Michael Moore - brilliant and uplifting

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anitram said:
I don't think that's really a fair commentary on Moore so much as it is on the complacency and sheer laziness of the middle class.

Maybe, maybe not. "An Inconvenient Truth" was a catalyst for a lot of complacent, lazy, middle class people getting serious about global warming.
 
shart1780 said:
He's incredibly desceptive and incredibly influential. That's not a good combination. If he's so confident in his beliefs maybe he should educate us by telling the truth instead of BS.

This is true, but why are you bringing the President into this?



:wink:
 
MaxFisher said:


Maybe, maybe not. "An Inconvenient Truth" was a catalyst for a lot of complacent, lazy, middle class people getting serious about global warming.

Yes, but that was sort of the conclusion of many decades of environmental work. You have to understand that environmentalism, as a cause, and a legal field, has not had much success in penetrating the middle class until recently. However, what happened is that over the last 4-5 decades, grassroots organizations chipped away at preconceived notions so that when Al Gore stepped in with the film, he was the right man at the right place at the right time. But even his work spanned a couple of decades, and many of those years brought no success.

Nothing changes overnight. Al Gore, as much as I like him, had the benefit of 40 years of backstory and changing the narrative. Moore does not have that, regarding healthcare.
 
A_Wanderer said:
You haven't substantiated the claims that he lies, you could at least go after him for declaring the nihilistic fascists in Iraq "Minutemen".

Ok, when I get back from work I'll show you a couple articles that point out MANY of his lies. If you want to see them for yourself they're very easy to find.
 
MrsSpringsteen said:


That's rather rude-Diane is a thoughtful and intelligent person. The health care system in this country is a majorly f'ed up mess and a complete embarrassment for the good ole USA.. Any person who can sit and watch stories about people literally dying because their insurance companies deny them treatments and dismiss it because they hate Michael Moore-well what kind of drugs are they on? Is everything in it 100 % factually accurate? No. But from everything I have read and seen about it's his most accurate and unbiased movie to date. The bottom line fact is that the insurance companies actually reward employees who deny claims and they are all about making profit. Michael Moore didn't make that up, unfortunately. Profit above all else, including human life. And the govt does nothing because they're all in bed with these people.

Yahoo movies

"Sicko," Moore's dissection of the ills of U.S. health care, played in 441 theaters, about half the number for his last movie, 2004's $100 million hit "Fahrenheit 9/11." With a $23.9 million opening, "Fahrenheit 9/11" did five times as much business, though.

Still, "Sicko" had the second-best documentary debut ever behind "Fahrenheit 9/11." By comparison, "Ratatouille" opened in nearly 4,000 theaters, about nine times as many as "Sicko."

Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of the Weinstein Co., said he wanted to roll "Sicko" out slowly to give it a longer shelf life and keep Moore's stand for universal health care on the front burner.

"The idea is to hold during the summer and just continue to build this thing," Weinstein said. "I just think the debate in this country is going to catch up with the movie, so we've got to keep it slow."

Weinstein and Moore said they hoped "Sicko" would do in the range of the $21.6 million total for the filmmaker's 2002 Academy Award winner "Bowling for Columbine."

Again, my problem isn't with Sicko (I haven't even seen it). I also have stated a couple times in this thread that I agree that our health care system is very flawed.

My point is that as a whole Moore's work is very deceptive and dishonest. That's why I don't like it when people call him a great American.
 
I don't think Sicko is deceptive and dishonest, and for making a movie about such an important issue when no other mainstream movie maker cares to-that's being great and an American in my opinion. Perhaps there are many Americans who are/have been considered great who are also considered to be deceptive and dishonest in their work. You can't just throw the baby out with the bath water in my opinion. What is that quote at the end of the movie? I'm trying to find it..
 
MrsSpringsteen said:
I don't think Sicko is deceptive and dishonest, and for making a movie about such an important issue when no other mainstream movie maker cares to-that's being great and an American in my opinion. Perhaps there are many Americans who are/have been considered great who are also considered to be deceptive and dishonest in their work. You can't just throw the baby out with the bath water in my opinion. What is that quote at the end of the movie? I'm trying to find it..

Again, I'm judging Moore from his whole body of work, not just this movie, which I made clear I have no opinion on yet (except that I agree with Moore's main point).

