Charlton Heston Dead at 84

What a shame.  It’s a shame that such a massive man, in skill, heart and stature, was reduced by Alzheimer.s for so long.  What might be the biggest shame of all is that Heston’s last public appearance will be probably be remembered as Mikey presented it in that travesty of a lie-filled, “creatively edited” segment in Bowling for Columbine.

I doubt Michael is capable of shame as a human being anymore - if he ever was - but if he is, I hope that for just a brief moment today, he is ashamed of what he did to Mr. Heston in that film, especially now knowing the man was in the early grips of a disease that confounds, confuses and erases the mind.

So...what was your favorite Heston role?  I must admit, I hated Branaugh’s Hamlet, but I thought Heston was great in it.  I’d have to say that my favorite role of his was George Taylor in Planet of the Apes.  All around, that’s the role of his that stuck with me the most over my life.  He played them all, though.  Marc Antony three or four times, Ben Hur, the Player King, Michelangelo, Jefferson, Richelieu, John the Baptist, Moses, Macbeth, Andrew Jackson...the list goes on and on. 

Rest easy, Chuck.  From our cold, dead hands now.  We’ll keep those damn dirty apes at bay.

Dr. Teeth

Remember folks, socialized medicine is a utopian paradise where everyone gets everything they need all the time.

Health service dentists have been forced to go on holiday or spend time on the golf course this month despite millions of patients being denied dental care.

Many have fulfilled their annual work quotas allotted by the National Health Service and have been turning patients away because they are not paid to do extra work. This is despite the fact that more than 7m people in Britain are unable to find an NHS dentist.

Patients have been told they must either pay privately or return in April when the new work year begins. People suffering from toothache have been advised to go to hospital.

This is vastly different from the US, where uninsured people are forced to either pay privately or go to an emergency room.

One In Five Million

You have to wonder if Mikey would ever happen to mention, when he talks about the cost of medicine, something about this:

I was appalled to learn of a colleague’s fate at the hands of a Mahoning County (Ohio) jury in a recent malpractice case. The patient presented with what any prudent physician would deem to be muscular back pain and went on to die of an aortic dissection. Given the patient’s age and sex, the likelihood of such an occurrence would be about two in 10 million.

The likelihood in the presence of back pain would be higher, but given the particulars of the case would still be vanishingly small. Making the diagnosis in a case like this would require a policy of obtaining a CT scan on virtually every case of back pain.

Why not obtain a CT scan on every patient with back pain or, for that matter, perform every test known to medical science on every patient who is ill? After all, peoples’ lives are at stake.

There are two reasons. First, nearly every test in medicine is inaccurate. A test that is positive often leads to further testing which, if the test result is in error, is unnecessary. Such testing is sometimes invasive and therefore potentially dangerous, and if the patient is hospitalized unnecessarily there is the additional risk of life-threatening infection. Because of this, the search for extremely unlikely diagnoses would kill more patients than would missing those diagnoses. Researchers at Dartmouth University have shown that more care is often worse care.

The second reason is cost. Embracing this policy would necessitate closing the Pentagon and abandoning public education. As it is, some of my younger colleagues, paralyzed by the fear of being sued, regularly spend $2,000 to diagnose a cold.

Malpractice is defined as a bad outcome resulting from negligence; negligence is defined as other than what a prudent physician would do in similar circumstances. That my colleague acted prudently is beyond dispute. The patient was a victim of fate, not negligence. My colleague was a victim of a process wherein a class of professionals with the morals of a drug dealer hires medical prostitutes to mislead juries in order to win the malpractice lottery. Nationwide, the money being diverted from patient care to service this process is $192 billion per year, approximately 10 percent of the entire cost of health care, enough to pay for all the costs incurred by America’s uninsured more than twice over, and far more than the annual cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I’ve probably said this before, but there is a perception in America that doctors note symptoms, look them up in a great big book and come out with a perfect diagnosis.  It ain’t so.  Medicine is as much art as science, as much instinct as knowledge.  Our bodies are not very good at indicating what’s wrong with them and most physicians have to to act on incomplete knowledge.  When they guess wrong—even when the right guess was a two in ten million shot—they get sued.  And we all pay.  Not only with malpractice premiums but with the cost of unnecessary tests.

