Desperately seeking attention to a Twitter feed that required 2862 follows in order to amass a mere 4663 followers, someone at the ridiculously irrelevant National Lampoon*, someone who finds AIDS fair game for “humor,” decided to gain a little attention by ripping into Andrew Breitbart today. Among those tweets came this witty zinger:

In other news, National Lampoon is still in business and somehow less relevant than “Saturday Night Live.”

But if I have their attention, if someone unworthy to even breathe the same air as The Mighty John Hughes and P.J. O’Rourke is reading this and has any kind of say in the film production side of their business, I’d like to offer a suggestion that might help with the credibility of their brand. Instead of naming your films, say, “National Lampoon’s Going the Distance”; title them this way: “Another Desperately Unfunny, Straight-to-Video Piece of Shit We’ve Called ‘Going the Distance.’”

You’ll sleep better. 

As a matter of fact, you might want to call your Twitter feed: “Another Desperately Unfunny Production from National Lampoon.” Really, this is the best you’ve got…?

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So last night, during another wretched episode of Fashion Show (imagine a bloated half-sister of Project Runway), I came across a new anti-HIV Ad. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s message was simple: “when you get HIV, it’s never just HIV.”

Now, some gay groups want the ad pulled because they feel graphic warnings about unprotected sex “could further stigmatize.. gay and bisexual men.” And the chuckleheads at GLAAD, of course, says it “misses the mark in fairly and accurately representing what it’s like to live with HIV/AIDS.”

Which wasn’t the ad’s point, but check it out for yourselves.

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At first, this ad bugged me. I mean, shouldn’t the fear of AIDS be enough to keep you from practicing unsafe sex? Worse, are we now at a point where a disease that’s killed millions is treated like it’s no big deal?

But then I changed my mind. I realized that this commercial wasn’t just a scare tactic – but a tribute to drug companies and those who work for them. (more…)

I must confess-I am not a huge fan of documentaries especially those made by partisan manipulators like Michael Moore and Al Gore. In fact, I find most documentaries quite boring. One would think that as a mother of six and grandmother of eight, I would have enjoyed “Babies,” but after five minutes I was switching the channels to something more stimulating. Maybe I’m all babied out.

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When I received a request by a priest to review a film, “The Human Experience,” I was less than enthused. As a columnist for the New York Sun, my mail box was always filled with similar requests which I seldom had time to address although those received from Moving Picture Institute in Tribeca proved quite interesting and I eventually wrote columns about their features. “Mine Your Own Business: The Dark Side of Environmentalism, “written and directed by Phelim McAleer was a favorite and McAleer became Al Gore’s public nemesis for challenging him at forums about global warming.

This being the start of the Christmas season, however, I was intrigued by the priest’s invite when he told me the documentary was made by young residents of St. Francis House, a group home for troubled youth founded by Father Benedict Groeschel. Grassroots Films began here at the home when producer Joe Campo had the residents take up the art of filmmaking. After a few successful short films, the young men decided to live on the streets of New York City to learn about the homeless community. From there the film developed with opportunities to visit areas around the world to discover how our humanity transcends our environment. One of these treks includes a visit to a leper colony in Ghana; another to dying AIDS victims in Africa. (more…)

JournoList scandal is back and prepare for it to be a driving force in the news for quite some time. The Daily Caller published an article tonight indicating they’ve obtained emails from the JournoList and the initial details are as damning as we expected when the list-serv, founded by the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein in 2007, surfaced with the Dave Weigel kerfuffle last month.

Snippets from the article below, but make sure to read the whole thing at the Daily Caller and return to Big Journalism early and often as we unpack the details that emerge and track the fallout from this seminal event in the history of left-wing media bias. It’s unclear exactly what the Daily Caller has, but there’s certainly no indication from this article they’ve already laid all their cards out on the table.

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.” (more…)

The climate change conference is long gone, but with Christmas just around the corner, I figured there had to be a connection. Also, I’m writing this after a holiday party, so I’m drunk.

As President Obama says, let’s be clear: that comical Copenhagen conference wasn’t about science, it was about wealth transfer. The gist: because of America’s “hyper-industrialization,” we need to pay off poor countries for all the harm we’ve caused in the world. That’s the real green in the green movement: It’s cash, not grass.

What’s this have to do with Christmas? Well, I think the world has forgotten that the biggest gift to this planet is America’s industry – and it’s time to remind them where they would be without it.