You act as if he can lie as long as he cares and that makes him great. If he's trying to decieve us into holding a view on an important issue that's much worse than if we didn't hold an opinion at all. You're making it sound like he can decieve as much as he feels like as long as the outcome is good. That the ends justify the means.

and you bring up another great point. When other Americans who were considered great were found out to be deceptive the American people basically shunned them. They weren't cheering them on even more. It almost seems like Moore's fans LIKE his deception. What you're saying is "well other guys are deceptive too... so why not support this guy's deception?". There's a difference between how we percive things and how things really are sometimes. When we discover highly influential people are trying to lie to us and trick us should we seriously cheer them on? No. That's ridiculous. I can't believe people are even trying to justify this guy. It's so sad that people will cheer Moore on just because he tells them what they like to hear.

I don't really know how to argue my point any further. It's such a basic concept I can't figure out how to elaborate on it any more.

Lying = bad
Liars = bad
Michael Moore = a liar

See the connection?
 
so what if he uses a little bit of sensationlism, nothing he said is actually a lie. Did he put the gun into the killers at columbine, did he hobble the guy in the wheelchair to get accross his point. Did he know about the planes flying into the twin towers, did he make the president look like a complete ass? Did he make your medical system so fucked that people die just so insurance companies can make more money? No.

You know what a great american is? Not someone who does lie or stretch the truth cause really, who hasn't lied in their life? Bush, Clinton, JFK, Truman, Washington, Woody Allen, Oprah, Madonna etc etc have all lie out their asses, yet are still loved and respected, but what makes an person great is saying 'no!' im not going to accept this shit, im going to make a movie and show people what the fuck is going on. What makes a dumb american is someone who watches that, and instead of taking the OVERALL MESSAGE has to rip it to shreds just to feel good about making fun of him and giving one back to the fundies!!!111.
Truly sad.
 
shart, i've read through this thread and i've seen you post that "michael moore is a liar" but you don't back it up with anything. do you have links to the articles of which you speak which debunk his movies?
 
anitram said:
Nothing changes overnight. Al Gore, as much as I like him, had the benefit of 40 years of backstory and changing the narrative. Moore does not have that, regarding healthcare.

If our healthcare system is as bad as Moore says it is then he has the benefit of 40 years worth of people's nightmares dealing with the system.
 
MaxFisher said:


If our healthcare system is as bad as Moore says it is then he has the benefit of 40 years worth of people's nightmares dealing with the system.

That 40 years is also full of 40 years worth of propaganda that US citizens have been hearing from their politicians, pharma, and private insurers about the perils of socialized health care, and how it's a dismal failure. Moore is just now trying to dispel some of those myths.
 
unico said:
shart, i've read through this thread and i've seen you post that "michael moore is a liar" but you don't back it up with anything. do you have links to the articles of which you speak which debunk his movies?

Here are some.There are more, but I haven't read them all (that would take a while). I would also like to add, that in my mind lies and deciet are basically the same thing. They're both meant to trick the audience into thinking something is true that is in fact not. Whe you read some of these it's clear that Moore may not have told outright lies, but he used editing and narration to create decieving points.

http://www.davekopel.org/Terror/Fiftysix-Deceits-in-Fahrenheit-911.htm



An article from Newsweek:


Headline: More Distortions From Michael Moore
Subheadline: Some of the Main Points in ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ Really Aren’t Very Fair At All
Byline: Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Source: Newsweek
Dateline: June 30, 2004

In his new movie, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” film-maker Michael Moore makes the eye-popping claim that Saudi Arabian interests “have given” $1.4 billion to firms connected to the family and friends of President George W. Bush. This, Moore suggests, helps explain one of the principal themes of the film: that the Bush White House has shown remarkable solicitude to the Saudi royals, even to the point of compromising the war on terror. When you and your associates get money like that, Moore says at one point in the movie, “who you gonna like? Who’s your Daddy?”

But a cursory examination of the claim reveals some flaws in Moore’s arithmetic—not to mention his logic. Moore derives the $1.4 billion figure from journalist Craig Unger’s book, “House of Bush, House of Saud.” Nearly 90 percent of that amount, $1.18 billion, comes from just one source: contracts in the early to mid-1990’s that the Saudi Arabian government awarded to a U.S. defense contractor, BDM, for training the country’s military and National Guard. What’s the significance of BDM? The firm at the time was owned by the Carlyle Group, the powerhouse private-equity firm whose Asian-affiliate advisory board has included the president’s father, George H.W. Bush.