But forgot that.  Our expensive healthcare system is entirely the result of evil insurance companies, evil drug companies and evil providers.  Don’t think.  Just feel. That’s it.  $8 for adults.  $4 for children.  Be sure to buy the DVD.

Anti-Military Recruiting Terrorists

As you all may have heard, at around 3:45 a.m. this morning EST in New York city an as yet unidentified male on a bicycle threw a home-made bomb encased in an ammunition box onto the front door step of the mlitary recruiting station in the middle of Times Square.  It’s obvious this person was targeting an identified military recruiting station, but the unanswered question is WHY?
Well, consider the rash of protesters blocking the doorways of recruiting stations and chasing recruiters away from school campuses and public places.  Consider the defacement of recruiting stations with grafitti and the harassment that soldiers who are working as recruiters have to endure from day to day by the moonbat leftists who have nothing else to do but violate the rights of these brave men and women.
When you consider the pattern of behaviors of these people, this event seems kind of inevitable.  But that certainly does not reduce the responsibility of those who committed this crime.
So what does this have to do with Michael Moore?  Glad you asked.  Go to his website and see how he this act:

Landmark Military Recruitment Center Shut Down in Times Square (no casualites reported)
“Shut Down”?  No Mikey, it was ATTACKED!  This is like someone saying the WTC was closed early on September 11, 2001 or saying flight 93 was “canceled” on 9/11 due to unruly passengers.  I mean come on!  “Shut Down”??!!  I know I shouldn’t be surprised at how Moore is downplaying the incident just because it involves a bombing of a military recruitment station, but the smugness in which he does it is what really disgusts me.  I mean this is a guy who calls our President a “war criminal” because he sent soldiers to war just like many many other Presidents before him have done.  This is a guy who calls big businesses “anti-America” while he runs his website through Canada.  This is a guy who professes to loving the minorities and identifying with the downtrodden while he lives in a Manhattan condo and sends his daughter to an exclusive private school.
I’m curious how he would react if someone “closed down” one of his offices in the same way this scumbag “closed down” the Times Square Recruiting Center.

I’ll Tell You Why

I just received a polite email from a reader named Nicole, entitled simply “Why?”

You seem to really hate Michael Moore, for reasons that aren’t evident on moorewatch.com. So my question to you is, why?

My response.

You obviously haven’t read the blog much.  We don’t “hate” Michael Moore.  I think he’s a scumbag, and I think he’s wrong on virtually everything.  That being said, Moorewatch is a repository of information that rebuts Michael Moore’s bullshit.  God knows nobody in the media will ever question anything he says, so we assumed this task ourselves.

When he says that socialized medicine is a wonderful thing, and Cuba is a paradise of free medicine, we provide hard, factual evidence that he’s lying out his ass.

It’s got nothing to do with hate, and everything to do with showing the world what a vulgar liar he is.

Seriously, read the blog.  Learn something.  For example, if you believe in fabulous government-run “free” healthcare for everyone you should at least have the intellectual honesty to be able to defend that position.  I disagree with Moore and I can tell you exactly why, and can provide copious amounts of information in support of what I believe.  If you disagree, fine, that’s a perfectly legitimate thing to do.  But you should be able to provide an honest, intellectual rebuttal to what we’ve posted.  And if you can’t, do a little soul-searching and ask yourself why.

Hate has nothing to do with it, Nicole.  Keep an open mind.  All the best.

I always wonder why so many people attribute what we do on this site to hatred of Michael Moore, when I think that even a cursory reading of the site would show that, while we clearly dislike the man, we’re making a sincere effort to be a counterweight to his lies, distortions, and general bullshit.

(Note:  Polite emails get the author’s identity protected.  People who write idiotic hate mail will be posted with full information so the rest of the world can make fun of them too.)

Scenes We’d Love To See

In this post below, Donna writes:

I just thought of something that really makes the idea of Moore bringing Castro to the Academy Awards this year even *more* repugnant, if that’s even possible.

As some of you will know, I published a long series of articles about the extraordinarily talented dissident Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas. In the year 2000, director Julian Schnabel brought the story of Reinaldo Arenas to the silver screen with his film “Before Night Falls”, an adaptation of Arenas’ memoirs by the same name. In the movie Arenas was played so well by the talented Javier Bardem that he won an Oscar nomination for his performance.

