We witnessed the reassignment of Dan Rather, rather than his firing. We still see Ward Churchill on the payroll of the U of C. And now, we see the University of Akron’s Theater Professor Susan Speers found “not guilty” of fraud by a committee of her peers (The Faculty Rights and Responsibilities Committee). 

The Associated Press reports that a University committee has ruled that Speers did not commit fraud, when she brought Michael Moore to speak to her “Introduction to Theater through Film” class at a University facility just days before the election. The issue is that no fees were charged for the use of the facility. U of A’s indoor facilities may be used for political purposes, but not at the expense of taxpayers, thus, the sponsor must pay a rental fee for the facility. Speers paid nothing to the University for the use of the facility. 

The committee informed Speers that she was off the hotseat in a letter which stated that “"there was no fraudulent intent” on her part. I don’t know what barometers the committee uses to gauge “intent”, but based on Speers own words; she certainly knew the Moore Speech was going to be political in nature.

In fact, she told Madelin Equivel, a reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal, in an interview that; ( it’s a subscription site, if you look hard enough, I’m sure you will find a link.)

``Now I can let the cat out of the bag,’’ she said. ``It is political.’’

The Beacon Journal reports:

Film lecture a ploy; it’s all about voting

By Posted on Sun, Oct. 31, 2004

Michael Moore urges action, stumps for Kerry

By Madelin Esquivel

Beacon Journal staff writer

For those coming to University of Akron professor Susan Speers’ Introduction to Theater Through Film class to hear guest lecturer Michael Moore talk about the influence film has on society, Saturday’s class was probably a disappointment.

For those coming to hear why Moore thinks U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., should be president, it was a pleasure.
The event that drew 400 enthusiastic people, mostly Kerry supporters, to UA’s Knight Auditorium was originally called ``an educational opportunity’’ so that Speers could use the facility free of charge.

``Now I can let the cat out of the bag,’’ she said. ``It is political.’’

Speers jokingly said it was a good thing the class had the word film in its title or she couldn’t have pulled off the event.
She even paid for the security—five bodyguards and campus police—out of her own pocket.

Did you notice the date on that interview? It was four months ago. That’s plenty of time for this committee to investigate and find the story. If they did find it, they sure ignored it to issue a statement that they found “there was no fraudulent intent”.  What kind of crack-pot committee is doing the investigating when they can’t see fraud, especially when the person being investigated ADMITS fraud?

I’ll tell you what kind, a cover-your-ass-look-out-for-your-own-kind committee. They just choose to ignore their own rules, rather than enforce them as long as the person being investigated is a good Liberal Crony.
I wonder if they are aware that the actions of Speers , a State Employee, were not only against the rules of the University, but also against Ohio State Law, as noted in this excerpt from Governor Taft’s Memorandum, which took effect way back in 1999?

BOB TA F T, G O V E R N O R, ST A T E O F OHIO
M E M O R A N D U M -~~-~-~~~-
Cabinet Advisory No.: 99-26
TO: Department Directors
Chief Legal Counsel
Governor’s Senior Staff
FROM: Governor Bob Taft
Bill Klatt, Chief Legal Counsel &&
. DATE: August 6,1999
RE..
Political Activity Policy
This policy sets forth guidelines for state employees who want to participate in political activities or run for elected office. .At the outset, we emphasize that state employees are strongly encouraged to exercise their Constitutional right to vote and to actively participate in our political process to the extent permitted by law.

However, as set forth below, unclassified employees have far greater latitude than classified employees to engage in political activities. Even if a political activity is permitted, state employees are prohibited from participating in such activities while on state time or on state owned or leased property. State time does not include lunch hours, vacation, compensatory hours earned or personal leave. Nor may state employees use state equipment while engaged in political activities, including but not limited to, computer equipment, copiers, bulletin boards, or state vehicles.
State employees who participate in any political activity prohibited by Ohio law or by policies established by this Administration are subject to disciplinary action up to and including dismissal.

Is this the biggest deal in the world? No, of course not. It may be a small infraction, but these things are starting to add up. Professor Speers should be disciplined when she returns from her “sabbatical”. Will she? I doubt it, just as Moore got a pass when he violated election law several times during the campaign both in the US and Canada.
At least we now all know the back story to the “Professor Acquitted” headlines we have been reading everywhere. Another broken law, and more complacency from the powers that be.

Whoa. On behalf of our producers Kathleen Glynn and Michael Donovan from Canada, I’d like to thank the Academy for this. I have invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us, and we would like to — they’re here in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction. We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it’s the fictition of duct tape or fictition of orange alerts we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you. And any time you got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up. Thank you very much.

