Who should save the sight of an uninsured South Carolina man who can’t afford eye surgery? That’s the question the Charlotte Observer asks in a story about a 49-year-old Republican who declined to sign up for Obamacare because he “prided himself on paying his own medical bills,” and is now upset that the Affordable Care Act won’t bail him out.

"Do you think you need to see where you're shooting if someone's on top of you, trying to kill or rape you, while their hands are slowly squeezing your neck and they're yelling 'I'm gonna kill you'? I didn't think so." This is the NRA commentator's argument for arming the blind that the NRA just removed from its website.

According to police surveillance footage, a 33-year-old blind man walking alone in the Germantown section of Philadelphia was shoved, beaten, and robbed while witnesses walked by without intervening.

Iowa is giving gun permits to people who are legally or completely blind that will let these residents acquire guns and carry these firearms in public. Officials from Polk Country report that at least three people who can't legally drive and weren't able to read the application forms have been given permits to carry firearms.

Eyeballs, that is.

As if you needed another excuse to skip church: In Viareggio, Italy, 46-year-old Aldo Bianchini blinded himself and permanently scarred everyone else attending mass at Sant'Andrea church when, during the priest's sermon, he suddenly stood up, ripped his eyes right out of their sockets with his bare hands, then "collapsed to the floor in a pool of blood."

David Headley, an American of Pakistani descent who is accused of helping plan the Mumbai terrorist attacks, was also a DEA informant. American officials received repeated warnings that Headley was planning attacks, but ignored them because drugs are really bad.

Twin discrimination! Sexing to success! Kiddie irony! Erasing wrinkles! Beating obesity! Late night fat! Insomnia menopause! Blindness progress! And bilingualism! It's your Tuesday Health Watch, where we watch your health—in English, y en Español (poquito)!

After a toxic poison burned the eyes of Saddleback Church's Pastor Rick Warren, he tweeted a request for prayers. Three hours later, the anti-gay mega-church creationist who gave Obama's inaugural invocation had been saved! Let us relive the miracle.

Glenn Beck says that he's been diagnosed with macular dystrophy, and could go blind within a year. "I knew that at 3!" Beck said. "You might go blind someday. You might not." [Deseret News]

Giant hogweed, an enormous plant whose sap can burn skin—not to mention cause blindness—has been found in Ontario. If you see it, contact the authorities, and maybe try shooting at it with a gun, or something. [CBC via]

Science: Private school makes you blind.

You really can't make this stuff up: If it's not the developmentally disabled failing to grasp the point of Tropic Thunder's "full-retard" satire, then it's the blind protesting a movie they can't even see. Or so says the president of the National Federation of the Blind, who sat in on a recent screening of the Julianne Moore/Mark Ruffalo film Blindness with a few sighted allies, only to emerge outraged over the depiction of townspeople reduced to madness and violence when struck by a blindness epidemic. Based on Nobel laureate Jose Saramago's novel, the film actually reflects the author's metaphor of sudden, corrupted social order; little did Saramago know he was actually composing the Simple Jack of modern literary allegories. We mean it! Take back his Nobel Prize! And boycott Blindness, while you're at it; that's the least you could do for a guy with grievances (after the jump) like NFB boss Marc Maurer's:

The much-ballyhooed film Blindness, a Fernando Meirelles (the harrowing City of God, the exquisite Constant Gardener) film starring Julianne Moore (the vagina in Robert Altman's Short Cuts), has been labeled a "misfire" at Cannes. Well, at least by New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis. The movie, some sort of political allegory (based on the Jose Saramago novel) about a whole town stricken with blindness (save for the wan, desperate Moore), is apparently "allegory with a very large capital A." Ahh, too bad. I was looking forward to this one. Oh wait, there's more? The film is also "nasty, brutish and nowhere near short enough." Ouch. Well, let's take ol' Manohla's early review with a little grain of salt. The film could change! Dargis could be completely wrong (as she often is)! If she's not, though, bad news for Miramax, which was pinning some major Oscar hopes on this one. Watch the trailer for the film, plus experience a little more of Dargis' ire, after the jump.

The pandas have been euthanized and Sean Penn is still lighting up despite you on the first full day of the Cannes Film Festival, which we continue to study from our vantage point in the salt mines. We continue to wince at the reaction to the opening-night film Blindness, whose bad buzz we were nervous about back when the festival waited forever to announce its selection. Variety's Justin Chang piled on this morning — "Blindness emerges onscreen both overdressed and undermotivated, scrupulously hitting the novel's beats yet barely approximating, so to speak, its vision" — with an only slightly happier James Rocchi following suit at Cinematical.

Then there's the anticipation for Indiana Jones and Whatever the Fuck, whose anxious makers are taking precautions to dodge the lynch-mob on their own tail:

Some day we'll bite the bullet and experience the magic of the Cannes Film Festival first-hand, but in the meantime, there are advantages to keeping one's distance. For starters, we're insulated from the horrors of marketing rituals like the one foisted on the international press this morning, when Jack Black strolled into Cannes with a few dozen minimum-wage costume slaves panda bears in support of his upcoming Kung Fu Panda. As evidenced by the accompanying video, much hammy ass-kicking and a sort of loin-churning, interspecial sexual chemistry ensues.

The Cannes rumor mill is whirring at full speed again today as the trades pick up whispers that the Julianne Moore/Mark Ruffalo drama Blindness is likely to occupy the opening-night slot. The Toronto Star is saying it's a done deal, but it's not official, and we're not so sure; with barely two weeks remaining before the May 14th opener, word over the Defamer transom suggests that Blindness is bad enough to make festival programmers wait — and make distributor Miramax stall — before committing the plum spot to a stinker.