► Show Top 10 Hot Links

Posts Tagged ‘Healthcare’

Alinsky Tactics at the Town Halls?

by tqcincinnatus ( 23 Comments › )
Filed under Democratic Party, Liberal Fascism, Politics at August 14th, 2009 - 3:32 pm

Great piece out yesterday by Kyle-Anne Shiver at American Thinker about the possibility (or, rather, likelihood) that Alinsky-style tactics are being used by the Left to try to tar the town hall protesters as “extremists,”  

When I saw this video interview of Bill Burton, White House Deputy Press Secretary, I could not help but be reminded of one of old Saul Alinsky’s favorite fake-em-out tricks of the revolutionary trade.  Burton is reinforcing Pelosi’s earlier claim that people were carrying Swastikas at town halls, but goes even further and claims that folks are actually “dressing up like Hitler.”
 
[snip]
 
When Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and now the president’s own deputy press secretary conjure up images of Nazis at healthcare town halls, they are engaging in one of the oldest tricks in anyone’s book, but an especial favorite of their mentor, Saul Alinsky.

Alinsky himself employed this method, quite deviously.  Alinsky biographer, Sanford D. Horwitt provides an anecdote using precisely this same diabolical tactic to deceive the people.  From Horwitt’s Let Them Call Me Rebel:

“…in the spring of 1972, at Tulane University…students asked Alinsky to help plan a protest of a scheduled speech by George H. W. Bush, then U.S. representative to the United Nations – a speech likely to include a defense of the Nixon administration’s Vietnam War policies.  The students told Alinsky they were thinking about picketing or disrupting Bush’s address.  That’s the wrong approach, he rejoined, not very creative – and besides causing a disruption might get them thrown out of school.  He told them, instead, to go to hear the speech dressed as members of the Ku Klux Klan, and whenever Bush said something in defense of the Vietnam War, they should cheer and wave placards reading, ‘The KKK supports Bush.’  And that is what they did, with very successful, attention-getting results.”

Planting major falsehoods has been a favorite Alinsky strategy from the start.  His acolyte, Barack Obama, learned his Industrial Areas Foundation lessons on deceiving for power while on a side trip during his Harvard years, then taught the Alinsky power tactics at the University of Chicago
 
[snip]
 
Here’s a little hint from me on the Nazi card.  If a few folks actually do start showing up at town halls, opposing the MediCoup*, even dressed like Hitler and carrying a Swastika poster, I’ll lay good hard cash on a bet that they’ve been sent by this Alinskyite President or his minions to deceive, just as Saul did with getting students to dress like the KKK at that rally back in the 70s.

She’s absolutely right.  My suspicion since the time that these “Obama = Hitler” people started showing up to the town halls has been that they’re nothing but left-wing plants being sent in to try to discredit legitimate citizen protest against the way Obama and the Dems are trying to destroy our health care system. 

What’s sad is that there are so many credulous fools out there in the blogosphere who are willing to bury their heads in the sand and believe the worst about the motivations and behaviour of the town hall protesters, without ever thinking about the possibility that these “extremists” might just turn out to be Mobies.

The real question: How many Americans have health insurance?

by bar ( 33 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Healthcare, Politics, Republican Party at August 14th, 2009 - 9:05 am

That’s the real question. We have all heard the alleged numbers of Americans that don’t have health insurance, 46+ million. The true number is likely less than half that. Twenty somethings are not interested in low insurance premiums with extended coverage. They are interested in new iPhones, clothes and pimping their cars out. When I was a twenty something, I didn’t care about health insurance or retirement. They are just things most young people don’t have at the top of their to-do-list. I worked for 7 years before I got a job that offered health insurance and I didn’t seek that job for the insurance benefits. I just needed a job.

Now just try to find out how many Americans really do have health insurance. When I do a goggle search 99% of the results are how many Americans DON’T have health insurance. Then I stumbled across a census report dated August 2008 with 2007 data and it states that more than 250 million Americans have health insurance. Of that, we have heard that about 89% are happy with their dreaded “status quo”. Even if I, for the sake of argument, accept the 46 million uninsured person claim, it still amounts to only 1/5th of the total number insured. I guess the 1/5th will now dictate to the other 4/5ths? That doesn’t seem right or fair. Why should I and the rest of the majority suffer for the minority? That is nothing but kowtowing to special interests.

Take the gay rights crusade for example, less than 3% of the population is homosexual, yet they will define what marriage is for the other 97%. That sounds really fair! Why turn the world upside down just to appease that small percentage?

I also take note of the Obummer canard that healthcare costs will rise dramatically in the near future. Thus the need to act RIGHT NOW before its too late! So he is fighting a crypto-ghost of his own making for his own convenience.

Illegal aliens use our emergency rooms as primary healthcare centers now and its on the American tax payers dime. We do not deny healthcare to those who can not afford it. Illegal aliens don’t pay taxes so they do not pay into any system that covers their healthcare costs, its free for them.