1. Whenever a horrible disaster hits, they would be dead. Be it an earthquake, a tsunami or a Madonna tour – we’re usually the first and biggest responders – saving the injured, and helping to rebuild. It is because of our tremendous capability to mobilize quickly that makes us a nation of superheroes. It also takes planes, trucks and tractors to do that stuff. Imagine that carbon footprint. (more…)

The star of Smokey and the Bandit was, of course, Burt Reynolds, a man of great passions, great flaws, and ultimately great loyalty to the people and place he came from. “I love the South,” he emphatically states to this very day. His is a career that — sometimes for worse but more often for better — stands as a testament to that simple heartfelt sentiment.

The man who would become one of the most popular movie stars of the last quarter century was born in 1936, the son of a small-town police chief in Florida. He grew up handsome and tough, randy and reckless — by fourteen, he had lost his virginity to a much older woman, and soon after knocked up the prom queen (his attempts to cajole her into marriage were rebuffed by the girl’s society-maven mother, who forced her daughter to abort the baby). Such antics were an early harbinger of both the charismatic charm and voracious, self-destructive appetites that would define (and sometimes decimate) his later career (a typical joke — Q: Why didn’t Burt Reynolds ever take Loni Anderson out to dinner? A: He made it a rule never to date married women.) (more…)

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Twenty-four year-old Susan La Muse has god-like powers. Actually, her powers surpass those of God since she can reconstitute dead people from scraps of debris and restore them to full health and cognizance. She waves her arms and AIDS disappears from Africa. Every internal combustion engine changes to electric (although the question of what is generating this electricity is never answered.)  She makes disparaging remarks about being a “white girl” while celebrating every other race. And she solves most of her problems through sex. 

Straight sex, gay, bi, group, it doesn’t matter to the sexually omnivorous Susan whose libido knows no bounds. In her most asinine encounter, which becomes key to “world peace,” Susan pulls a train of skinhead Nazis who quickly see the light, accept their “bi-curious” strains and copulate with her and one another. Thereafter, anyone who views her sex tape becomes one with the world and all living things. And “Kumbaya” was heard in the land.   (more…)

I’ll admit up front: I’ve never been a U2 fan. I never really understood the appeal of their self-righteous brand of music, and frontman Bono, with his made-up solo moniker (real name Paul David Hewson) and ever-present see-through wraparound sunglasses, simply irritates me.

Yet I was willing to give him some credit for working with former President Bush on a cause they both believed in – AIDS and poverty in Africa – even though he disagreed with Bush’s stance on Iraq. I honestly don’t think throwing all the money in the world at Africa will change anything there unless the tin pot dictators on that continent are all tossed out on their hineys – and I believe fellow rock star philanthropist Bob Geldof said something similar - but that’s beside the point. I might think even more of Bono if he were to give all of his own massive fortune to the needy in Africa before he lectures the rest of us about our “responsibility,” but I doubt even his philanthropic tendencies go that far. If he did, how could he afford to do things that only rich folks can do, like have his favorite hat flown from the UK to Italy because he forgot it? 

But cool rock stars have their limits. Apparently the B Man reached his when Bush tried to give him a hug at a prayer breakfast a couple of years ago. Adroitly dodging the president by scooting behind the podium, he shook his hand instead. Apparently Bush was good for soaking for taxpayer money for Bono’s cause, but that didn’t merit a hug.

Surprisingly, the media failed to pick up on that little maneuver until this week, when Bono admitted to the dodge in a BBC interview. Why mention it now? Apparently he felt bad about it, but since no one noticed it, why point it out publicly and humiliate someone who is no longer in the public eye? He could have just written Bush a private note saying “sorry, dude.” But I’m a little more cynical – I’m thinking he knew about the buzz of publicity that would accompany his little admission. See, with Bush out of office and criticizing Obama being verboten in the media, even new evidence of old Bush-bashing would immediately be picked up on and go viral. When a world tour is looming, any publicity will work in a pinch. (more…)

It used to be that the most important job in the world was to “raise awareness.” Everyday we were told how important it was to do it for issues like AIDS, global warming, and indoor plumbing. But just as raising awareness had become fulltime jobs for millions of people bearing clipboards and acne, in some very important arenas the crusade is now being undermined. Destroyed, even.

