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Deena
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| You certainly avoided mentioning Bush I though... |
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Mon Dec 03, 2007 12:50 pm |
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twotap
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Nitpicker.  Actually I have attempted put Bush 1 out of my memory since the idiotic things he did allowed Slick to win the whitehouse. Reagan should have given George a swift kick in the ass for screwing things up so badly much like junior has done. And I am not referring to killing as many taliban,or whatever name the terrorists are using nowdays. |
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Mon Dec 03, 2007 12:57 pm |
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Ryan Eashoo
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Mr. Smith did not help Flint that is for sure!
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_________________
Flint Michigan Resident, Tax Payer, Flint Nutt - Local REALTOR - Activist. www.FlintTown.com |
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Mon Dec 03, 2007 2:43 pm |
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Ryan Eashoo
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Gosh Shawn you are too harsh, let us be judged on those we help, maybe he helped over 70,000 move on with their lifes and do good things... Kill Rabbits, Sell Amway and even move to warmer climates!!
quote:
Shawn Chittle schreef:
Friday, November 30, 2007
Today, a permanent pink slip was issued.
Roger Smith is in a dark and quiet room. He looks around and there's no one there.
"Hello...." he says. "Roger Smith, Chairman of General Motors, remember me? I died today, so I'm coming up to enjoy the afterlife."
He looks around. There's no one. "I wonder where everybody went?" he ponders. Then he notices, in the distance, what looks like the pearly gates. He walks over and sees they are rusted shut, and there is some faded lettering on the top. It's covered in dust and barely legible. He reaches up and wipes the dust away with the edge of his sleeve to reveal the letters...
F-L-I-N-T
...everyone is gone. He's all alone. He furiously rattles the gates, trying to pry them open. "Hey, let me in!" he screams. "You're not being fair!" "Is this some kind of a joke?"
The gates are not opening.
There is no one there to open them.
There he sits, locked outside. He falls to the ground, sobbing. "What's going on here?" he cries. "Why did they close heaven for no reason? Where is everybody at?"
They are where they're supposed to be at, Roger. The problem is, you're not where you think
you're
at.
Welcome... to eternity.
http://thestarrymessenger.blogspot.com/2007/11/today-in-place-between-heaven-and-hell.html
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Flint Michigan Resident, Tax Payer, Flint Nutt - Local REALTOR - Activist. www.FlintTown.com |
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Mon Dec 03, 2007 2:58 pm |
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Demeralda
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quote:
twotap schreef:
Well anytime you have someone heading off to a place like Cuba and declaring how great the folks there have it as compared to the US I gotta say it appears a little anti American to me. Of course old James Earl Carter did the same so maybe Mikey was just following his lead. I wonder if he and Jimmy will head there when they are in real need of some quality healthcare, Heres hoping.
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smug, a liar, and an idiot.
my feelings about Mike exactly.
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Real liberals should despise Bill Clinton
Maybe they should but they sure dont and they are pulling out all the stops to get his sorry ass back in the Whitehouse.
Did you even see the movie? He didn't go to Cuba to say how great they have it. He actually tried to get the Veterans care at Guantanamo.
Your feelings about Mike exactly? I don't see how they compare. Mike isn't getting thousands of young men killed with his "lies". Mike's smugness isn't what let the world's most feared terrorist escape. And Mike's idiocy didn't march us to the brink of recession.
Not even in the same league.
AND on a different note: VW workers have been better paid that GM's all along |
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Mon Dec 03, 2007 4:06 pm |
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twotap
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[quote]Mike isn't getting thousands of young men killed with his "lies".
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Well you are correct there that would be the goal of the terrorists.
Mike's smugness isn't what let the world's most feared terrorist escape.
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Once again correct that would have been slick Willies screwup, had him half a dozen times let him go
I guess its good you are so in with Fat Mike lots of folks are. Not many from Flint though.
By the way it appears that I have been aware of the goings on of Mike long before you started paying attention to him.  |
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Mon Dec 03, 2007 5:42 pm |
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Dave Starr
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| I'm still trying to figure out what Mike has for FOR his "beloved Flint", as opposed to what he's done TO it. |
_________________
I used to care, but I take a pill for that now.
Pushing buttons sure can be fun.
When a lion wants to go somewhere, he doesn’t worry about how many hyenas are in the way.
Paddle faster, I hear banjos. |
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Mon Dec 03, 2007 5:55 pm |
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twotap
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Old Mike does have his legions along with his fans on this forum their are these folks also.
Michael Moore?
