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View Full Version : Peter Schiff Dissects President Obama's "Life of Julia" Ad [Video]




Zatch
05-05-2012, 07:25 PM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3ZbSzLjh3U


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifIAteIqKwg

S.Shorland
05-06-2012, 12:45 AM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3ZbSzLjh3U


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifIAteIqKwg&feature=relmfu

thoughtomator
05-06-2012, 01:32 AM
He missed the part where Julia murders Zachary in his sleep so she can sell his innards anonymously to Planned Organhood.

tasteless
05-06-2012, 08:15 AM
I thought the videos were hilarious, but a little too bitter. Don't think this is the kind of video you can show someone who believes in Obama's policies and convince them that Obama's policies are wrong.

mport1
05-06-2012, 10:32 AM
That was amazing.

The only thing I don't like is when he says he'd love to see Romney's rebuttal. How would America under Romney's rule be any different than under Obama's?

LimitedGovernment
05-06-2012, 11:35 AM
I thought the videos were hilarious, but a little too bitter. Don't think this is the kind of video you can show someone who believes in Obama's policies and convince them that Obama's policies are wrong.

I'm glad that someone else noticed the glaring problem here.

It's hard to disagree with Schiff on basic explanations of how markets work. it is easy to disagree with him on the conclusions he makes about the current government and the way he responds to people he disagrees with things on.

His treatments of many key issues in these responses are unjustified. No one who doesn't fall into one of two camps will listen to this. Camp 1) People who are as uncritical and angry at Obama as he is. Camp 2) People who are appropriately critical, but want to hear out what someone like Schiff has to say.


The lack of intellectual consistency demonstrated in videos like these is what prevents the kind of broad coalition-building that we need in order to change the country.

cstarace
05-06-2012, 11:56 AM
I'm glad that someone else noticed the glaring problem here.

It's hard to disagree with Schiff on basic explanations of how markets work. it is easy to disagree with him on the conclusions he makes about the current government and the way he responds to people he disagrees with things on.

His treatments of many key issues in these responses are unjustified. No one who doesn't fall into one of two camps will listen to this. Camp 1) People who are as uncritical and angry at Obama as he is. Camp 2) People who are appropriately critical, but want to hear out what someone like Schiff has to say.


The lack of intellectual consistency demonstrated in videos like these is what prevents the kind of broad coalition-building that we need in order to change the country.

While you raise a good point regarding the limitations on Schiff's potential audience in the videos, I don't think the targeted audience was much different to begin with. The only people that are actually going to listen to Peter Schiff video that criticizes Obama regardless are 1) Ron Paul and/or Peter Schiff supporters or 2) Republicans/conservative-minded individuals who have no or little idea who Schiff is, but love to hear somebody chastising Obama. I don't think any Obama lovers are going to be dissuaded from their support by watching 21 minutes of Peter Schiff doing a voiceover of Obama's website. We agree upon that, but I'm not so sure that this is necessarily a glaring issue.

We can have materials that are simply for the intellectual consumption of those already within the movement. Not everything has to be for the persuasion of masses.

TheNcredibleEgg
05-06-2012, 12:20 PM
How might Julia’s son, whom she names Zachary, fare in a post-Obama world? Herewith “The Life of Zachary.”

Age 0: Zachary is born. Nine months earlier, Julia’s government-provided birth control failed. Unprepared for this development, Julia’s sexual partner texted her that he was not ready for a child. Julia went ahead and had the baby, and so Zachary has entered the world without a father. He starts off with disadvantages because of Julia’s “choice.” But luckily, he’s a smart, sturdy tyke.

Age 3: Zachary gets an earache. Though distressed that Zachary is in pain, Julia is relieved that her government-provided health care will take care of everything. She calls up Zachary’s pediatrician to make an emergency appointment. Zachary’s doctor’s assistant reminds Julia that the doctor’s practice sent out letters months ago to patients informing them that the practice no longer accepts health insurance. Reimbursement rates are far too low for the doctor to make a profit that way. The assistant gently suggests that Julia sign up for the doctor’s concierge service, which offers visits for a $5,000 annual retainer and a $200 per-visit fee. Otherwise, she can go to the local emergency room. Julia opts for the emergency room and waits seven hours for a check-up and prescription. Because she has no spouse to share this burden, she misses work and loses a day’s pay.

