Tim Blair

Hate to break it to you Tim, but that's Barnes & Noble's standard discount for bestsellers. Or were you joking? If so, too subtle for me.

I think B&N usually slaps various discounts on new books & bestsellers, so I wouldn't take a 30% off sticker as indicating much. I believe they had the Harry Potter books at 30% off when they were first released.

The real measure is when they appear in the Bargain Books section....

Do Michael Moore fans even read?

Do Michael Moore fans ever read? Has to be an oxymoron or two there!

it's raining here in ny now tim. couldn't you have at least brought us some nicer weather? and if you happen to get downtown, give a jingle.

I had turkey salad for lunch. Here's the beauty part: I made it myself. Wife bought a turkey yesterday and after roasting it, I made broth with the carcass, then picked over the carcass and got about a 1/2-pound of meat. Not something you'd normally want to eat, kind of dog-foody, but a little mayo, a little relish, a little celery, and it actually came out quite good. I guess you could do the same with kibble, but hey, I enjoyed it.

It's the great travelling lunch ilk.

Here's hoping that Tim's broadsheet friend proves right, and Bush wins by a landslide. Just to make sure, my donation to the Howard Dean campaign is in the mail.

The big story is not that Bush will win in a landslide. The big story is by the big margin that Republicans get for both the house and senate. The dems are toast there as well.

Hopefully Australia is next to get a two-house majority. Is it just me, or does it bother anyone else that Australia is effectively governed by a crackpot ex-One Nation Queenslander, Meg Lees, Brian Harradine and somebody else who I can't remember?

Michael Moore was "lecturing" at the People's Republic of Berkeley, CA weekend before last. Strangely enough, the East Bay was hit by a "swarm" of small earthquakes (in the 3ish range) at the same time that Moore was in town.

Rumbling on the East Bay's numerous faults? Or Michael Moore stampeding several times toward the East Bay's nearest Krispy Kreme Donut Shop?

You decide.

Too fucking right it bithers other people ilibcc. Queensland can run with a unicameral system, as does the NT and all local government - why not the Nation? Would save a shed load on parliamentary expenses and the guvernment of the day could do exactly what it was elected to do - make decisions and carry them out. Those decisions are reviewed regularly by the voting public.

Nnd if we are not going to get rid of the Senate then change the way the idle gits are voted in. The current system is bullshit. It should be preferrential like the house of reps not proportional so the crack pots get the balance of power.

ilibcc, it bithers me too, to see Senate crackpots like Bob Brown and Merry Kettle (that it'd be Ma and Pa Kettle) hogging the limelight during Bush's address and claiming to be the moral conscience of the nation. I didn't elect them and they don't speak for me. They are so full of their own self-importance that they don't realise how offensive their posturing on behalf of the Aussie supporters of terrorism are to most Australians.

Thanks Freddyboy. I've given up the use of bother, in favour of bither, for the month of Ramadan.

Bither, bother, buther, it doesn't matter it just fucks me off no end to see some bunch of backwoodsmen stalling legislation for months on end and holding the country to ransom while they try to cut a deal on some totally unrelated piece of legislation. It shouldn't annoy me so much, my great grandfather was an Irish horse trader, but it just does.

Maybe the fact that thousands of small business manhours are lost every week due to the complex GST compliance statements introduced thanks to the Australian Democrats holding the balance of power in the Senate has something to do with it.

Ilibbc, I am going to take that last statement as the ittle, ittle bit of mouth-froth you need to spit out before whining on about the importance of xtianity and golden retrievers.

Of course your mate wants to stay anonymous. When all 50 states come in with 51% or more for Dubya he is going to look rather sheepish in his lowly estimates. With the People's Republic of California falling and even the old lefty stalwart Hawaii under a Republican governor for the first time anyone can remember, the basket weavers and assorted other fruitcakes will have to beat a hasty retreat to seek asylum in Canada in November 2004.

And then Bush will get even more obnoxious and annoying? Good god.

