Posted by amanuse at 12:00 AM on April 10, 2009
Just one week after the Massachusetts Public Health Council unanimously decided schools must note students' Body Mass Index on report cards sent home to parents, President Barack Obama introduced a bill in Congress to require "the redistribution of [fat]," so everyone weighs the same and can't be mocked.
"It's not that I want to punish your success," Obama told a group of fit and skinny Americans. "I want to make sure that everybody who [has a bigger] behind [than] you, that they've got a chance for success, too." (real quote)
Taking the cue from his Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, who noted, "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste," the president said the obesity crisis in American schools and neighborhoods could only be solved if the federal government makes sure everyone weighs the same.
The president proposed taxpayer-funded lyposuction for students whose Body Mass Index is too high. The biological waste from the procedure would be saved by a new division of the IRS devoted to the redistribution of fat. Americans whose Body Mass Index is too low would be forced to undergo a taxpayer-funded procedure using the stored lard to bring them up to the standard weight for their height.
"My attitude is that if [average weight] is good for folks from the[ir] bottom[s] up, it's gonna be good for everybody," Obama said. "I think when you spread the [fat] around, it's good for everybody." (real quote)
A new tax on foods that contain more than 1 percent fat will partly pay for the procedures, according to the president. A tax on self-induced vomiting will cover the balance, he said.
The president said he realized the Body Mass Index is a function of citizens' weight and height, but noted that his office had so far only come up with a solution to make sure everyone is "an appropriate" weight for their height. The president proposed a new tax on professional basketball players to fund research into ways to equalize Americans' height.
Critics said the move was just one more example that shows the president wants to change America.
"It's clear that his main goal is redistribution of [fat], not growth," said Andy Roth with the group Club for Growth. "He's perfectly happy to destroy [fat] as long as he can redistribute it." (real quote)
Yeah.... so if that parody scares you, here's some terrifying comments that he really made:
"If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement, and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples, so that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I'd be okay."
"But," Obama said, "The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, as least as it's been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn't shifted."
Obama said "one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil rights movement, was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still suffer from that."
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