This office has no record that a specific license was issued authorizing you to engage in travel-related transactions involving Cuba.That’s what Dale Thompson, chief of general investigations and field operations for the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, wrote to filmmaker Michael Moore after he took eleven ailing 9/11 workers to Cuba to obtain the medical treatment they have been unable to receive in the US. Moore documents this journey in Sicko, his new critique of the US’s high-profit, low-care health-“care” industry.
Does anyone see a similarity between the lip service that the repugs (thanks for the term, mehitabelmmoss!) pay to heroic 9/11 workers (who, in reality, are routinely deprived of adequate medical treatment by repug policies) and the lip service that the repugs pay to patriotism when, in reality, the soldiers they pretend to support and honor are actually inadequately paid, insufficiently armored, and cannot obtain adequate medical treatment because of the corporate-fattening-at-
the-expense-of-the-rest-of-us repug policies?
Nice job making yourselves sound good though, guys.
Perception of truth, not truth—you know, Truthiness—is what matters in the end for this administration.
And you gotta hand it to them. They understand that they can fool many of the people much of the time with the right combination of speciously squishy soundbite-heavy jingoistic communication strategies (with the piquant taste of fear added for extra flavoring)—and boy do they use this knowledge to their advantage.
This is definitely a bottom-line administration—one whose policy has consistently been to cut funding and/or deregulate protections and hope for the best. After all, they can always hire publicity folks to sugarcoat the damage when the chickens/attorney generals who fire US attorneys of who poutyboy does not approve/illegal prisoners/torture victims/maimed soldiers/legislators/lobbyists/crumbling bridges/bursting levees come home to roost.
In other news, did anyone else note that Army officials actually accused Pat Tillman’s parents of being unChristian when they questioned the lies they were being told about their son’s death?
That’s right folks—our government’s response to their grief and desire for answers was to shift the blame to the grief-stricken parents of the Armed Services' poster boy whom our own soldiers killed (oopsie!)—and they did this by questioning whether or not the Tillmans are religious enough.
As if!
But I digress. We were talking about Michael Moore and how he, in a moment of true marketing genius, placed a copy of SiCKO (which premiers next week at Cannes) in a “safe house”—not to be confused with one of Bush&Co’s blood-spattered black houses—in another country “to protect it from government interference.”
Hey, Michael, why not seize the opportunity to market your flick?
I mean, if the government is going to harass someone who points out the administration’s blatant failings—What up, guys? Michael didn’t have a convenient wife whose secret identity Dick could reveal?—then why not pay a fine for your transgressions, then use the harassment to promote your film?
Sounds like a good marketing strategy to me.
Huh. I guess Cheney is still ticked off about Fahrenheit 9/11.
Meanwhile, back at the Oh Holy Shit um I mean Oh Holy Cross Ranch, the Christianists are calling for a boycott of Ford products because Ford supports PFLAG and an upcoming Out at Work session.
The repug protest of the Matthew Shepherd Act might be paying off too, since Bush is vowing to veto the act.
So now’s the time folks. Register your support so that the Christianists don’t leave the world with the impression that all Americans condone hate.
If enough people contact their legislators, then maybe Bush won’t get away with it.
LISTENING TO Holly Near’s “I Am Open”
READING “Michael Moore Faces U.S. Treasury Probe,” by David Germain, Yahoo! News, 5/10/2007. See here.
BEST OF SPAM: you have already won
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