Poor Michael Moore has had his website hacked. This is what appears now:
Mr. Moore, your documentary “Bowling for Columbine” is fictitious, not factual. David Hardy’s Truth About Bowling is simply damning. You deliberately deceive your viewers, who are only expecting a slightly biased factual report. Mr. Moore, my personal hope is that you publicly apologize, not for your ideas, but for dubbing your lies the truth.
Please see revoketheoscar.com
Love always,
NHA Crew.
OK- new game. Be the first kid on the block to find a liberal claiming this is an example of the suppression of free speech in Ashcroft’s Amerikkka. Let me know when you see it so I can link to it and laugh with you.
William Burns
Good to see another conservative endorsing the violation of both free speech and property rights by hacking someone’s site.
Ryan Waxx
Go look up the word “endorsing” in a dictionary, idiot.
Hacking is vandalism. Get the hell over it. Or continue to cry in your cheerios… I don’t care.
JKC
Funny how all the conservative defenders of “Law ‘n’ Order” are strangely silent.
John, please please please give up the “nasty liberals are calling this censorship” meme. If someone had hacked into the FCC website and inserted a picture of Michael Powell blowing Rupert Murdoch, you’d be screaming for law enforcement, not about censorship of market forces.
This is unbecoming of you, and all it does is give me more hope that the conservative movement will fall apart from the weight of its own stupidity and hypocrisy.
JKC
BTW, I don’t like Michael Moore much either. That doesn’t give me the right to key his car, or hack his website. Or are the rules of polite society only for liberals to follow now?
zaphod
been done already…
see http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=539377
John Cole
Actually- I wouldn’t have been screaming anything- this is just a bunch of asshole kids doing something obnoxious. It is annoying when DOS attacks hit e-bay, it is annoying when they hack the White House website, but it is not censorship. This is juts more of the same- cyber vandalism.
“Good to see another conservative endorsing the violation of both free speech and property rights by hacking someone’s site. ”
Cute- precisely where did I endorse any of that.
Moe Lane
Hmm.
This is unbecoming of you, and all it does is give me more hope that the conservative movement will fall apart from the weight of its own stupidity and hypocrisy.
and…
Or are the rules of polite society only for liberals to follow now?
And they say that irony is dead.
Moe Lane
Bleeping bleeping no html tags… stick quotes around the second and fourth paragraphs.
Barney Gumble
Q. Is that bank that hands out guns for real?
A. Yes. North Country Bank (with branches throughout Northern Michigan) offers you a wide choice of guns when you open up a certificate of deposit account. In effect, they are giving you all of the interest the account will earn in advance in the form of a gun. The bank is also an authorized federal arms dealer so they can do the quick background check right there at the bank. I put $1,000 in a long-term account, they did the background check, and, within an hour, walked out with my new Weatherby-just as you see it in the film. (I did have a choice of getting a pair of golf clubs or a grandfather clock, but they didn’t have either of those hanging on the wall like they did those three rifles). I learned about the bank’s gun offer from an ad in the local paper that showed a gun across the top with the heading, ” More Bang for Your Buck” from North Country Bank.
http://www.bowlingforcolumbine.com/about/faq.php
Q. I was the “Bowling for Columbine” producer who scouted the bank that gives you a gun. I was there for Michael Moore’s only and entire visit to the bank and was dismayed to see you repeating an outright lie about this scene. Mike walked into North County Bank and walked out with a gun in less than an hour. He opened a CD account, they faxed in his check, it came back all clear, and a bank official handed him his rifle. The crew, Mike and I then drove to directly the barber shop where Mike bought the bullets for his new rifle just as you see in the film. All this occurred before lunch that day, the final day of filming. Then everyone flew home. Maybe you ought to expose the origin of this lie rather than repeat this easily refuted fabrication.
Jeff Gibbs,
Traverse City, Mich.
A. I am happy to oblige. It originated at
http://www.opinionjournal.com/forms/printThis.html ?id=110003233
Of the bank incident Gibbs mentions, author John Fund writes:
“Jan Jacobson, the bank employee who worked with Mr. Moore on his account, says that only happened because Mr. Moore’s film company had worked for a month to stage the scene. ‘What happened at the bank was a prearranged thing,’ she says. The gun was brought from a gun dealer in another city, where it would normally have to be picked up. ‘Typically, you’re looking at a week to 10 days waiting period,’ she says.”
I asked Michael Moore about this report. His response: “I walked in cold. It happened exactly as you see in the film. A producer did call ahead and said I wanted to come in. It is not true that an ordinary person could not have walked in and gotten a gun. No need to go to a gun shop; they had 500 guns in their vault. There’s a 2001 story in the St. Petersburg Times about how the bank is proud as a peacock about its gun offer.”
http://www.suntimes.com/output/answ-man/sho-sunday-ebert06.html
HH
“If someone had hacked into the FCC website and inserted a picture of Michael Powell blowing Rupert Murdoch, you’d be screaming for law enforcement”
Can’t speak for John, but not me. I’d find it funny.
HH
More from the above Ebert article:
Another critical analysis of the film is at
http://www.hardylaw.net/Truth?186-143?About?186-143?Bowling.html
On this site, David T. Hardy, a lawyer associated with the National Rifle Assn., raises questions about the accuracy and fairness of many sequences in the movie. One point he makes is that “Bowling for Columbine” misquotes a plaque on a B-52 bomber at the Air Force Academy. Hardy writes: “Moore solemnly pronounces that the plaque under it ‘proudly proclaims that the plane killed Vietnamese people on Christmas Eve of 1972’…The plaque actually reads, ‘Flying out of Utapao Royal Thai Naval Airfield in southeast Thailand, the crew of “Diamond Lil” shot down a MIG northeast of Hanoi during “Linebacker II” action on Christmas eve 1972.’ ”
Moore’s response: “I was making a point about the carpet bombing of Vietnam during the 1972 Christmas offensive. I did not say exactly what the plaque said but was paraphrasing.”
I think here he is fudging. Few audience members would have considered it a paraphrase. It would also appear that his depiction of a Charlton Heston speech is less than accurate. You can compare the “Bowling for Columbine” verison at
http://ufies.org/archives/000586.html
with this transcript of Heston’s original speech:
http://www.nrawinningteam.com/meeting99/hestsp1.html
As for the St. Petersburg Times story Moore cites, here is the full text from Mar. 18, 2001:
GUNS AND MONEY: North Country Bank and Trust in Traverse City, Mich., offers customers an alternative to traditional interest payments on 20-year CDs: pricey merchandise including a selection of Weatherby rifles and shotguns. Background checks are run before a gun is handed over.
No “proud as a peacock” here, in fact no quotes from the bank at all, nor does it clear up Moore’s claim at all.
HH
FYI the quote from the Ebert article ends just after the Heston transcript URL.