Day By Day: National Treasure
by Chris Muir
Like many conservatives, I was intrigued and excited by the promos for ABC’s reboot of one of my favorite mini-series, “V.” Finally, we thought, one of us had infiltrated the system and slipped one by the hippies who run Hollywood. Even better, we hoped that ABC, in a brash display of “corporate greed” had decided to green-light a series that appeals to the many of us (the majority of the country actually) who are less than enthralled by the hopey changeiness of the current administration.

Old School Visitor
But alas, it wasn’t meant to be. As my colleague Jeffrey Jena pointed out, the show’s writer is a devout leftist and Obama supporter. The show was actually written in 2007, long before David Axelrod and his minions concocted the brilliant marketing campaign that elevated an inexperienced and naive community organizer to the most powerful position in the world.
So, is that it? Case closed? Is “V” not an indictment and slam at the “O-mania” that swept the nation? Far from it. In fact, the show contains two powerful messages that should warm the hearts of all conservatives and make leftists think twice. (more…)
Generally after a story has been told as a book, play, musical, numerous animated, live, made-for-TV films, and Muppets movie, its content is completely exhausted. But Disney’s latest, “A Christmas Carol,” by writer-director Robert Zemeckis of “Forrest Gump” and animated films “Beowulf” and “The Polar Express,” resurrects the classic tale through vibrant visuals while sticking to the classic story.

Briefly, “A Christmas Carol” is the story of Ebenezer Scrooge (Jim Carrey), a miser who hoards his money and pays his single employee, Bob Cratchit (Gary Oldman), the bare minimum. Scrooge lives alone in a huge, dark mansion, leading a lonely life. When his nephew Fred (Colin Firth) invites him to Christmas dinner, Scrooge berates him for being happy when he has so little money. When local charity representatives ask for support, Scrooge tells them that he supports the poor through paying taxes. “Are there no work houses? Are there no prisons?” Scrooge asks. To him, taxes are all the dues he owes to society. (more…)
Once upon a time in America, the 1960s to be exact, a generation of young people dissatisfied with the status quo decided they wanted to change society for that they felt was the better. They resented the culture of the time, which was a conservative, somewhat conformist society born out of the 1950s. Taking a cue from the Soviets who called anything that was against Communism “counter-revolutionary” they referred their movement as the “counter-culture.”

From this we got the hippies, the yippies, underground comics, groups like the SLA and the Black Panthers, all sorts of pressure groups and social movements. These were mostly influenced and orchestrated by the left. In fact, leftists had a big hand in shaping a lot of those communities and they infiltrated academia, education, government, media. Over the years they effected a lot of change to our society.
You can judge for yourself how well that worked out. But you can’t deny they managed to get a lot of what they wanted. Except what resulted is a typical example of human irony. (more…)
To which I respond to my unofficial biographer Conor Friedersdorf’s Daily Beast criticism of your’s truly and bigger fish Andrew Sullivan’s two-thumbs-up to it:

Andrew Sullivan (left) and Conor Friedersdorf
In the piece you link to and affirm in the Daily Beast, “The Right’s Lesser Press,” Conor Friedersdorf refuses to interview me as he continues to be my unofficial biographer. (I’m VERY reachable, Conor.) He writes opinion pieces on me purporting to be journalism. He doesn’t quote or cite me, he simply assumes and pushes the point of view he thinks I have and makes an argument based on these alleged positions. It’s sloppy and you, of all people, should know better.
Breitbart.com is MOSTLY a news aggregator. It carries the Associated Press, Reuters, even, Agence France Presse, from those dreaded croissant eaters!!!
It even carries the New York Times on its front page — a benefit that even Big Government and Big Hollywood don’t receive.
Big Hollywood is what it is: a counter-voice to the virtually monolithic Hollywood left. How dare I grant a platform, and a means for the defense of those in Hollywood who would dare go against the strident and intolerant Hollywood left.
Big Government, too, is providing an outlet for voices and ideas that are not proportionally represented in the traditional and mostly biased mainstream media.
Big Hollywood and Big Government have done tremendous work in recent weeks. They have proved without a doubt that the Obama administration and its allies have gone too far. They’ve crossed the line. Federal agencies are turned into propaganda tools. This is something we haven’t seen in the U.S. since, well, ever. This administration knows no shame. Everything is permissible in order to push its legislative agenda through the collective throat of the American people. And the MSM are covering it all up, refusing to spend time and attention to the ACORN scandal first and now the NEA scandal.
It’s a good thing there are conservatives willing to expose this administration for what it is.

