Over to You, Larry Hubich

Saskatchewan Federation of Labour President Larry Hubich likes Brigette DePape. He also seems to like Michael Moore.

So it seems entirely fair to wonder what he would think of Moore's job offer to DePape, considering his record as a bad boss.

As reported by -- of all outlets -- The New Yorker and Mother Jones:

"...as the staff of Mother Jones [a magazine that had fired Moore for being toxic in the office] had discovered, Moore wasn’t the ideal boss. Little by little, he began to alienate people. He disliked sharing credit with his writers. He would often come in late. He didn’t yell at people: if someone said something he didn’t like, he wouldn’t argue; he would simply not invite that person to the next meeting, or the person would be fired. … One day during production on the first season of the show, Moore called two of his writers into his office. It was, for both of them, their first job in television, and they had been hired with the title of associate producer. They were not members of the Writers’ Guild, the powerful union for writers in movies and TV, and thus were not receiving health benefits, and would not qualify later for a percentage of video and rerun sales. 'Michael said, ‘I’m getting a lot of heat from the union to call you guys writers and pay you under the union rules,’' Eric Zicklin, one of the associate producers, says. ‘I don’t have the budget for that. But if they keep coming down on me that’ll mean I’ll only be able to afford one of you and the other one’s gotta go.’

… One by one, his employees stopped believing in the Cause. The job became just a job, and Moore became just another boss in a business that had an almost limitless tolerance for bad behavior. But, because they had once believed in him, their disappointment was painful."

Particularly intriguing is Moore's speculation that he would have to fire one of his associate producers if he had to pay them Writers' Guild-mandated wages.

This becomes especially interesting when one considers Hubich's astoundingly-dishonest take on comments by Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, whom he does not like.

Wall publicly speculated that, if Saskatchewan agreed to a contract with its teachers' union similiar to the one Alberta teachers have, his government would liklely be forced to lay teachers off, as has been happening in Alberta.

Hubich had a different take. He claimed -- quite falsely -- that Wall had threatened to fire teachers over negotiations.

Judged according to Hubich's rhetorical standard, Michael Moore's threat to his associate producers is very different. They weren't involved in any kind of negotiations with Moore (one can only imagine how Moore would have reacted if they'd even mused about unionizing). Moore's "threat" -- according to the Hubich standard -- was that one of the associate producers would be fired if the Writers' Guild (of which neither was a member) didn't get off his back.

Yet Larry Hubich seems to rather like Michael Moore, but dislikes Brad Wall to a rather comical degree, despite the fact that the people of Saskatchewan simply do not agree with him.

But Wall's 59% approval rating -- which Hubich seems to be having a hard time coping with -- is besides the point. Perhaps he could be troubled to tell Canadians how he feels about the prospect of Brigette DePape being offered employment by such a notoriously horrible boss.

After all, he threatened to fire his associate producers. By the Hubich standard, that is.

Here's Your "Iconic Moment", Michael

Brigitte DePape puts a vacuous smile on inane rhetoric

As merciful as it would be to everyone involved -- especially Brigette DePape herself -- for the entire matter of the "protesting Page" to fade into obscurity, there's at least one person who won't let it go away: self-glorifying American leftist blowhard Michael Moore.

Moore has reportedly offered DePape a job. Doing what, God only knows.

Moore has evidently become DePape's biggest fan.

"For a young person to do that and to do it peacefully, and quietly and with grace, I thought it was a very powerful moment," Moore remarked. "Every now and then there is an iconic moment where an individual takes action, and it inspires others to think about, you know, what else would we be doing."

But unfortunately for Moore, he has the "iconic moment" all wrong.

The "iconic moment" DePape has sparked is not the image of her holding up her "Stop Harper" sign on the floor of the Senate. It wasn't even the image of DePape, giggling with self-satisfaction, repeating her vapid talking points twice on CBC and CTV, without offering so much as a nugget of original thought.

Regardless of what questions DePape was asked, she simply repeated her talking points, so unimaginative and uninsipired they could have been lifted out of the most recent Heather Mallick column.

No, the iconic moment will happen on June 10 when the tiny smattering of far-leftists who haven't been utterly disgusted by DePape's glory hounding will gather in Ottawa for a "Stop Harper" rally in which they'll hold the bubble-headed DePape up as an icon to be admired, while the same empty rhetoric is spouted over and over again.

The iconic moment will be when the undead legions of the far-left stream onto Parliament Hill to fearmonger Canadians with spectres that, when one examines the budget tabled today, don't seem to be much more than that: phantoms of a demagogic terror scenario that just doesn't seem to be coming to pass.

That is the iconic moment Brigette DePape has to offer: that of an individual with no ideas to offer, and to whom facts simply do not seem to matter. Pleasing to thsoe who find her message ideologically soothing, incredibly boring to everyone else.

Kind of like a Michael Moore film. No wonder he can't tell the difference.

Balancing Gun Ownership & Public Safety A Matter Of Perspective

In Michael & Me, Phil Elder makes his case against Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine, and the arguments Moore makes in that film.

Move the Fuck Over, Michael Moore...

...George Galloway is coming for your "craziest person in Hollywood" crown

One wouldn't believe it if it didn't come from his own website, but former British MP George Galloway is planning to make documentary films.

Or rather, one should say that Galloway plans to follow Michael Moore's lead in abusing the medium of documentary film to advance his political agenda.

But to each their own, one suspects.