National Review, August 23, 2004
* Did you know that Fidel Castro really, really likes Michael Moore? Not content simply to screen Fahrenheit 9/11 throughout Cuba--where the theaters had been packed for a week--Castro sought an even wider audience for the film. On July 29, the dictator broadcast the movie in prime time on Cuban television to ensure that it reached each and every Cuban home.
In a speech earlier that week, Castro had paid tribute to Moore's literary masterpiece, Stupid White Men, and had displayed his own clinical skills, conjecturing that President Bush's "fevered and fundamentalist mind" derives from his past drinking problems. El Jefe is far from alone in his admiration of Moore and his film. He joins Hezbollah, which offered to help distribute Fahrenheit 9/11 in the Middle East, and, of course, major powers in our own Democratic party: Terry McAuliffe, Tom Daschle, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. See how Bush unites people? |
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Mon Dec 03, 2007 6:09 pm |
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twotap
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Some more Mikey trivia.
You might have read the stories about filmmaker Michael Moore taking ailing workers from Ground Zero in Manhattan to Cuba for free medical treatments. According to reports, he filmed the trip for a new movie that bashes America for not having government-provided health care.
Now, I have no expectation that Moore is going to tell the truth about Cuba or health care. I defend his right to do what he does, but Moore’s talent for clever falsehoods has been too well documented. Simply calling his movies documentaries rather than works of fiction, I think, may be the biggest fiction of all.
While this PR stunt has obviously been successful — here I am talking about it — Moore’s a piker compared to Fidel Castro and his regime. Moore just parrots the story they created — one of the most successful public relations coups in history. This is the story of free, high quality Cuban health care.
The truth is that Cuban medical care has never recovered from Castro’s takeover — when the country’s health care ranked among the world’s best. He won the support of the Cuban people by promising to replace Batista’s dictatorship with free elections, and to end corruption. Once in power, though, he made himself dictator and instituted Soviet-style Communism. Cubans not only failed to regain their democratic rights, their economy plunged into centrally planned poverty.
As many as half of Cuba’s doctors fled almost immediately — and defections continue to this day. Castro won’t allow observers in to monitor his nation’s true state, but defectors tell us that many Cubans live with permanent malnutrition and long waits for even basic medical services. Many treatments we take for granted aren’t available at all — except to the Communist elite or foreigners with dollars.
For them, Castro keeps “show” clinics equipped with the best medicines and technologies available. It was almost certainly one of these that Moore went to, if the stories in the NY Post and The Daily News are true.
Nothing about this story inspires doubt, though. Elements in Hollywood have been infatuated with the Cuban commander for years. It always leaves me shaking my head when I read about some big-time actor or director going to Cuba and gushing all over Castro. And, regular as rain, they bring up the health care myth when they come home.
What is it that leads people to value theoretically “free” health care, even when it’s lousy or nonexistent, over a free society that actually delivers health care? You might have to deal with creditors after you go to the emergency ward in America, but no one is denied medical care here. I guarantee even the poorest Americans are getting far better medical services than many Cubans.
According to Forbes magazine, by the way, Castro is now personally worth approximately $900 million. So when he desperately needed medical treatment recently, he could afford to fly a Spanish surgeon, with equipment, on a chartered jet to Cuba. What does that say about free Cuban health care?
The other thing that irks me about Moore and his cohort in Hollywood is their complete lack of sympathy for fellow artists persecuted for opposing the Castro regime. Pro-democracy activists are routinely threatened and imprisoned, but Castro remains a hero to many here. According to human rights organizations, these prisoners of conscience are often beaten and denied medical treatment, sanitation or even adequate nutrition.
If Moore wants a subject for a real documentary, I would suggest looking into the life of Cuban painter and award-winning documentarian Nicolás Guillén Landrián. He was denied the right to practice his art for using the Beatles’ song, “The Fool on the Hill,” as background music behind footage of Castro climbing a mountain. Later, he was given plenty of free Cuban health care when he was confined for years in a “mental institution” and given devastating, repeated electroshock “treatments.”
There are many other artists and activists who have enjoyed similar treatment. I suspect we’ll see movies with sympathetic portrayals of terrorists held in Guantanamo before we ever hear about the torture of true Cuban heroes. Even Andy Garcia’s brilliant fictionalized movie about the real Cuban experience, “The Lost City,” was given the Hollywood silent treatment. My bet, though, is that we’ll hear lots about how Michael Moore showed that Cuba’s socialized medicine is better than ours.
