Joe, you seem to have forgotten that Sicko can be viewed for free online here

People sensible enough not to want to impose unnecessary middleman insurance costs on themselves and others, are also sensible enough to watch a film for free online instead of paying for it.

And Michael Moore granted his permission, even though he knew it would drastically reduce his profits, since his goal wasn’t to make money but to let people see the facts for themselves.

Those who have eyes, saw. Fortunately, that’s most of us. The latest polls show that 2/3 of Americans favor single payer.

The only ones opposed to it The Top Ten Enemies of Single Payer are corporate interests.

MES-
Of course I was referring to the hype surrounding around swine flu.  The 38,000 figure you quote is almost exactly the number that die from influenza every year in the U. S..  Where’s your outrage about that?

http://www.theblogofrecord.com/tag/annual-influenza-deaths/

And I’d like to see the credible reference (not MM, please!) that shows these 38,000 died because they didn’t have healthcare (not 38,000 of the people who died didn’t have healthcare).

Only in a Liberal echo chamber would someone accept your “facts” about the MM movie.  Sicko was a grade B movie that grossed under $25MM, so unless all those people paid $.17 apiece, still too much, nowhere near a majority of America saw this film.  Nowhere near even a majority of the idiots that voted for BO, either.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=main&id=sicko.htm

Sicko is red-meat entertainment for people who already believe the drivel that healthcare is just another reason to hate America.

I don’t live my life in a Conservative echo chamber—I’m here aren’t I?!  You sound reasonable and smart.  Get out more.

AvwerageJoe, we can continue to do without socialized medicine and keep getting by on privatized medicine, but it just means that we pay more for health care because the insurance companies act as middlemen and their profits increase everyone’s costs, and it also means that a lot of people will continue to die unnecessarily.

If and when there is a genuine epidemic of a deadly disease, something that happens quite often in human history, it will spread more quickly because people with health coverage will hesitate to go to a doctor for fear of missing a day’s work and losing their coverage, and fear of having to make co-payments and of the risk of having their premiums go up if they turn out to be seriously ill, while people without insurance will be unable to see doctors at all and will spread the disease far and wide before anyone knows that they’re ill.

38,000 needless deaths a year of American citizens for lack of health insurance may be something that you’re comfortable with continuing, but not everyone is as callous.

The ignorance of Libertarian right-wingers who haven’t watched Sicko is immediately apparent to everyone who has seen the film—which means a majority of Americans because it broke all box office records for a documentary film.

We are becoming a nation of wimps.  Though many of us are guilty, liberals, and the media lead the pack.  I’m glad I wasn’t waiting in a burning building after 9/11 for Joe Biden to come rescue me.

Swine flu is either an attempt for gov’t employees to justify their existence or CYA, or a transparent attempt to make us feel like we can’t do without Nationalized healthcare. 

Save us Obama! Save us from the pigs!

KDelphi, the only things we know for sure are that big pharmaceutical corporation stocks have risen in value and that Rumsfeld is going make a lot of money on Tamiflu sales.

Everything else we’re told seems to change from one day to another.

Who else would benefit? Possibly those who want to stir up anti-immigrant hysteria and increase the militarization of the Mexican/American border.

Only when it became clear that Mexico did not have advanced bio-warfare laboratories (they don’t even have labs capable of identifying different strains of flu), and that if it derived from a factory farm, the farm was owned by a U.S. corporation, did the stories start to change.

And it certainly did help take attention away from torture, the bailouts, and other things we’re not supposed to think about, like the successful election boycott in Haiti where, after the government took all the popular candidates off the ballot, only three percent of the population voted.

I wonder why Haitians haven’t fallen for the “lesser evil” scam the way that Americans have, so that when all the good candidates are denied nominations (or have to run on third party tickets where they can’t win), voters simply settle for one of the nominees they didn’t want that they are given the “privilege” of voting for. I guess it’s the two-party thing, where even if the nominees of both major parties have virtually identical Senate voting records, they have different party affiliations, so voters believe that no matter how invisible it may be, there must be some secret difference that they can’t see. And of course the candidates do tell slightly different campaign lies. This time around they were even different colors. How could anyone possibly think that just because both were pro-war and pro-corporate and both were rich Senators, that there wasn’t a difference?

By KDelphi, May 3 at 4:29 pm

It may have also allowed the Mortgage sector to defeat the proposed help for citizens about to be foreclosed. Here is a link:

http://bravenewfilms.org/blog/?p=70556

We just stand around and stare as we continue to be fucked by our ‘compassionate’ corporations and our complicit electorate. I would have thought TD would have had something on this or maybe I missed it.

Mark—will we ever know if it was a weapon of mass distraction? the article stating that it was found in pigs in Canada has disappeared…sure got us off of the torture stuff, though…i know people who are convinced that they have swine flu…I have no idea…

Strangely enough, it just might not have anything to do with factory farming or pigs.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124113696409275445.html

Now the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is saying that the swine flu may have begun in California with patients who had never visited Mexico or had any contact whatsoever with pigs.

Should we start calling it the California flu?

Well, they have found it in pigs in Canada…so much for “it has nothing to do with pigs”...factory farming and genetic manipulation…

“Not All Swine Flu News Is Bad”

That could be, but good for who? I wonder what those bankers and wall street’s ‘best and brightest’ were able to do while mommies and daddies were all fretting over something that has not lived up to the deadly expectations harped on in the MSM. More ‘disaster capitalism’?
One thing is for certain, if even half the people just here in the US stayed and are staying home, that sure took some pressure off of payrolls.

It will morph just like how the media will be told how to morph it.

One positive aspect that might come out of the Swine-Flu scare is that it might serve as a wake-up call for recalcitrant and abusive human beings. The following is my poetic rendering of the issues related to this matter from Swine Family point of view:
   
      “The Voice of the Swine Family!”

Once upon the time,
We were among the early creatures of God;
Unmolested by man anywhere,
We roamed the spacious wilderness and open lands;
Two religions condemned our flesh as unclean to eat,
That was fine with us, since we were not sacrificed;
Then came the unwise so-called civilized man,
With his non-satiated appetite for flesh of all kind;
We were domesticated and raised in mass;
We were force-fed with chemically-modified feed of all type;
We started to artificially multiply,
Getting big and fat at the speed of light;
And as soon we reached the prime of our lives,
We were led, in mass, to man’s slaughter house after house;
Wrong was the treatment meted to us,
We complained to the One Who Created us;
He heard our complain and send us a virus-friend,
Through which we were to get our revenge,
Not only from the glutton eaters of our flesh,
But also from hypocrite Muslims and Jews,
Who don’t eat our flesh,
Yet they love the money it brings!

Yeah but it served as the shiny thing able to distract America from torture, war, etc. and etc. so it did its job.

Like terrorism, it does not need to actually be deadly, it simply needs to serve as a basis for the our media and government to use it to scare the people.