Well, this year, Rock tried to say the same thing but ( and I know this sounds impossible) he actually found a way to comment on the war that made Moore’s little rant sound intelligent by comparison.

Rock, in the middle of his schtick, threw in this nugget to the “I-wish-Moore-was-on-the-stage-because-he-would-really-stick-it-to-Bush” crowd;

“Bush did some things you could never get away with at your job, man. ... Just imagine you worked at the Gap. You’re $70 trillion behind on your register and then you start a war with Banana Republic ‘cause you say they got toxic tank tops over there. You have the war, people are dying, a thousand Gap employees are dead, bleeding all over the khakis, you finally take over Banana Republic, and you find out they never made tank tops in the first place.”

There are so many things wrong with this analogy, I don’t know where to start. Needless to say, I’m adding another name to the list of Hollywood moonbats, although this time with an asterisk.

Chris Rock, Hollywood Moonbat* (possible mental retardation)

Over the years, Michael Moore has had an apparent on-again/off-again awareness of the drugs; Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Luvox and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI’s).  In 1994, Moore produced a segment called “Pets on Prozac” by Director Immy Humes in his second episode of TV Nation. The episode featured a dog who was obsessed with a log. Details of this episode are very scarce and it is unclear whether or not the dog granted Moore an interview. The theme however, was definitely about Prozac. That I can say with a degree of certainty. 

In 2002 Moore attained national recognition again with his film “Bowling for Columbine”, which featured a look at America’s Gun Culture™, Culture of Fear™, and Culture of Racism™, starting with an analysis of the Columbine High School shootings. In the movie, Moore fingered every culprit in the book; Lockheed, the NRA, and even a lack of Canadian-esque culture for the shootings.

Well, almost every culprit.

Moore never mentioned that one of the shooters, Eric Harris “was rejected by Marine Corps recruiters days before the Columbine High School massacre because he was under a doctor’s care and had been prescribed an anti-depressant medication”. (via CNN)

Apparently, Harris was prescribed Luvox, an anti–OCD drug, which some some people feel was ( partly) the cause of his irrational, deadly behavior.  According to the Food and Drugs Administration;; “In a ten week pediatric OCD study, 2 out of 57 patients (4%) treated with fluvoxamine (Luvox) experienced manic reactions, compared to none of 63 placebo patients.”

Moore was either ignorant of this part of the story, or chose not to include it in his analysis of events. Moore’s famed “Army of Fact-checkers™” is reportedly among the “best in the business”, so I’m surprised that they failed to uncover this part of the story. How did they not seize the opportunity to throw a roundhouse at the pharmaceutical industry, armed with this information?  My guess, (and this is merely speculation of course), is that it didn’t fit with the rest of his hypothesis. If at least part of the problem could have been caused by a bad reaction to a prescription drug, it pretty much implies that part of the problem wasn’t all of those other things he featured in the film. It seems he omitted that part of the story because it conflicted with his “America-is-a-cultural-wasteland-which-causes-people-to-act-violently-especially-when –missiles– roll-through-the-town-in-the-middle-of-the-night” hypothesis. In other words, facts be damned, Moore had a point of view to express and he wasn’t about to let “the rest of the story” get in his way.

Did the prescription drugs Harris took cause part of his behavioral issues? I have no idea. I’m not a doctor or scientist. Heck, I’m not even that bright. However, I do believe that Moore feels that prescription drugs, specifically SSRI’s can cause damage to a person. In his January 6th interview with Katie Couric on NBC’s Today show, Moore said:

“First of all, health care should be a human right. It should not have anything to do with profit. The news this week (about) Eli Lilly (is) that they have kept quiet a study that they did, what, 15 years ago? They’ve known this whole time that Prozac makes you 12 times more likely to attempt suicide than other antidepressants. And they sat on that and didn’tmake that public? This is a crime. These are criminal, criminal acts, and these people are criminals, and the American public are sick and tired of these health insurance companies and these drug companies and that’s exactly who we’re going to go after.”

So, Moore not only has issues with Eli Lilly, but he also admits that he believes that SSRI’s can lead to mental problems worse than what they are supposed to fix. Now he’s not only acknowledging that theory, he’s using it to “go after” the pharmaceutical companies. Why the sudden change in focus on SSRI’s now, when he totally ignored them when analyzing the Columbine events?

I have a theory, which may or may not prove to be accurate, but is worthy of discussion.

