Written on March 15th, 2010 by adminno shouts
-By Warner Todd Huston
Here is one of the sneaky tricks that the Old Media plays in order to support a cause. In this case it’s the Associated Press coming to the aid of Obamacare with “news” that a “Catholic” hospital group is coming out in support of Obamacare. Of course, the AP does not inform the reader that this purported Catholic group is not associated with the Church and is not authorized to speak for Catholics but it conflates this “Catholic” group with Catholics as if they do anyway.
With a headline that screams, “Catholic Hospitals Support Health Care Bill,” the AP’s Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar reports that the Catholic Health Association has come out in support of Obamacare despite the federal funding of abortion.
Naturally this report of Catholics in support of Obamacare is meant to fool readers into thinking that the Catholic Church itself, or some important segment of Catholics, are in support of Obamacare. If all you read is the headline and the first two paragraphs you might come away thinking that “Catholic Hospitals” support Obamacare.
Later in the story, after the lede, Alonso-Zaldivar does delve into some of the controversy amongst Catholics concerning the federal funding for abortion in Obamacare and states that the Church itself is still not supporting Obama’s takeover of our healthcare — this is good — but Alonso-Zaldivar never does fully explain that the group he is discussing is NOT a real “Catholic” organization.
You see, the Catholic Health Association is a for profit company that works for some Catholic hospitals as a sort of trade association. It isn’t part of the Church nor does it represent any official group of religious Catholics, nor does it serve as a source of Catholic teachings.
The truth is that CHA chief Carol Keehan is paid around $800,000 a year to advocate for this trade association, not the Catholic Church. She is not an altruist like nearly every other member of the actual Church that serves in an official capacity.
Kehan’s interest is to make money not to serve the Catholic Church and its doctrine. Naturally, Alonso-Zaldivar doesn’t inform his readers of any of this leading the reader to assume that the CHA represents Catholics.
So, readers are left thinking that “Catholic hospitals” are in support of Obamacare yet are never informed of the capacity in which this Catholic hospital group serves Catholics… or rather doesn’t serve Catholics. And why is this so important right now? We all know that this coming week will find Obamacare facing a crucial and perhaps final push. This report is meant to help Obamacare pass. Plain and simple.
Share on Facebook
Tweet This Post
Written on March 15th, 2010 by adminno shouts
-By Warner Todd Huston
Pajamas Media is capitalizing on its earlier coverage of the Tea Party movement and has launched Tea Party TV. As the PR release says, “Expanding on its coverage of the National Tea Party Convention last week, PJTV announced its launch of Tea Party TV, offering comprehensive coverage of the Tea Party movement. The cornerstone of the Tea Party TV coverage will be a twice-a-week Internet TV show hosted by Glenn Reynolds and AlfonZo Rachel, well-known commentators on PJTV. ” Since the original PR release, they’ve also added Dana Loesch to Reynolds and Rachel. It’s “the best way to stay informed about the Tea Party movement,” they claim.
So, what is it all, anyway? To answer that I chatted with Glenn Reynolds and we talked about all things Tea Party. Coming down from the stomach flu as he was, we still had a lively talk.
I asked Glenn what sort of future he saw for the tea parties and he said that he was an early booster of the movement even when folks like Roger Simon thought it was all a flash in the pan and would go nowhere. “I think it is the most genuine outbreak of popular grassroots political activism in my lifetime,” Reynolds said, “and so that’s a pretty big deal and I think it’s coming to a crucial time for the country as well.”
Reynolds told me that PJTV wanted to cover the Tea Party movement because the Old Media was doing its best to ignore the whole thing. He praised PJTV as being one of the few to “put eyes on what is the biggest thing politically that’s been going on” in the nation.
One of my worries about the Tea Party movement is that it just might suffer from being too widely diffused. I asked Glenn if he thought it might suffer from not having a few central figures that can be focused upon.
