So what was wrong with the story of the billion dollar fence? Let me put it this way: we need a word for the sort of deception where conservatives take the cost of something they disapprove of, pick one part of it, and pretend the whole cost is for the one part. They did it to oppose the bonding bill in the last legislative session by dividing the cost by the projected number of jobs and coming up with a ridiculous cost per job, hoping no one would ask whether construction projects might also have materials costs. They did it to attack the stimulus bill, like when they denounced $200 million for re-sodding the Capitol Mall. They didn't mention "re-sodding" included shoring up foundations of national monuments before they slid into the Potomac.
They did it again here. The most correct answer (I neglected to set the poll to multiple-select instead of single-select, even though three answers were correct) was the billion dollars paid for the whole summit, not just the fence. It is the case that, according to that linked CBC story, most of the cost was security, but even at that, only a part of the security was the fence. Moreover, the cost was controversial, since it was twice the security cost of the Vancouver Olympics, and MPs from the New Democratic Party and Liberal Party objected. Given how much PM Stephen Harper reminds me of Bush, I'd suggest they look for pricey outsourcing to connected contractors.
Bill recently posted a clip of an interview Michele Bachmann did with Laura Ingraham on Fox News where they talked about the demonstrations at the G20. About 2:20 into the clip, I heard Ingraham say, "A billion dollars it cost Toronto to build that fence. I'm hoping they understand why Israel has its own fence now, because they had to build their fence in Toronto."
Beyond the dismissive attitude toward demonstrators and utter disinterest in knowing why anyone demonstrated --- though ironically, as Bill pointed out, Bachmann used the G20 to foment global government paranoia --- something smelled in a factual error sort of way.
Not that such a smell is a strange thing when a "fact" sounds hard to believe, and I'm hearing it for the first time from Fox, but just what exactly was wrong with Ingraham's statement? And why, with her well known penchant for factual precision, didn't Bachmann correct her?
So I am looking for information about other country's systems. When I was running children's activities for an organization in two countries, I realized that Canada did not have so many rules as the US because the US was afraid that a child would get hurt and someone would be sued! The health care problems even restricts what children can do! So my experience confirms this video:
In the spirit of truth, my friend Matte Black (@Shoq on Twitter) and his brother took their video camera to Canada on vacation to interview Canadians about their health care system. When we talked about it, I asked him to try to get negative views with specifics for balance. Here is the result. It has been edited for brevity, but the negative views were not removed, because there were none. He could not find one Canadian who thought they should kill the system. These are everyday people. They have no agenda at all other than being patriotic Canadians.(US Health Crisis)
There are times when reasonable people read something, and just know - JUST KNOW - that what they just read just cannot - CANNOT - be correct. And just this morning, Laura Brod provided reasonable people another one of those times.