Age 5: Zachary starts kindergarten. Julia drops Zachary off at his first day of public kindergarten. She is surprised and perplexed to find that despite the hefty local property taxes she pays, the class is large. While Zachary is at school, Julia does some Googling and finds that more and more of her taxes pay for pension and health benefits for retired teachers, not for salaries for current teachers. She wonders vaguely whether all that money from the federal government will really help Zachary.

Age 17: Zachary applies to college. Julia isn’t too worried about the cost. She knows that her government takes care of such things for hard-working middle-class folk like herself. She is dismayed, therefore, when she learns that the federal government considers Julia to be pretty well-off (Julia makes decent money by this point, but she lives in an expensive state, so she doesn’t save much). So the feds don’t offer her and Zachary much grant money for college. Julia explains to Zachary that the only way he can get an education and compete in the world is to go deeply into debt.

Age 18: Zachary doesn’t go to college. Zachary informs Julia that he won’t be going to college after all. He’s done some research and learned that many employers don’t consider a college education what it once was. Employers now have more respect for a young person who has taken free online classes from schools such as Harvard and MIT. Though these schools don’t offer degrees for such learning, they do offer certificates of completion for each class. Employers have come to realize that a person who compiles enough such certificates is just as smart as a person who has the degree—smarter, even, because he or she has shown skepticism and cost-consciousness at a young age. Zachary works at a local restaurant, babysits his younger half-sister, and works toward his education.

Age 22: Zachary gets into a car accident. Zachary is driving at a reasonable speed when he must swerve to avoid a giant hole in the road. He breaks his arm. His local emergency room treats him after a 14-hour wait. While waiting, Zachary leafs through an old magazine informing him that the Obama administration’s stimulus was supposed to ensure that America had twenty-first-century infrastructure. Zachary needs physical therapy for six weeks afterward. He finds, though, that no physical therapist within a 100-mile radius accepts any form of insurance. He does some reading on the Internet and teaches his half-sister how to help him exercise his arm.

Age 23: Zachary gets a good job. Zachary’s employer is a small businesswoman wary of hiring other women. A few years ago, a female employee sued her for paying less than a male employee made. The court didn’t accept the businesswoman’s argument that the employee was paid less because, as a single mother, she often needed time off to watch her child. Zachary’s employer doesn’t like to think of herself as discriminatory, but she knows that she can’t go wrong hiring a young, single, white man. If it doesn’t work out, she can let him go and won’t face a lawsuit.

Age 25: Zachary meets a nice girl. Zachary meets a woman at work (his employer has taken a legal chance on this hardworking young lady). But in getting to know her, Zachary learns that she has $70,000 in student loans, plus $10,000 in credit-card debt. She makes about the same salary that Zachary does. Zachary likes her, but he can’t help but worry that if he got serious with her, he would be taking on a tremendous debt burden. Zachary often thinks long-term; he realizes that if he married her in a few years, both of them would have to work full-time, even if they had children, in order to stay current on the debt. They remain friends.

Age 27: Zachary’s boss asks him to become a junior partner. One of new responsibilities is to oversee the purchase of employee benefits. Zachary finally figures out why his salary has been so modest all these years: he’s been paying for everyone else’s discretionary health care. In perusing insurers’ marketing materials as well as government regulations, he realizes that he’s got to subsidize everything from birth-control pills to sleeping medication. He wonders why, if such medication is so important to people’s health, they can’t pay the modest out-of-pocket costs themselves. Nobody subsidizes his thrice-weekly glass of wine or weekly canoe rental. Zachary determines to pay more attention to what politicians say about health-care reform.

Age 31: Zachary decides to get married. Zachary always felt that he was missing something as a kid, not having a father around. Two years later, Zachary and his wife have a child.

Age 37: Zachary’s child is supposed to start kindergarten. Zachary knows that the local public school is a mess. Among other things, the teachers are obsessed with standardized tests, as test scores are the key to more money from the feds—money the school thinks it needs, because so many parents have gotten their children certified as “special-needs,” meaning that everyone else must subsidize their individualized classroom attention. Zachary’s neighbor informs him that some local parents have gotten together to send their kids to an informal school. They have hired their own teacher, a young woman working her way through her online education; the school holds classes out of a residential basement. Zachary pays to join. He soon gets tired of paying twice to send his kid to school once, so he votes for state and local candidates who support a voucher program under which parents can take their education-tax dollars and put them toward a school of their choice, including schools like this one.

