A belated Labor Day offering from Michael Moore. ;)

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Danospano

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August 29, 2003
Happy Labor Day - Now, Get a Job (A letter from Michael Moore)

Greetings Friends,

For his part, George W. Bush will spend Labor Day doing what he does best ?
not really working. Instead of protecting the country (I'll have much more
to say on that in the coming weeks) or addressing the nation's floundering
economy, he'll be raising money for his re-election campaign in Ohio.

Bush is on pace to raise almost $200 million in time for the Republican
primaries where his only competition will be his own dismal record. In
Minnesota this past Tuesday, Bush raised $1.4 million by giving a 24-minute
speech. That's about $60,000 for each minute of "work." By contrast, the
weekly salary of the average American worker is a staggering $616.

As Ron Eibensteiner, chairman of the Minnesota Republican Party, left the
event in St. Paul, he was met by hundreds of demonstrators. Being the
dignified, freedom-loving, compassionate conservative we all wish we could
be, Eibensteiner leaned over a police barricade toward the protestors and
yelled, "GET A JOB!"

It was a positive, uplifting message to America. The Minnesota Republican
Party isn't going to do anything to turn the economy around, and Bush
hasn't done anything in almost three years in office. The best any of them
can do is yell at people.

In the past year, 700,000 people were added to the list of unemployed. The
number of people out of work for half a year or more is up 28%. Thanks to
"Welfare to Work" (and Bill Clinton), July of 2003 saw 43.8% of the
unemployed lose their state support even though they still could not find a
job?a record high. Since Bush took over the country, roughly 2.5 million
jobs have simply evaporated.

Bush and the Republicans are going to need every cent of that $200,000,000
to campaign against an increasingly angry nation of temps and burger
flippers! In fact, he might need more, which is one good way to explain the
Republican's recent attempt to paint Bush as an 'underdog.'

"Democrats and their allies," Bush's campaign chairman Marc Racicot wrote
to super-rich Republicans, "will have more money to spend attacking the
president during the nomination battle than we will have to defend him."
Obviously Bush and his team have a problem with math that extends beyond
the $400 billion deficit we'll have by the end of this year (and the
projected $6 trillion deficit we will have amassed ten years from now under
Bush's guidance). If you look at the campaign fundraising so far, you see
that Bush has already raised $35 million. The closest Democratic candidate,
John Kerry, doesn't even have half that. Does the Bush campaign know
something we don't about where the Democrats are hiding all that money?

And who has been giving Bush all this money in a time of prolonged economic
downturn? Why, the companies that trade in money, of course! Of the top
twenty contributor's to the Bush campaign, twelve are finance companies.
With more than a year to go until the election, his top contributor,
Merrill Lynch, has already given $282,250. Doesn't it seem just a little
strange that the companies which SHOULD be suffering the most in Bush's
destroyed economy, would not only want to keep Junior around, but then get
together and pump millions into his reelection campaign?

As for the Bush protestors in Minnesota, and the unemployed across the
country, and the millions who only make minimum wage, and the 40 million
who don't have health insurance: if you can't rake in $60,000 a minute ? or
if you can't even manage the $616 weekly American average?there's only one
thing left for you to do this Labor Day: GET A JOB!

Find a temp agency. Go to Wal-Mart. Join the Army (Lord knows we'll be in
Iraq for a while, and that'll be one handsome, steady paycheck).

Or apply for work at the Minnesota Republican Party's office. Here's their
email address: info@mngop.com. Send them your resume and a nice letter
telling them you've decided to take their advice to "GET A JOB"?and you're
coming to work for them!

But whatever you do, you really must quit your whining.

You are scaring the "President."

Yours,

Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
www.michaelmoore.com <http://www.michaelmoore.com/>
 
Gee, that's nice "get a job"... compassionate Conservative, that guy is :up: :rolleyes:

Funny, I finally rented Bowling over the weekend, and it was so thought provoking.

I also went to his web site afterwards, and read that Labor Day piece. Also the bonus chapter of Stupid White Men, about the lighters/matches being allowed on planes :eyebrow: I tried to find some more information re. if that has changed. I hope to God it has. The lists of banned items I found were all different depending upon date, etc.
 
MrsSpringsteen said:
I also went to his web site afterwards, and read that Labor Day piece. Also the bonus chapter of Stupid White Men, about the lighters/matches being allowed on planes :eyebrow: I tried to find some more information re. if that has changed. I hope to God it has. The lists of banned items I found were all different depending upon date, etc.