Healing a Sick Health Care System

One has to be very careful when approaching any film by Michael Moore.

As one approaches Sicko during a time of turmoil over American health care -- the debate is as fierce as it has ever been -- one has to be especially careful.

Sicko isn't specifically a film about health care. It's more a film about the American health insurance industry. In highlighting many horror stories about the actions of this industry, it paints a very unflattering picture.

Many Canadians have objected to the use of Canadian horror stories -- including that of Shona Holmes -- as part of the debate over health care reform. It's certainly little fun for Canadians to watch these stories paraded out in the debate in a foreign country.

Sadly, these horror stories very much are fair game. By the same token, however, so are the horror stories of the American private insurance system.

Even -- especially -- in a system in which private for-profit health insurance exists alongside government-paid insurance government regulation is necessary to ensure equity in dealings with these firms.

There's little question that many corporations employ bean-counters at various levels of their organization who are concerned with one thing and one thing alone: ensure that the company isn't spending more money than it needs to. At surface level this isn't that innoble a pursuit. However, when these individuals become determined to carry out their duties at the expense of the service being provided to their clients -- service their clients have paid for -- such a practice becomes morally bankrupt.

Interestingly, the French health care system minimizes the incentive for health insurance companies to deny care by paying 70% of the cost of health care, leaving the remaining 30% of the cost to be paid either by the patient or by their health insurance company.

Sicko also provides a very familiar reprise of the debate that raged when Hilary Clinton, during the administration of Bill Clinton, proposed a universal health care system in the United States.

It's very familiar because it's nearly identical to the debate that is currently raging right now, which could be seen as another message of Sicko: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Thanks For Calling, Guys

Bill Maher, Michael Moore, Ben Stein sent packing by Academy Awards

When the Best Documentary Film Oscar is handed out at the 2009 Academy Awards, the producers of Expelled, Religulous and Slacker Uprising will not be accepting the award.

The omission of Ben Stein, Bill Maher and Michael Moore off the 15-film roll call of Oscar nominees, probably represents one of two things: either the less-than-spectacular stature of each of these films, or a rejection of a growing scourge in the genre of documentary film: the documentary style often referred to as Michael Moore-ism.

Films made in the Michael Mooreist style tend to be sensational and ultimately self-promoting; long on rhetoric and short on actual facts. The editing is usually cartoonish, relying on inter-cut clips of cartoon shows or amusing archive footage, often inserted into the film on a random cue -- what Richard Dawkins describes as a "lord privy seal" in his less-than-sparkling criticism of the film.

(Interestingly, Bill Maher's pro-atheist Expelled contained a great many such "lord privy seals" -- something that Dawkins declined to criticize. Commentators on Dawkins blog even went to great lengths to defend Maher's indulgences, which really only reinforces the known hypocrisy of many Dawkinites.)

Sometimes, the questions asked by such films are, in and of themselves, quite valid: Expelled, for example, calls into question the level of academic freedom at many institutions of higher learning, and Religulous questions many of the excesses of the religious faithful. Bowling for Columbine raised important questions about American gun culture, and about the effect organizations such as the NRA have on American society.

In the end, however, each film is ultimately self-promoting. Ben Stein clearly intends to elevate to heroic status among the community of religious believers -- or at least amongst those who believe in Intelligent Design theory. Bill Maher clearly wants to ascend to Dawkins-like status in terms of being a religion fighter. Slacker Uprising turned out to be nothing more than shameless self-promotion on Michael Moore's part, offering little more than a showcase of Moore speaking to large anti-Bush rallies and hobnobbing with like-minded celebrity buddies during the 2004 election.

Rarely has anyone gone to the lengths Moore has gone to in order to promote himself as a hero of the American left -- or, some would say, the global left, as the distinction between the two so often proves to be rather slim.

Films made in the Michael Mooreist style often feature one highly unethical feature: that of the late-film ambush, where an unsuspecting subject is lured into a compromising interview with a surprise interviewer.

Bill Maher lied to many subjects of Religulous in order to get them to appear, and later shamelessly admitted it. Richard Dawkins accused Ben Stein of lying in order to get him to appear in Expelled (but remained oddly silent when Maher admitted to lying in order to lure many of Religulous' subjects into interviews).

In each case, however, it could be argued that lying was the only way to draw these individuals into the richly-deserved limelight of ridicule. Few have parlayed outright arrogance into star status as effectively as Dawkins. And, quite frankly, anybody who has the audacity to claim to be the second coming of Jesus Christ deserves to be forced to defend that assertion in the public eye.

At base level, Moore's ambush of Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine seems to fit the same bill. Yet, as it turned out, Heston was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's disease during the time of the interview. While Heston certainly deserved to be called to account for his callous response to several shooting incidents, what eventually emerged was a failure of human compassion: the badgering of a man at the beginning of a slow, agonizing process of dying.

Perhaps moreso than Farenheit 9/11, Bowling for Columbine provided the model for the explosion of Michael Mooreist films in the succeeding years. That it won an Oscar and provided its maker with a nearly unprecedented stage from which to pronounce his political views only encouraged the proliferation of such films.

Which makes it perhaps fitting that the pale imitations of this film -- including Moore's own pale imitation -- will likely continue to be snubbed by the Academy.

But one way or the other, so long as self-promoting unethical hacks continue to look at documentary film as a venue through which they can lionize themselves, the Michael Mooreist style isn't going away.

At least now the Academy is set to stop pretending it represents any form of excellence -- technical or otherwise.