Age 42: Zachary’s mom calls him, crying. Julia is 73 now. She likes working, so she wasn’t too upset when the government abruptly pushed the Social Security retirement age for full benefits back five years, to 72. But now that she’s been collecting benefits for a year, she realizes that what she collects isn’t enough to live on. She’s more upset, though, at the reforms to Medicare that have just been enacted. Though generations of politicians promised never to touch benefits for people close to retirement age, in the end, they had no choice: younger voters demanded it. The basic Medicare package now will cover only big-ticket items. All but the poorest are on their own when it comes to doctor’s visits, prescription drugs, and tests.

Julia wonders who on earth voted for the politicians who put these reforms into place. After all, the tax increases that the losing side proposed didn’t seem so onerous. Meanwhile, the house that she bought so long ago under one of the government’s efforts to lure people into the busted housing market (a 3 percent down payment seemed like such a good deal at the time) never recovered its value, so she can’t depend on selling it to fund her old age. Younger people simply chose to live within their means and stay away from the McMansions that remain the legacy of early-century folly. Zachary counsels his mom to try to cut her expenses. But it’s hard for her to do, especially with the price of food. Julia starts a garden.

Age 62: Zachary’s mom moves in with him. Julia is now 93, but she still has her health. She can’t afford to live on her own any more, though, since the government suspended cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security for a half-decade. The price of prescription medication is out of reach for Julia. But she grows medicinal herbs in her transplanted and flourishing garden.

Age 67: At 98, Julia helps homeschool her great-granddaughter, little Julia. In helping little Julia with her history lesson, the elder Julia chuckles at a chapter about the grand improvements promised by the Obama administration. In the end, the country turned out fine. But it owed its success to the ingenuity of Americans as they worked around government “protections,” not within them.

http://www.city-journal.org/2012/eon0504ng.html

By Nicole Gelinas (Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. She tweets at @nicolegelinas.)

LimitedGovernment
05-06-2012, 12:20 PM
It's fair to say that there's a difference between producing something for what is essentially Schiff's political base and producing something for mass consumption, but there are two important sub-points to consider with the base:

1) If the materials produced for the base are full of thoughtless responses and bashing people, then it makes people who like to bash and not consider other perspectives feel validated and encouraged. I left the Daily Paul because there eventually were so many bashing-driven articles and comments that it became the norm to attack people based on article titles and the number of downvotes - without even reading the articles or comments.

2) We must remember that everything produced directly by a public figure is fair game for reference by people on the other side. If 90% of Schiff's work is positive, fair, and considerate, but 10% of it is ad hominem and strawman nonsense, Schiff is discredited. Recall the "Ron Paul racist newsletters" issue. Many of the people who brought it up and questioned it (Stewart and Maddow among them) didn't have a clue what the detailed history was, but ran the segments because of past local news reports about the newsletters and criticisms of Paul. Oversights come back to haunt people, and obviously uncivil and incorrect materials can destroy them.

ronaldo23
05-07-2012, 10:04 AM
hahaha. Great vid, but this would probably be the last video I'd show to an Obama supporter. I imagine they'd feel the same way watching this vid as I would watching Keith Olbermann or Lawrence O'Donnell

Zatch
05-07-2012, 10:26 AM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5xaZB8AgAQ

DEGuy
05-20-2012, 10:12 AM
When I first saw that Life of Julia propoganda, I threw up a little in my mouth. On the plus-side, at leat the socialist movement is being more honest about their overall goals. It's not about women's rights, or making healthcare affordable, or having better schools. No, it's about the federal government regulating every aspect of Julia's life. The message is being made clear, and I sincerely believe that most American's do not support it. And enough young people are angry and frustrated to reject that message.

timosman
10-15-2016, 09:11 PM
https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-SV206_botwt0_G_20120503135351.jpg

timosman
10-15-2016, 09:15 PM
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304743704577382170789179442


In Obama's ideal world, men are replaced by bureaucrats.
By JAMES TARANTO
May 3, 2012
Barack Obama has a new composite girlfriend, and her name is Julia. Her story is told in an interactive feature titled "The Life of Julia" on the Obama campaign website. Julia, who has no face, is depicted at various ages from 3 through 67, enjoying the benefits of various Obama-backed welfare-state programs.

