Suzanne Collins’ series “The Hunger Games,” which will soon see the release of a major film adaptation, is captivating the minds of teenagers and adults around the world. Collins’ unique style has made for an excellent series, appropriate and entertaining for all ages. But after reading and loving all three books, I have to wonder, are the books simply creative fiction, or are they a prediction for the future?

“The Hunger Games” trilogy is based in a country named Panem, which is located on the ruins of North America. Within the country of Panem there are two types of societies, the tyrannical Capitol and the twelve districts.

The Capitol of Panem is the perfect exhibition of power and sheltered opulence. The citizens are rich, well fed, and stocked with everything nice. But while the Capitol is throwing their big parties and buying expensive goods, the districts surrounding them are working hard to fulfill the Capitol’s every need, leaving them with next to nothing.

The twelve districts of Panem are full of misery, poverty, and food shortages. Each of the districts has an assigned duty by the Capitol, from agriculture to coal mining; they work hard and suffer to provide their designated good. The citizens of the districts live within the tyrannical laws of the Capitol, and if they ever decide to break the law, they are sure to pay. The Capitol strives every day to remind the people of the districts that their reign is supreme, and one of their favorite torture devices is the annual Hunger Games.

Every year the Capitol goes around to each of the districts to select two teenagers to fight ’til the death. With 24 in the beginning, only one will win–well, usually, that is.

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“Kate, California is going down! Pack up the kids now!

It’s not just California. It’s the whole goddamned world that gone to shit.” (John Cusack, 2012)

It’s surprising to me how often it seems like Sacramento wrote the plot of its own disaster movie and is now acting the part it has written for itself of panicking, incompetent government.

John Nolte, editor of Big Hollywood, has joined that great mass of reverse Joads (of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath), in search of a better life anywhere but California. I imagine him, with his affects, trucking across the Mojave Desert in search of the better life that eluded him in California.

“The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one. It’s as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California,” Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley in Search of America. Now the desert, notwithstanding the government-induced drought in the Central Valley, is more metaphorical and all around us. There are no jobs but government jobs or the jobs the government has yet to destroy.

“You know what’s remarkable? Is how much England looks in no way like Southern California,” Austin Powers once said. But he was wrong. We are England, circa 1970. We’re still looking for our Thatcher. We hope if New Jersey can get Christie, maybe this state can come back, even if our last Republican governor merely played the part of a conservative. Indeed, the fattest governor in America could have taught the body builder a thing or two about trimming the fat. (more…)

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CNS News:

“Well, I mean, I think so because I think that when you come into office and you want to put your mark on things — this is just my opinion, when you want to put your mark on things, you want to be able to spend. And what’s crippled Obama’s administration, as far as I’m concerned, is the financial crisis and it’s prevented him from doing any new spending,” said Baldwin, who publicly supported Obama in the 2008 Presidential election.

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Conservatives have long been silently known as the “more liberal givers“ despite the slacktivist narrative to the contrary. I can’t count a single conservative of my acquaintance that doesn’t include charitable work in their list of priorities. If we don’t want intrusive government then we need to care for the least among us so that they are not exploited as a reason by the government for bigger government.

My husband owns a recording studio, declared as one of the top 16 in the world by Mix Magazine so it wasn’t unusual when an artist named Becky Kelly called them to present a track, titled “Where’s the Line to See Jesus,” that she wanted to turn into a professional recording. What was unusual was the message: simplistic, heartfelt; one distinct melody with a lesson that extends beyond the boundaries of the holiday season. Along with the song Becky and Chris created the accompanying video below.

I’m proud of all the hard work everyone put into this and especially proud of the song’s biggest benefactor – it’s not Becky, it’s not the studio, but a charity called CFS that has long helped families in need and children who need temporary or forever homes. The charity operates solely on private donations but due to tumultuous economic times, those funds are shrinking. We can’t cede the privilege and responsibility of helping our fellow man to the government; that’s not who we are or what we believe and using the arts is a fantastic way to raise funds and awareness.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) – Andrew Breitbart strips off his blazer, windmills it over his head and lets it fly to the stage with a matador’s flourish. He booms into a microphone, sneering, taunting. Breath sprints to keep up with words.
A Breitbart boil is under way, before a cheering throng of tea partiers on a moonlike strip of Nevada desert back in March.

A finger stabs overhead as the conservative online publisher declares Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., a racist. An arm lances outward as he decries Republican leaders as apologists. Voice rising, Breitbart pledges $10,000, then $20,000, then $100,000 for the United Negro College Fund if proof is found to corroborate claims of racial name-calling during tea party protests on Capitol Hill.

“They decided to play lowball, hardball tactics,” Breitbart seethes. “Well, we’re going to have to play it right back at them.”

You could argue he has done just that.

Two weeks ago, Breitbart posted an edited video that left the impression that Shirley Sherrod, then a little-known black federal employee, was racist. Within days she was out of a job, the doctored tape (whose source Breitbart will not name) proved wildly misleading, and President Barack Obama was on the phone with her trying to make things right. (more…)

When Andrew Breitbart takes on a left-wing news meme, you’ve gotta give him credit:  he comes prepared.  After drawing the ire of the NAACP for challenging their resolution against alleged Tea Party racism, Breitbart’s Big Government set off the blogosphere with video of Shirley Sherrod, a government official speaking at an NAACP-sponsored event, drawing cheers and laughter from her audience while recounting a time when she denied help to a white farmer solely because of his race.  While Ms. Sherrod went on to make a point about looking past racial differences, these questions remain: why did no one speak up?  Why was there only positive feedback from the audience at this point in the story? 