How does this movie made nearly a decade ago connect to Moore’s desire to bring Castro to the Oscars this year? Simple, really. This year, Julian Schnabel is up for Best Director for his work in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”, and of course Javier Bardem is the favorite to take home the Best Actor in a Supporting Role statue for his astounding performance in “No Country for Old Men”. So… Moore would like sit Castro just rows away from the man who brought Reinaldo Arenas’ story to the world and the man who immersed himself so deeply in the tortured soul of Reinaldo that he won an Oscar nomination for his work. Can you imagine the effect having Castro so close to them would have on both of these men, on what should be one of the happiest nights of their lives? How selfish and thoughtless could Moore possibly be?

We’ve all known for years that Michael Moore is a sociopath who cares about nobody but himself.  But if he does end up bringing El Presidente to the awards, this presents a golden opportunity. Assume that either Julian Schnabel or Javier Bardem win their respective awards.  They’ll be standing there, in front of the world, and can say anything they want.  Allow me to fantasize using Javier Bardem as an example.

“Wow, this is just incredible.  Thank you so much.  However, before I get stuck in with the thank you’s I’d like to say something.  A few years ago I played a Cuban Dissident named Reynaldo Arenas, a man tortured and humiliated by Castro’s Cuba, which was directed by another of tonight’s nominees, Julian Schnabel.  This man Castro, this monster, this piece of human filth, now sits among us as the guest of another nominee.  To Michael Moore, Castro’s most famous propagandist, I would like to say, shame on you.  Shame on you for sullying these awards with the presence of this vile, disgusting person.”

I think he’d get a standing ovation.  Of course Moore, Castro, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and Sean Penn will all remain seated.  Someone forward this to Javier Bardem’s publicist.

Whither Fidel?

Like most of you, I’m getting a little sick of the stories in the media about the glories of Castro’s Cuba. I’m reminded of a line in the Greatest Television Miniseries of All Time: “Everybody’s loved when he’s dead.” Fidel ain’t dead but he’s getting eulogies.

Well, I don’t love someone just because he’s dead. When Fidel kicks the bucket, people should dance on his grave the way they would dance on Stalin’s. Fortunately, many others are immune to this “Viva Castro!” bullshit:

Stacking the Deck

Even the wonderful glorious NHS is apparently not immune to the Law of Unintended Consequences:

Hospitals were last night accused of keeping thousands of seriously ill patients in ambulance ‘holding patterns’ outside accident and emergency units to meet a government pledge that all patients are treated within four hours of admission.

Those affected by ‘patient stacking’ include people with broken limbs or those suffering fits or breathing problems. An Observer investigation has also found that some wait for up to five hours in ambulances because A&E units have refused to admit them until they can guarantee to treat them within the time limit. Apart from the danger posed to patients, the detaining of ambulances means vehicles and trained crew are not available to answer new 999 calls because they are being kept on hospital sites.

...

Evidence of patient stacking is revealed in the official ‘turnaround time’ data from seven of England’s 11 regional ambulance services who responded when asked for the figures last week. These show that delays of at least an hour are widespread in the NHS. Figures relating to the past 15 months show that a total of at least 44,000 delays were reported by the seven ambulance services.

In London, there were 14,700 occasions last year when an ambulance took at least an hour from its arrival at one of the capital’s 35 hospitals to hand over a patient and be ready to respond to the next emergency. This figure includes 332 that took more than two hours.

The Department of Health says an ambulance should arrive in 15 minutes and, although it includes time taken to clean and restock a vehicle after a patient has been handed over, ambulance staff say that takes only five or 10 minutes.

‘These figures show there’s a terrible and colossal waste of ambulance resources going on in many parts of the country,’ added Oestreicher, whose union represents about half the 30,000 ambulance personnel in England. ‘The problem is that A&E units aren’t admitting patients who are in the back of ambulances if at all possible if it’s going to compromise the four-hour target that they are set by the government to treat all patients in A&E. They are deliberately keeping patients outside waiting in ambulances.’

...

A Department of Health spokeswoman said last night that ‘these statistics are based on only seven out of 11 trusts and measure the time taken to turn around an ambulance for its next emergency, including cleaning and restocking the ambulance ready to go back out on the road. They do not reflect time spent by patients in the ambulance before being admitted to accident and emergency. These figures must be seen in the wider context of the 4.3 million patient journeys undertaken by emergency vehicles in 2006-07.