President Obama and Kalpen Modi, Associate Director of the Office of Public Engagement
But the question is, what’s next? How can this be countered and how can the Obama administration be forced to back down? As it is, liberal groups, news organizations and individuals continue to cover up for the administration. Perhaps someone will be thrown under the bus again, but the thugs of Team Obama will remain in place and continue to “transform America.”
Exposing their tactics is necessary to fight them, but it’s not enough to actually beat them. Mr. Breitbart and team have learned that the tactics the left has used against conservatives for decades; to discredit them works wonders. But if conservatives want to take back the government, we have to copy the left’s organizing skills as well. (more…)
“The only way to upset the power structure in your communities is to goad them, confuse them, irritate them and, most of all, make them live by their own rules. If you make them live by their own rules, you destroy them. And never forget that ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. Comedy is our friend. Throw the kitchen sink at them!” – from Saul Alinksy’s “Rules for Radical Comedians.”
I never really had any insight into the pure comic genius of Saul Alinsky until I saw his new age Method followers display their considerable chops on the national stage. James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, the Master’s ostentatious and envelope-pushing Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner-like proteges, whose hilarious ACORN skits also showed brilliant flashes of the late great Allen Funt. The Mysterious Mister X, the L.A. street comic who “Alinskyed” Faris Alkhateeb’s boredom-fueled Obama Joker art into an urban poster as devilishly humorous as Hannibal Lecter, also made as big a national splash as a 300-pound chub doing a cannonball into a crowded public kiddie pool. (more…)
From El Rushbo:

Do you remember that NEA phone call? I think it was back in August, the 21st or the 25th, and it featured basically a coordination from the White House to the National Endowment for the Arts to promote Obama’s health care and parts of his domestic agenda. One of the artists on that call got hold of Breitbart and said they’re turning the National Endowment for the Arts and www.Serve.gov, the latest website out of the White House, into political instruments, and there are four pieces written on this at BigGovernment.com. But all it really exposes up ’til now is that the NEA was lying about their coordination with the Obama White House on spreading propaganda. This is the thing that George Will had a comment on This Week, said some laws were broken in this call. Then after some attention was focused on this they announced that the National Endowment for the Arts director of communications Yosi Sargent had been reassigned. They said he was fired but he was actually just reassigned. (more…)
On August 25th 2009, Big Hollywood’s Patrick Courrielche broke the story of a conference call he attended with other “rising artist and art community luminaries”:
On Thursday August 6th, I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts to attend a conference call scheduled for Monday August 10th hosted by the NEA, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and United We Serve. The call would include “a group of artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, taste-makers, leaders or just plain cool people to join together and work together to promote a more civically engaged America and celebrate how the arts can be used for a positive change!”
The email invite came directly from Yosi Sergant, then-Director of Communications at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and it advised this hand-picked group that the call was about laying “a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda – health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.”
Courrielche describes the call this way: (more…)
(….and I approve of this mess. Um….uh….. I mean, I approve of these friends……..that is, until they become political liabilities)
Barack Obama inspires me.
I’m sitting in a waiting room. I’m waiting for my auditioning squad to execute me. I’m wearing my black and red plaid, $1400 St. John audition outfit. I’ve worn it to every audition for six years. It has a small hole in it. I hope they don’t notice. I have time to kill so I’m trying to crawl inside the head of a liberal.
The people auditioning me will all be liberals. Should I hide my recent, passionate Tea-Bagging activities, if the topic comes up? Why should they hate me? I only want the best for everyone. My beliefs in the Bible, and freedom and capitalism are only ideals that bless people. And, they worked real good from 1776 to 2008…with a hitch in the 60s where immorality, free love, the pill, drugs, divorce, and the breakup of the family started the thread of morality unraveling. You can’t have a great country without the spirit of The Ten Commandments hovering in the hearts of its citizens. (more…)
The biggest success of the “Spending Bill,” oops, “Stimulus Bill,” is ending. Yup, that is right; “Cash for Clunkers” is gone. Why? Because it was such a big success, the government ran out of money for the program not once, but twice. This time President Obama is shutting it down. No more money. It is finished. The official spin is that it brought the automobile industry back from destruction. Or, did it?
In my opinion, it is just another example of a government program that did not work contrary to what I said in a prior column. To begin with, the government mistook the popularity of the program and only allocated one billion dollars of stimulus money to the bill. That money ran out in less than two weeks. Then, Congress immediately allocated another two billion dollars. That money is running out in less than four weeks. Another Big Government miscalculation! (more…)
A new Gallup poll shows that married people are more likely to be Republicans than Democrats. The propensity for marriage among Republicans was the same regardless of race or age groups. So this is my formal call to all single Democrats who want to get married; it’s time to change your party affiliation or you’ll go through life alone, or worse, with some flaky narcissist with commitment issues.
We all pretty much know that most Democrats can’t be trusted and that’s reflected in this marriage poll. It’s not that Democrat women are ugly, because we’ve seen too many cute ones out there. The men aren’t hideous either, unless you think a soft, effeminate man hen-pecked his whole life by his domineering mother is hideous. The main reason people don’t get married is out of a fear of divorce– a fear of a breaking of vows. And Democrats talk with their feet when it comes to making commitments with those who philosophically have no grounding to keep any commitment. Did Obama shut down Gitmo? Will he get health reform finished before August recess? Is he going to cut taxes for most Americans? (more…)
So last week I was reading up on the “Cash for Clunkers” program – which just got approved by the Senate – hoping to talk about it on the show. I gave up, however, because it didn’t make any sense to me.
Then it dawned on me. It didn’t have to make sense! It’s a government program. As long as it’s paved with good intentions, it doesn’t matter if it’s a road to nowhere.
So let me try to make sense of this for you (believe me, it’s not easy).
The goal here is to get gas-guzzlers off the roads. So the government is offering a voucher worth anywhere between $3500 to $4500 for your guzzler, which must then be used to buy a new car. How do you qualify? (more…)
Inspired by an article in today’s Wall Street Journal.
For more on my work, visit my blog.
Remember way back in 2008 when George Bush was still the President and everyone on the left was screeching about lies? If you can’t remember that far back just flip over to MSNBC and wait a few minutes they’ll be happy to remind you. I thought I would write a short piece about the lies we have already heard from President Obama. I did little research and there are plenty of websites that focus on a lot of picayune stuff and things from long ago.
I decided to stick to direct quotes from the President within the last 18 months. Some I have commented on, the others, as they say at Harvard Law, res ipsa loquitur.
1) ”…not because I believe in bigger government — I don’t — not because I’m not mindful of the massive debt we’ve inherited — I am.” Speech to Congress, February 24, 2009
2) “And that is why I have ordered the closing of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay and will seek swift and certain justice for captured terrorists…” Speech to Congress, February 24, 2009 (more…)
“It’s says; ‘We The People’, Mr. Obama, – not ‘We the Government,’ nor ‘We the Bureaucrat,’ nor ‘We the Department of Everything Pleasant and Unpleasant,’” the rigidly regal legend declared just seconds after materializing in the bedroom. Then, turning towards the window, his eyes widened almost dis-pleasingly, as he surveyed the city given his name.
“Mr. Washington…. President Washington…” said a nervous Obama, “things are different now; I inherited a crisis… we need government to provide for the people, we need government for our banking system, and we need government to protect the quality of life for citizens all around the country.”
The elder tapped his chest with the lightest of touch, gripped his mouth and raised his chin slightly as if holding back an angry torrent of knowledge, his mind seemed to be sifting that knowledge as to politely address the younger man. Then, speaking slowly, he said softly: (more…)
Ever since Bill Clinton gave us the greatest insight into the modern political mind with the words, “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is,” it has become important for the intelligent citizen to closely parse all political speech. I didn’t listen to President Obama’s speech to Congress live because I was busy watching a “Maude” marathon on some obscure cable network. I recorded the speech so I could fast forward through all of the obligatory applause breaks and got his hour and ten minute speech down to forty five minutes. I pulled out a few quotes from the speech so I could break them down and share their deeper meaning. Mr. Obama’s words will be in bold and my explanation will follow. I may have missed your favorite quote, or your take on these may be a little different than mine, so feel free to add it when you comment.
“Nor did all of our problems begin when the housing market collapsed or the stock market sank. We have known for decades that our survival depends on finding new sources of energy.”
So your theory, Mr. President, is that if we would have given out a wind turbine or a solar panel with every bad loan we would be ok today? (more…)