Did Michael Moore not ever recognise the irony in calling his book "STUPID WHITE MEN..." and putting a very large picture of himself on front of the cover?

I've always found that very hard to ignore.

Did Michael Moore not ever recognise the irony in calling his book "STUPID WHITE MEN..." and putting a very large picture of himself on front of the cover?

I've always found that very hard to ignore.

Only one obesity joke? You hicks are dropping the ball.
I remember when Mike Moore relevance envy pieces posted here would sucker a range of primary school style "tubby" gags from ya'all.

Richard,
With Michael,like most blinkered lefties, I-R-O-N-Y is a one-way street with no U turns possible. I'm sure that he feels very noble in his pursuit of outing the REAL "axis of evil".

Sadly, that leaves absolutely no time for self reflection. It's foreign concept to his ilk, in my experience.

Welcome to NYC! Folks in my Upper-East-Side zip code love Dubya and love Aussies! In fact, we've produced more cash for Dubya than any other zip code in the U.S. This shouldn't be surprizing, since we saw jihadists kill 3,000 of our neighbors one day, but we DO have more than our fair share of idiots in this town ... that or the folks on the Upper West Side were having TV transmission problems on 9/11, 'cause they act like nothing happened.

ANY-hoo, like your contact said, Dubya'll carry 45 states or more, no worries!

RE: Michael More -- oops -- Moore

www.bowlingfortruth.com

RE: Michael Moore 2

Moore's being sued.

I love it ... now if only the Academy would strip his fict-umetary of its award!

Why so scathing about his profit margin? He's not the first lousy writer to make a packet, just look at Ann "Treason" Coulter.

I don't believe he ever said he was against getting rich. Rather he rails against perceived abuse of power of the wealthy.

Why does the loony right always take umbrage when the working class dare to make it big? Talk about 'class envy'. Haven't seen any books by Mr Cut and Paste on the best-seller list. But i can venture some titles:

"What I did on My Holidays"

"How to use your internet connection to pretend you do a lot of research"

"Blogging for blowhards"

"Iraq: the untrue story"

"Why does the loony right always take umbrage when the working class dare to make it big?"

Gosh, where to begin? First, Michael Moore is not a member of any "working class." I'm not really sure what a "working class" is, but let's just call it a certain group consisting of people who work for a wage. Moore doesn't do this. If we were to define it as a group of people who do something very difficult that requires specialized training in a particular discipline, again Moore is not such a person. He's thrown together some lies that loony lefties can masturbate to, and for this they pay him like they would any pornographer, but there's no real substance or higher thought taking place.

But the question remains: Why do conservatives berate nouveau riche lefties? Let's see ... if we were to read a summary of the left written by a curious Martian trying to understand Earth politics, the first paragraph would surely be something like this:
"The Left on Earth hates rich people. They feel that anyone above a certain income level has gained their wealth illegally, or at least by some ruse pulled on unsuspecting and righteous poor people. Poor people to the Left are automatically good and victims of economic crime (with some exceptions -- see below). The Left do not subscribe to free-market economics, but instead see low wages as the result of the stinginess of rich people, unemployement as the result of the denial of jobs by rich people, and a variety of social ills as the result of the rich not paying enough to fix these problems. Thus, the Left on Earth have fought politically to make rich people pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes, attack corporations that have generated too much wealth in the economy, and launch investigations on presumed conspirators in situations of anomalous supply-demand situations. The Left does hate some poor people: religious ones, rural ones, and White ones. And the Left does like some rich people: those that make their money espousing Leftist social theories in books and movies, political leaders who simply take their money from the coffers of socialist and communist governments, and various celebrities who preach hate for the very economic and political system that has allowed them to generate enormous wealth. The fact that certain wealthy people are both using a sytem they claim to despise is a bit of hypocrisy not lost on the Right, although it does soom to be lost on the Left. Nonetheless, because humans take several years to become educated and abandon fantasies of being given wealth beyond the market value of their skills, the Left is a considerable political force year after year by drawing on the influx of young people and keeping them ignorant as long as possible.

