lie to the American public; we were never meant to have any say, it's already decided.

Second, this reporter talks about what Mark Warner's presentation "shows." It does not "show" anything -- it contends, and it is widely disputed by many reputable economists, two of them Nobel Prize winners. It is in the same factesque vein of a prosecutor's opening statement to the jury.

But facts don't seem to matter anymore, do they?

RICHMOND, Va.—A bipartisan group of senators is close to proposing legislation they hope will force Congress to tackle the federal government's ballooning debt, and they have begun a road show to win public support.

The proposal would cut the federal budget deficit by $4 trillion over 10 years, roughly four times the savings the White House proposed in February, Sens. Mark Warner (D., Va.) and Saxby Chambliss (R., Ga.) told about 200 business leaders at a meeting in Richmond.

If enacted into law, the plan would likely force Congress to boost revenue through new tax rules, cut spending and bring down the growth rate of Medicare and Social Security over time.

Some executives at the meeting appeared skeptical that a bipartisan deal could eventually win support from Congress and the White House, but many encouraged the lawmakers to try.

"They know they have to do it now and if they don't do it now, we are going to have other countries in charge of our future," said Doug Gray, executive director of the Virginia Association of Health Plans trade group, who attended the meeting.

Messrs. Warner and Chambliss are crafting the proposal with Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D., Ill.), Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D., N.D.), Tom Coburn (R., Okla.), and Mike Crapo (R., Idaho).

Mr. Warner's presentation showed that if current trends continued, interest payments on federal debt would skyrocket from more than $20 trillion in 2060 to $80 trillion in 2080. It also showed that U.S. government debt as a percentage of total economic output could soon equal that of Greece, whose fiscal problems have threatened to destabilize Europe.

"If we put this off, we are approaching financial Armageddon," Mr. Warner said.

The senators said their plan would seek to largely implement the recommendations made in December by the White House's bipartisan deficit-reduction commission. That group called for cutting spending in myriad government programs, and trimming costs on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. The proposal was made by commission co-chairmen Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan Simpson.

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Credit: New York Times

During his 2004 campaign, Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn declared, "I favor the death penalty for abortionists." Four years later, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin famously refused to condemn an abortion clinic bomber as a "terrorist." Last week, a GOP mayoral candidate in Jacksonville joked that bombing an abortion clinic "may cross my mind." Now, deadly serious Republican lawmakers in Nebraska and Iowa are pushing legislation that would in essence legalize the murder of abortion providers.

Less than two years after the assassination of Dr. George Tiller and less than two weeks after South Dakota Republicans shelved a similar bill, Nebraska state Senator Mark Christensen has introduced an even more onerous version in LB 232. As Mother Jones explained:

Unlike its South Dakota counterpart, which would have allowed only a pregnant woman, her husband, her parents, or her children to commit "justifiable homicide" in defense of her fetus, the Nebraska bill would apply to any third party.

"In short, this bill authorizes and protects vigilantes, and that's something that's unprecedented in our society," Melissa Grant of Planned Parenthood of the Heartland told the Nebraska legislature's judiciary committee on Wednesday. Specifically, she warned, it could be used to target Planned Parenthood's patients and personnel. Also testifying in opposition to the bill was David Baker, the deputy chief executive officer of the Omaha police department, who said, "We share the same fears...that this could be used to incite violence against abortion providers."

Meanwhile in Iowa, two new measures backed by House Republicans could together enable "the justifiable use of force against abortion or family planning providers." In violation of the Supreme Court's Roe v Wade ruling, House File 153 would ban abortion by mandating the state must protect "life" from the moment of conception. House File 7 would provide civil and criminal immunity for citizens using "reasonable force, including deadly force, to protect themselves or a third party from serious injury or death or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony." Together, the Iowa Independent explained, the two bills could enable the very kind of necessity defense for anti-abortion terrorists a Kansas judge rejected for Tiller murderer Scott Roeder:

If passed into law, the two bills -- House File 7 and House File 153 -- would offer an unprecedented defense opportunity to individuals who stand accused of killing such providers, according to a former prosecutor and law professor at the University of Kansas, and are something that might have very well led to a different outcome in the Kansas trial of the man who shot Dr. George Tiller in a church foyer.

If terrorism is defined as "as the deliberate murder of civilians or destruction of property in order to achieve a political objective," the wave of attacks on American abortion providers certainly qualifies. After the 2003 capture of Atlanta Olympic Park and Birmingham family planning clinic bomber Eric Rudolph, then Attorney General John Ashcroft agreed, announcing "this sends a clear message that we will never cease in our efforts to hunt down all terrorists, foreign or domestic, and stop them from harming the innocent."