Just think, Mikey. Ten minutes of setting up your camera in an NHS parking lot and you might have broken a huge story. But then, that would go against your pre-conceived vision of the glories of socialized medicine.

Moore would like to bring Fidel Castro to the Oscars?!?!

Please bear with me here… I have a torn-up shoulder and can’t type very well at the moment, but when I saw this story I had to tap this out for the site. Apparently, Michael Moore has a new mission… he wants to bring Fidel Castro to the Academy Awards:

Moore’s Oscar-nominated documentary on the health care industry ends with a trip to Cuba, where he seeks care for a group of Nine-Eleven responders who’ve had health problems.

Moore told AP Television he’s been trying to figure out how to get Castro into the Oscars, and Castro’s resignation as leader of Cuba comes with great timing. Moore says now Castro can come to L.A. and be Moore’s guest at the Academy Awards and maybe even get to give an acceptance speech—as long as he keeps it under five hours.

As most of you might know by now, Fidel Castro recently “resigned” as the President of Cuba and handed over the governmental reigns to his brother, Raul. Raul Castro has in fact been running Cuba for some time now due to Fidel’s health issues, so this isn’t a monumental change for the Cuban people, who remain horrifically oppressed, starved, and completely controlled by the governmental machine. I’ve written extensively about Cuba for Moorewatch in the past, so my passionate hatred for Castro and all he and his government have done to destroy the people of Cuba is no secret. Indeed, I have openly stated that Moore’s trip to Cuba in “Sicko” made him a Castro collaborator and demonstrated that he, on some level, supports Castro’s despicable treatment of the Cuban people.

Moore’s statements about bringing Castro to the Academy Awards proves most every allegation I have made towards him in regards to his trip and attitude towards Cuba. The fact that Moore wishes to bring a Communist dictator, a mass murderer, a man who systematically slaughtered tens of thousands of his own people in order to establish his totalitarian government is not only offensive to me as an American but a huge slap in the face to all Cubans and Cuban-Americans who have fought their way out of Cuba over the last fifty years. Clearly Moore has no regard whatsoever for the feelings of the thousands of Cuban-Americans and Cuban refugees whose lives and families have been destroyed by this monster, and this cavalier attitude just disgusts me to no end. It seems that whatever will bring Moore press is a good thing, no matter who it might hurt or offend.

Once again… shame on you, Michael Moore. Shame on you indeed.

UPDATE: I just thought of something that really makes the idea of Moore bringing Castro to the Academy Awards this year even *more* repugnant, if that’s even possible.

As some of you will know, I published a long series of articles about the extraordinarily talented dissident Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas. In the year 2000, director Julian Schnabel brought the story of Reinaldo Arenas to the silver screen with his film “Before Night Falls”, an adaptation of Arenas’ memoirs by the same name. In the movie Arenas was played so well by the talented Javier Bardem that he won an Oscar nomination for his performance.

How does this movie made nearly a decade ago connect to Moore’s desire to bring Castro to the Oscars this year? Simple, really. This year, Julian Schnabel is up for Best Director for his work in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”, and of course Javier Bardem is the favorite to take home the Best Actor in a Supporting Role statue for his astounding performance in “No Country for Old Men”. So… Moore would like sit Castro just rows away from the man who brought Reinaldo Arenas’ story to the world and the man who immersed himself so deeply in the tortured soul of Reinaldo that he won an Oscar nomination for his work. Can you imagine the effect having Castro so close to them would have on both of these men, on what should be one of the happiest nights of their lives? How selfish and thoughtless could Moore possibly be?

I am, quite simply, disgusted beyond words.

And the Walls Came Crumbling Down

As happens oh so often with Michael Moore’s bullshit, reality comes along and slaps him in the face with its dick.

Foreigners coming to Britain are to face a new “immigrant tax” under Government plans to try to make them help pay for the schools and hospitals they use, ministers are to announce.

They will have to pay a special levy on entering the country which will be used to provide extra funding for public services.

The announcement follows growing evidence that health, education and social services are coming under increasing strain from immigration, with councils complaining that they need hundreds of millions of pounds more every year to cope.