Hey, Miranda -- President Bush and John Howard have both said they are opposed to people holding their heads underwater for twenty minutes at a time.

There. I think that'll improve the gene pool a bit.

"I don't believe he ever said he was against getting rich."

No, he's not against getting rich. He's against people who are rich. In his world, and yours, that is neither inconsistent nor illogical.

"Did Michael Moore not ever recognise the irony in calling his book "STUPID WHITE MEN..." and putting a very large picture of himself on front of the cover?"

It's not irony. It's eponymous.

"Only one obesity joke? You hicks are dropping the ball."

I have two university degrees and have always lived in a northeastern city. How does that make me a hick? And do you have demographic data on the majority of the other posters that I don't have access to?

Oh, yes, and Michael Moore is two cheeseburgers away from collapsing into a singularity. Happy now?

Congratulations on the university degrees and northeastern residence.

However, hick is as hick does Dave S.

Sincerity Slips: Please define "hick," then. What behavior, exactly, makes one a "hick?"

(Also, a comma right after "does" in your second sentence would make it more readable and avoid sexual innuendo.)

"However, hick is as hick does"

So, a hick is a college-educated urbanite who reads and comments upon a political weblog written by an Australian journalist?

Yup, that's right up there with NASCAR and country music. Y'all.

If I didn't know any better, I'd think the left wing has lost any semblance of basic logic. Wait a sec, they have.

You gotta love the idiocy of some. Can't attack his message so they call him fat. Does that mean Piers Ackerman is irrelevent. God, I hope so.

Incedentally, Atlas Shrugged was at a Bookshop near me at 75% off. That just proves something...

Oh contraire! Moore's been debunked so many times, the only fun left is his grotesque appearance. Rarely before has a person's outside been such a nice representation of their inside.

Thanks AMjo for answering brett's query.

Though it seems you're going to need to work at this a little harder than most, Dave S.

Listening to country music and watching NASCAR racing doesn't automatically qualify ya'all as a hick (or thick). And the difficult bit....college educated urbanites are not automatically disqualified.

Communicating your point of view using humour most five year olds have mastered (and that quicker six year olds have learned to discard) is hardly a logical, credible or educated approach.

Sincerity Slips

(Thanks for the grammatical leg-up, brett!)

"Thanks AMjo for answering brett's query."

What query? What answer? Please tell me what query I posed and what answer was given.

So, what IS a "hick?" I'm still wondering what your definition is.

As for Moore ... can some Lefty provide some respose to any of the, oh, hundred attacks on his credibility? Here's your big chance; I've been looking for some logical, factual response to criticism of Moore, and I can't find any. You don't have to deal with ALL of the problems with Mooe's "work," but start with one, OK? Go ahead and take logical baby steps first, and then we can work up to the big issues later.

Moores credibility? Just view him as primarily a comedy writer in a similar (although not as funny) way as PJ O'Rourke. Except replace right wing apologist with left wing apologist.

"Here's your big chance; I've been looking for some logical, factual response to criticism of Moore, and I can't find any."

Gee, my big chance! Well, he makes more money than you do!

Your query brett, was in seeking a definition of hick. I thought AMjo was showing you the lead here by pointing to the idiocy of basing criticism on Mike Moore's appearance, when it is what he (MM) says which seems to generate the disagreement.
Obviously I left too much space for you to join the dots, sorry for that.
My definition of a hick?
In this instance it is the ability to allow an irrelevant fact to become the basis of your argument.
Here you have folk online who are prepared to go toe to toe with you philosophically, and the only consistent response the Mike Moore haters can produce...... fat jokes.
So lets discuss the "hundreds" of criticisms (don't be stingy with the facts!!), starting with number one. And that would be......

