I think we were all surprised and disappointed when Michael Mann’s $100 million ode to the midwestern bank robbers of the 1930s, Public Enemies, misfired at the box office, A Nightmare on Elm Street or no Donnie Brasco. After all, Captain Jack Sparrow meets Edith Piaf in Capone-era Chicago directed by the man who put De Niro and Pacino together for the first time at Kate Mantelini’s on Wilshire: what’s not to like?

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Many theories have been offered as to why the public made b.o. enemies of John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd, but the real reason, I think, has yet to be articulated.  And it’s this: Mann, perhaps our greatest living director, taught his cast how to do everything – fight, handle firearms, rob banks, ogle Marion Cotillard… (more…)

I have received a number of e-mails over the years from disgruntled parents griping about the left-wing indoctrination their kids are forced to undergo at colleges and universities all over America.  One minute, it seems, the kids are sane, or at least as sane as one can expect of 18-year-olds, and the next thing you know they’re parroting the likes of Ward Churchill, William Ayers and Noam Chomsky, bad-mouthing America and yodeling the praises of such left-wing troglodytes as Hugo Chavez, the Castro brothers and Barack Obama. I feel their frustration.  Even if the little nincompoops can’t do long division or write a coherent sentence, parents feel like child abusers if they don’t pony up the dough to send their kids off for what is laughingly referred to as higher education. 

If I were running things, most high school grads would enter trade schools.  America will always need nurses, plumbers, carpenters, glaziers and mechanics.  What nobody needs is some 21-year-old schnook who’s wasted four years and most of his inheritance majoring in black, Hispanic or lesbian, studies.  And, then, to make matters worse, because like the Scarecrow of Oz, they have a sheepskin, they’re actually convinced they’re smarter than their parents. 

One of my readers, Penny Alfonso, of Glendale, California, shared a conversation she had with her daughter.  “I told her I won’t pay the tuition for any classes that end in the word “studies”.  I have also told her that while I have no right to tell her how to think, if she comes home hating America and spewing the lies of the leftists, I will tell her I love her, and that she has the right to believe whatever she wants to believe, but I don’t have to pay for it.  In the 20 years of her life, if she’s learned nothing else, she has learned that I am completely serious about this.”  (more…)

I wish I could say I was shocked to discover that Health and Human Services cabinet nominee Kathleen Sebelius is a tax cheat. I’m not moronic or Democrat enough to call this administration a “culture of corruption,” I’ll leave that to smaller minds buried beneath tighter stretched faces. But now we can add Sebilius to a pile of tax-cheating nominees that include; Daschle, Geithner, Nancy Killefer and Hilda Solis.

Kathleen Sebelius didn’t admit to cheating, she claimed that they were “unintentional errors.” I have reason to suspect cheating when all of these unintentional errors just happen to go in one direction. None of these Democrat nominees unintentionally overpay taxes or claim too little on their charitable donations. Like Franken vs. Coleman, the errors always seem to go one way. (more…)