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Are Conspiracy Theorists Nuts?


Douglas Caddy

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Being a 'conspiracy theorist' per se does not mean you are nuts; everyone knows that there ARE conspiracies out there.

It is more what conspiracies you subscribe to and what you base your belief on. I posted this in another thread; the more your conspiracy has these attributes, the less likely it is to be true:

  • Proof of the conspiracy supposedly emerges from a pattern of “connecting the dots” between events that need not be causally connected. When no evidence supports these connections except the allegation of the conspiracy or when the evidence fits equally well to other causal connections—or to randomness—the conspiracy theory is likely to be false.
  • The agents behind the pattern of the conspiracy would need nearly superhuman power to pull it off. People are usually not nearly so powerful as we think they are.
  • The conspiracy is complex, and its successful completion demands a large number of elements.
  • Similarly, the conspiracy involves large numbers of people who would all need to keep silent about their secrets. The more people involved, the less realistic it becomes.
  • The conspiracy encompasses a grand ambition for control over a nation, economy or political system. If it suggests world domination, the theory is even less likely to be true.
  • The conspiracy theory ratchets up from small events that might be true to much larger, much less probable events.
  • The conspiracy theory assigns portentous, sinister meanings to what are most likely innocuous, insignificant events.
  • The theory tends to commingle facts and speculations without distinguishing between the two and without assigning degrees of probability or of factuality.
  • The theorist is indiscriminately suspicious of all government agencies or private groups, which suggests an inability to nuance differences between true and false conspiracies.
  • The conspiracy theorist refuses to consider alternative explanations, rejecting all disconfirming evidence and blatantly seeking only confirmatory evidence to support what he or she has a priori determined to be the truth.
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IN TWO PARTS ++

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Obamacare Is Not Some Left-Wing, Socialist Plot; It Is a Republican Plot

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Thursday, 26 February 2015 15:14

By The Daily Take Team, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed

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2015_0226dt.jpgMost of the tenets of Obamacare were introduced way back in 1971 by Richard Nixon, a Republican president. (Photo: Tim Pierce)Obamacare is not some communist, left-wing, socialist plot.

It's a Republican plot.

Back in 1971, then President Richard Nixon was extremely concerned that he would have to face then Sen. Ted Kennedy in the 1972 presidential election.

At that time, Senator Kennedy was pushing a proposal for a national single-payer health care plan that would extend coverage to all Americans.

Nixon knew that Kennedy's proposal would be popular with the American people, and could threaten his re-election chances, so he came up with a health care proposal of his own.

Nixon's proposal for health care in the US included different plans for four categories of Americans.

See more news and opinion from Thom Hartmann at Truthout here.

Under Nixon's plan, employers would have been required to buy health insurance providing a basic package of benefits for 150 million working US residents and their families.

For 20 million people who were considered the working poor at the time and their families, Nixon's plan would have replaced Medicaid services with private health insurance plans fully paid for by the government for the poorest, with a sliding scale of contributions for families earning over $3,000 (roughly $17,300 in today's dollars).

Nixon's plan also dropped Medicare premiums for 21 million "aging" Americans, and instead adjusted Social Security taxes to make up for the costs.

Finally, Nixon's plan lowered health care costs for 30 million self-employed Americans by allowing them to buy health care policies at lower group rates through insurance pools.

Now, what does all of that sound like to you? It sounds an awful lot like Obamacare, right?

That's because most of the tenets of Obamacare were introduced way back in 1971 by Richard Nixon, a Republican president.

But Nixon wasn't the only Republican to get behind a health care plan that sounds a lot like Obamacare.

Back in 1993, then-President Bill Clinton tried desperately to reform healthcare in the US. He created a special health care task force that was charged with finding solutions to rising healthcare costs and an increasing number of uninsured Americans.

While that task force was trying to find solutions, Republicans in Congress were trying to create a health care reform alternative of their own.

They came up with the Health Equity and Access Reform Today bill, or HEART.

That bill was spearheaded by then Republican Sen. John Chafee of Rhode Island, and co-sponsored by 18 other Republican senators, including current Republican Senators Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley, both of whom are now opposed to Obamacare.

It was also supported by the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation, which at the time was pushing particularly heavily for an individual mandate.

Among other things, the HEART bill proposed by Republican senators included an individual mandate (to appease the folks over at the Heritage Foundation), the creation of insurance purchasing pools, standardized benefits, vouchers for poor Americans to buy insurance and a ban on insurance companies denying coverage based on preexisting conditions.