As a toddler, she's in a head-start program. Skip ahead to 17, and she's enrolled at a Race to the Top high school. Her 20s are very active: She gets surgery and free birth control through ObamaCare regulations, files a lawsuit under the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and pays off her student loans at a low interest rate. We get updates at age 31, 37 and 42--and then the narrative skips ahead 23 years when she enrolls in Medicare. Two years later, she's on Social Security, at which point she can die at any time.

In a column amusingly titled "Who the Hell Is 'Julia' and Why Am I Paying for Her Whole Life?" David Harsanyi raises an obvious objection to the story: "What we are left with is a celebration of . . . how a woman can live her entire life by leaning on government intervention, dependency and other people's money rather than her own initiative or hard work. It is, I'd say, implicitly un-American, in the sense that it celebrates a mindset we have--outwardly, at least--shunned."

This may explain why, in the campaign's telling, nothing happens to Julia between 42 and 65. That period includes the typical peak earning years--the time at which, assuming Julia is gainfully employed, she will be paying the biggest price for "Obama's" generosity.

At 31, the story tells us, "Julia decides to have a child. Throughout her pregnancy, she benefits from maternal checkups, prenatal care, and free screenings under health care reform." In due course she bears a son named Zachary, the only other character in the tale.

Harsanyi is right. Obama is setting forward a vision contrary to the American tradition of self-sufficiency--a welfare state that runs from cradle to grave. And it's a dishonest vision, because it presents all of these benefits as "free," never acknowledging that they are paid for through coercive taxation.

Not to mention unsustainable levels of debt: Commentary's Alana Goodman charts the life of a now 3-year-old "Julia" and compares it with debt projections at various stages of her life: "Julie [sic] hits a milestone around 2084, when publicly held debt will be just about 200 percent of [gross domestic product]--and rising."

The most shocking bit of the Obama story is that Julia apparently never marries. She simply "decides" to have a baby, and Obama uses other people's money to help her take care of it. Julia doesn't appear to be poor; at various points the story refers to her glamorous career as a Web designer, and it makes no mention of her benefiting from poverty programs like Medicaid or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

In 1999 Lionel Tiger coined the word "bureaugamy" to refer to the relationship between officially impoverished mothers of illegitimate children and the government. "The Life of Julia" is an insidious attack on the institution of the family, an endorsement of bureaugamy even for middle-class women.

Fake Nonfiction and Fake Fiction
By now everyone knows that, as David Maraniss points out in his new presidential biography (excerpted in Vanity Fair), the "New York girlfriend" to whom Barack Obama refers in his autobiography "Dreams From My Father" is actually a "composite"--a fictional character based on multiple actual women.

One of them is Genevieve Cook, who met a 22-year-old Obama at a party in 1983. Maraniss provides excerpts of her diaries, including this: "His warmth can be deceptive. Tho he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness--and I begin to have an inkling of some things about him that could get to me."

We're all beginning to have that inkling now, aren't we?

A Politico story about the composite girlfriend led to a mildly embarrassing pair of corrections:

UPDATE: In the reissue of "Dreams from My Father," Obama writes in the introduction that "some of the characters that appear are composites of people I've known."
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this blog post stated that Obama had acknowledged using composite characters in the reissue. In fact, Obama acknowledged the use of composite characters in the first edition of the book.
The Atlantic's David Graham sees a right-wing conspiracy at work:

It's much the same as the flap over Obama eating dog, in which a different piece of Dreams From My Father, in which he describes eating canine meat as a boy in Indonesia, was rediscovered. While conservative activists and journalists present these stories while claiming that Obama wasn't properly vetted four years ago, what's actually happening is they're reintroducing facts to the record, this time with a far more negative spin.
But Slate's Dave Weigel is right:

Expect 10,000 or so versions of this story: "Why didn't liberal media vet Obama and find out about his ex-girlfriend's diary?" It's actually a fair question (one answer: David Maraniss is better than most reporters), because the media took a lot for granted about Obama's life.
Further, that the revelations of dog eating and girlfriend compositing come as news to almost everyone is evidence in favor of the conservative claim that the media failed to vet Obama sufficiently. (It must be acknowledged, however, that the conservative media also failed in this regard in 2008.)

The composite girlfriend raises another interesting question: What exactly is nonfiction? Using a "composite" character wouldn't be acceptable in newspaper work; the practice cost Janet Cooke her Pulitzer Prize. On the other hand, it's fine in a based-on-a-true-story movie dramatization like "Shattered Glass," the 2003 biopic of New Republic fabricator Stephen Glass.

