So sorry I didn't call in!

I got home late, AND we had a power failure. VERY unsexy.

i tried checking it out at 5:20-ish and kept on getting an error message from blogtalkradio. . . i tried several times but only was able to connect after 6pm when it was already over and archived. . .

i was kind of curious tho' - has that dude who was saying how horrible it was to live in cuba actually lived and/or traveled around thru cuba?. . . or have friends and/or family who have?. . .

'cuz he made it sound really really bad but the friends i've talked to who've lived and/or traveled throughout cuba, and couch-surfed with a few cuban families they knew, didn't paint nearly as bleak a picture and in fact, generally enjoyed their time there. . .

i'm not saying that the dude who called in was wrong, i'm just curious if his description of cuba was from first-hand experience, secondhand, or from stuff he's read. . .

That wasn't me, but I know dozens of people who lived in Cuba, including people who were jailed by Castro--without trial--for their political beliefs or forced to cut sugar cane as slave laborers.

They don't seem to miss him much, but I guess the happy folks your friend met as a sheltered tourist prove he's a great guy.

Funny how many people drown each year, trying to escape his island paradise. It's too bad they don't know as much about Cuba as you do.

Sorry if I seem crabby, but your question is unbelievably stupid. Like something an apologist for the Nazis would have asked in 1940.

Bloopy, I'm sorry that BTR wasn't working. I actually lost my switchboard a few times during the show. It's not perfect technology (as my sound problems show) but it's really damn cool to be able to take callers, podcast live, etc.

I can speak a bit about Cuba as my best friend from High School, her mother and grandma escaped from Cuba. There are endless horror stories.

Steve is very close to some fine people who blog about Cuba constantly. I think it's a sensitive subject. Which is why so many people are going to see Sicko and talking about life in Cuba. This is all good.

And besides all that, you get the warm hug for being one of my only lefty readers :)

Sorry, I have been experiencing tightness issues with my fabulous new underwear.

um, yeah, i actually didn't claim to know *anything* about cuba (shit, you're talking to a dude who couldn't even point out new york on a map with 100% certainty), just mentioned what i've heard from about 6 or 7 granola hippy friends i know who've traveled there, 4 of whom actually had friends who were cuban and didn't actually go the normal gringo tourist route. . .

i really was curious if the dude had been there and seen the crappiness firsthand 'cuz what my friends talked about seemed wildly incongruous from what i'd heard of the place growing up. . . but i mean, let's face it, when you're a tourist you generally don't go hang out in the grinding poverty stricken areas, and even if you're hanging out with friends who are locals, they ain't gonna take you there either (unless you're there specifically for that purpose). . . so, yeah, i wondered how accurate their observations were. . .

and that's unlike michael moore's portrayal of the place which, to me, came across as soooo fake and chock-a-block full of cuban propaganda - easily the weakest part of his movie. . . being a liberal i generally dig his work but his documentaries always seem to have one or more sections that just makes me think, "wtf is he doing? he's fucking up his own movie!". . .

but going back to the tinted glasses a tourist has when traveling, if you go there as a tourist specifically to see the grinding poverty for, i dunno, a study or a documentary, again, i imagine you'd get a skewed viewpoint as well. . .

so i was just wondering, y'know, what tint of glasses he was wearing. . . i mean i lived and worked in mexico for a year - i dug it, i made several friends who were locals and who had no desire to emigrate to the US, but i also knew that i wasn't seeing the whole picture, even when i'd spend some time at a shelter for street kids. . . was mexico a great place to live?. . . i loved it but there's two sides plus a gajillion shades of grey to give a full answer. ..

and before you get your panties in a bunch, note that i'm not comparing mexico to cuba. . . never been there, couldn't really say. . .

and y'know, actually now that i look back at my earlier comment, i don't see how it's stupid, much less unbelievably so as tho' i could've been a nazi apologist in a past life. . . i was just asking to see how many degrees away (if any) he was from really knowing what life was like in cuba. . . for instance, say he'd heard cuba sucked from john hodgeman on the daily show or, i dunno, an ann coulter rant, then, y'know, i'd probably ignore his opinions completely. . . however if, say, he'd lived in cuba for a while - well then i'd actually like to hear more about his experiences. . .

