Fox News has generously placed the full, unedited conversation between Bill O'Reilly and Jon Stewart online, so we can see precisely how unfairly and deviously Fox edited the interview in order to weaken Stewart's case: A lot!
http://gawker.com/5465299/im-not-saying-your-mothers-a-whore-how-fox-new...
Last night on his show—Part Two of a ludicrously overhyped "faceoff" between O'Reilly and Stewart in which Stewart attempted, among other things, to present a critique of Fox as a fear-mongering GOP messaging operation—O'Reilly boasted that his edit of their 42-minute interview for broadcast was "a fair cut" and invited viewers to have a look at the unedited version online to judge for themselves: "Some of these idiots in the press who hate us, 'O'Reilly cut the interview to make Stewart look'—OK, all of that is bull. It's a fair cut. And then when you watch the cut and watch the whole interview you'll see it."
So we took him up on the offer, and guess what? If by "fair cut" O'Reilly means "cut in a manner that left some of Stewart's best lines, most effective arguments, and most convincing evidence out of the interview and hidden from the broadcast audience," then he's absolutely right.
Here's the best exchange of the whole interview, in which Stewart gets O'Reilly to admit that he thinks Barack Obama believes in "tyranny and socialism," and then asks him why Obama's most generous spending has been to bail out banks. He closed with this unanswerable question: "How many tyrants do you know that really suffer because they can't get cloture?" O'Reilly rejoindered with a lame joke about NBC, because what else could he do? None of this made the air:
Stewart was Stewart and O'Reilly was O'Reilly. I didn't really see anything that made either give up on their positions on their views. It was more like an admiration party...with lots of light humor as expected.The witty banter needed to be cut.
O'Reilly believes that President Obama is a socialist because he (Mr. President) has expressed those views on more than a few occasions, and continues to do so.
Stewart did have one good point on socialized medicine. I believe the analogy was .....I won't sleep with you for 10 dollars, but for 1000...eh maybe. We have Medicaid and Medicare....so whats a little more gonna hurt? Good point Jon...we should eliminate them too; and if the government wants to provide mandatory health benefits it should charge the recipients 3 times the going rate. That would be incentive enough for them to shop for a better deal.
Open the market to all insurance companies to all the states and they could find even better deals.
It wouldn't take long for insurance companies to try to under cut each other and ....like everything else where there is open free competition..the costs would drop.
The internet to compare prices,free market, lots of shoppers...wow, now that's economic stimulation.
I agree that competition in a free market works well. However, would a "free market" exist?
In the real world, what would happen over time is that the largest and strongest insurance companies would buy out, or force out the smaller companies. Consolidation would occur, and competition would no longer exist. Without government intervention, the consumer voice is lost.
We have a local example of such monopolistic forces. Which National Amusement movie theater do you want to attend?
I notice you didn't cite Medicaid or Medicare as an example of how well government intervention into health insurance works.
And as you mentioned over time the biggest and strongest would win out; especially if they were subsidized by the taxes of the American people, didn't have a need to show a profit, and not be accountable to the IRS.
I think I can live without movies.
that is hilarious....I could see why Fox wouldn't want that to make the cut. O'Reilly sounds like an idiot when called out to describe why Obama is "socialist", when he wouldn't consider other presidents or administrations so. But hey, it's their show, they can do what they want to....