But… but… this is Britain.  They have glorious “free” healthcare for everyone!  It’s all free free free!!!  So how can it be that their healthcare system is swamped under the demand of immigrants?  Could it be that—gasp!—there is no such thing as “free” healthcare, and a single-payer system run by the government is a recipe for complete disaster?  (You know, exactly what we’ve been saying through the entire history of this blog.)

Sources indicate that the additional levy could be set at 10 per cent of the visa fee - an additional £20 for the usual £200 visa granted to those wishing to stay in Britain longer than six months.

Ministers hope to generate an extra £15 million a year, although council chiefs say they need £250 million more annually to avoid increased council tax.

Ah, I see.  So what’s going to happen is the immigrants are going to pay a little bit extra in taxes, and the rest of the bill is going to be footed by the general public through increased local taxes.  So much for “free” healthcare.

Damian Green, the Tory immigration spokesman, said the cost of the visas could put off key workers such as nurses coming from outside the EU.

What?  You mean there are negative consequences to big government socialist idiocy?  Who the hell could have seen THAT coming!

Liam Byrne, the immigration minister, said recently: “It is fair that those who benefit most from using our immigration system should help fund it.

Come now, Liam.  Where’s your compassion?  What will Michael Moore make of this development?  Does anyone here think he has the balls or integrity to send out one of his super awesome messages?  Of course not, he’s a fucking coward.

How to Document a Cuba

What Our Mr. Lee calls the Greatest Magazine on the Planet has the goods on a real documentary about Cuba:

In June 2000, this magazine published a cover story on Hollywood’s “missing movies.” These were not, alas, films that had been neglected by inattentive archivists or spurned by Ted Turner’s guardians of classic film. The target of this search-and-rescue operation, wrote critic Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, were those tales of injustice, those triumphs of the spirit that Hollywood had little interest in producing. Long under the spell of radical writers such as Dalton Trumbo and Clifford Odets, Hollywood was “a town that welcomed Daniel Ortega of the Sandinista junta but never took up the cause of a single Soviet or Eastern European dissident.”

Almost 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the entertainment industry is still sensitive to charges of Cold War jingoism, though the spread of hipster Buddhism has necessitated the occasional dramatization of China’s occupation of Tibet. A spate of recent films—none of them produced in Hollywood—is also providing a more nuanced picture of the Cold War, one that eschews simple moral equivalence in favor of the dystopian reality of the Eastern Bloc.

...

Even Hollywood’s strange love affair with the Cuban revolution, recently evidenced by Oliver Stone’s Comandante and Walter Salles’ saccharine salute to Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries, is at long last showing signs of abating. A few years ago, New York painter/director Julian Schnabel memorably upbraided Castro in his film Before Night Falls, a portrait of the gay writer Reinaldo Arenas, imprisoned by the communist government for both his aberrant politics and sexuality.

Now, from first-time director Cristina Khuly, comes Shoot Down, a brilliantly rendered and scrupulously even-handed documentary revisiting the 1996 Cuban downing of two civilian planes over international waters, both piloted by Miami-based exiles from the group Brothers to the Rescue. Khuly, a 37-year-old sculptor, is the niece of shoot-down victim Armando Alejandre Jr.

An event soon overshadowed by the saga of Elian Gonzales, the attack on the unarmed Brothers to the Rescue planes is now largely forgotten outside Miami. And despite the smokescreen of misinformation presented by Castro and his foreign enablers, the facts of the story are rather straightforward and grimly characteristic of a totalitarian regime.

As three Brothers to the Rescue planes approached Cuban territory, the lead plane, piloted by the group’s founder Jose Basulto, briefly breached Cuban airspace. While the planes were searching for refugees in the water, officials in Havana, tipped off by a mole in the Brothers leadership, scrambled Soviet-made MiG fighter planes to knock the planes out of the sky. Basulto’s plane managed to escape. When the other two were vaporized by Cuban missiles, both were flying over international waters.

The mole, former Cuban Air Force MiG pilot Juan Pablo Roque, is a chilling reminder of the Stasi-like tactics of the Cuban secret police. Roque infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue by insinuating himself into the exile community—going so far as to write a book for the Cuban American National Foundation detailing his escape from the island—and marrying a local woman as cover. The day before the deadly flight, Roque declined an invitation to participate in the mission and informed his wife that he would be away on business. A day later, he reappeared on Cuban state television to denounce the Brothers as “terrorists” of the empire.