Shelley Shannon, one of the nation's most notorious anti-abortion extremists, agreed with Ashcroft.

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There is simply no understanding the prevalence of gun violence in America - as evidenced by the recent attempted assassination of a congresswoman during a mass shooting - without discussing the nefarious role played by the National Rifle Association (NRA).

Once an organisation primarily concerned with the education and training of sportsmen, in a coup that came to be known as the Cincinnati Revolt in 1977, hardliners took over the leadership and believed that any gun regulation would take us down a slippery slope to Khmer Rougism.

In the years since, unlike the US in the wake of the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy - or for that matter Australia after the Port Arthur Massacre - the response to senseless gun violence has been to discuss everything from the rhetoric on our airwaves to the weather outside.

But any public conversations regarding restricting who has access to guns has been considered verboten (although, thankfully, this time some cracks are beginning to show).

This is largely because the NRA's duping its own members, which we'll discuss below, and coming to the realisation that the real money was in actually protecting the rights of gun manufacturers, which we'll discuss in Part II of this series.

If the NRA leadership is not radical, they certainly see the benefit in playing radicals on TV in order to enrich their financial benefactors who produce and sell the weaponry of death.

In the 1990s, in a climate of fear and paranoia that produced the Oklahoma City bombing, they were all too happy to refer to the government authority that tries to enforce gun laws, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms (ATF), as "jack-booted thugs". This led former president George H.W. Bush to resign his membership.

They then decided to up the ante by accusing former president Bill Clinton of murder and saying he "had blood on his hands" - all for the crime of supporting background checks at gun shows - which is among the many legislative proposals to reduce gun violence that they have repeatedly blocked.

Others include a ban on high-capacity magazines, banning sales to those on terrorist watch lists, and fully funding the aforementioned ATF (think about the latter when they say they want to "strengthen existing gun laws" after each new tragedy).

In fact, just a few days after the mass shooting in Tucson it was reported by Ryan Reilly from TPMMuckraker that a "jihadist" in America who was... "a moderator and contributor on Islamic extremist web forums, posted songs praising suicide bombers, discussed his jihad fantasies in the open..." was able to get an AK-47, no questions asked.

Emerson Begolly, the "jihadist" in question, responded when queried about this with laughter and facetiously exclaimed that "someone at the FBI showed up to work drunk". Perhaps, but if they were, it was only because the NRA forced them to do keg stands.

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Follow me On Twitter: @cliffschecter

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It's the growing meme throughout the traditional media and newly "fiscally responsible" Republican Party: we must prepare for austerity. In fact, Sen. Tom Coburn is so sure that we must make deep, painful cuts (to the middle and lower classes, naturally) to protect the next generation that he warns of "apocalyptic pain" if we don't.

I told you the other evening that if we didn't take some pain now, we're going to experience apocalyptic pain, and it's going to be out of our control. The idea should be that we control it.[..]

I think you'll see a 15 to 18 percent unemployment rate. I think you will see an 8 to 9 percent decline in GDP. I think you'll see the middle class just destroyed if we don't do this. And the people that it will harm the most will be the poorest of the poor, because we'll print money to try to debase our currency and get out of it and what you will see is hyperinflation. So we don't have a lot of options other than living within our means and sending the signal that creates confidence that we can repay our debt and that we're not going to debase our currency to do it.

Holy Flying Spaghetti Monster on a popsicle stick, what does Coburn think it's like now for the 99ers (who have been forgotten by Congress) and the exponentially growing number of people are on government assistance, more now than ever before? A frickin' picnic? There's a whole lot of pain out there, Senator, exacerbated by you and your party's INSISTENCE that the wealthiest 2% keep paying Bush era tax rates. Talk to me about austerity and pain when EVERYONE in this country feels it as bad as the neediest. C&L commenter Wilbur1 put it astutely in Karoli's earlier post on Tom Friedman's similar calls for austerity:

What he is calling for is generational theft. His parents weren't GIVEN a god damn thing. They fought for what they got and they paid much higher taxes, had far more constricted trade and finance, had more social programs handled by the government and a wider safety net than we do. They were handed a good country and made it better. When it came time to pay for that society they did. Now, Friedman and his generation comes along and when it is time for them to pay, to pass on to the next generation a good educational system, health care system, etc, they refuse. They've destroyed everything with their nihilistic materialism. They refuse to pay higher taxes, allow for inequitable trade, financial and tax deals, allow for economic exploitation and greed to dominate the economy and here we are. They have made every single part of our society worse and are now saying to us that we better not dare hold them accountable. We better not let billionaires who couldn't posisbly "earn" that much money (it isn't possible to earn that much money, you must obtain that money by monopolizing someone else's work in some way or creating debt that adds nothing to the world) pay for money they didn't earn. It's not even let them eat cake. It's denying that cake exists, that he and his parents had plenty of it when he was younger but now he's grown, fat. and its all gone. He's telling them to eat paper.