So go ahead and start working on the Oscar speech, Michael. |
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Mon Dec 03, 2007 6:17 pm |
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FlintConservative
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I say again, from MTV, that bastion of right wing extremism:
"'Sicko': Heavily Doctored, By Kurt Loder
Is Michael Moore's prescription worse than the disease?
Del.icio.us Digg Newsvine Send to Friend Print You Tell Us
Michael Moore may see himself as working in the tradition of such crusading muckrakers of the last century as Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair — writers whose dedication to exposing corruption and social injustices played a part in sparking much-needed reforms. In his new movie, "Sicko," Moore focuses on the U.S. health-care industry — a juicy target — and he casts a shocking light on some of the people it's failed.
There's a man who mangled two of his fingers with a power saw and learned that it would cost $12,000 to save one of them, but $60,000 to save the other. He had no health insurance and could only scrape together enough money to salvage the $12,000 finger.
There's a woman whose husband was prescribed new drugs to combat his cancer, but couldn't get their insurance company to pay for them because the drugs were experimental. Her husband died.
Then there's a woman who made an emergency trip to a hospital for treatment and subsequently learned her insurance company wouldn't pay for the ambulance that took her there — because it hadn't been "pre-approved." And there's a middle-aged couple — a man, who suffered three heart attacks, and his wife, who developed cancer — who were bankrupted by the cost of co-payments and other expenses not covered by their insurance, and have now been forced to move into a cramped, dismal room in the home of a resentful son. There's also a 79-year-old man who has to continue working a menial job because Medicare won't cover the cost of all the medications he needs.
Moore does a real service in bringing these stories to light — some of them are horrifying, and then infuriating. One giant health-maintenance organization, Kaiser Permanente, is so persuasively lambasted in the movie that, on the basis of what we're told, we want to burst into the company's executive suites and make a mass citizen's arrest. This is the sort of thing good muckrakers are supposed to do.
Unfortunately, Moore is also a con man of a very brazen sort, and never more so than in this film. His cherry-picked facts, manipulative interviews (with lingering close-ups of distraught people breaking down in tears) and blithe assertions (how does he know 18,000* people will die this year because they have no health insurance?) are so stacked that you can feel his whole argument sliding sideways as the picture unspools. The American health-care system is in urgent need of reform, no question. Some 47 million people are uninsured (although many are only temporarily so, being either in-between jobs or young enough not to feel a pressing need to buy health insurance). There are a number of proposals as to what might be done to correct this situation. Moore has no use for any of them, save one.
As a proud socialist, the director appears to feel that there are few problems in life that can't be solved by government regulation (that would be the same government that's already given us the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Motor Vehicles). In the case of health care, though, Americans have never been keen on socialized medicine. In 1993, when one of Moore's heroes, Hillary Clinton (he actually blurts out the word "sexy!" in describing her in the movie), tried to create a government-controlled health care system, her failed attempt to do so helped deliver the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives into Republican control for the next dozen years. Moore still looks upon Clinton's plan as a grand idea, one that Americans, being not very bright, unwisely rejected. (He may be having second thoughts about Hillary herself, though: In the movie he heavily emphasizes the fact that, among politicians, she accepts the second-largest amount of political money from the health care industry.)
The problem with American health care, Moore argues, is that people are charged money to avail themselves of it. In other countries, like Canada, France and Britain, health systems are far superior — and they're free. He takes us to these countries to see a few clean, efficient hospitals, where treatment is quick and caring; and to meet a few doctors, who are delighted with their government-regulated salaries; and to listen to patients express their beaming happiness with a socialized health system. It sounds great. As one patient in a British hospital run by the country's National Health Service says, "No one pays. It's all on the NHS. It's not America."
That last statement is even truer than you'd know from watching "Sicko." In the case of Canada — which Moore, like many other political activists, holds up as a utopian ideal of benevolent health-care regulation — a very different picture is conveyed by a short 2005 documentary called "Dead Meat," by Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg. These two filmmakers talked to a number of Canadians of a kind that Moore's movie would have you believe don't exist:
A 52-year-old woman in Calgary recalls being in severe need of joint-replacement surgery after the cartilage in her knee wore out. She was put on a wait list and wound up waiting 16 months for the surgery. Her pain was so excruciating, she says, that she was prescribed large doses of Oxycontin, and soon became addicted. After finally getting her operation, she was put on another wait list — this time for drug rehab.
A man tells about his mother waiting two years for life-saving cancer surgery — and then twice having her surgical appointments canceled. She was still waiting when she died.