I don’t expect MIchael Moore to make do an expose of Cuban society in a film about healthcare. I do expect that he might mention, maybe in passing, that Cuba is something less than a socialist paradise.

The first post I wrote on my own blog that got any attention was on Hollywood’s refusal to take either communism or Islamism. Nice to know that not everyone is afraid.

Sorry, Tubby.  Go Home and Die.

Take note, Michael Moore, you fat bastard.

Doctors are calling for NHS treatment to be withheld from patients who are too old or who lead unhealthy lives.

Smokers, heavy drinkers, the obese and the elderly should be barred from receiving some operations, according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone.

That’s right, tubby.  You’re a multi-millionaire, so you can afford to climb into your private jet and scoot off to the world’s most luxurious fat farms when you want to drop a couple of pounds.  But the average working class Joe, who eats the same food you do and puts on a few pounds, well, he doesn’t qualify for healthcare under your socialist medical care utopia.  But wait, it gets better.

Fertility treatment and “social” abortions are also on the list of procedures that many doctors say should not be funded by the state.

That’s right, Mikey.  Not only is your socialist paradise going to stand by and allow fat fucks like you to drop dead of a heart attack, but they’re also going to prevent pregnant women from terminating their pregnancies, as well as only allowing the infertile rich to have children, since poor people won’t be able to afford to pay for the treatment themselves.

Oh yeah, that free healthcare is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?  Smokers, fatties, sluts, and the barren, all of them are completely fucked under your socialist healthcare fantasyland.

The findings of a survey conducted by Doctor magazine sparked a fierce row last night, with the British Medical Association and campaign groups describing the recommendations from family and hospital doctors as “out rageous” and “disgraceful”.

About one in 10 hospitals already deny some surgery to obese patients and smokers, with restrictions most common in hospitals battling debt.

Managers defend the policies because of the higher risk of complications on the operating table for unfit patients. But critics believe that patients are being denied care simply to save money.

Of course they’re being denied treatment because of money.  Money is a finite resource.  In economic terms it is “a scarce resource which has alternate uses.” And when the government provides all the fabulous free healthcare that people could ever hope for, they will quickly run out of money, because the public has no financial incentive NOT to go to the doctor.

But keep pushing for this evil scheme, you fat fuck.  Someone can always buy one of your books or DVDs instead of paying for their own medical care, while you hobnob with the rest of the unhealthy socialist millionaires at your $20,000 a day for-profit Swiss health chalet.

Update: Oh man, it just gets better and better.

School lunchboxes could soon be monitored by dinner ladies to ensure children are eating healthy meals, ministers said.

Under the Government’s obesity strategy, all schools will be expected to design a “healthy lunchbox policy” on what makes a nutritional packed lunch over the next year.

Some parents may even be asked to sign a form agreeing to ban unhealthy foods from their children’s lunches.

If a packed lunch is deemed to contain too much fat and sugar, parents could be sent warning letters or their children’s meals confiscated.

That’s right.  The food Nazis are now going to be keeping an Orwellian eye on what British children eat.  If they make food choices that Big Brother has determined are not in the public interest, then the Gestapo will ensure you comply.  Then, if the kid happens to choose to smoke or turns into a fat kid anyway, well, don’t come crying to the government for fabulous free healthcare.

Hey Michael Moore, we all know that you (or at least one of your low-paid, non-union flunkies) read this site.  Do you have the balls at all to comment on this?  You claim to oppose government and worship individual freedom, but the very policies you support are going to result in this type of surveillance-state over fucking food.  So rather than suck your own cock over your latest Oscar nomination, why don’t you show some integrity and actually send out one of your Mike’s Messages either supporting this type of police state activism or decrying it?

Naah, you’ll just keep sucking your own cock, won’t you?  Have fun at the fat farm, Tubby.

Oscar time

Mike was nominated for Sicko.  Does he have a shot at winning?

