10) We can afford James Earl Jones to read our tagline. So there BBC!!

9) Graphics! You call those graphics!! Heck, we spend more on our graphics than you spend on your whole show!!! Shows what you get when you allow commercials to run half the time.

8) Larry King - I learn so much from that man!

7) BBC files stories from Mauritius and Mali and stupid countries like that that don’t even exist.

6) No crane shots in studio.

5) Who cares about the climate in Cambodia. Do they even *have* climate in Cambodia?

4) I like commercials. They’re almost as slick as the news itself!!

3) The BBC calls people “communist” or “socialist” like it’s some kind of sociopolitical viewpoint, instead of the evil mark of the beast we all know it to be. Who writes the copy at the BBC anyhow? Might it be… SATAN!!!

2) They talk too much. It hurts my head. I like my news short and snappy!

1) SHE IS TOO NEWS!!! AND HER CHIHUAHUA TOO!!!

Confused, yup! I never said anything about higher education. But the U.S. doesn’t offer primary health care for free either, right? Read Tim Harford’s solution where he emphasizes on insurance for expensive and infrequent procedures.

Supremus, of course! Moore isn’t the gold standard in political thought or even progressive politics but he certainly knows how to rile up the (white) elephant in the room.

I like Moore, though I had watched one of his TV episodes of yester years before he became a full time movie documentary maker, and he had an episode about India which had me appalled. Since then I take his views with a grain of salt, but they are fun nevertheless :)

, why isn’t public education called ’socialized education’ and ridiculed in Presidential debate?

We are talking of primary education here, and not college education. That’s an important distinction.

The comparisons with Cuba frankly are redundant as they are ranked close to each other. The U.S should be compared with other developed nations and when we do so, they fall woefully short. In the end, CNN and Moore end up with similar conclusions that health care in the U.S. sucks; only difference being few numbers here and there.

Talking about investigative reporting, CNN or any other network could have easily done Moore’s job i.e. if they wanted to but I’ll ascribe this to ratings-driven reporting that ends up with Paris on an exclusive with Larry King.

Ashutosh, isn’t it surprising that the administration that swears by fiscal conservatism now heads up the biggest government and the largest deficit? To make it worse, whatever government they are heading isn’t half as efficient and functionary as it was earlier.

This is the second link that I promised.

It was not too much trouble after all :)

Boing Boing and/or /. had a post up where they linked to CNN’s official statement regarding their fracas with Moore. Apparently they did some fact checking of their own and found that when Moore does his comparisons, he chooses numbers from different years to illustrate his differences.

Their contention is that Moore used US numbers from a report from one year to compare it with numbers for Cuba from a different year. CNN agrees that the there is still a difference if the same year was considered, but the difference is much more substantial in Moore’s “study” because of the different years chosen.

Also today’s there was another link that fisked Moore’s claim that he donated money anonymously (so why crow about it now) to keep his worst critic’s website running when the said critic was facing the choice of running that anti-Moore website or using the money to treat his wife’s cancer. Apparently not only did Moore donate money two months after the fact that the critic was having fiscal issues, but that the hate site’s readers had already pooled in money to keep it running. Apparently the shortage of money was because the web host’s owner had cheated all his customers and the guy had to move to another host and start afresh with a fresh account.

I will post relevant links this evening after I get my hands on them again.