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A lot of people don't like Michael Moore because they believe his last film aided radical Islamists in Iraq and Afghanistan, at the expense of the lives of U.S. and British military personnel.  That makes him the worst sort of opportunist.

As for socialism, communism and other collectivist schemes, many Americans view them as slippery slopes into authoritarianism.  Socialism and communism rest on the same conceits, after all, and communists generally clothe themselves as socialists until they're in a position of strength.

America's founders saw democracy as a means to preserve liberty, not as an end in itself.  So to employ socialism in a democracy, when socialism has anti-libertarian tendencies, would be to negate the purpose of having a democratic state apparatus in the first place. 

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This is great fun:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiH7pkCObdA

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Actually, it is illegal to be a crackpot if your crackpottiness leads you to commit treason.

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Just gleaned this from the Drudge Report:

http://www.breitbart.tv/html/1762.html

According to that clip, Moore doesn't have a problem with the downloading as long as whoever is doing it isn't making a buck off it. 

Not sure what to make of it personally… but since I don't watch his flicks anyway, for me the matter is moot.

For Michael Moore to encourage people to download the movie represents a total betrayal of the investors who paid to make and distribute the film.  Of course, betrayal is his specialty and his investors should have known better. 

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…Health is not something we should put a price on…

Anything desirable has a value.  You can't make it not have one.  In the 20th century, 100 million citizens of communist states died because so-called intellectuals couldn't wrap their brains around a simple fact: a thing's value is what a person is willing to pay for it.

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Whoa. Other countries have better healthcare services and this should praise socialism? Who says America can't have something like that and still be capitalist? I'd prefer tax dollars be used to improve healthcare than be directed on the war machine.

Medical litigation and malpractice insurance are significant costs in the U.S. medical system.  Small practice doctors often have to spend 1/3 or more of their income just on insurance.  A ceiling on lawsuit rewards would reduce costs significantly.

Unfortunately, most congressmen are lawyers, so don't hold your breath.

Also, Americans have confused the concept of "insurance" with "purchasing plans".  Insurance is something you purchase to mitigate risk.  But using health "insurance" to cover a regular expense means that it's not insurance anymore – it's just a purchasing plan. 

Finally, no person or country can ever spend enough money on health insurance, because even though death is inevitable, people will spend everything they can get their hands on to avoid it.  One thing most socialized medicine systems do is cut people off at a certain point prior to death – they get minimal treatment thereafter because their death is imminent.  In the U.S., we pile money down the hole for as long as someone's breathing – which is fine when the sick person or his family is paying for it, but not so fine when it's being paid for by my insurance company, because it affects my rates, or the government. 

Still, socialized medicine systems have huge problems with scarcity, because if you give something away for less than it's worth, people will want more of it than you can provide.  Al, the guy who wrote the Dr. Hooters saga back in the 90s, died a year ago today in Britain.  He was sick for two weeks but could not get a bed in a UK hospital – they were full up and wouldn't admit him until he was on death's door.  And then he died: http://forum.bearchive.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=478936&an=0&page=0#Post478936

People are creatures of the market – you can't remove market considerations from any human calculus.

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http://amaz0ns.com/muscular-women/celebrities/jaime-pressly-in-doa/

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I posted a screencap gallery to Shulkie.com, here: http://shulkie.com/image/tid/66

Also, a discussion thread here:
http://shulkie.com/node/104

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Ritzy Raccoon

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Best Superbowl ad ever (alas poor Pets.com Sock Puppet, I knew him well).

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(hat tip: Stale Media)

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