Update by Lee: I don’t think so.  First off, Sicko wasn’t that good of a movie.  His previous efforts were timely and something a large section of the general public was interested in.  And, had Moore treated the subject matter in Sicko with the seriousness it deserves he might have made more of an impact.  But, as I’ve said before, Sicko was nothing more than a two-hour infomercial for socialism which used healthcare as a context.  Even Hollywood lefties, who would all spout the expected platitudes about how we need to “provide healthcare for everyone” know that government run socialist disasters like the UK and Canada simply don’t work.  And I think the Cuba segment, where he portrayed the island as a tropical paradise of egalitarian brotherhood and compassion, was the final nail in the coffin.  Castro is an evil bastard, and other than the usual suspects—Moore, Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, etc.—most Hollywood types know it.  They all know Moore to be nothing more than a manipulative, self-promoting blowhard, and I doubt they’re going to reward him for this film, which from a cinematic standpoint was nowhere near as entertaining as F9/11 or Bowling for Columbine.

But, these are Hollywood liberals, so ultimately you never really know what the fuck they’re going to do.

More Money for Schools!

When you hear Michael Moore or some other leftist issue their plaintive wails about how we need “more money for education,” despite the highest per-student spending in the world, think back to this story about the abandoned Detroit public school book depository.

Pallet after pallet of mid-1980s Houghton-Mifflin textbooks, still unwrapped in their original packaging, seem more telling of our failures than any vacant edifice. The floor is littered with flash cards, workbooks, art paper, pencils, scissors, maps, deflated footballs and frozen tennis balls, reel-to-reel tapes. Almost anything you can think of used in the education of a child during the 1980s is there, much of it charred or rotted beyond recognition. Mushrooms thrive in the damp ashes of workbooks. Ailanthus altissima, the “ghetto palm” grows in a soil made by thousands of books that have burned, and in the pulp of rotted English Textbooks. Everything of any real value has been looted. All that’s left is an overwhelming sense of knowledge unlearned and untapped potential. It is almost impossible not to see all this and make some connection between the needless waste of all these educational supplies and the needless loss of so many lives in this city to poverty and violence, though the reality of why these supplies were never used is unclear. In some breathtakingly-beautiful expression of hope, an anonymous graffiti artist has painted a phoenix-like book rising from the ashes of the third floor.

Click the link for pictures.  This is, yet again, why government is a failure at everything it does.

You Are the Future of Healthcare

Yet another dispatch from Britain’s wonderful NHS:

The London Telegraph reported Tuesday that the British government has a “plan to save billions of pounds from the NHS budget.” But it won’t come without enormous pain.

“Instead of going to a hospital or consulting a doctor, patients will be encouraged to carry out ‘self-care’ as the Department of Health tries to meet Treasury targets to curb spending,” the Telegraph explained.

So when is a universal health care system not actually universal? When Britain’s 60-year-old National Health Service can no longer support the weight of its clamoring clientele.

Granted, there should be more self-treatment in developed nations. Emergency rooms and doctors’ offices are often overcrowded with patients who aren’t in need of urgent need but who go anyway because their insurance or government is paying. That type of open access to health care has led to overuse of the system.

The NHS, though, is hoping to cut down on more than frivolous visits. It’s looking for patients with “arthritis, asthma and even heart failure” to treat themselves, the Telegraph said.

Some of the self-care that will be expected of patients includes the monitoring of heart activity, blood pressure and lung
capacity using equipment that has been placed in the home.

Patients will be counted on to relate health information to doctors either by phone or computer link. To manage pain, they will administer their own drugs and other treatments.

This isn’t a completely horrid idea as socialized systems can be over-run by people running to their “free” doctor for every sniffle.

Still, if a private company were encouraging “self care”, don’t you think it would be the basis of a hilarious five minute section of Sicko II: The Re-Sickening?

Police Officer Can’t Get Necessary Healthcare

West Hawaii Today

A very sad and disturbing story ran in the local paper here on the Big Island regarding a Police Officer named Charles Keliipio who suffered brain damage resulting from a car accident which occurred while in the line of duty. 

Broken Clocks

Jim summed up Mikey’s screed nicely in the previous post.  There is, however, one small section I want to focus on.

Let’s assume that’s true. Do you want a President who is so easily misled? I wasn’t “misled,” and millions of others who took to the streets in February of 2003 weren’t “misled” either. It was simply amazing that we knew the war was wrong when none of us had been briefed by the CIA, none of us were national security experts, and none of us had gone on a weapons inspection tour of Iraq. And yet… we knew we were being lied to!