For which group is there more evidence of members assenting to racist comments:  the Tea Party or the NAACP?  

While the national leftist media outlets continue to fall over themselves trying to figure out a spin on the story that sticks, we at Big Hollywood thought we’d double down with some analysis of the NAACP’s treatment of racism in the entertainment industry.

For 41 years, the NAACP has awarded “Image” awards to black entertainers who achieve excellence in the arts.  Despite its rightful role in celebrating the accomplishments of people of color in the arts, the awards show has also been beset by controversy.  Several nominees and winners of awards have engaged in openly racist behavior.  For example, Jamie Foxx, a winner of multiple NAACP Image awards, called Miley Cyrus a “little white bitch” who should “catch chlamydia on a bicycle seat.”  The NAACP has yet to comment on Foxx’s remarks.  Going beyond hatred for one white person, rapper Ice Cube released a song in 1993 titled “Enemy,” with lyrics that state: (more…)

Former Police frontman Gordon “Sting” Sumner has once again made news – this time with his insistence that “the people” are clamoring for big government (read: a socialist nanny state):

“Well, you can see the enthusiasm out there. And people are here to really tell big government that we want big government to make big decisions about the most important problems we face. And also to pressure our corporations to behave properly, as consumers, but we’re here to — we’re asking for big government, basically.”

First of all, who is this “we?” Don’t include me in that statement, bucko - or the readers of Big Hollywood, for that matter. And don’t include the millions of Tea Party attendees all across this still great nation of ours. Obviously someone’s too busy polishing the Grammys on his mantel to pay much attention to the news – except to watch videos of his own CNN appearances, natch.

And I have to ask the obvious question – is Mr. Sumner even an American citizen, or is he just here because the US (for now) taxes him at a lower rate than the UK? Either way, he’s a blowhard who doesn’t speak for me. (more…)

So two eighty-year-old sisters are suing each other over a half million in powerball prize money. They haven’t talked to each other in years, all because one sis claims they had a contract that says they would split their winnings every time they gambled.

And this reminds me of something very important: people are bad.

Seriously: people are bad. To the bone, to quote Mr. Thorogood. I mean, when two sisters who’ve known each other for nearly a century are rejecting their own blood over bucks – you’re seeing humanity. Or more specifically: what happens to humanity when you think you have something – and then it’s taken away.

I want you to think about that when you consider the health care reform bill, which will create new agencies, new bureaucracies, new taxes, new costs. Meaning new opportunities for entitlement desire, and entitlement rage. The thing that grows cannot ungrow. It’s here to stay, and it will only get bigger. And our government wouldn’t have it any other way. (more…)

One of the greatest ironies of so called “progressive politics” is that it destroys what it’s supposed to save. California has been run by statist politicians for over 30 years now, and most of them would call themselves “progressive.” The alleged goals of progressives are to take care of “the little guy”; they’re supposed to make a society that’s more “open and fair.” In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Progressive politics have the net effect of doing the reverse of everything it claims to be about.

I’ll be getting into that in detail in another series of articles, but we’re here to talk about Hollywood. Hollywood was once a conservative town run by immigrants who believed in the American way. Many of the stars fought in WWII and acted in patriotic movies. But there was a labor struggle in Hollywood starting with the unions, which began to get infiltrated by communists and socialists in the 1930s. They made more and more demands of the studios that they didn’t like. In 1947, the studio bosses decided to take advantage of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), with which Senator Joseph McCarthy had no direct involvement despite misinformation to the contrary. The Hollywood studio bosses wanted to bust up the unions and the method they used was the HUAC investigations and the blacklist. (more…)

Over at the L.A. Times today, art critic Christopher Knight went after Big Government for reporting on the White House Christmas trees ornaments and the man, Simon Doonan, tapped to oversee the decorations for the White House.  Knight’s objection to Big Government’s coverage of the administration’s decision to inject left-wing politics into the White House Christmas tree begins and ends with the fact that Andy Warhol was the artist behind the particular image of the murderous Communist dictator Mao Zedong featured on one of the ornaments we brought to your attention.  Knight’s article is excerpted below followed by Breitbart’s take downs and Knight’s response.  Jump in the comments here or head over to the L.A. Times article and join the fray.

“A Warhol Christmas at the White House”
By Christopher Knight, L.A. Times

When it comes to art, the right-wing anti-Obama crowd hasn’t had a very good year. Repeated efforts to gin up outrage in a manufactured culture war have either fallen flat or proved downright embarrassing. (You can see some of them here, here and here.)

The latest fiasco is the Great Christmas Ornament Scandal.

On Tuesday, Andrew Breitbart’sBig Government blog got its knickers in a twist over one of the Obama White House’s myriad Christmas trees. (Big Government is a sibling to Breitbart’s Big Hollywood blog, which cranked up a paranoid fantasy about the National Endowment for the Arts a few months back.) The blaring “EXCLUSIVE” led with a blurry photo of a decoupage Christmas ornament adorned with the face of Chinese Communist dictator, Mao Zedong.

“Of course, Mao has his place in the White House,” Big Government wailed about the GCOS, taking the Obama-as-socialist meme out for a yuletide spin.

Except, it wasn’t exactly Mao. It was Andy Warhol’s “Mao.”

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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…)

And for the other bad guys…

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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…)

Who is Bosch Fawstin?

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.

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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…)