If we truly want to cut healthcare costs, we must first stop these illegal free loaders.
You and I and your insurance and my insurance are paying for those free loaders, because nothing is really free, somebody has to foot the bill.

Mr President and members of congress stop wasting our time and your time writing thousand page bills that change the “status quo” for over 250 million Americans that are happy with their “status quo” just to appease the very small minority and illegal aliens. Unless you want to lose your job, then by all means carry on.

Its past time for the American people to stand up and take notice of your shenanigans and vote you all out of office. Its time we get some representatives that care about the majority interests and stop kowtowing to special interests. Last time I checked the majority has a larger vote then the minority, a simple fact that is lost on our current elected officials.
-bar

Update: 10 things that make American healthcare better than any other developed country.
Well at least until Obummer and congress get their hands on it.

I Guess There *Were* End-of-Life Provisions in ObamaCare After All

by tqcincinnatus ( 97 Comments › )
Filed under Healthcare, Politics at August 14th, 2009 - 7:04 am

Hmmmm.   Looks like a lot of left-leaning bloggers will be eating crow, since Chuck Grassley, one of the leading Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee, says that end-of-life provisions have been removed from the Senate’s version of ObamaCare,

Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, who is working with Finance Committee chairman Sen. Max Baucus on a health care compromise, has just issued a statement saying that concerns about end-of-life issues in the House health care bill are entirely legitimate.  In addition, Grassley says the Finance Committee has “dropped end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely” because of those fears and also because of concerns that they could be “implemented incorrectly.”  Grassley’s statement:

The bill passed by the House committees is so poorly cobbled together that it will have all kinds of unintended consequences, including making taxpayers fund health care subsidies for illegal immigrants. On the end-of-life issue, there’s a big difference between a simple educational campaign, as some advocates want, and the way the House committee-passed bill pays physicians to advise patients about end of life care and rates physician quality of care based on the creation of and adherence to orders for end-of-life care, while at the same time creating a government-run program that is likely to lead to the rationing of care for everyone. On the Finance Committee, we are working very hard to avoid unintended consequences by methodically working through the complexities of all of these issues and policy options. That methodical approach continues.  We dropped end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly. Maybe others can defend a bill like the Pelosi bill that leaves major issues open to interpretation, but I can’t.

In other words, the end-of-life provisions could have lead to “death panels”….just like Palin said. 

Makes sense, really.  When you start rationing care – as you almost invariably do under any universal single payer health care system – then you start taking into account things like “how many useful years does this person have left?”  And you start considering that giving health care to old people who won’t be working and producing tax revenue isn’t worth it.  You start measuring the value of a person’s life on how much revenue they can generate for the state.   Then you end up with the death panels Palin warned about.  Where did she get such a silly idea?  Probably from Oregon, where exactly that sort of thing has already happened via Oregon’s state-run health care system. 

Once again, conservatives were right, and the leftie blogs were wrong.  I’m starting to detect a trend here.

 

 


This is why you don’t just take Obama’s word for it

by tqcincinnatus ( 45 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Economy, Healthcare, Politics at August 11th, 2009 - 4:52 am

Because chances are, he’s lying to you.  Case in point, the White House’s new “Reality Check” website about health care “reform”,

A new Web site launched Monday by the Obama administration to rebut alleged disinformation about the administration’s efforts to reform the health care system claims that reform “would not add one penny to the deficit”–despite the fact that the two health care reform bills that have been analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office are predicted by the CBO to increase the national debt by $239 billion and $1.042 trillion respectively.

The administration, meanwhile, has not produced any health-care reform legislation that has been independently determined to be deficit-neutral.
 
Appearing on CNN yesterday, Linda Douglass, communications director for the White House Office of Health Reform, said that the new Web site that premiered today has been designed to defeat disinformation and make sure people “can get the facts” about health care reform.

“You know, one of the things we’re going to be doing this week is making available a Web site where people can go to get the facts about health insurance reform,” Douglass said in an interview with CNN’s Howard Kurtz. “There’s a lot of misinformation, and there is, as I said in the video, a lot of disinformation. That’s information that’s meant to mislead you. So, we’re going to have a new site where people can go, they can get the facts, they can share it with family and friends.”

But in its first day of operation the Web site claimed that the reform “will not add one penny to the deficit,” a claim that cannot be made for any bill that has been drafted in Congress and analyzed by the CBO.

Who to believe….the Obama administration, which has an obvious partisan interest in lying to people about the effects of the health care bills which its Party is pushing, or the Congressional Budget Office, which has always had a reputation for being reasonably non-partisan.

And c’mon, do they really think people are stupid enough to believe that the nationalisation of one-sixth of the economy isn’t going to create some rather large deficits?  Financially speaking, the only way that could be avoided is by raising taxes extensively, including taxes on the middle class (which, IIRC, Obama promised not to do back during the campaign, so we know they won’t be taking that route, right???)

This, in a nutshell, exemplifies what the Obama administration is and will continue to be – non-transparency, smokescreen, falsehood, chicanery, and waste.