Sincerity Slips

What a strange definition of a hick. ANY-hoo, and unfortunately, you still haven't offered a rebuttal to any of the criticisms of Moore's "work;" these are not irrelevant facts. The web is full of Moore-slamming sites and articles, but here's a nice collection of research on his Columbine fictional tale which he amazingly passed off as a documentary ... pick any one and respond:

Moore wrongly claims the columbine killers went bowling that morning

Willie Horton ad lies

Staged bank scene

Staged dog scene

Dishonest scene with blind shooter

Moore is wrong on weapon manufacturer

Wonderful World lies

Air Force plaque lies

American history lies

Canada-America comparison lies

International gun violence distortions

And one could go one and on ... but just pick one of the easy ones and let me hear your rebuttal. Moore hasn't responded to criticism in any substatial way, but maybe his fans can.

"Communicating your point of view using humour most five year olds have mastered (and that quicker six year olds have learned to discard)"

Let's see... I said:

"Michael Moore is two cheeseburgers away from collapsing into a singularity."

Oh, yeah. All the little hick kindergarteners here at Gopher's Gulch elementary crack wise just like this.

Here you go brett...

http://www.michaelmoore.com/

There should be a "substatial"(sic) enough series of answers to your Bowling for Truth link there.

And Dave, the cheeseburger crack is just as boorish the second time around.

Damn hicks.

Sincerity Slips

Unfortunately, Michael Moore's site contains not a single response to the criticisms raised on bowlingfortruth.com. Have you visited either of these sites? You seem to be operating in a vacuum. I mean, I pawed through various rants and promotions for the Columbine video, and went to the FAQ section (Since, one would think, one of the most frequently asked questions would be "Did you really fabricate scenes in your 'documentaries,' and if so, why?"). Instead, the first question is this nonsense:
Q: "What cereal do you eat?"
A: "A combination of Post Raisin Bran and Start Smart from Kellogg's. (This is not a product endorsement. Both these cereals contain worms and anthrax and the chairmen of their companies live in North Korea and Tajikistan, respectively.)"

What I am looking for is a point-by-point response to the quite specific allegations of fraud in what is supposed to be an award-winning documentary. You see, if Moore or any of his cheerleaders can't respond to all of them (although I am willing to give you a point for responding to one of them), then we are simply left with no choice but to conclude that Moore is dishonest and purposely misleads people.

So let's try this again, OK? You pick a criticism and respond; or you can give me the exact link to a response; or you can copy and paste a response written by someone else.

For example, you could pick the opening scene in the bank. You could respond by saying that you have evidence or quotes that the scene is not staged and put the links here:
____________________________

Or you could argue that the scene -- while technically staged -- conveyed an accurate depiction of the process by which people can get guns for opening an account, since you know of an article about someone who opened an account at that (or any) bank and walked out the same day with a gun. You could put a link to the article here:
____________________________

Do you follow? Good. So let's give this another try. Thanks ... eagerly awaiting SOME sort of response.

"Unfortunately, Michael Moore's site contains not a single response to the criticisms raised on bowlingfortruth.com. Have you visited either of these sites? You seem to be operating in a vacuum"

Nice "effort" brett. Maybe you should have tried this easy to find and aptly named link on Mike Moore's site.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/wackoattacko/

Plenty of hard evidence linking to a range of news sources.

So yes, lets do give this another try. Off you go tiger.

Sincerity Slips

*Whew* finally we're getting somewhere. Thanks for the link -- I don't know how I missed that wee box 2/3 of the way down his message page on the right.

But this is exactly what I mean by an unsubstantial response. After a long attack on the people who have criticised him and excuses about needing to save his resources to write more books, Moore plucks out only four criticisms to respond to, and his responses are as follows:

Staged bank scene -- Moore simply says that the benk teller who says this was staged and offers good reasons for why this was staged (for example, she says, logically, that guns are not kept at the bank and that the guns hanging on the wall behind the teller are models) is simply lying. Moreover, Moore's transcript has the following quote by one of the bank employees:
"TELLER 2: We have a vault which at all times we keep at least five hundred fire arms."
But is the vault 4 hours away? That's what his critics say, and he doesn't respond. He says he phoned ahead to make sure he could bring a camera ... who knows what else he asked for (like, can you bring a gun over from the vault so that we can film me walking out with it, or some such). He's the filmmaker, he should respond point by point when one of the people he filmed gives several reasons why this was not what happens.

