"Well, going quietly to Cannes, I guess, was not to be. For some strange reason, on May 2nd the Bush administration initiated an action against me over how I obtained some of the content they believe is in my film. As none of them have actually seen the film (or so I hope!), they decided, unlike with "Fahrenheit 9/11," not to wait until the film was out of the gate and too far down the road to begin their attack." --Michael Moore today.
CANNES, FRANCE--Considering the real story tomorrow at the film festival will be Michael Moore's "Sicko," we're getting a lot of truly inane stories already, starting with the news that Jerry Seinfeld has a movie with people in bee-suits in it. Then today, we're hearing that--gasp!--Pamela Anderson is getting booed by the paparazzi there! My God, the gall! Next to a captioned photo of actor Dean Hamilton looking at her fake-tits, the article...I'm sorry, it doesn't constitute an article, it's crapulence. What's next? A headline stating, "A bum farts in the direction of Jerry Lewis"? SACRE BLUE!!!!
In a Felliniesque-aside, the paparazzi were pissed that she was late for the shoot, then only stayed for a few-minutes. OK, granted that these folks are just doing their jobs taking the Michigan bimbo's photo, but I'll give her some credit: she was late and didn't stay long because she wanted to be with her kids first. That's admirable. What isn't admirable is AP using this non-story to downplay the explosion coming tomorrow with Moore's documentary on the broken American health care system.
You can see those tentacles of power pulling all the meaning out of the coverage. This week had an interview between Moore and Entertainment Weekly, with a stunning first question (stunning in its possible credulity):
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So what makes you think there's a problem with our health care system?
MICHAEL MOORE: [laughs hard] I said to the crew on the first day, ''Let's not insult the audience by telling them that the health care system is broken. Let's start with the assumption that people know it. What kind of film would we make then?'' (EW, 05.15.2007)
I don't usually bother naming journalists who reported on and authored a piece, but in this case it's appropriate. If Daniel Fierman is kidding, my bad, but what universe does this perspective come from? Could anyone ask this question in any seriousness without seeming completely out-of-touch and/or daft? I contend that there will be an army of these shills telling all of us in the United States that nothing is wrong with our current health care system at all--every one of them having a connection to that system for a living in some form (shills gotta eat, unfortunately).
Mr. Fierman should really hope he was kidding, because if he's not, we're all really in much bigger trouble than we imagined. But there really are bourgeois-types who are this sheltered. They're stuck in their own bubble, just like the president. The president's father famously walked into a grocery store through the wrong door during the 1992 campaign, mainly because he had never bought groceries for himself. It's possible he had never been in one before that moment since the help usually did it. People like this should be in office? How can they know the needs of anyone?
Meanwhile--not back at the ranch in Crawford--Michael Moore has filed a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request on the Treasury Department's OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control ) investigation into his trip to Cuba with ailing 9/11 first-responders earlier this year. E! online repeats most of the boring attacks in their article on this request, spending most of the piece simply bashing Moore, but whoever said they were journalists was probably drunk when they said it.
So despite the fact that Sicko premieres Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival, where Fahrenheit 911 won the Palme d'Or three years ago, the storm clouds are gathering in Washington. [Ed.--my emphasis, sort of!] ..."They started this," Moore said, "and I think that somehow by making some sort of example of me, that helps them with a certain community in terms of voters." The leftwinger also sent a duplicate copy of Sicko to a "safe house" outside of the United States to ensure that he wouldn't have a problem providing the Cannes fest with his film. (E! online, 05.17.2007)
You know, if Natalie Finn--the author of this piece--wants to be a real prostitute, she should have called up Deborah Jeane Palfrey to pay her rent. So, lady, what are these "storm clouds gathering in Washington" exactly? We know what past fines have been, and that a stiff one will be paid immediately by the Weinsteins if it's excessive. That's the worst-case scenario here, and we can safely assume the production is insured too. Another thing that makes this slanting so obvious is that Moore can appeal this. What you and our scumbag president want is to smear Moore with a brush that makes him appear to have broken-the-law. It's baseless.
There's no reason to think Michael Moore should be fined more than a couple thousand dollars personally, considering the New York Yankees just paid $70,000 in fines to the Treasury Department. They must have taken a lot of players on that one, and it's impossible to mistake their trip for anything except business. Considering Michael Moore was filming a documentary, he's still protected under existing laws governing travel to Cuba under the First Amendment. It's too-bad for the cultural managers that the Bush administration botched the whole program--the whole approach. Now, they have even more damage control to contend with.
Statements in articles like Finn's and Fierman could be nothing, or they could be a propaganda campaign that might even be funded with our taxes. This could be the reason for Moore's FOIA. We'll see. Ignore the white-out, the coverage will be on the internet regardless. I think it's high-time Mr. Moore began some libel suits, starting with former-Senator Thompson. It's a safe bet that what we're witnessing are the cheap-shots of Big Pharma, the HMOs, and the rest of our corrupt health care industry in a nation that refuses to recognize basic human rights. This is life in a plutocracy where money rules, and where even hints at the truth are forbidden. This is dehumanization, the inhuman-side of our society.
AP Today, reporting a lot of unimportant bullshit: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070518/ap_on_en_mo/people_pamela_anderson
Entertainment Weakly, asking stupid questions? http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20038926,00.html
E! online, vomiting lies & grotesque bias, 05.17.2007: http://news.yahoo.com/s/eonline/20070517/en_celeb_eo/c8f3b3f48e5f_42b8_b68b_71eb6f0f0a90
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