I haven't seen the extra chapter, so I don't know what you are referencing, but I can post a list of banned items if you want. It would be the official government list.
 
MrsSpringsteen said:

I also went to his web site afterwards, and read that Labor Day piece. Also the bonus chapter of Stupid White Men, about the lighters/matches being allowed on planes :eyebrow: I tried to find some more information re. if that has changed. I hope to God it has. The lists of banned items I found were all different depending upon date, etc.

I've had a pack of matches taken off me at a US airport (NYC).
The guy was really cool about it. They were from a bar/restaurant and he asked if I was keeping the pack as a souvenir, cos if I was he offered to tear out the actual matches and give me back the packet. I wasn't, but I was pretty impressed with the attitude of the security at US airports in general, expecting them (understandably) to be alot more 'cold' then they ever were.
 
Funny thing is, I was just in Mexico, flying out of Cancun this past weekend. Their X ray machines died so they were inspecting carry on luggage by hand.

Interestingly enough, the guy spent 5 minutes leafing through every page of the new Harry Potter book, but when he saw the razor at the top of my cosmetics bag (I totally forgot to put it in the suitcase), he didn't blink an eye.
 
Sorry, I didn't mean for this to overtake the subject of this thread, which certainly is a very important one. Whatever official list there is, it seems the airports might differ in how they enforce it. I rarely fly, so I'm no expert.

Anyway, here's the link to that article, and I'll just leave it at that. Of course this is a bonus chapter to his book, so who knows when it was written

http://www.michaelmoore.com/books-films/stupidwhitemen/onlinechapters/part01.php
 
No big deal Mrs. Bruce......

It is always good to clear false information. I actually work for an airline, and I am required to follow the safety regulations DAILY (we are told of new safety measures at least once a day...often more than once a day).

Here is a link to the TSA Web Site. Click on the link there, and it will pull up an Adobe Acrobat page (five actually) of all the items that are permited/prohibited.

As for Tyler's cooment concering the U.S. Security person (TSA), they will look through books, making sure they are not "cut out" or have any weapons in them (thin razors, etc.). As for the shaving razor...it is an acceptable item.

TSA's mission is to keep the traveling public safe. At the same time...they want to be friendly and non-threatening. They want the public to be comfortable with flying. TSA has put agents through customer service training. Unless you clearly are trying to bring something on board you are not supposed too, you won't have too many problems.
 
I''m gonna get my whole family to send their resumes to the republican party... Dude, I would love to earn thousends a minute... :p
 
November 6, 2003

"Dude" #1, Three Weeks in a Row, on New York Times Bestseller List

I'm back home after visiting 39 cities in 23 days on my book tour and I want to thank everyone who came by to see me. It was our biggest tour yet, with five to ten thousand people a night filling basketball arenas and county fair grounds across the country. In many cities there were thousands more of you who couldn't get in (4,000 people pounding on the door in Baltimore was quite a sight!). Next time we do the football stadiums!

The book went immediately to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. And it is still at #1 after three weeks! It is also #1 in the L.A. Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle and most other lists in the country.

It took one year for "Stupid White Men" to sell a million copies in the United States. It took "Dude, Where's My Country?" just three weeks. That should give you some indication of the level of concern/frustration/anger in the country right now over what the Bush administration is up to.

All over America, this is what I saw on the tour: Tens of thousands of average Americans who don't like their commander-in-chief lying to them in order to start a war. Not a night went by where I didn't have parents or siblings of soldiers in Iraq coming up to me, many of them in tears, pleading with me to "do something" to help bring their loved ones home from this war without end. It was heart-wrenching, and I never knew quite what to say except to tell them that they were not alone and that all of us are doing our best to get rid of George W. Bush. But that's a year away. How many more of our children will be sent to their deaths for another no-bid multi-billion dollar Halliburton contract in the next 12 months?

What was amazing to me on this tour was that some of the biggest and most enthusiastic crowds were in hard-core Republican areas like Stockton, California and Wooster, Ohio. I get it when 13,000 show up and try to squeeze in as they did at Berkeley's Greek Theatre. But when five or six thousand show up in places like Pullman, Washington (on the Idaho border) or Ypsilanti, Michigan, I'm convinced that there has been a shift, a real shift, in public opinion, and the only question now is what are WE going to do?

.....
 
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