Leave aside the tenuous six-degrees-of-separation nature of this “connection.” The main problem with this figure, according to Carlyle spokesman Chris Ullman, is that former president Bush didn’t join the Carlyle advisory board until April, 1998—five months after Carlyle had already sold BDM to another defense firm. True enough, the former president was paid for one speech to Carlyle and then made an overseas trip on the firm’s behalf the previous fall, right around the time BDM was sold. But Ullman insists any link between the former president’s relations with Carlyle and the Saudi contracts to BDM that were awarded years earlier is entirely bogus. “The figure is inaccurate and misleading,” said Ullman. “The movie clearly implies that the Saudis gave $1.4 billion to the Bushes and their friends. But most of it went to a Carlyle Group company before Bush even joined the firm. Bush had nothing to do with BDM.”

In light of the extraordinary box office success of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” and its potential political impact, a rigorous analysis of the film’s assertions seems more than warranted. Indeed, Moore himself has invited the scrutiny. He has set up a Web site and “war-room” to defend the claims in the movie—and attack his critics. (The war-room’s overseers are two veteran spin-doctors from the Clinton White House: Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani.) Moore also this week contended that the media was pounding away at him “pretty hard” because “they’re embarrassed. They’ve been outed as people who did not do their job.” Among the media critiques prominently criticized was an article in Newsweek.

In response to inquiries from NEWSWEEK about the Carlyle issue, Lehane shot back this week with a volley of points: There were multiple Bush “connections” to the Carlyle Group throughout the period of the Saudi contracts to BDM, Lehane noted in an e-mail, including the fact that the firm’s principals included James Baker (Secretary of State during the first Bush administration) and Richard Darman (the first Bush’s OMB chief). Moreover, George W. Bush himself had his own Carlyle Group link: between 1990 and 1994, he served on the board of another Carlyle-owned firm, Caterair, a now defunct airline catering firm.

But unmentioned in “Fahrenheit/911,” or in the Lehane responses, is a considerable body of evidence that cuts the other way. The idea that the Carlyle Group is a wholly owned subsidiary of some loosely defined “Bush Inc.” concern seems hard to defend. Like many similar entities, Carlyle boasts a roster of bipartisan Washington power figures. Its founding and still managing partner is David Rubenstein, a former top domestic policy advisor to Jimmy Carter. Among the firm’s senior advisors is Thomas “Mack” McLarty, Bill Clinton’s former White House chief of staff, and Arthur Levitt, Clinton’s former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. One of its other managing partners is William Kennard, Clinton’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Spokesman Ullman was the Clinton-era spokesman for the SEC.

As for the president’s own Carlyle link, his service on the Caterair board ended when he quit to run for Texas governor—a few months before the first of the Saudi contracts to the unrelated BDM firm was awarded. Moreover, says Ullman, Bush “didn’t invest in the [Caterair] deal and he didn’t profit from it.” (The firm was a big money loser and was even cited by the campaign of Ann Richards, Bush’s 1994 gubernatorial opponent, as evidence of what a lousy businessman he was.)

Most importantly, the movie fails to show any evidence that Bush White House actually has intervened in any way to promote the interests of the Carlyle Group. In fact, the one major Bush administration decision that most directly affected the company’s interest was the cancellation of a $11 billion program for the Crusader rocket artillery system that had been developed for the U.S. Army (during the Clinton administration)—a move that had been foreshadowed by Bush’s own statements during the 2000 campaign saying he wanted a lighter and more mobile military. The Crusader was manufactured by United Defense, which had been wholly owned by Carlyle until it spun the company off in a public offering in October, 2001 (and profited to the tune of $237 million). Carlyle still owned 47 percent of the shares in the defense company at the time that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—in the face of stiff congressional resistance—canceled the Crusader program the following year. These developments, like much else relevant to Carlyle, goes unmentioned in Moore’s movie.

None of this is to suggest that there aren’t legitimate questions that deserve to be asked about the influence that secretive firms like Carlyle have in Washington—not to mention the Saudis themselves (an issue that has been taken up repeatedly in our weekly Terror Watch columns.) Nor are we trying to say that “Fahrenheit 9/11” isn’t a powerful and effective movie that raises a host of legitimate issues about President Bush’s response to the September 11 attacks, the climate of fear engendered by the war on terror and, most importantly, about the wisdom and horrific human toll of the war in Iraq.

But for all the reasonable points he makes, on more than a few occasions in the movie Moore twists and bends the available facts and makes glaring omissions in ways that end up clouding the serious political debate he wants to provoke.

Consider Moore’s handling of another conspiratorial claim: the idea that oil-company interest in building a pipeline through Afghanistan influenced early Bush administration policy regarding the Taliban. Moore raises the issue by stringing together two unrelated events. The first is that a delegation of Taliban leaders flew to Houston, Texas, in 1997 (”while George W. Bush was governor of Texas,” the movie helpfully points out) to meet with executives of Unocal, an oil company that was indeed interested in building a pipeline to carry natural gas from the Caspian Sea through Afghanistan.