Reynolds:The thing I’ve learned from the internet is that you can accomplish a huge amount with searches of popular entries and you can get more from the Internet in a period of a few weeks to a few months with people who just sort of drop whatever they’re doing and get involved than you can do in years or decades of professional organization, but I’ve also learned if you want somebody to stick on something and keep plugging, it helps to have somebody who’s paid to deliver it. And that obviously is something you won’t going to have in a grassroots organization very much.
Keeping with the question of long-term effectiveness, I asked Reynolds how long he felt the movement would remain potent?
Reynolds:I think that it’s going to last through the next election and probably through the election after and what’s going to happen after that is, you know, a lot of the grassroots enthusiasm will fade but it’s going fade and some people just find something else to do which maybe political or not. And on the other side of it, it’s going – people are going to leave the Tea Party movement and they’re going to run for office themselves, become cabinets themselves, become precinct chairman or county chairman or members of the state or national party committees and things like that. And you know, that’s what normally happens with grassroots movement if they’re successful which is that they become part of the mainstream.
But what of the supposed extremists in the Tea Party movement, I asked. Won’t that just introduce the wackos, as the left and the Old Media claims?
Reynolds: The New Left took the Democrats further away from the mainstream of the American public, its true. But I think the Tea Party is moving the Republicans more in line with the mainstream to the American Public, so it more likely to have productive effects.
There is no political movement that doesn’t fringes, but compared to the new Black Panther Party which is getting kissy face from Eric Holder, compared with Bill Ayers, compared with Bernadine Dohrn, compared with Van Jones these are people at the core of the administration Democratic party today, the Tea Party has got no fringe at all.
I pointed out that the Old Media focuses on what they portray as the Tea Party extremists, but it ignores all the extremists always in attendance at the left’s protests. There are actual communists, anarchists, radical abortionists, even animal rights and enviro terrorists but you never see these whack-jobs in the news.
Reynolds: Well, when we had the anti-war protest in 2003, 2004 with the almost sole exception of David Korn at the nation, nobody was willing to point out that those movements were organized by people who are literally, not pejoratively, literally communists. David Korn was we talked about Answer and the Workers World Party and the people who are providing the organizational infrastructure for those big marches on Washington and he wrote about in the nation and in L.A. weekly but places like Washington Post and the New York Times pretended that these are just ordinary mom-and-pop types of middle America coming down. When they don’t give that kind of a treatment to the Tea Party, but that is because they are fundamentally dishonest in their reporting.
I brought up another one of my worries for the candidates that try to rely on Tea Party groups and that is money. The sad fact is that politics means spending money. I asked Glenn if he thought that the Tea Party groups could raise the money necessary to help a candidate they are supporting win an election?
Reynolds: There are three angles to the money front. Angle number one is that in many ways Tea Party activism is the substitute for cash that is to say you don’t have to pay people to go out and do yourself because Tea Party people will do it for free.
I read over 6000 people traveled in from out of state to work as volunteers for Scott Brown and you know, and so that’s as good as money and indeed a lot of the publicity, a lot of the support of the Tea Party people produce is far more valuable than paid political ads.
The second thing is that yes they do raise money as you’ve seen, for example, in the Scott Brown money bombs and for that matter with some of the other fundraising efforts.
The third part is that the real impact of the Tea Party rule on money has in some sense been a dog who didn’t bark which is say since 2005, 2006 Republicans have had a hard time raising money from the grassroots. And those are, I think, the same Tea Party people who decided to quit giving to the Republican Party when they felt it wasn’t living up to it’s principles.
My next question was about candidates claiming to be “the Tea Party candidate.” I think it is a mistake for a candidate to claim this mantle because there are so many groups, no national organization, and therefore it is a bit disingenuous for a candidate to say “I am the Tea Party candidate.” Plus it seems that this could actually work cross-ways and make Tea Party groups mad at the candidate that makes the claim without really having the solid support to back it up.
