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.

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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.’

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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.

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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.