The second is that another Taliban emissary visited Washington in March, 2001 and got an audience at the State Department, leaving Moore to speculate that the Bush administration had gone soft on the protectors of Osama bin Laden because it was interested in promoting a pipeline deal. "Why on earth would the Bush administration allow a Taliban leader to visit the United States knowing that the Taliban were harboring the man who bombed the USS Cole and our African embassies?" Moore asks at one point.

This, as conspiracy theories go, is more than a stretch. Unocal’s interest in building the Afghan pipeline is well documented. Indeed, according to “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to Sept. 10., 2001,” the critically acclaimed book by Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll, Unocal executives met repeatedly with Clinton administration officials throughout the late 1990s in an effort to promote the project—in part by getting the U.S. government to take a more conciliatory approach to the Taliban. “It was an easy time for an American oil executive to find an audience in the Clinton White House,” Coll writes on page 307 of his book. “At the White House, [Unocal lobbyist Marty Miller] met regularly with Sheila Heslin, the director of energy issues at the National Security Council, whose suite next to the West Wing coursed with visitors from American oil firms. Miller found Heslin…very supportive of Unocal’s agenda in Afghanistan.”

Coll never suggests that the Clintonites’ interest in the Unocal project was because of the corrupting influence of big oil. Clinton National Security Council advisor “Berger, Heslin and their White House colleagues saw themselves engaged in a hardheaded synthesis of American commercial interests and national security goals,” he writes. “They wanted to use the profit-making motives of American oil companies to thwart one of the country’s most determined enemies, Iran, and to contain the longer-term ambitions of a restless Russia.”

Whatever the motive, the Unocal pipeline project was entirely a Clinton-era proposal: By 1998, as the Taliban hardened its positions, the U.S. oil company pulled out of the deal. By the time George W. Bush took office, it was a dead issue—and no longer the subject of any lobbying in Washington. (Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force report in May, 2001, makes no reference to it.) There is no evidence that the Taliban envoy who visited Washington in March, 2001—and met with State Department and National Security Council officials—ever brought up the pipeline. Nor is there any evidence anybody in the Bush administration raised it with him. The envoy brought a letter to Bush offering negotiations to resolve the issue of what should be done with bin Laden. (A few weeks earlier, Taliban leader Mullah Omar had floated the idea of convening a tribunal of Islamic religious scholars to review the evidence against the Al Qaeda leader.) The Taliban offer was promptly shot down. “We have not seen from the Taliban a proposal that would meet the requirements of the U.N. resolution to hand over Osama bin Laden to a country where he can be brought to justice,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said at the time.

The use of innuendo is rife through other critical passages of “Fahrenheit 9/11.” The movie makes much of the president’s relationship with James R. Bath, a former member of his Texas Air National Guard who, like Bush, was suspended from flying at one point for failure to take a physical. The movie suggests that the White House blacked out a reference to Bath’s missed physical from his National Guard records not because of legal concerns over the Privacy Act but because it was trying to conceal the Bath connection—a presumed embarrassment because the Houston businessman had once been the U.S. money manager for the bin Laden family. After being hired by the bin Ladens to manager their money in Texas, Bath “in turn,” the movie says, “invested in George W. Bush.”

The investment in question is real: In the late 1970’s, Bath put up $50,000 into Bush’s Arbusto Energy, (one of a string of failed oil ventures by the president), giving Bath a 5 percent interest in the company. The implication seems to be that, years later, because of this link, Bush was somehow not as zealous about his determination to get bin Laden.

Leaving aside the fact that the bin Laden family, which runs one of Saudi Arabia’s biggest construction firms, has never been linked to terrorism, the movie—which relied heavily on Unger’s book—fails to note the author’s conclusion about what to make of the supposed Bin Laden-Bath-Bush nexus: that it may not mean anything. The “Bush-Bin Laden ‘relationships’ were indirect—two degrees of separation, perhaps—and at times have been overstated,” Unger writes in his book. While critics have charged that bin Laden money found its way into Arbusto through Bath, Unger notes that “no hard evidence has ever been found to back up that charge” and Bath himself has adamantly denied it. “One hundred percent of those funds (in Arbusto) were mine,” says Bath in a footnote on page 101 of Unger’s book. “It was a purely personal investment.”