We’ve all heard the expression that even a broken clock is right twice a day.  Michael Moore opposes war. All war.  Especially when it could in any way conceivably benefit America.  He opposed Afghanistan.  He opposed Kosovo, going so far as to make the asinine assertion that it inspired the Columbine killers. He opposed the first Gulf War.  He opposed the Cold War.  He just opposes ALL WAR.

Now, let’s look at what he wrote. By his own admission he had no inside information.  He wasn’t briefed by the CIA.  He isn’t an expert on national security.  He’d never gone on a weapons tour of Iraq.  Yet somehow, mysteriously, he just KNEW he was being lied to.  My question is, how did he know?

Imagine, for a second, if I wrote the following.  “I didn’t graduate from Harvard medical school.  I hadn’t been Chief of Thoracic Surgery at John’s Hopkins for the past ten years.  I hadn’t done over 600 heart transplants.  But I KNEW that my child didn’t need surgery.” Sounds pretty ignorant, doesn’t it?  Even if it turned out that, in the end, the surgery was indeed unnecessary, so what?  The doctor was basing his opinion on his education and years of experience, and the parent is basing it on a gut feeling.  When it comes to making critical decisions, which do you think is a more prudent course of action?  President Bush makes a lot of his decisions based on “gut feeling” and we can all see how well those turned out, can’t we?

So, back to Mikey.  Somehow, through some mystical, magical process he just “knew” that this war was bad.  I imagine he “knew” this in the same way that a fundamentalist Christian “knows” that fags are going to burn in hell, or that a suicide bomber “knows” that there will be 72 virgins waiting for him in Paradise. 

Here we have a guy who just opposes all war, period.  Eventually he opposes a war which, guess what, turns out to be a disaster.  Then, completely disregarding all the other wars he’s opposed in the past and been wrong about, he hails himself as possessing some kind of mysterious power of prognostication, wherein he “knew” that something was up with this war.  This despite the fact that, by his own admission, the very people who had access to all the information and data disagreed with him.  But somehow he “knew.”

So, which is more likely.  Did he “know” something, or did the broken clock just happen to be right this time?

Moore shopping for ass-kisses

Mikey put out one of his lengthy, semi-coherent rants again this morning.  These days, I’m getting about half my email, but today I seem to have won the blowhard lottery; this and two older, screechy screeds from the AFA crying that Ford wants to *gasp* sell cars to TEH GAYZ.  It’s like my inbox is being punished.

After the jump, Mike’s words.  After that, my summary.  Feel free to skip to that part and then read Mikey’s diatribe afterward to see if I accurately summed it up.

…and a Happy New Year!!!

Wishing everyone all the best in 2008!!!
(Where are all the flying cars? I was distinctly promised flying cars by now!!!)

A question about releasing Sicko worldwide

I’ve got a question that has been bugging me ever since the international Moore fanbase have decided to take Sicko at face value;

What is the purpose of releasing a film that is hyper-specifically about the US health insurance business in the rest of the world?  What purpose is being served?  It doesn’t apply to anyone else in the world except US citizens.  Why is it released in Norway, Spain, Australia, Denmark, etc.?  Why am I getting email from every country in Europe over this?  How can this information in any way pertain to them?  It’s not like it’s a fair analysis of the business.  It’s not a documentary.  It’s a hyper-specific polemic about a situation that applies to US citizens with health insurance.  So why drum up so much business with college kids all over the world?

I have two answers.  One is to make as much money as possible.  Nothing more, nothing less.  Nothing wrong with that either, if one is honest about one’s intentions, that is.

Moore cashes in on anti-American sentiment the world over by releasing this movie to as many foreign markets as possible.  He knows that as hard as it is for us to verify some of the outrageous claims, it will be impossible and even undesirable for people in other nations to fact-check.  They want it to be true and already trust him.

The second is a logical extension of the first reason; it helps him de-value and denigrate the United States.  He’s never loved this country, in fact he’s openly hated everything from the people to the highest levels of government (the same government he is now pretending he wants in charge of health care).  The worse off we seem to everyone else in the world, the more he gets to be “right” about it all.  If that means stretching the truth, making things up and leaving things out, then so be it.

Can anyone give me a reason for releasing Sicko internationally that doesn’t fall into one of those two categories?