Reynolds: Well, the problem with that is there is no Tea Party to give you the nomination. The Tea Party is a movement it’s not party. If you support Tea Party principles and Tea Party people back here, then you are Tea Party candidate but you can’t become one by calling yourself one and I suspect people really pretty good at spotting the phony.
Well, it was a very good interview and I was glad Mr. Reynolds took the time with me. I asked him if he had anything to close with about PJTV Tea Party TV and here is what he said…
Reynolds: I think the Tea Party is going to be fun. Dana Loesch has come on board to Spearhead and she’s terrific for a number of reasons, one is she’s just terrific. She’s a really smart, savvy person. She’s very good on radio and TV, and you know does a fair amount of it. I mean she was one of the real movers and shakers in the St. Louis Tea Party movement which is one of the more successful Tea Party movements around the country. So she’s really a great person to have involved and the goal is going to be to really get out there and put the spotlight on people who are actually doing stuff. You know, the stars of Tea Party TV will be the Tea Party activists who are out there doing things and that something I’ve done to some degree to my own show on PJTV and will continue to do. But Tea Party TV is just a way of throwing more focus on that and more organized in the same way.
So, once again, thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the time. Please do check out Tea Party TV, folks.
Share on Facebook
Tweet This Post
Written on March 15th, 2010 by adminno shouts
The cat poop sandwich (surprisingly, no video of that scene from Anchorman) they are showing is not the same cat poop sandwich they will ask you to eat, as the American Spectator points out
Shortly before midnight on Sunday, Democrats released a 2,309 page health care bill that will start the process of reconciliation — but don’t let that fool you, it’s not the actual reconciliation bill with all the changes you’ve been reading about. Instead, as Rep. Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican member on the Budget Committee, explained to me last week, this is just the “shell” bill — the vehicle that Democrats need to get moving on health care. Once the bill gets approved (likely Monday), Democrats will send this phantom bill over to the Rules Committee, where it will be stripped, and then they’ll insert in all of the actual changes that they’ve negotiated.
Why all of the theatrics?
Well, under the reconciliation rules in last year’s budget, any reconciliation bill would have to have been submitted to the Budget Committee by October 15, 2009. It just so happens that earlier versions of health care legislation cleared the Ways and Means and Education and Labor Committees last year. So Democrats just dusted that legislation off, and are using that as the vehicle to begin the reconciliation process. That’s why, for instance, if you look through the 2,309 page bill that was released Sunday night, you’ll find a public option, which leadership has indicated would not actually be in the final bill. (Interestingly, the student loan bill is also tacked on at the end.)
Just a “simple up or down vote,” remember?
Constitutional democracy? We don’t need no stinkin’ Constitutional democracy.
Michelle Malkin has a taste of the table of contents, at least prior to the Democrats get around to inserting in all the provisions not in the bill. The Democrats are expressly attempting to thwart the Will Of The People, as John Boehner points out
“Democrats may run Washington, but the American people are in charge of this country,” Boehner said. “The moment a majority forgets this, it is writing itself a ticket to minority status.”
Why would they do this? They don’t have the votes.
R.S. McCain, along with mentioning that the election of Scott Brown hurt the Dems ability to ram this through in a Constitutional way, writes
This whole Pelosi procedure is nothing but a thumb in the eye of the Constitution.
Gateway Pundit, through a commenter, points out the illegal alien and ACORN provisions.
Question: will any group, including the GOP, have the cajones to challenge the Constitutionality in court if passed?
Crossed at Pirate’s Cove
Share on Facebook
Tweet This Post
Written on March 14th, 2010 by adminno shouts
-By Warner Todd Huston
Well, I am back home from attending the AFP Defending the American Dream Summit. The speakers were inspiring and the panel on which I sat during one of the break out sessions was really fun.