The innuendo is greatest, of course, in Moore’s dealings with the matter of the departing Saudis flown out of the United States in the days after the September 11 terror attacks. Much has already been written about these flights, especially the film’s implication that figures with possible knowledge of the terrorist attacks were allowed to leave the country without adequate FBI screening—a notion that has been essentially rejected by the 9/11 commission. The 9/11 commission found that the FBI screened the Saudi passengers, ran their names through federal databases, interviewed 30 of them and asked many of them “detailed questions." “Nobody of interest to the FBI with regard to the 9/11 investigation was allowed to leave the country,” the commission stated. New information about a flight from Tampa, Florida late on Sept. 13 seems mostly a red herring: The flight didn’t take any Saudis out of the United States. It was a domestic flight to Lexington, Kentucky that took place after the Tampa airport had already reopened.(You can read Unger’s letter to Newsweek on this point, as well as our reply, by clicking here.)

It is true that there are still some in the FBI who had questions about the flights-and wish more care had been taken to examine the passengers. But the film’s basic point—that the flights represented perhaps the supreme example of the Saudi government’s influence in the Bush White House-is almost impossible to defend. Why? Because while the film claims—correctly—that the “White House” approved the flights, it fails to note who exactly in the White House did so. It wasn’t the president, or the vice president or anybody else supposedly corrupted by Saudi oil money. It was Richard Clarke, the counter-terrorism czar who was a holdover from the Clinton administration and who has since turned into a fierce Bush critic. Clarke has publicly testified that he gave the greenlight—conditioned on FBI clearance.

“I thought the flights were correct,” Clarke told ABC News last week. “The Saudis had reasonable fear that they might be the subject of vigilante attacks in the United States after 9/11. And there is no evidence even to this date that any of the people who left on those flights were people of interest to the FBI.” Like much else relevant to the issues Moore raises, Clarke’s reasons for approving the flights—and his thoughts on them today—won’t be found in “Fahrenheit 9/11,” nor in any of the ample material now being churned out by the film-maker’s “war room” to defend his provocative, if flawed, movie.


An article about Moore's clip-job.


Headline: Paper says its movie cameo is misleading; Headline triggers `Fahrenheit' flap
Source: Chicago Tribune
Byline: Bill Glauber
Dateline: August 15, 2004

The Pantagraph newspaper wants an apology--and $1 in damages--from Michael Moore, whose controversial documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" allegedly includes a doctored headline from the feisty downstate daily.

So far, all they've gotten is a brushoff letter from the filmmaker's lawyer.

"It looks to me that it's a developing story that shows Michael Moore is becoming the very person he defies--the big guy who talks through his attorneys," said Pantagraph columnist Bill Flick.

It was Flick who last month helped discover the origin of The Pantagraph headline that was used in the film. Moore's movie challenges the legitimacy of the Bush administration and its reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks and the resulting war against terror.

The film has won awards, but also has been criticized for fudging the facts.

During the film, newspaper headlines pop up to document the contested 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

One of the headlines purportedly appeared in the Dec. 19, 2001, edition of The Pantagraph: "Latest Florida recount shows Gore won election."

But it turns out the headline actually ran in much smaller type above a Dec. 5, 2001, letter to the editor.

One of Flick's readers contacted him to say The Pantagraph was in the film--for about a nanosecond, it turned out.

A few days later, Flick contacted Dawn Riordan, manager of the Normal Theater, and asked her to slow down the movie to take a closer look at the clip. He said Riordan later left a message on his answering machine, "Oh my God, it IS The Pantagraph," adding "and it looks to me like they did a clip job on it."

Flick searched the archives and found no such headline in the Dec. 19 edition. Later, a librarian, Robin Helenthal, tracked down the smaller headline above a letter to the editor.

Flick said several attempts to contact Moore through Lions Gate Entertainment, the film's distributor, were unsuccessful.

"I loved the movie," Flick said. "I laughed throughout."

But for The Pantagraph, the alleged misuse of the headline was no laughing matter.

Through local attorney J. Casey Costigan, the newspaper demanded that Moore write a letter acknowledging "unauthorized use of The Pantagraph copyright and acknowledging that the content of The Pantagraph depicted in your film was misleading."

The paper also asked for $1 in compensatory damages.

"The easy thing would be to enjoy the fact we were mentioned in the movie and just let it drop," said Henry Bird, The Pantagraph's president and publisher.

"But you know, it's not right. All we really want is an apology."

Wednesday, newspaper executives received what they termed a dismissive letter from an attorney whose firm represents Westside Productions, which produced the documentary.

