Category Archives: Propaganda

Are BO's Pants On Fire?

Barack Obama, Democrats, IMMIGRATION, Law, Media, Politics, Propaganda

By federal fiat, US state schools and hospitals must bear the costs of teaching and treating illegal aliens because of federally granted rights. Unless the courts overturn these mandates, Obamacare will uphold federal provisions that are already on the books. By logical extension, Joe Wilson, South Carolina’s Republican Representative, was correct—if indecorous—in asserting, during Obama’s address to the chambers last week, that the president was not being truthful.

This college senior from Charleston is sufficiently savvy to mine the relevant source and deduce what the malfeasant media refuses even to entertain, let alone investigate:

“President Obama just swore that his plan would never include such an element, and there’s no reason for the president to lie. However, Obama has not published his own written plan, and the only written plans currently being considered are those bills in Congress. Therefore, we must test the president’s claim against those plans which do exist, chiefly HR 3200.”

“HR 3200 cannot hold up against some basic scrutiny. Republican-proposed amendments that would explicitly exclude illegal aliens from the legislation were voted down consistently by Democrats in committee hearings. Further, pages 50 and 51 of the HR 3200 legislation clearly read that ‘all health care and related services covered by this Act shall be provided without regard to personal characteristics extraneous to the provision of high quality health care or related services.'”

“Can proof of legal citizenship be reasonably considered a personal characteristic that is ‘extraneous to the provision of quality health care?’ Yes, it can: someone’s health can be cared for regardless of whether or not he or she is a citizen of a particular country. Reasonably, therefore, it may be concluded that HR 3200 provides care for illegal aliens. So indirectly, perhaps even unintentionally, the president did lie.”

“Hopefully, this exercise gives the health care debate new meaning. Wilson’s outburst, whatever you may think of it, embodies the frustration growing numbers of Americans feel over health care reform: namely, that the message being preached by President Obama and other Democrat leaders is simply not compatible with the dominant legislation at hand.”

On LIVING A LIE. Why the incredulity all around at the suggestion that a politician might lie? Jack Hunter speak to that general issue.

Preparing For Unhealthy Propaganda

BAB's A List, Communism, Economy, Healthcare, Individual Rights, Objectivism, Political Economy, Propaganda, Socialism

As valid today as it was when it was first written for the occasion of Hillary Healthcare, Dr. George Reisman’s 1994 essay, “THE REAL RIGHT TO MEDICAL CARE VERSUS SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, is a must read in anticipation of Obama’s obfuscating oratory tonight. As Dr. Reisman puts it, “It’s a demonstration that government intervention inspired by the philosophy of collectivism is the cause of America’s medical crisis and that a free market in medical care is the solution for the crisis.”

Begin with the premise undergirding the Obama argument:

“For over a century, virtually all proposals for economic or social reform have been based on the thoroughly mistaken philosophical and theoretical foundations of Marxism, and have aimed at the ultimate achievement of a socialist society, in the belief that socialism represented the most rational and moral system of mankind’s social organization. On the basis of this conviction, individual freedom was progressively restricted and the power of the state progressively enlarged. Individual freedom—laissez faire capitalism—was assumed to be a system of chaos and of the exploitation of the masses by the capitalists. The onslaught of the socialists (who in this country call themselves “liberals”)—the step-by-step achievement of their political agenda—encountered virtually no philosophical resistance. Not surprisingly, again and again, the “liberals” defeated their ill-equipped conservative adversaries, who at most could only delay their advance. The victories of the “liberals” were inevitable because it was a battle of men with the seeming vision of a better world that could be achieved by means of intelligent human effort based on a body of ideas (however mistaken those ideas were), against men who, while they valued the relatively free world they saw around them, had no significant philosophical or theoretical knowledge of how to defend it.”

Move on to an understanding of your rights. Who exactly is violating these immutable rights?

“… the right to medical care does not mean a right to medical care as such, but to the medical care one can buy from willing providers. One’s right to medical care is violated not when there is medical care that one cannot afford to buy, but when there is medical care that one could afford to buy if one were not prevented from doing so by the initiation of physical force. It is violated by medical licensing legislation and by every other form of legislation and regulation that artificially raises the cost of medical care and thereby prevents people from obtaining the medical care they otherwise could have obtained from willing providers. The precise nature of such legislation and regulation we shall see in detail, in due course.”

“This then is the concept of rights, and specifically of rights to things, that I uphold. One’s rights to things are rights only to things one can obtain in free trade, with the voluntary consent of those who are to provide them. All such rights are predicated upon full respect for the persons and property of others.”