moxie mentioning her best friend in high school with a mom and grandma escaping from cuba, well, see, at this point i'd be more inclined to believe something from moxie than the other dude, purely because i know how many degrees of separation there are in her case, and i have no idea with his. . .

i guess i just don't see what's so stupid about wondering about the source of information rather than blindly accepting what people tell you as fact. .. and yes, i see the breakdown in my logic with that last sentence when i blindly accept moxie's word when she talks about her friend, but hopefully you see my point, stupid, ignorant, and uninformed tho' it may be. ..

Bloopy, your question was not stupid. However, I don't want to get into the "wondering about the source of information" thing in the context of Michael Moore. That would be a huge shitstorm. Not in Moore's favor.

Mike Moo's work on 9/11 was questionable in terms of sources and logic, however I'm glad he tackled something that isn't in the past, totally false and can actually be changed.

Like healthcare.

He went astray, and I'll tell you where. As millions of people who risked death to land in Miami can attest, Cuba is no paradise.

He got special treatment. Just like Paris Hilton did in jail, or anyone toting a videocamera would if they set foot in Cuba. You don't show your bad side on camera, right?

Likewise, ask any Canadian about their free health care. I did! I couldn't get a word in edgewise on my own show to share those comments. Likewise, my Aunt lives in London and had to go to a private hospital to have her baby.

I could not agree more with the premise that our health care system is broken.

But socialized medicine is not the panacea folks like Mike Moore imagine.

It's not better than what we have now. In many ways, it's far worse.

My late friend Cathy Seipp wrote on National Review about her thoughts about our health care problems, and I think she was exactly right. If we all have to have to have health insurance (like we do car insurance), costs will go down.

Otherwise, if you still fancy Cuba....go read BabaluBlog for a few weeks.

oh, no doubt, F9/11 was one weak-ass documentary. . . painfully one-sided, weak logic, half-truths, several scenes inserted for what seemed like having the sole purpose of tugging at the ol' short & curlies. ..

one of the problems i find interesting about socialized health care is deciding where it stops. . . 'cuz if it's not an insurance company, some other entity has to decide who gets cared for and who loses out. . . it's just that i'd hope the deciders might not be a for-profit insurance company looking out for the best interests of the shareholders. . .

i remember my friend telling me there's some city in the US, i forget which one, maybe portland?. . . or hell, maybe it's even a state, but i thought it was a city. . . anyway, whatever it is, it decided to adopt a form of socialized health care. . .

their solution to figuring out who got covered and who didn't ended up being to crank out a list of possible maladies in some kind of order where, say, a broken bone was at the top at #1 and a baby born with no brain but could be kept alive indefinitely was at the bottom, say, #1000 (totally making up the problems and ranking 'cuz i don't remember the specifics). . .

they then looked at their budget, extrapolated data from the previous years to see how much they could afford to cover, and declared that for that year anyone with problems 1-577 were covered, and anyone lower on the list was s.o.l. . . .

and that made me wonder when moore went to the other countries to check out their health care system, i mean, those places *must* have a cutoff point, don't they?. . .

and actually now i'm kind of curious since you brought it up - in what ways is the canadian health care system far worse than ours?. . . 'cuz as you might imagine, moore didn't just gloss over negatives, there wasn't even an acknowledgement that they existed. . .

I can always hear Steve and other callers great, but the voice of Mox is always low and squeeeeeky. So when I turn it up I can hear Mox ko and get blasted by the others. Still great talk and a definate hour killer.

How can anyone who doesn't live in a burrow be unaware that Castro is a murdering tyrant or that his people live in squalor and misery? It's not exactly classified information. Asking whether life is unpleasant in Cuba is like asking whether they have rice in China.

I'm sorry, but like I said, the question was unbelievably stupid.