Back in the BFC days, apparently Moore didn’t have an axe to grind with Eli Lilly. Maybe that’s because back then he didn’t know that Eli Lilly would someday donate $866,352.00 in 2004 to political candidates and PAC’s, 75% of them being Republican. Quite simply, he didn’t know Eli Lilly would help get Bush re-elected. He also couldn’t have known that Bush would nominate former Eli Lilly CEO Randall Tobias to head a new State Department office assigned to oversee the global AIDS iniative

You can bet this will be highlighted in “Sicko” , along with the “revelation” that the Patriot Act contains a “Eli Lilly Provision” which “protects” the pharmaceutical company from lawsuits dealing with the increased threats of autism caused by a mercury additive in some of it’s vaccines. Dick Armey explained that :: “it’s a matter of national security. We need their vaccines if the country is attacked with germ weapons.”

If Moore stays true to form, he will make the connection of campaign contributions to the lawsuit protections in the Patriot Act as a quid pro quo from George Bush. If I had to guess, I would predict that plenty of the focus in “Sicko” will be on George Bush again, in fact, I’d say that’s one of his primary motivations for making the film. It’s a whole new anti-Bush angle. Moore could get a lot of mileage from the “crony-ism” angle as well.
So, the angle is new, but it would seem that the tactics may remain the same, which is a shame.

If Moore was totally honest, he might actually be able to shed some real light on some real problems with the pharmaceutical industry. I somehow doubt he will take the high road.

How can I possibly predict this you say? Well, remember that interview with Katie Couric in January when Moore said:

“The news this week (about) Eli Lilly (is)that they have kept quiet a study that they did, what, 15 years ago? They’ve known this whole time that Prozac makes you 12 times more likely to attempt suicide than other antidepressants.”?

The “story in the news” Moore was referring to was actually an article in the British Medical Journal which accused Lilly of hiding documents, but was retracted in the following issue.
The Journal printed; “The BMJ is happy to set the record straight and to apologize to Eli Lilly for this statement, which we now retract, but which we published in good faith.”
Lilly had offered an explaination which led to the retraction two days before the Moore appearance on the Today show, something Moore’s fact checkers missed. The story had already been debunked by the time Moore was interviewed, but he ran with the rumor anyway ( big surprise, huh?)

As to whether Eli Lilly actually “kept quiet” the study that showed an increase in the likelihood of the user’s negative reactions to the drug is indeed up for discussion. It is known that those documents were forced by litigation in a 1994 lawsuit to be presented to the court . Lilly won the case and the actual documents were not made “public”, however one of the plaintiff’s reviewing Physicians, Dr. Peter R. Breggin wrote about them in several books and peer related articles, therefore, the results of these studies have been public for years. The Doctor also publicly testified about the documents during that case. On his website Breggin also says that Eli Lilly provided several charts to the FDA concerning the increased risk of suicide attempts and aggression, although it would seem that the FDA lost them as they cannot reproduce them at this time. Still, Dr. Breggin contends most vehemently however that Lilly didn’t properly disclose these studies as they should have although they did disclose them. When it comes to the Prozac story, you can’t really tell it without including Dr. Breggan.  Moore could make this Doctor the “star” of this segment of “Sicko”, as he is the pivotal character in the story.

I doubt he will, though. You see, Dr. Breggin is also the author of an article in April of 1999 entitled; “Eric Harris was taking Luvox (a Prozac-like drug) at the time of the Littleton murders”

In the article, he explains:
“Psychiatric drug use is only one of the contributing factors to the episodes of school violence. However, it is one of the most easily prevented factors. There is strong scientific evidence to support the view that SSRIs should not be given to children and teenagers.”

All of this information puts Moore in a precarious situation. On one hand, you have the Physician who most strongly feels that Lilly did not properly disclose the documents as they should. On the other hand, you have the very same Physician who writes about the “probability that he was suffering from a drug-induced manic reaction caused by Luvox.”

Moore has a decision to make. He claims that he is “going after” folks like Eli Lilly, so I wonder how he will address this issue in “Sicko”?

Will he feature the alleged problems with Prozac and SSRI’s, which essentially shows he at least partially missed the mark in BFC, especially when the central character in the issue has proposed a theory that Moore ignored when analyzing the massacre?
Or, will he back off the story, instead opting to only analyze Eli Lilly as far as their connections to George Bush are concerned? (which in my opinion would miss the mark entirely)

Either way, he has painted himself into a corner. I can’t wait to see how he spins this one.

One thing’s for sure though, Michael Moore can’t go on another talk show claiming that “Nobody is talking about this stuff other than me”.

We’re talking about it at Moorewatch, and we beat him to the punch.