Singer/actor Will.i.am rallied Obama Nation in 2008 with his original song “Yes We Can.”

Turns out the performer actually meant to sing “You Better You Bet.”

Will.i.am spoke about his support for Obama during a fundraising event this week as well as why he created his own foundation to support education.

The Black Eyed Peas leader said he was inspired by the 2010 documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” about U.S. public education. He said that “Superman is not coming to save no neighborhood or no education system.”

Please take a moment to digest, or better yet, diagram that sentence. Let’s move on.

Will.i.am also talked politics: He said President Barack Obama is not a “magic man,” and that people shouldn’t expect him to solve the country’s problems with “some freakin’ plan.”

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Here’s a link to Cherry Tree Media.

Politico:

Today’s screenwriters often have little use for white and black hats.

The modern hero is less than perfect, to put it mildly. Think Showtime’s “Dexter,” or films like the “Bourne” franchise where shades of gray are the order of the day.

The era of John Wayne-style heroes is no more.

Enter “Safe House,” the new Denzel Washington thriller about a rogue CIA agent who possesses a file so important people are lining up to kill him. Washington’s character, Tobin Frost, is a prime example of the modern anti-hero. He’s a mastermind who went off the grid a decade ago against the will of his government.

At least that’s what we’re told.

The film keeps us guessing about Tobin’s true nature, and that’s part of the story’s appeal. But “Safe House’s” impressive nuance ends abruptly when it’s time to give us a typical Hollywood finale. (Major Spoilers Ahead)

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According to Michael Moore’s tweet (and everyone on MSNBC and CNN), President Barack Obama is correct to force the Catholic Church to offer insurance that provides free birth control, sterilization, and the Morning After abortion pill — because “the law is clear” about “equal access to birth control for all women no matter where they work.”

Really? There’s a right to free birth control through your employer? Liar.

But what Moore is doing here is what Obama and his media minions are doing. They’re turning a government mandate that violates the First Amendment into a “rights” issue.

What Obama is attempting to do to the Catholic Church is no different than creating a federal mandate that would require every Islamic-run business to provide pork rinds in their vending machines — because people have a right to equal access to fat free foods.

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Clint Eastwood says audiences understood exactly what his Chrysler advertisement broadcast during Sunday’s Super Bowl broadcast meant – “let’s work our way out of [the recession].”

Those who say otherwise are missing the point, Eastwood tells CNBC in a new interview to air tomorrow during the 6 a.m. EST edition of “Squawk Box.” The following is from a rush transcript of the interview:

I’m surprised at the people who are supposed to be intelligent have interpreted it otherwise because it’s very disappointing to see that because the average person seems to get it … there are some people who make it a political element about everything you talk about from everything to where you’re dining or what on.

Eastwood also talked about out of control government spending, throwing his weight behind the bipartisan commission created by the Obama administration to the address the issue:

I was kind of amazed that they took Simpson-Bowles and assigned them this research and they come back with a recommendation which was exactly stop spending. And that everyone said, ‘that’s enough from you guys. Go home….’”

“I don’t know why the current administration assigned them to it if they weren’t going to pay any attention to it.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi has had enough of Stephen Colbert’s political sheninagans.

Not really. The former Speaker of the House has unleashed a new faux political ad chastising the Comedy Central comic for his faux political ads. Their combined purpose? To squash the GOP’s Super PAC ads, of course, before they can take aim at President Barack Obama.

Meanwhile, Obama’s recent flip-flop on using those very same Super PAC ads goes unmentioned in Pelosi’s new video:

In a new TV ad, Nancy Pelosi takes aim at Colbert’s Super PAC, suggesting that their former friendship (note picture of her signing his wrist cast) has been ruined by the mock-conservative pundit’s refusal to disclose the complete sources of his funding….

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Kirk Cameron could have ended up as yet another sitcom star gone bad.

Instead, the teen heartthrob from the ’80s sitcom “Growing Pains” became a parent, headlined one of the biggest movie sleepers in recent memory (“Fireproof”) and today addressed the conservative conference CPAC about his latest project.

Cameron’s “Monumental,” hitting theaters next month, mourns a nation in decline and looks to the past for a brighter future. The actor turned activist told CPAC attendees why he made the film:

As I look around I get this sinking feeling that we’re off track, that there’s something sick in the soul of our country,” Cameron told those gathered at the conservative conference in Washington on Thursday. “I examine the fruit that’s hanging on the tree of America and I can see that it’s rotting. And that concerns me deeply.”

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On February 7th, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the marriage protection amendment, commonly known as Prop 8, violates the U.S. Constitution. Although it passed with the support of 52% of California voters in 2008, the court said it “serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples.”

From where I sit, this ruling was a travesty, not only because it discarded the wishes of 7 million Californians who voted for it, but because much of the money to overturn it came from Hollywood elites who are completely out of touch with the heart and soul of America.

Honestly, watching the decision come down from the 9th Circuit was like watching Brad Pitt and Elton John stomp all ever everything that flyover country holds near and dear to its heart. I cite Pitt and John because Pitt gave at least $100,000 to “fight the proposition,” and in Jan. 2011, John played a benefit concert in Beverly Hills that raised $3,000,000 for the same cause.