The attorney, Devereux Chatillon, wrote "this fleeting use of a headline from The Pantagraph as one among several illustrations of the discussion in the press of the results of the election is not copyright infringement, but classic fair use."

The attorney added the headline was not used "in any false or misleading way. What appeared on screen appeared in The Pantagraph. While the date depicted was unfortunately off by a couple of weeks, that mistake did not make a difference to the editorial point being made in the film and was in no way detrimental to your client."

As the controversy bubbled over recent weeks, the newspaper learned that taking on Moore has political ramifications.

"The right wing really wants to grab this and the left wing really wants to grab us," Flick said.

And some of the media are having a field day with what is essentially a media story about a media spat.

Flick said he has been contacted by Fox News and radio stations around the country. Terry Greenberg, The Pantagraph's editor, even fielded a call from a TV executive wanting to know if the newspaper would be interested in taking on Moore in a televised court case using a judge and jury.

"It wasn't a joke," Greenberg wrote in an Aug. 8 column. "The show is real."

One reader e-mailed Greenberg: "Get a life, people. Michael Moore wouldn't want an editorial position on your stupid newspaper, because nobody's ever heard of it. More so, nobody cares about it. You should be thanking him for including mention of your ridiculous rag in his movie, not trying to sue him for changing (improving?) the type size of one of your headlines."

One reader who clearly is having a good time with the controversy is Richard Soderlund, an Illinois State University history professor.

It was Soderlund who sparked the headline with his letter to the editor on the outcome of the 2000 election. He has not yet seen the movie.

"Historians would find it shocking," Soderlund said of the alleged doctored headline. "It's misrepresenting a document. It's at odds with history. It was probably not a smart thing to do on Moore's point. It's grist for the mill."

The Pantagraph's executives would like the story to have something of a happy ending.

"Somebody said the other day, why don't you just get Michael Moore to come to town and do a lecture," Bird said. "That would be great fun and serve the community well."




Anyways, there are some articles, and these are only regarding Fahrenheit 9/11 (there is a ton more where that came from). I'll try to find more on his other stuff later.
 
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VintagePunk said:


That 40 years is also full of 40 years worth of propaganda that US citizens have been hearing from their politicians, pharma, and private insurers about the perils of socialized health care, and how it's a dismal failure. Moore is just now trying to dispel some of those myths.

I've lived under the NHS system in the UK for many years; first employer who got me a discount on private health care I jumped all over it. Will never go back if I can help it/afford it.
 
I have many problems with Michael Moore. While I find his documentaries to be funny, he gets too personal. Here is a man who has made butt loads of money from his various documentaries, yet do you see him helping the needy w/ it? He is a hypocrite.

In the movie, he totally promotes the Canadian health care system, yet anyone who knows it would tell you that it has huge faults. Yes they have cheap drugs, but you have to wait months due to the shortage of doctors. Imagine waiting 4 weeks for heart bypass or 8 weeks for an MRI. This socialized health care that they have is destroying the quality of it. The only good thing is being an American there, b/c they help you extremely fast.

In general, I have noticed (not specifically here) that people who are for the movie and this idea of universal health care go along with the idea just because they do not back the current US government. Please, really consider all of the dimensions, other than doing it just because you don't like Bush. If this were to occur everyone, rich and poor, would pay greatly in the amount of their paychecks. I love it when Bono says, "Thanks for spending your hard earned on a U2 show." Just think w/ the higher taxes that would be set forth from this health care, that we would have less to spend on the rock shows.

At the same time, we need to ask why health care costs is so high? Let me spell a little out for you. It begins w/ the doctors: if they didn't have to worry about patients suing them w/ huge lawsuits all the time, their insurance would go down, then our insurance could go down, etc. etc.

While our system has it faults, do you guys honestly think socializing health care would be better? There are so many alternate ideas that would be much more effective. It would be a lot higher taxes for all of us and the quality and competitiveness of it would decrease greatly. Look at Europe, you do not hear that much happening there regarding medical innovation. We need to keep a free market so new ideas and competitiveness can continue to flourish.

Michael Moore should not criticize health when he is fat as hell.
 
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shart1780 said:
Any thoughts on the articles?


They are not very good.


