Misleading commercials

There was a commercial that caught my attention today from "Conservative's for Patients Rights" where they bring up the now infamous $500 toilet seat ... it was a seat designed for the Army in the 1980's ... and they are comparing it to Obama's plan for Single-Payer Heallth Care.

here's the problem .... that toilet seat was designed to operate under conditions that regular ones don't, conditions where an ordinary toilet from your local Home Depot can put not only the craft & soldiers in jeopardy but also those on the ground should the plane come down.

This point was driven home during an episode of West Wing ... Christian Slater played a Naval officer working at the White House (he and Donna meet when she accidentally voted for the wrong candidate so she is looking for someone to 'trade' votes for her) .... in it he has an ash tray from his former post upon an aircraft carrier -- its a special gift, you can't buy them and only officers get them, don't remember why only officers got them but it was very special that he got it ...

and Donna (or is it Aimsley?) starts chatting about how its a waste of money when you can get them for like $20 or something at the store ... and he is getting, well fed up, but you can tell he has had to put up with this question about 100 times by then ...

so he grabs a hammer and smashes the ash tray - which breaks into two or three nice pieces. Then he explains that a regular ash tray would shatter into hundreds of pieces and bits of glass dust would be flying around whenever the ship ran into bad weather, or if a sub had to make a deep dive, etc. and that's why it had to cost so much.

Well same thing with those toilet seats -- they have to with stand all sorts of issues, much more than the standard ones used by the airlines. there are weight issues to take into consideration, the average size of the user (which is really different than airlines), military craft go higher/faster and go thru greater temperature changes than the regular air craft.

It is like saying you can put standard tires on a race car ... or you can make race car tires with the same material and in the same manner as regular tires --- it doesn't work.

So trying to compare the Health care plan to the hammer/toilet seat is really a bad correlation -- someone didn't do well on their ACT/SATs -- it is trying to compare apples to carrots, they aren't even in the same genre.

They really need to come up with a better comparison than that.