A man in critical need of neck surgery plays a voicemail message from a doctor he'd contacted: "As of today," she says, "it's a two-year wait-list to see me for an initial consultation." Later, when the man and his wife both needed hip-replacement surgery and grew exasperated after spending two years on a waiting list, they finally mortgaged their home and flew to Belgium to have the operations done there, with no more waiting.
Rick Baker, the owner of a Toronto company called Timely Medical Alternatives, specializes in transporting Canadians who don't want to wait for medical care to Buffalo, New York, two hours away, where they won't have to. Baker's business is apparently thriving.
And Dr. Brian Day, now the president of the Canadian Medical Association, muses about the bizarre distortions created by a law that prohibits Canadians from paying for even urgently-needed medical treatments, or from obtaining private health insurance. "It's legal to buy health insurance for your pets," Day says, "but illegal to buy health insurance for yourself." (Even more pointedly, Day was quoted in the Wall Street Journal this week as saying, "This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years.")
Actually, this aspect of the Canadian health-care system is changing. In 2005, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled in favor of a man who had filed suit in Quebec over being kept on an interminable waiting list for treatment. In striking down the government health care monopoly in that province, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin said, "Access to a waiting list is not access to health care." Now a similar suit has been filed in Ontario.
What's the problem with government health systems? Moore's movie doesn't ask that question, although it does unintentionally provide an answer. When governments attempt to regulate the balance between a limited supply of health care and an unlimited demand for it they're inevitably forced to ration treatment. This is certainly the situation in Britain. Writing in the Chicago Tribune this week, Helen Evans, a 20-year veteran of the country's National Health Service and now the director of a London-based group called Nurses for Reform, said that nearly 1 million Britons are currently on waiting lists for medical care — and another 200,000 are waiting to get on waiting lists. Evans also says the NHS cancels about 100,000 operations each year because of shortages of various sorts. Last March, the BBC reported on the results of a Healthcare Commission poll of 128,000 NHS workers: two thirds of them said they "would not be happy" to be patients in their own hospitals. James Christopher, the film critic of the Times of London, thinks he knows why. After marveling at Moore's rosy view of the British health care system in "Sicko," Christopher wrote, "What he hasn't done is lie in a corridor all night at the Royal Free [Hospital] watching his severed toe disintegrate in a plastic cup of melted ice. I have." Last month, the Associated Press reported that Gordon Brown — just installed this week as Britain's new prime minister — had promised to inaugurate "sweeping domestic reforms" to, among other things, "improve health care."
Moore's most ardent enthusiasm is reserved for the French health care system, which he portrays as the crowning glory of a Gallic lifestyle far superior to our own. The French! They work only 35 hours a week, by law. They get at least five weeks' vacation every year. Their health care is free, and they can take an unlimited number of sick days. It is here that Moore shoots himself in the foot. He introduces us to a young man who's reached the end of three months of paid sick leave and is asked by his doctor if he's finally ready to return to work. No, not yet, he says. So the doctor gives him another three months of paid leave — and the young man immediately decamps for the South of France, where we see him lounging on the sunny Riviera, chatting up babes and generally enjoying what would be for most people a very expensive vacation. Moore apparently expects us to witness this dumbfounding spectacle and ask why we can't have such a great health care system, too. I think a more common response would be, how can any country afford such economic insanity?
As it turns out, France can't. In 2004, French Health Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy told a government commission, "Our health system has gone mad. Profound reforms are urgent." Agence France-Presse recently reported that the French health-care system is running a deficit of $2.7 billion. And in the French presidential election in May, voters in surprising numbers rejected the Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, who had promised actually to raise some health benefits, and elected instead the center-right politician Nicolas Sarkozy, who, according to Agence France-Presse again, "plans to move fast to overhaul the economy, with the deficit-ridden health care system a primary target." Possibly Sarkozy should first consult with Michael Moore. After all, the tax-stoked French health care system may be expensive, but at least it's "free."
Having driven his bring-on-government-health care argument into a ditch outside of Paris, Moore next pilots it right off a cliff and into the Caribbean on the final stop on his tour: Cuba. Here it must also be said that the director performs a valuable service. He rounds up a group of 9/11 rescue workers — firefighters and selfless volunteers — who risked their lives and ruined their health in the aftermath of the New York terrorist attacks. These people — there's no other way of putting it — have been screwed, mainly by the politicians who were at such photo-op pains to praise them at the time. (This makes Moore's faith in government medical compassion seem all the more inexplicable.) These people's lives have been devastated — wracked by chronic illnesses, some can no longer hold down jobs and none can afford to buy the various expensive medicines they need. Moore does them an admirable service by bringing their plight before a large audience.