With a little effort
\or if one reads a decent daily newspaper - one can get the information




from your article - blasting Moore
\/


The innuendo is greatest, of course, in Moore’s dealings with the matter of the departing Saudis flown out of the United States in the days after the September 11 terror attacks. Much has already been written about these flights, especially the film’s implication that figures with possible knowledge of the terrorist attacks were allowed to leave the country without adequate FBI screening—a notion that has been essentially rejected by the 9/11 commission. The 9/11 commission found that the FBI screened the Saudi passengers, ran their names through federal databases, interviewed 30 of them and asked many of them “detailed questions." “Nobody of interest to the FBI with regard to the 9/11 investigation was allowed to leave the country,” the commission stated. New information about a flight from Tampa, Florida late on Sept. 13 seems mostly a red herring: The flight didn’t take any Saudis out of the United States. It was a domestic flight to Lexington, Kentucky that took place after the Tampa airport had already reopened.


2 minute Fox news clip


Freedom of Information FBI documents

September 14-19, 2001: Bin Laden Family Members, Saudi Royals Quietly Leave US
Edit event

Khalil bin Laden at the Orlando, Florida, airport, about to be flown out of the country in the days after 9/11.Khalil bin Laden at the Orlando, Florida, airport, about to be flown out of the country in the days after 9/11. [Source: Lions Gate Films]Following a secret flight inside the US that is in violation of a national private airplane flight ban, members of the bin Laden family and Saudi royalty quietly depart the US. The flights are only publicly acknowledged after all the Saudis have left. [Boston Globe, 9/21/2001; New York Times, 9/30/2001] About 140 Saudis, including around 24 members of the bin Laden family, are passengers in these flights. The identities of most of these passengers are not known. However, some of the passengers include:
bullet The son of the Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan. Sultan is sued in August 2002 for alleged complicity in the 9/11 plot. [Tampa Tribune, 10/5/2001] He is alleged to have contributed at least $6 million since 1994 to four charities that finance al-Qaeda. [Vanity Fair, 10/2003]
bullet Khalil bin Laden. He has been investigated by the Brazilian government for possible terrorist connections. [Vanity Fair, 10/2003]
bullet Abdullah bin Laden and Omar bin Laden, cousins of bin Laden. Abdullah was the US director of the Muslim charity World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY). The governments of India, Pakistan, Philippines, and Bosnia have all accused WAMY of funding terrorism. These two relatives were investigated by the FBI in 1996 (see February-September 11, 1996) in a case involving espionage, murder, and national security. Their case is reopened on September 19, right after they leave the country. [Vanity Fair, 10/2003] Remarkably, four of the 9/11 hijackers briefly live in the town of Falls Church, Virginia, three blocks from the WAMY office headed by Abdullah bin Laden. [BBC, 11/6/2001]
bullet Saleh Ibn Abdul Rahman Hussayen. He is a prominent Saudi official who is in the same hotel as three of the hijackers the night before 9/11. He leaves on one of the first flights to Saudi Arabia before the FBI can properly interview him about this. [Washington Post, 10/2/2003]
bullet Akberali Moawalla. A Pakistani and business partner of Osama’s brother Yeslam bin Laden. In 2000, a transfer of over $250 million was made from a bank account belonging jointly to Moawalla and Osama bin Laden.(see 2000). [Washington Post, 7/22/2004]
There is a later dispute regarding how thoroughly the Saudis are interviewed before they leave and who approves the flights. Counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke says he agrees to the flights after the FBI assures him none of those on board has connections to terrorism and that it is “a conscious decision with complete review at the highest levels of the State Department and the FBI and the White House.” [US Congress, 9/3/2003]


it seems your article writers are the ones that are misleading / more than Moore
 
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Those are good points, but what about the countless other matters the articles accuse Moore of twisting, like the Congessmen's sons in Iraq and the unlawful editing of newspaper documents?

There are obvious faults in the movie that can't be denied.
 
Most importantly Moore doesn't even mention the reality side of his "so called" health care phenomenon of ideas. In reality, health care involves about a sixth of our national economy, hundreds of government programs, thousands of private insurance plans and hundreds of thousands of health care workers. In his movie he doesn't mention this, he just gives these main ideas: Americans are exploited, insurance companies are bad, politicians are ineffective.

Great ideas Mr. Moore
 
the current health care system? of course i do. to moore's extent, no. i don't believe in universal health care.
 
shart1780 said:
Those are good points, but what about the countless other matters the articles accuse Moore of twisting, like the Congessmen's sons in Iraq and the unlawful editing of newspaper documents?

There are obvious faults in the movie that can't be denied.

I think I started this thread because “Sicko” was being perceived as a departure from his previous style of film making.

If I wrote “Moore’s Sicko is a brilliant and uplifting film”. Would you have responded the same way?

