This Looks Like Fun

Rep. Baron Hill, international movie star! I’m sure our former Rep., the anti-government Republican Mr. Sodrel will be using this movie in his 2010 attack ads against Hill. Not to mention this weekend’s town hall meeting in Bloomington:

YouTube

Michael Moore: the left’s answer to Rush “Gasbag” Limbaugh. Pass.

Just what the reality-based community needs: a guy so strident and off-hand he can make sound, objective fact seem suspect.

@FlyingChainSaw: No joke. If “Sicko” had been made by someone less controversial, the message that having insurance will not protect you might have gotten through to at least some of these people.

Somewhat related:

That was when Bunker pulled up to the wharf in a pickup truck and confronted Young and Weston Ames, Young’s sternman—and when Janan Miller stepped out from behind a stack of lobster traps and leveled a 12-gauge shotgun at Young and Ames, according to investigators’ reports.

When Ames tried to push the shotgun barrel away, Bunker pulled a pistol from his holster and fired at him, police said. He missed.

…

Bunker said he shot in self-defense, claiming he had been threatened in the previous days and that he pulled his gun because he feared that he and his daughter were going to be shot when Ames grabbed for the shotgun.

“When there’s a lot of verbal threatening going on and people threatening to kill you or threatening to beat you up or threatening to kill your family, I feel you better pay attention to make sure they ain’t going do it,” Bunker said in an interview with The Associated Press.

If anybody needed a fine example of how fucked up people are here in the US, this is it. Shooting somebody in self defense after STARTING the confrontation by pulling a shotgun – priceless.

@Mistress Cynica: Oh, I know. I groaned when I heard the announcement and didn’t see the film. Worst thing that could have happened to the reform proponents’ side. Had a documentary maker framed it in conventional narrative, say, the Remote Area Medical project, getting inside one of its temporary encampments in the US, more of the essential messages like that would have been picked up by other writers and documentary makers. Big and loud and rude only works when the details don’t matter, and is a real disservice when the subject is complex.

@FlyingChainSaw and Mistress Cynica: It pains me to think that if my hero Bill Moyers and his upright progressive Baptist self had produced/directed “Sicko” we would all have universal health care with the soft East Texas cadence quoting Bible verses to us of “who would Jesus insure*?”

*pronounced in the true Tex-ass style of “INNNN-shure” as my buddy Jamie can attest. Hell, I still say it that way decades after leaving the Lone Star State.

@SanFranLefty: Moyers would just as likely have been dismissed as a partisan as well but the reportage would have been picked up and rerun in a lot more places. And who knows what very useful and sober sources might have said no thank you to helping Moore just out of disdain for his style of advocacy.