Lockheed factory in Littleton, Colorado -- Moore starts by misrepresenting the criticism ("The Lockheed factory in Littleton, Colorado, has nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction!") and he puts quotation marks around this misrepresented criticism as if it's a direct quote from one of his critics. Actually, this is not the criticism. The criticism concerning this plant is that it does not make missiles. Moore asks a son of one of the plant employees about his father making "missiles" every day, and that's not what's made there. Moore's response is to talk about what the company used to make, what it makes in other plants, and the connection between military satellites and military operations. But regardless of the fact that he's just fast and loose with the facts in the movie and has now backpedalled, he needs to reformulate his argument given the new "clarifications;" that is, being that the plant makes things loosely connected to military operations, how would the kids in Columbine come out any more violent than kids in Arlington, VA, or any other kid near anything that has any loose connection to the military. Once we get past the misrepresentations, then there's the whole issue of Moore's arguments, and this is a perfect example.

Heston speech -- Moore is still trying to make it sound like Heston went to Denver in response to Columbine ("Heston took his NRA show to Denver") when, in fact, it was a scheduled annual meeting. Moore responds that the different clips of Heston and Heston's "cold hands" comment (which was not made in Denver) is the Denver TV station's fault (they sent him an old clip). Embedded in here is Moore's defense of his statistics -- all other countries have their numbers taken from police records, while the US figure is from the CDC. There are multiple reasons why medical records give inflated gun-death numbers; you can Google to find the articles. Basically, Moore found a number he liked and didn't care to wonder if using a different method to get that number was important.

Did the boys bowl the morning of the shooting? -- This has to be my favorite response by Moore:
"Of course, it's a silly discussion, and it misses the whole, larger point: that blaming bowling for their killing spree would be as dumb as blaming Marilyn Manson." Moore doesn't even respond to the discrepancy between his statements that the boys were bowling that morning and the multiple reasons and witnesses that say they were not. Moore just tells us that this muddling of the "facts" is not important. But it gets even better -- not but two paragraphs later Moore makes this amazing statement: "I can guarantee to you, without equivocation, that every fact in my movie is true." I guess we're supposed to just take his word for it, because that's all Moore responds to. No response to the Willie Horton ad, the American history cartoon, etc. In fact, to this last criticism he really offers no response at all.

Are the facts important? Well, given that Moore is trying to support a broad and complicated social theory, one would think he'd want it to resemble reality. As it stands, why would I agree with Moore's arguments when his facts are just so jumbled?

Moore ends with this: "Total number of lawsuits to date against me or my film by the NRA? NONE." But lawsuits by folks other than the NRA? Here's one.

Well, I guess there's not much more to talk about. This is probably as good as it gets with Moore and his fans ... don't bother me with facts, I have Big Social Theories to prove!

Why are you guys always carping on about Michael Moore? I know there's not much to say abt Mr Cut-and-Paste, all he does is surf the web looking for lamo lefties to farce at. But why don;t you dissect your Ann 'Treason' Coulter with a fine tooth comb for a change. Let's hear you defend Sean Hannity or Rush or Bill O'Really or Safire or... I dunno, Matt Drudge, even. I thought this was meant to be a hotbed of right-wing fervour. Where's your fascist spirit?

Instead you waste your days blathering on abt a second rate pamphleteer who has dared to find an audience for, and get rich from, tearing down your heroes any way he can.

Maybe the reason you all hate Michael Moore so much is he plays by your rules.

Just a thought from your friendly neighbourhood troll. Remember, to feed me only encourages me!