Of course, these two were not alone. Steven Bing, long time Democrat Party donor and Hillary Clinton supporter, donated $500,000 to the cause, and according to Advocate magazine, Mary J. Blige and Melissa Etheridge were right there in the mix as well. Oh, and we can’t overlook old “Meathead,” Rob Reiner, who opposed Prop 8 when it was on the ballot in 2008 and who’s been “one of the biggest fundraisers behind the legal effort” to overturn it since. (more…)

Conservatives will start rolling their eyes early on in the new movie “Safe House.”

Denzel Washington stars as a rogue CIA agent who turns himself in to U.S. authorities, and before you can say “human rights abuse” his character undergoes a waterboarding treatment.

Had “Safe House” come out five years ago, the scene might have included jabs at the Bush administration, the War on Terror or both. Likely both. Instead, the scene arrives and leaves without any sermonizing to lessen the moment’s impact.

We’re supposed to learn that Washington’s character, the colorfully named Tobin Frost, is a certifiable bad-ass, and that the information he possesses is critically important to the story. And that’s it.

Nice.

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Yesterday, the creators of the hit show “House” announced that at the end of this, its eighth season, Dr. House and his cast of characters would fade into the distance.

“The decision to end the show now, or ever, is a painful one, as it risks putting asunder hundreds of close friendships that have developed over the last eight years,” said executive producers David Shore, Katie Jacobs and Hugh Laurie, “but also because the show itself has been a source of great pride to everyone involved.

The producers have always imagined House as an enigmatic creature;  he should never be the last one to leave the party.  How much better to disappear before the music stops, while there is still some promise and mystique in the air.”

Now’s as good a time as any for a post-mortem on one of the quirkiest, most interesting character shows of the last decade. “House’s” focus on a thoroughly unlikeable character was risky, and it paid off; the creators’ decision to make him a thoroughgoing atheist constantly at conflict with others subtly made the case for the bankruptcy of his ideology.  Or, at the very least, it offered philosophical contrast.

Most famously, “House” featured a very pro-life episode in 2007, “Fetal Position,” in which an unborn child reached out of the womb and touched House’s hand, mirroring the famous photograph. That was mirrored by a pro-choice episode that same season that made the case for abortion for a religious rape victim. That was House’s style.

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The feature-length documentary “Ayn Rand & the Prophecy of ‘Atlas Shrugged‘” is currently in its final week of a month-long limited national theater run, having to date played to enthusiastic audiences in upwards of 75 cities, including New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Toronto, Stamford, Boston and Annapolis, Md.

The documentary will be available on DVD and download beginning in April through Virgil Films (“Restrepo,”"Forks Over Knives”) complete with extra features.

Author/philosopher Rand began writing her last and most ambitious novel – “Atlas Shrugged” – in the years immediately following World War II. Her working title for the book was “The Strike.” It was about what would happen if all the productive people in America went on strike, leaving the entitlement recipients and governmental regulators she called “moochers” and “looters” without anyone to create value for them.

The result is chaos and ultimate disaster.

The post-war years and early ’50s are generally thought to be a relatively prosperous and benign period in twentieth century American history. Yet that’s the period through which Rand painstakingly crafted her novel. When it was published in 1957, “Atlas” was widely dismissed for its “preposterous” scenario. “Atlas” was science fiction. In no way, said the critics, did it depict the real America. Not yet, Rand said. In fact, she wrote the novel in the hope she might prevent it from coming true.

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Artist John McNaughton should have beefed up his bandwidth this month.

News of the Nevada-based artist’s new painting, “The Forgotten Man,” went viral over the past few days sparking massive sales and a bit of outrage as well. The painting depicts President Barack Obama standing on the Constitution while previous presidents look on with outrage.

John McNaughton’s “The Forgotten Man” sold in one day “what we would sell in three months.”

The amount of traffic the story generated even crashed his website.

“I hate to think of the sales I lost with the site being down, but I’m pleased that the message got out,” he told CBS Las Vegas.

His webmaster needed to increase the amount of bandwidth for the site four times before it went back up Saturday night.

Naturally, some Obama supporters instantly dubbed the painting racist, charges McNaughton refutes on his web site:

There is no racial meaning or undertone that the FM [Forgotten Man] isn’t black. This is not a racial painting; it is about the vanishing of the American dream.

Conservative movies can rock the box office, as anyone who so much as glanced at the balance sheets for “The Passion of the Christ” can attest. But a new study by Movieguide, a faith-friendly film outlet, claims the big picture is far more positive for movies promoting patriotism and faith.

The Hollywood Reporter:

The Movieguide report rates movies using more than two dozen criteria, such as whether a title promotes capitalism or socialism or if it promotes or denigrates biblical principles. Violence, sex, political correctness, revisionist history, environmentalism, feminism, homosexuality and more hot-button political issues all are taken into consideration.

This year’s report concludes that seven of the top 10 films of 2011 scored high on Movieguide’s index and therefore qualify as films with “strong or very strong Christian, biblical, moral and redemptive content.”