A word about what this whole thing was is apropos here. It was attended by some 4,000 folks, all regular every day folks, most from Wisconsin. Not all were necessarily AFP members as it was open to the public. A lot of different tea party groups also had representatives in attendance. There were some few vendors of buttons, T-Shirts and the like, but selling things was in no way the main point of this thing. The speakers and the message was preeminent. This was a true grassroots gathering.
The announcement was made that AFP Wisconsin had grown to 58,000 Wisconsinites and ranked as the second largest grassroots political organization in the state second only to the Wisconsin teachers union.
I guess my only complaint was that they tried to shoehorn so many speakers all into the 10AM to 11:30 AM slot. Here is the list of speakers we heard from…
- Mark block- State Director of AFP Wisconsin
- Tim Philips- National President of AFP
- Tim Nerenz- The Oldenburg Group
- Lord Christopher Monkton- Former advisor to Lady Margaret Thatcher and global warming skeptic
- J.B. Van Hollen- Wisc. Attorney General
- Grover Norquist- Amer. for Tax Reform
- Phil Kerpen- AFP
- Paul Driessen
- Eric O’Keefe- Sam Adams Alliance (Chicago, Ill.)
- Linda Hanses- Wisc. Prosperity Network
- Steve Moore- The Wall Street Journal
- Debra aller- Chairman and CEO of Jockey Int’l (Underwear manufacturers)
- Niger Innis- Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
- John Fund- The Wall Street Journal
- Dr. Chris Magiera- Healthcare (Bucky to the Rescue)
- Dr, David Gratzer- Canadian Doctor against Obamacare
- Judge David Prosser- Wisc. Supreme Court Justice
- Herman Cain- Author, Radio Show Host
OK, seriously? All these speakers in an hour and a half? Naturally it ran overtime. Still, they were nearly all riveting. So, the time went pretty quickly. But I do wish there weren’t so many as it was a tad much. As to the speeches, taxes, global warming and Obamacare dominated the discussion.
Also I was a bit disappointed that they were never able to get a table set up for me to live blog from. I guess they had trouble getting the union electricians, the Teamsters and other union layabouts to get in gear to get it all set up. Ah well, maybe next time.
After lunch (or rather as we ate), Michael Reagan, author and talk show host as well as son of Ronald Reagan, gave a nice address. Here I have to relate one of his stories about his dad as it was just so “Ronnie.”
When Mike was 8-years-old, he told us, he wanted a bigger allowance. Father Reagan gave him $1 a week and Mike said it was hard to keep up with all the other Hollywood kids that got far more than that. So, he asked his dad for more money. Instead of saying yes you can have it or no you can’t, Michael told us that dad Ronnie gave him a 20 minute lesson on Midwestern work ethics and federal tax policy! Ronald told him that he was taxed at nearly 90% and once a president gets into office that cuts his tax rate then Mike would get more money in his allowance. Michael Reagan laughed that once Ronnie’s tale was done, Michael almost wanted to give back half his $1 to his dad because of the unfairness of the tax! But, once JFK got to office and cut the personal income tax back to 75%, his dad gave him the raise he promised. From then on it was $5 a week. That whole story just seems so much like Ronald Reagan and it warmed everyone’s heart in the audience.
Breakout Sessions
I was part of the panel for the first breakout session after lunch. It was the RightOnLine, New Media Discussion Panel. Alongside me was Curt Mercadante of Merc Strategy Group and leading the panel was AFP’s RightOnLine Director Erik Telford.
We discussed how to use email, blogs, Google, FaceBook and Twitter to get your message out there and to get your friends, neighbors, family, and associates involved in the process locally. I was gratified that we had some really great questions from the audience, too. It seemed as if we had about half the audience with active bloggers and half that were trying to figure the whole new media world out. A good time was had by all.
Then I hit the road to get back so I didn’t stay for the 5PM closing reception.
Anyway, I have to thank Mr. Telford for inviting me up to the summit. I enjoyed my overnight trip to the Wisconsin Dells.
Share on Facebook
Tweet This Post