Look at the issues that will potentially devastate your bank account. There, “raising awareness” no longer matters. It happened first with the stimulus bill.  It was far more important to push that mess through than it was to actually read it. Nationalized health care? Beyond knowing that we need it right now – what else is there? And what of this cap and trade muck? It’s way too dry – too bad there aren’t any Cliffs Notes. (more…)

I’ve been way behind on this, mainly because I had relatives staying with me, and consequently I’ve been drunk for four days. However, this piece of footage is still worth showing, courtesy of Weaselzippers. In it CNN’s Don Lemon is interviewing a correspondent about President Obama’s visit to Ghana. Here Lemon earnestly brings up the “unprecedented” welcome Obama received upon his arrival. Only he finds out quickly, that it wasn’t unprecedented. In fact it’s totally precedented, if indeed that’s a word:

Watch Lemon’s response around thirty seconds in. It looks like someone gently pokes him with a stun gun.

Can we go back to that moment again? But this time, producers, let’s slow-mo it.

Joy! In that instant, you learn a couple of valuable things:

-Lemon is adorable when he’s miffed (more…)

Cancer is no laughing matter. AIDS on the other hand, can be hilarious…. But I digress.  A friend of mine went in for a prostate cancer operation this weekend. The whole ordeal lead me to a painful realization: If you get a disease, you’d better hope that it’s one with a celebrity “march for the cure.” Chances are that if Bono isn’t singing about it, you’re probably dying from it. Is anybody else as sickened by this as I am?

AIDS is still the most funded disease around (by the American taxpayer) despite its insignificance on the fatality radar and the fact that in the industrialized world it’s entirely preventable. AIDS doesn’t just “happen” to you here in the U.S.A.  You sort of have to seek out those high risk…activities.  While countless people die of other more prevalent, non-communicable sicknesses, Hollywood has made AIDS benefits trendier than torn Levi’s. (more…)

Part 1 of what I half-jokingly called my “Manifesto.”

In a fiscal conservative’s utopian dreamworld, there would be no federal funding for the arts (or so many other government agencies or programs for that matter).  This has been our position since the inception of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the early 1970’s.  We’ve been saying that if elected, we would abolish these misguided programs and departments and bring our government back to the bare-bones constitutionally described role that it has and leave everything else to the states.

We’ve held the influential bully pulpit of the presidency for twenty of the past twenty-eight years, and what has happened to the NEA?  It has grown.  While we have stood on principle,  we have also stood on the sidelines.  The founding fathers would be outraged that the federal government is funding art with taxpayer money, but because we are on the sidelines standing on our principles, all of that money is going to the people creating art with messages that undermine our very existence. (more…)

“This class struggle plays hell with your poetry,” John Reed, celebrated in Warren Beatty’s Reds, confessed to friends after jumping from the lighthearted literary Left of Greenwich Village into the world of hardcore Communists. Bono may be thinking the same thing about saving the world. U2’s much-hyped No Line on the Horizon, the band’s first album in nearly five years, might be interpreted by celebrities as a cautionary tale against mixing activism with their art. As I write in my American Spectator review of No Line on the Horizon, the album represents the transformation of U2 from relevant it band to greatest hits act. It is uninspired, leaving diehard fans to wonder if meetings with popes, presidents, and queens, fundraising for debt relief, human rights activists, and AIDS, and writing columns for The New York Times makes U2 an afterthought for Bono.

With “Taken” debuting at the box office today, we’re inching closer to the melting of the post-9/11 “Thou Must Whitewash Islam” commandment.

Since 9/11, Hollywood is taken with the politically correct idea that they’re not allowed to portray Muslims as terrorists, or when they do, it’s to glorify the terrorists and justify their behavior–that America deserves it and made them do it.  Or–a la “24″–that Muslim terrorists are always working for the American White man.  Instead, Hollywood, post-9/11, made terrorists and hijackers, everyone BUT Muslims.  There were Black Men with AIDS from Africa (“The Interpreter“),  Federal Air Marshals and airline stewardesses, er . . . “flight attendants” (“Flight Plan,” exec produced by my uber-leftist cousin, Charles J.D. Schlissel), White Christians (a number of movies and TV shows) and everyone else you can think of . . . except Muslims, who make up the majority of real-life terrorists plotting against America today. (more…)

Many of the celebrities that were central to demonizing and making life impossible for President Bush for eight loathsome years NOW want to help with the heavy lifting of bringing America back together under President Barack Obama.

Witness Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher’s cavalcade of shiny, happy situational patriots appearing in a derivative public servitude announcement: A “Presidential Pledge” to President Barack Obama.

Forgive and forget? Right.

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