The solution? A Free Market in Medical Care:

“To be successful, such reform must approach the problem of bringing down medical costs from two sides: on the one side, the reduction and ultimate total elimination of the artificial increase in demand for medical care fostered by the alleged need-based right to medical care and the collectivization of costs to pay for it. On the other side, the reduction and ultimate total elimination of the artificial increase in medical costs caused both by the alleged need-based right to medical care and by medical licensing. Everything that rolls back the artificial increase in demand for medical care will, of course, operate to reduce medical costs, but there also needs to be more direct action as well. This is necessary both in order to speed up the process of cost reduction and insofar as the artificial increase in demand for medical care has led to increased government intervention into medical care and to irrational standards of medical malpractice. These latter will not go away just by means of reducing the artificial increase in demand for medical care. Nor will medical licensing and its contribution to the high cost of medical care.”

“Approaching the matter from both sides will make possible a process of mutually self-reinforcing cumulative success in bringing down medical costs. That is, not only will the rollback of the artificial increase in the demand for medical care bring down the cost of medical care, but everything that serves directly to bring down the cost of medical care will make such rollback all the more likely.”

READ the entire piece.

Kennedy Reincarnated

Celebrity, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Propaganda, Pseudoscience

TED KENNEDY is back with a posse. “Beaches around Chatham, Mass., remain closed because of shark sightings made in the Cape Cod area before the busy holiday weekend. Reports of the sightings and closures — as well as the tagging by scientists of two great white sharks — make national news.”

In any event—and as I argued in “Animals Gone Wild”—“Steven Spielberg’s magnificent thriller Jaws is an infinitely better Guide For the Perplexed than the shark experts”:

The latter “insist that, if presented with a menu, sharks will choose fish over folks. (‘Too tough and chewy,’ confirmed a spokesfish for the shark community.)”

Dare I say that the alleged culinary preferences of sharks are because there are more fish in the sea than people? If the oceans were peopled more plentifully, sharks would adapt their refined taste buds to human flesh in a flash. A witness—a brave surfer who paddled to the rescue—confirmed that Sharky didn’t seem remotely put off, and was doing what powerful, flesh-eating animals with sharp teeth do: tucking in.

“Apparently, the bears and the sharks haven’t had the benefit of liberal expert propaganda.”

Updated: Those Invisible Jobs

Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Labor, Political Economy, Propaganda

The excerpt is from my new WorlNetDaily.com column, “Those Invisible Jobs”:

“Let’s suppose a business employed ten workers in June. Along came Barack Obama and huffed and puffed and blew six jobs away. Four employees now run a pared-down operation. The next round of retrenchments will invariably entail fewer than six people. The president, or any other wolf in sheep’s clothing, may declare that our proprietor has shed fewer jobs in the month of July. But he may not frame a mathematical inevitability as a sign of economic recovery.

Fewer jobs lost probably means that there are fewer jobs to lose.

Nevertheless, this is exactly how the president spun the static employment market—and, to be fair, this is the way all presidents, aided by statisticians at the Bureau of Labor, finesse unemployment. …

The fig leaf of a “jobless recovery” is yet another unbeatable bit of political fraud.

A jobless economic recovery is the equivalent of a housewarming for the homeless. …

READ THE COMPLETE column, “Those Invisible Jobs,” on WND.COM. And on Taki’s Magazine, every weekend.

Update (August 28): Today, on Chuck Wilder’s nationally syndicated CRN show, “Talkback,” we briefly discussed “Those Invisible Jobs.” I immediately tackled, without being asked to, a possible argument against the case I make in the column’s first paragraph:

Let’s suppose a business employed 10 workers in June. Along came Barack Obama and huffed and puffed and blew six jobs away. Four employees now run a pared-down operation. The next round of retrenchments will invariably entail fewer than six people. The president, or any other wolf in sheep’s clothing, may declare that our proprietor has shed fewer jobs in the month of July. But he may not frame a mathematical inevitability as a sign of economic recovery.

Fewer jobs lost probably means that there are fewer jobs to lose.

The employment market is not static; it’s dynamic. Jobs are destroyed and created all the time. Efficiencies and productivity also reduce and improve the labor force. However, it’s safe to say that if ever the labor market was static, it’s now. And for a good reason. As a snapshot in time, the logical example I give above holds. Because—again, for good reasons—there are fewer jobs to be had, the number of jobs lost will also diminish. But this is because of 1) a relatively static job market. 2) A private economy, “penetrated and enervated by a tentacular bureaucracy.”

For ideologues out there slowly learning, on BAB, to meld reason, reality and ideology, don’t be rigid Postrelians (from Virginia Postrel’s dynamism folly).