Again, what does that sound like?

Speaking about the HEART bill, Sheila Burke, former chief of staff for former Sen. Bob Dole told PolitiFact's PunditFact that,

"You would find a great deal of similarity to provisions in the Affordable Care Act. The guys were way ahead of the times! Different crowd, different time, suffice it to say."

So, yet again, you have Republicans introducing a national health care reform plan that contained a lot of the key tenets of today's Obamacare.

The facts speak for themselves. Republicans have been pushing Obamacare-like health-care principles for more than 40 years!

So, why in 2015, are Republicans suddenly so opposed to policies they have crafted and supported in years past?

Because today, Republicans aren't operating on principle, they're operating on politics.

They're doing everything in their power to sabotage President Obama's presidency and tarnish his legacy.

They're fulfilling the plans of a group of powerful Republican lawmakers and strategists who sat down to a private dinner at the Caucus Room restaurant here in Washington on the night of January 20, 2009, and vowed to filibuster and obstruct any and all legislation supported by President Obama.

Republicans aren't morally opposed to Obamacare; after all, it's helped millions of people, and it's making the insurance industry even richer.

Republican opposition to Obamacare is entirely about politics, and that's no way to run a country.

If you're going to run a country, which Republicans basically are by being in control of Congress, you should be operating on principle and on legitimate policy disagreements.

It's time for Republicans to stop playing politics, and start doing what's right for the people of the United States.

This article was first published on Truthout and any reprint or reproduction on any other website must acknowledge Truthout as the original site of publication.
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PART 2
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Rothman: Yet Another Crazy Conservative Conspiracy Theory Proven Correct by Noah Rothman | 12:29 pm, April 15th, 2014 977

obama-census.jpgIn 2009, in the earliest weeks of President Barack Obama‘s administration, the White House made the controversial decision to take the unprecedented step of moving the Census Bureau from control of the commerce secretary over to the White House ahead of the decennial 2010 census.

Conservatives sounded alarm bells. “It takes something that is supposedly apolitical like the census, and gives it to a guy who is infamously political,” said Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) of then White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

“Requiring the Census director to report directly to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is a shamefully transparent attempt by your administration to politicize the Census Bureau and manipulate the 2010 Census,” read a letter addressed to Obama authored by Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Patrick McHenry (R-NC).

While Republican officeholders were the primary sources of statements expressing concern over the move, some non-partisan analysts were also unnerved by the move. “The last thing the census needs is for any hard-bitten partisan (either a Karl Rove or a Rahm Emanuel) to manipulate these critical numbers,” wrote University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato in an email to Fox News at the time. “Partisans have a natural impulse to tilt the playing field in their favor, and this has to be resisted.”

The White House dismissed the concerns of conservatives which were, indeed, unfounded insofar as they related to the 2010 census. But the fears of some that the Census Bureau could be corrupted by the imperatives of the political operatives in the White House was today proven accurate.

RELATED: Census Bureau Changes Health Care Survey Questions Hiding Effects of Obamacare

According to a report in The New York Times, the Census Bureau has been directed to change the wording of its questions relating to health care coverage so that they can no longer be checked against the past three decades of data. According to the nonpartisan analysts and census officials The Times spoke with, this change will make it nearly impossible to accurately assess the effects of the Affordable Care Act has had on the number of Americans who have health insurance.

The changes will, however, likely have the effect of showing a reduction in the number of uninsured. This will not be the result of the effects of the law. Rather, according to the Census Bureau’s chief of the health statistics branch, the drop in uninsured is only going to be due to “the questions and how they are asked.”

Policy analysts and columnists, who are not reflexively friendly to conservative causes, called the debasement of a formerly neutral agency to achieve a political end “insane” and “inexcusable.”

And, thus, another crazy conservative conspiracy theory is proven to not be so crazy after all.

[photo via Pete Souza/White House]

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CONCLUSION ############ >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Obama a fake LEFTY that will use conspiratorial tactics to achieve his ends.

Are Conspiracy Theorists Nuts?

Edited by Steven Gaal
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Conspiracy Theorists think the MSM is a disinformation system.

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The Economist: The World's Sleaziest Magazine

The Economist has always been awful

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http://russia-insider.com/en/2015/02/06/3193

Edited by Steven Gaal
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