And would it surprise you to learn that Coburn & Co. are looking at this problem completely ass-backward? I didn't think so. Economist Dean Baker (who has been far more correct on economic issues than Tom Friedman and the rest of the Chicago School of Economics devotees have been put together) appeared on Countdown last week to warn that these austerity measures are ignoring the real problems and the deep cuts they advocate will absolutely bring on the apocalyptic pain they're predicting:

More from Dean Baker: Shared Sacrifice: Where's Wall Street's Sacrifice?

I'm not suggesting that we're not in a terrible economic position and need to make changes to bring us back into recovery. But no one with an ounce of sense can suggest that reducing the incomes of those already in dire financial straits will help the economy recover.

Transcripts below the fold...

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What is the state of the union when a madman can come within a whisker of assassinating a member of Congress? When his rantings and ravings and drug use don't stop him from getting a high-capacity magazine? When a sophomore in high school can show up to school with a gun in his backpack, and accidentally shoot two of his classmates?

I'm not sure, but I know I'd really like to hear President Obama address this during his SOTU address--without platitudes, but with an actual plan of action. One which might include demanding that the Senate confirm his nominee to run the ATF forthwith, fixing gaps in government databases of mental health and criminal records, requiring states to share data on those who have been deemed mentally unfit, questioning the intelligence of selling high-capacity magazines to just anyone, allowing concealed carry without a permit, as Arizona and two other states do, wondering whether those with firearms should just be able to meander up next to their member of Congress, and closing loopholes that allow the crazed and criminal to get guns at gun shows while firmly ensconced on terrorist watch lists.

Because anything less than this would tell me that he is to the right of such known Progressives as Dick Cheney, Sen. Tom Coburn, Sen. Dick Lugar and Rep. Peter King. Not to mention A-rated NRA supporter Harry Reid and former RNC Communications Director Cliff May.

Oh yeah, it would also mean he is FAR to the Right of that key element in our democracy known as the American People:

"Large majorities of Americans agree with the 2008 Supreme Court ruling that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to own guns, and Americans strongly oppose efforts to ban handguns," said Bob Carpenter, vice president of American Viewpoint, the Republican polling firm that joined with Democratic firm Momentum Analysis to conduct the survey. "But Americans and gun owners feel with equal fervor that government must act to get every single record in the background-check system that belongs there and to ensure that every gun sale includes a background check. Most Americans view these goals, protecting gun rights for the law-abiding and keeping guns from criminals, as compatible."

Some findings from the poll results, provided exclusively to The Huffington Post:

-- 90 percent of Americans and 90 percent of gun owners support fixing gaps in government databases that are meant to prevent the mentally ill, drug abusers and others from buying guns.

-- 91 percent of Americans and 93 percent of gun owners support requiring federal agencies to share information about suspected dangerous persons or terrorists to prevent them from buying guns.

-- 89 percent of Americans and 89 percent of gun owners support full funding of the law a unanimous Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed after the Virginia Tech shootings to put more records in the background-check database.

-- 86 percent of Americans and 81 percent of gun owners support requiring all gun buyers to pass a background check, no matter where they buy the gun and no matter who they buy it from.

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Closing the so-called "terror gap" has particularly strong support. A 2010 Government Accountability Office report found that during the past six years, individuals on the terror watchlist were able to buy firearms or explosives from licensed U.S. dealers 1,119 times.

The NRA has opposed bipartisan legislation closing the gap on the grounds that the list is flawed -- some individuals are put on the list by mistake, while many who pose legitimate threats are never added.

But this position puts the NRA far to the right of even its members. A survey last year by conservative pollster Frank Luntz found that 82 percent of NRA members supported "prohibiting people on the terrorist watch lists from purchasing guns." Eighty-six percent agreed with the statement that the country can "do more to stop criminals from getting guns while also protecting the rights of citizens to freely own them."

This folks, is about whether we want democracy by ballot or intimidation by bullet. It goes to the very heart of who we are and want to be, and it is most certainly an issue of National Security--or security for our democracy. Lets hope President Obama does the right thing.