(This is not a product endorsement. Both these cereals contain worms and anthrax and the chairmen of their companies live in North Korea and Tajikistan, respectively.)

I had to LOL at this.

He sometimes has a good sense of humour, which is part of the reason he gets away with being a fictitious film-maker.

I wonder if some of his fans took that sarcasm as fact?

Miranda:
This an intellectual exercise, so try not to stamp your feet and pout too much.

Ann Coulter and Matt Drudge are yours for the taking. if you think you can do better than Frankin at making the case for them as liars, go for it. I simply don't find Ann to be a liar, and I found her point-by-point rebuttal of Frankin's book more than satisfactory. I see unaswered evidence that Moore is a liar, and it's not in my interest to take "information" from liars, no matter who they are.

I used to read the New York Times, they lied, I fired them. I used to watch CNN, they revealed that they had been lying to us for the past 10 years about Baghdad, so I fired them. I'm not talking about differences in emphasis or spin, but errors and omissions that I would have never known about without doing some digging and which they themselves quietly recanted much later.

This brings me to the latest flap about the Ronald Reagan miniseries CBS. Liberals are up in arms about this being censorship (although censorship only applies to the government stopping free speech and doesn't cover speech between private individuals; they don't even understand the constitution), and Liberals are crying that this is because some right-wing underground threatened a boycott. No such thing -- former liberals like me, who are tired of being lied to, heard that this miniseries was full of inaccuracies and we wrote some emails to simply ask why CBS was hell-bent on telling lies about someone over the course of several hours. Reagan simply did not say the mean and awful things they have him saying. That's not to say that he wasn't a mean guy sometimes, and maybe he found gays completely repulsive -- I wouldn't know, I wasn't a fly on his walls in the 1980s; but I do know that the authors of this script also didn't know, so why are they just lying?

Barbara Streisand has some huge moan on her web site today about how this was some right-wing censorship event, but why doesn't she simply respond to the accusations that she and her pals wrote a bunch of lies and tried to get them into millions of homes. Why did they make Reagan such a cusser, when he was not? Why did they have him saying bad things about AIDS victims, when he did not? Why did they have him being diagnosed with Alzheimers much earlier then he actually was?

When someone accuses me of lying, I respond -- point-by-point. But alas, liberals live in the shadow of one of the most accomplished liars of all time, Bill Clinton, and somehow it's just not a big deal to them. When Moore, Streisand, The NYT, CNN, MSNBC, and espcially BBC knowingly fabricate crap and try to shove it down our throats, they need to realize that they are damaging themselves irrevocably. If you're my friend, my family, or my news station, you'd better believe you're in deep trouble the moment I think I can't trust you.

Go ahead and break down Ann or Matt or anyone else your little heart desires. Knock yourself out.

"And Dave, the cheeseburger crack is just as boorish the second time around."

Let's review:

First, you say I'm a hick. I disprove that by pointing out that I'm a university-educated urban dweller, which (at least in the definition of "hick" understood by anybody who is not you) disqualifies me as a "hick."

You then re-define "hick" as one who makes jokes a five-year-old would. I then submit that a five-year-old would not make the joke I did. At which point you re-define "hick" once again as "boor."

Seems like every time you are proven wrong, you move the goalposts. Very Lefty of you. Maybe you should change your name to "Slippery Sincerity."

http://www.viagra-exchange.com/ (Viagra), please erase this message and you'll never see our ad again.

http://www.viagra-exchange.com/ (Viagra), please erase this message and you'll never see our ad again.

http://www.viagra-exchange.com/ (Viagra), please erase this message and you'll never see our ad again.

http://www.viagra-exchange.com/ (Viagra), please erase this message and you'll never see our ad again.

http://www.viagra-exchange.com/ (Viagra), please erase this message and you'll never see our ad again.

http://www.viagra-exchange.com/ (Viagra), please erase this message and you'll never see our ad again.