I watched “Columbine” on cable and enjoyed it. I did have some problems with the way he played with the numbers. But I do believe there is a correlation between the numbers of guns in the public’s hands and gun deaths. I own quite a few guns myself.. btw

There are a high number of guns in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I don’t believe it is making anyone in those two countries any safer.

I can not really address Fahrenheit 911. I started to watch it at the movies but I walked out on it. So I can not respond about the Congressman's son. etc.

I had so immersed myself in the whole Iraq debacle that I had seen and read all of the source materials he was using. I do think he did bend and manipulate “facts” for dramatic effect. It did kind of annoy me.

The beginning of ‘Sicko” was the weakest part for me. But then it got better so I did not walk out.

“But this time around, the controversial documentarian seems to be letting the subject matter do the talking, and in the process shows a new maturity.”

I think this film is better than his previous work, you may want to check it out.
 
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Yeah I might check it out. On a lot of points I do actually agree with Moore, it looks like especially from Sicko. But movies like Fahrenheit and Columbine just annoyed me so much. I can admit they were well made and entertaining (well, to a lot of people), but I was just so annoyed by the constant sympathy plays and editing tricks it drove me crazy.

The way he dealt with Heston throughout 9/11 was so deciteful it's not even funny. And then laying the picture of the dead girl in front of Heston's house. Pathetic. Does he think our minds are that simple and easily swayed? Many Moore fans I've talked to go on about how this interview shows how racist Heston is, when in reality he was a huge figure in civil rights for blacks in the 60s. All that stuff just seems so, so ridiculous to me. It's like he's trying to play the pudgy little innocent kid who's trying to get the big bad guys to admit their wrongs and break down and ask for forgiveness right there. His attitude sickens me and makes me laugh at the same time. I can't take one bit of it seriously.

Fahrenheit was even worse. If you just watch the movie it doesn't seem nearly as bad (although I could still barely stand it), but when you actually read the stories behind the making of the film, and then watch the finished cut, it's all so stupid. It's completely unreliable. It baffles me how anyone could take this tripe seriously. Oh wait, I know why. Because they so desperately want to believe what Moore is saying.

The guy is a complete schmuck and I can't stand him at all. Sicko may be a lot better. I know I'll see it eventually, and hopefully change my opinion of Moore a bit.

Here's a Columbine article. Look at the editing for the Hston speeches. It's amazing what this guy get away with. I'm suprised he hasn't been sued for this junk.

http://www.hardylaw.net/Truth_About_Bowling.html
 
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BonoVoxSupastar said:


So what's your solution?

here's a question for you, who i am getting the feeling supports government run health care idea:

think about other government agencies, such as the post office and how long you had to wait in line there, or maybe at the DOL waiting for a new drivers license, or the time it took after Katrina. Is this the type of health coverage you want? This is what will happen w/ universal health care? There will be more suffering, deaths, and of course, higher costs.

Throughout the movie he talks about HMOs. Well, the use of those have decreased drastically b/c they were rejected by employers and patients, and proves that the free market system works, thanks to congressional lobbying.

Regarding your question, this could help:
- require the costs of all healthcare services to be published publicly, so there is competition for insurance.
- increase financial grants and incentives.

those are the big ones that i can think of.
-
 
shart1780 said:

Sicko may be a lot better. I know I'll see it eventually, and hopefully change my opinion of Moore a bit.

I'm glad you're at least open to that. I think it's great that Moore heard the criticism of his previous films and has apparently done it differently this time. That's all you can really ask of a person, and it seems ridiculous to keep hating him for what's already done. Just move on with where he is now. Doesn't mean you have to like him or Sicko, but at least respect the fact that he got that bending the truth to make bigger (and valid, IMO) points or just to be entertaining maybe isn't what people want in a documentary. The Bush administration has had many opportunities to learn from people's criticisms but sadly has been too arrogant to listen and change.
 
struckpx said:


here's a question for you, who i am getting the feeling supports government run health care idea:

think about other government agencies, such as the post office and how long you had to wait in line there, or maybe at the DOL waiting for a new drivers license, or the time it took after Katrina. Is this the type of health coverage you want? This is what will happen w/ universal health care? -

This is a large misconception: that there is no waiting in line when you have privatized healthcare. According to a report published by the CID a couple of years ago, the average wait for a mammogram in New York was a stunning 6 weeks. And that was in both private and public facilities. There are similar wait times for elective surgeries and other non-life saving procedures. I guess the lobby in the US managed to convince the public that you don't wait, you just waltz into the hospital and get services, while the rest of the world dies in lines. What a terrible mischaracterization.
 
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