"Dreams From My Father" seems to have been based on a true story, but is it really nonfiction? True, as Politico notes, Obama discloses "the use of composite characters," but is that enough? Shouldn't he tell us which characters are composites? For that matter, if disclosing the use of a fictional narrative device is sufficient to meet the standards of nonfiction, isn't every fiction book a nonfiction one, so long as it has FICTION stamped on the cover?

What's more, much fiction is actually thinly disguised nonfiction. Stephen Glass, for example, published a novel that was thought to be essentially autobiographical. (Glass's nonfiction masquerading as fiction was widely panned, unlike his fiction masquerading as nonfiction, which most readers found charming and engaging until it was revealed to be fake.)

David Frum has a new "novel" out, "Patriots," which in a CNN.com essay he describes as an extension of his punditry:

In my day job as a political pundit, I talk a lot about the dysfunction of the American political system. That dysfunction is not a new fact, but it has taken on new importance in these hard economic times.
So I took on a second challenge: to write a story in which the recession appears just as it does in the lives of so many Americans, an unremitting reality.
"Patriots" is a comic novel, a satire about Washington and Washington politics. It tells the story of an aimless young man, dropped into Washington because he has failed at everything else, who finds himself in the middle of the political machinations that render the U.S. government so useless to its people.
The first few chapters of Frum's tale are excerpted in the Puffington Host, and some of his fictionalizations are laughably flimsy. There's little doubt which actual newspapers "the Washington Guardian, the Wall Street Transcript and the New York Tribune" are. (We hear, though we have not confirmed, that a later chapter refers to a Transcript columnist based on yours truly.) The Constitutionalist and Nationalist parties are the Republicans and Democrats, respectively. Monroe Williams is the (recently defeated) first black president. Guess who that is?

In Chapter 9, Frum's protagonist has lunch with a Freddy Catesby, editor of a conservative magazine:

The waiter filled Catesby's wine glass, then looked questioningly at me. What the hell. I nodded yes.
"To understand why I invited you, you have to understand me. I'm not only the founder of Constitutional Review, although I'm proud of my role in launching the magazine. You know that Time magazine called us the most influential political magazine in the country on our 10th anniversary? I'll put you on the list for our 30th anniversary dinner next month as my guest, I'll put you at my table. No, no, don't thank me--it's my pleasure.
"All those things I've accomplished, all the awards and accolades--they mean nothing to me. I live for my principles, not for recognition. What I care about is fighting the Kultursmog. You know I coined the term?"
This is obviously Bob Tyrrell, editor of The American Spectator, the real-life neologist who coined Kultursmog. Later "Catesby" mentions an art critic named Sheraton Feldman. We suppose the death of Hilton Kramer left Frum free to be even more obvious in the reference.

What exactly is it that makes "Dreams From My Father" nonfiction and "Patriots" fiction? What difference is there, really, between Barack Obama and David Frum?

How to Win Friends and Influence People
"Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, fending off questions about whether she used her Native American heritage to advance her career, said [yesterday] she enrolled herself as a minority in law school directories for nearly a decade because she hoped to meet other people with tribal roots," the Boston Herald reports:

"I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am. Nothing like that ever happened, that was clearly not the use for it and so I stopped checking it off," said Warren.
Earlier, the Herald's headline said Warren had listed herself as an Indian "to make friends," and in her defense, she apparently stopped doing so right around the time Match.com was launched in 1995.

The Herald reports Warren tried to change the subject and talk about sex instead:

"The only one as I understand it who's raising any question about whether or not I was qualified for my job is [Sen.] Scott Brown and I think I am qualified and frankly I'm a little shocked to hear anybody raise a question about whether or not I'm qualified to hold a job teaching," she said, pushing to put Brown on defense. "What does he think it takes for a woman to be qualified?"
Interestingly, after our Monday column, in which we suggested Warren might have concealed her supposed roots once she had settled in at Harvard so as to avoid the stigma of affirmative action, a reader wrote us to ask if women, who also benefit from preferences, might face such a stigma too.

We wrote back that in a field like law, in which women are at least as capable as men (as opposed to engineering, math or hard science), we thought not. But for female profs who lean on their sex to play the victim, there ought to be.

Feelgood
10-15-2016, 10:03 PM
Nice necro