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Oprah Winfrey has more to worry about these days than just her flailing TV network.

The former talk show queen’s self-named magazine is also suffering a significant sales drop, according to The New York Post:

Newsstand sales plunged to 413,363 copies — down 32 percent from the same period a year ago, when she was selling 608,212 copies.

Winfrey’s last syndicated talk show aired in May 2011, so while there has been some softness for the past two years, this marked the first six-month stretch with no broadcast TV exposure at all. The magazine’s total circulation was also down by 5 percent, to 2,380,782.

Combine that with the dismal ratings for OWN, Winfrey’s upstart network, and you have a picture of a media titan in trouble.

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Rush Limbaugh isn’t making Clint Eastwood’s day.

The conservative talker spent a second straight broadcast mocking Eastwood’s now infamous “Halftime in America” Chrysler ad that aired on Super Bowl Sunday. Today, Limbaugh played a parody on his popular radio show to keep the story alive despite Eastwood’s protest that the commercial wasn’t meant to support President Obama’s auto bailout policies.

When somebody tells me Clint Eastwood did a halftime commercial for Chrysler, I expect it to be something like this,” Limbaugh told his 20 million listeners before audio of an Eastwood impersonator began:

Limbaugh’s is audio only, but video parodies from other sources were created for the Internet, including one from the Second City Network that appears to be a subtle attack on GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Actress Scarlett Johansson once famously swapped emails with future president Barack Obama.

Now, the curvy star of “We Bought a Zoo” is carrying Obama’s water for his 2012 campaign.

Johansson announced she’s back on Team Obama, reading off the Celebrity Apology script while chatting to The Huffington Post about her return to the Hope and Change Express:

I think people are really in dire straits and they are very reasonably and understandably upset,” she said. “I mean Obama inherited a turkey, he really did, and he’s working to… he’s fighting a kind of uphill battle in a sense and he has these past four years. And he never ran his first term as that — he was always going to be a two-term election in that sense. And change doesn’t happen overnight, you know, we know that.

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The reports and books that were timed with Reagan’s 100th birthday last February tended to mention the Hollywood years as a mere afterthought. Moreover, most Reagan biographers typically focus on the more well-known movies such as “Kings Row and “Knute Rockne.”

But there are several films worth revisiting that have gone largely unheralded. At a time when Reagan has earned high marks from historians and academics for his time in office, the caricature of him as just a B actor persists. But Reagan’s uncommon human touch and affable
personality are on full display in films that are worth revisiting.

Furthermore, his conversion from New Deal liberalism over to Goldwater conservatism is directly tied in with Reagan’s Hollywood years. And, as Gorbachev learned during their summit meetings, Reagan could be a tenacious, shrew negotiator; a skill that can be traced back to his time as head of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) union.

The steel behind the congenial smile was forged during some of the more intense altercations with Hollywood communists intent on taking over the union and organizing the film industry. “Thugs” attached to the “red-dominated” Conference of Studio Unions were significant players here, Kengor informs readers in his book. They went after Reagan personally and even threatened to throw acid on his face. Reagan began to carry a gun for his own personal safety and did not give any quarter.

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El Rushbo didn’t mince words on EastwoodGate today.

Rush Limbaugh, back behind the golden EIB microphone following a one-day vacation, addressed the Chrysler Super Bowl ad featuring Clint Eastwood. And the talk show titan didn’t like what he heard.

I think he got scammed. I think he got roped into doing something he thought was patriotic and ended up being played. I do,” the conservative radio host said on his show on Tuesday. “I’m just going to give him the benefit of the doubt and suggest he got suckered into this.”

Limbaugh … said “all of this talk of ‘working together’” is something people say when Democrats are “about to get shellacked.”

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Dwayne Johnson, the actor once known by his wrestling moniker “The Rock,” couldn’t wait to Tweet about the death of Osama bin Laden.

Johnson is just as eager to share his love for the U.S. and talk about how he shows it now … and in the future. Turns out we might have another actor-turned-politician on our hands. Here’s Johnson taking about being one of the first few Americans to share the news of bin Laden’s death via social media and his future job plans:

I got friends in high places and low places. It was a very interesting day; I’m proud of our country and proud to be American….

Right now the best way that I can impact the world is through entertainment. One day, and that day will come, I can impact the world through politics. The great news is that I am American, therefore I can become President.

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The celebrities have spoken - at 140 characters at a time – to show their support for today’s court ruling striking down Proposition 8.

TheWrap.com:

Not many bold faced names expressed any outrage, which is not that surprising as Hollywood is a liberal town, after all. That was left to folks on the other end of the political aisle, such as presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich who took to Twitter to decry the decision….

Here’s a look at some of the best responses to the news.

Olivia Wilde
Woohoo!! Die Prop 8 Die!!!! 9th Circuit just ruled you unconstitutional. Next step Supreme Court!

Seth MacFarlane
Prop 8 architects: Every civil rights battle is eventually won by the oppressed party. Save your hundred mil and buy some Bud platinum.

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