However, there's never a moment when we doubt that he's also using these people as props in his film, and as talking points in his agenda. Renting some boats, he leads them all off to Cuba. Upon arrival they stop briefly outside the American military enclave on Guantanamo Bay so that Moore can have himself filmed begging, through a bullhorn, for some of the free, top-notch medical care that's currently being lavished on the detainees there. Having no luck, he then moves on to Cuba proper.
Fidel Castro's island dictatorship, now in its 40th year of being listed as a human-rights violator by Amnesty International, is here depicted as a balmy paradise not unlike the Iraq of Saddam Hussein that Moore showed us in his earlier film, "Fahrenheit 9/11." He and his charges make their way — their pre-arranged way, if it need be said — to a state-of-the-art hospital where they receive a picturesquely warm welcome. In a voiceover, Moore, shown beaming at his little band of visitors, says he told the Cuban doctors to "give them the same care they'd give Cuban citizens." Then he adds, dramatically: "And they did."
If Moore really believes this, he may be a greater fool than even his most feverish detractors claim him to be. Nevertheless, medical care is provided to the visiting Americans, and it is indeed excellent. Cuba is in fact the site of some world-class medical facilities (surprising in a country that, as Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar noted in the Los Angeles Times last month, "imprisoned a doctor in the late 1990s for speaking out against government failure to respond to an epidemic of a mosquito-borne virus"). What Moore doesn't mention is the flourishing Cuban industry of "health tourism" — a system in which foreigners (including self-admitted multimillionaire film directors and, of course, government bigwigs) who are willing to pay cash for anything from brain-surgery to dental work can purchase a level of treatment that's unavailable to the majority of Cubans with no hard currency at their disposal. The Cuban American National Foundation (admittedly a group with no love for the Castro regime) calls this "medical apartheid." And in a 2004 article in Canada's National Post, writer Isabel Vincent quoted a dissident Cuban neurosurgeon, Doctor Hilda Molina, as saying, "Cubans should be treated the same as foreigners. Cubans have less rights in their own country than foreigners who visit here."
As the Caribbean sun sank down on Moore's breathtakingly meretricious movie, I couldn't help recalling that when Fidel Castro became gravely ill last year, he didn't put himself in the hands of a Cuban surgeon. No. Instead, he had a specialist flown in — from Spain.
* The figure cited in the original posting of this review — 18 million — was radically incorrect."
http://www.mtv.com/movies/news/articles/1563758/story.jhtml |
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Mon Dec 03, 2007 7:17 pm |
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twotap
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| MTV, holy cow maybe Mike should try making a few gangbanger rapping videos. Cant ya picture him hat sideways, big baggy pants, pointing a Glock upside down at the camera. That should get him on the right track with MTV. He must have done something to piss off them MTV big wigs to slam old Mikey like that. |
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Mon Dec 03, 2007 7:37 pm |
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00SL2
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On NAFTA:
Demeralda: "Real liberals should despise Bill Clinton -- NAFTA was the beginning of the end, and I don't see how anyone could blame Bush for that, even though I hate his guts."
Deena: "NAFTA was Bush 1."
twotap: "United States President Bill Clinton acknowledges applause after signing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Congress approved NAFTA in 1993."
Deena: "http://www.epa.gov/history/topics/economy/01.htm" which is the Statement on the North American Free Trade Agreement by William K.Reilly[Statement - August 13, 1992]. Excerpt: "Yesterday President Bush, Ambassador Carla Hills, and the governments of Canada and Mexico announced the completion of negotiations for a North American Free Trade Agreement. Once this agreement is ratified by all parties . . . ."
Accessed: December 3, 2007
__________________________________________________________________
GeorgeW. Bush, January 20, 2001 to (Term expires January 20, 1989)
William J. Clinton, January 20, 1993 to January 20, 2001
George H.W. Bush, January 20, 1989 to January 20, 1993
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States
Accessed: December 3, 2007
___________________________________________________________________
Excerpt from:
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
September 28, 2007
Duty Elimination for Certain Goods of Mexico Under the North American Free Trade Agreement
A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America
1. On December 17, 1992, the Governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States of America entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The NAFTA was approved by the Congress in section 101(a) of the North American Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act (Public Law 103-182) (the "NAFTA Implementation Act") (19 U.S.C. 3311(a)) and was implemented with respect to the United States by Presidential Proclamation 6641 of December 15, 1993.
* * * * *
Source: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/09/20070928-7.html
Accessed: December 3, 2007 |
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Mon Dec 03, 2007 8:47 pm |
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