I was reading a recent article at the Huffington Post, unfortunately, and it was typical of what you’d find there. A story about leftists breaking down arguments of those on the right and the person on the right in a kind of weird denial or something. It’s a very long article, and I saw the direction it was going pretty quickly.
The woman in the article is talking about her brother coming to visit her; him a conservative, her a liberal. At one point she writes:
“Never heard of them,” I said.
“That’s the group that wrote the heath care bill. It’s led by Bill Ayers and ACORN.” [her brother]
First of all, I’ve seen little on the Internet saying that the Apollo Alliance wrote any health care bill, apart of some wild speculation (just search Google). What exactly was her brother talking about? The stimulus package, a.k.a. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (HR 1).
Don’t be fooled though, this is also a gross exaggeration. Did they write it? Uhh… no. Did they have influence on it? Yes and yes.
“We’ve talked about moving forward on these ideas for decades. The Apollo Alliance has been an important factor in helping us develop and execute a strategy that makes great progress on these goals and in motivating the public to support them.”
The fact is that the Apollo Alliance wrote up a 4 page program of how to get some so-called “green-collar jobs.” Here it is, for your viewing pleasure. Now take that, and let’s crack open the 407 page stimulus bill. Here it is. There is clearly alot more information in the stimulus bill than there is in that Apollo pdf, with alot more than just the kinds of things that the Apollo Alliance was talking about. So it makes sense to rationalize that they had a hand in there somewhere, but not to the extent of writing the whole thing. I can’t say that I like that they had something to do with it, but whatever. I’m definitely not a fan of the stimulus bill.
Back to what I was talking about in regards to that article. Either the writer didn’t listen to her brother properly in that statement, which would be an exaggeration on his part if he actually DID say the stimulus bill and not health care, or her brother is a complete idiot.
What I’m trying to get at is that there are people that won’t do any checking about things. I am guilty of this at times, but I’m usually quick to mention in my blogs when I haven’t yet researched something that I post about.
All in all, this post was intended to try and debunk the notion that the Apollo Alliance wrote the whole bill. I just don’t see how they could’ve. If anyone else has any reliable info that would say otherwise, I’d like to see it.
Tags: Big Government, Stimulus
