There's nothing "centrist" about surrounding oneself with corporate beltway tools

[brentspeak]

And there's nothing "leftist" about refusing to surround oneself with corporate beltway tools.

FDR, Truman, Ike, and to a lesser extent, JFK and LBJ -- all had business people in their cabinets, but not of the corporate toady variety. Henry Wallace was a centrist. Harold Ickes was a centrist. Stewart Udall was a centrist. Tom Daschle is a lobbyist. Sanjay Gupta is a shill. Larry Summers works for Wall St.

[Occam Bandage]

1. Defend the statement that Sanjay Gupta is a shill.

I have seen it, I have asked several people to explain it, and none have bothered to do so beyond "he has a television show that also runs advertisements." That is not my personal definition of "shill."

[brentspeak]

4. Trying to discredit Michael Moore's "Sicko" film, just for one example

[Occam Bandage]

6. He made two errors in his discussion of "Sicko."

He misplaced a decimal point (making "$250" read as "$25.0") and he falsely claimed that a guest was not affiliated with a partisan think-tank. Both are just as easily explained (and in fact are more easily explained) by sloppy research on the part of an assistant, and a negligent lack of follow-through on Gupta's part. The rest of the fracas involved the two men looking at different sets of data to make points that were entirely in line with the data they used.

None of that constitutes "shilling." I'm beginning to suspect you are not quite sure what the term means, but are just repeating what you heard someone else say about him.

[brentspeak]

10. Your patronizing response notwithstanding, you can spin it any way you want

The fact of the matter is that Gupta was shilling on behalf of the status quo Big Medicine system -- attempting to discredit universal health care systems employed in countries like Germany and Canada. And there was more than "two errors" and a "decimal point":

http://www.michaelmoore.com/sicko/news/article.php?id=10017

[Occam Bandage]

12. There were more things stated than the two errors, but none but the two were false.

CNN wrote a full counter-rebuttal to Moore's rebuttal. If you read through both, it's clear that both are simply drawing valid conclusions from differing sources.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/Movies/07/15/moore.gupta/index.html

Now, as for "shilling:" I remain of the belief that you are either not quite sure what the word means, or are allowing your fevered imagination to bypass the necessity to actually back up one's claims. A shill is a person who takes money to advocate for a particular organization while pretending to be neutral. "This one time Sanjay Gupta disagreed with Michael Moore over the factual basis of some claims in his movie" is not remotely evidence of that. You seem to have allowed that sentence to morph into "Sanjay Gupta takes money from pharmaceutical companies to work against health-care reform, and because of this he disagreed with Michael Moore over the factual basis of some claims in his movie, and did so because he wanted to prevent health-care reform from occurring."

Again: Where is the shilling? The best case I can see is that he is host of a television show that runs advertising. That's a very weak case.

[grantcart]

5. I agree but it should prompt us to ask questions about what he thinks about

the pharmeceutical's influence in the market and its lobbying in Congress.

I wonder what Gupta thinks when CNN viewers go into their doctors office and tell them what medicines the doctor should be prescribing (the whole point of those advertisements).

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x8068574

[Occam Bandage]

8. Gupta has already spoken about a very similar issue, and took the wrong side, IMO.

In talking about the free promotional items given by drugmakers to doctors, Gupta claimed that it was silly to believe that doctors would prescribe medications because they got a free pen. In actuality, research has shown that there is a correlation between promotional gifts and prescription issuances. That suggests to me that Gupta is either unaware or chooses to ignore the evidence that advertising has undue influence in the doctor-patient relationship, and I think it's fair to say that it's quite probably because of his career in media.

[snowbear]

2. Oh C'mon brentspeak...

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Are you EVER happy?

[AtomicKitten]

3. Some are tools figuratively, but all are tools literally

and I can't wait to see what Obama does with them!

They will be his personal hand-puppets.

[Hippo_Tron]

7. "The corporate today variety"

Perhaps maybe they didn't have any of those because they aren't governing today. Just a thought...

[Occam Bandage]

9. It's a bit like being impressed with the road layout in medieval Britain

because not one Londoner was killed in an automobile wreck in the fourteenth century.

[Danger Mouse]

11. This post is good...

for me to :hurts:

[SoxFan]

13. "Henry Wallace was a centrist"

:eyes: