Let’s be honest. Movies, today, aren’t just one step away from being left wing propaganda, they just plain suck.

We’ve gone from Dirty Harry to Jason Bourne (or whatever his name ended up being; the camera was too shaky for me to ever tell what was going on). We’ve gone from Humphrey Bogart to George Clooney.  We’ve gone from John Wayne fighting Indians to Na’vi fighting Americans.

But, don’t fret. For there is an answer to our problems, fellow film buffs. I know you’re six feet from that ledge, but let me give you hope…they are called books. They are these contraptions with bindings and pages with words on the inside. Together this all creates a story one hundred times more fulfilling than today’s dim-witted liberal flavor-of-the-month films.

Hollywood has always been a liberal town. They give us anti-Iraq war movie after anti-Iraq war movie despite the fact that they all flop at the box office. But what of the literary world?  They must surely share Hollywood’s contempt for conservatives and enriching stories, right? Wrong. The publishing world seems to get it, for the most part. They like to publish what sells and what seems to sell today are right-leaning stories.

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Oscar-winning film producer Harvey Weinstein entered Bill O’Reilly’s “No Spin Zone” last night, and the grouchy executive may still be spinning as you read this.

Weinstein was there to support some of his recent films, including the Oscar-bait biopic “My Week with Marilyn,” but the Fox News host opened with a salvo of political questions.

The longtime Democratic supporter took the bait, first waving away concern about President Barack Obama’s falling poll numbers – “they go up and down,” he says in a calm, dismissive tone – and then saying the president will breeze to re-election.

Then, the Obama worship really began in earnest.

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Few things make us happier than “Factor” producer Jesse Watters, a video camera, and a hypocritical Obama-supporting celebrity:

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Last night, Jon Stewart addressed the fact check of his claim that Fox News viewers are consistently the most misinformed about politics compared to the audiences of other news networks and shows– in “every poll,” he said. Though much of the conservative blogosphere went to town on that bunk claim right away, the backlash against Stewart found a rallying point in an article by the normally left-leaning Politifact:

So we have three Pew studies that superficially rank Fox viewers low on the well-informed list, but in several of the surveys, Fox isn’t the lowest, and other general-interest media outlets — such as network news shows, network morning shows and even the other cable news networks — often score similarly low. Meanwhile, particular Fox shows — such as The O’Reilly Factor and Sean Hannity’s show — actually score consistently well, occasionally even outpacing Stewart’s own audience.

Meanwhile, the other set of knowledge surveys, from worldpublicopinion.org, offer mixed support for Stewart. The 2003 survey strikes us as pretty solid, but the 2010 survey has been critiqued for its methodology.

The way Stewart phrased the comment, it’s not enough to show a sliver of evidence that Fox News’ audience is ill-informed. The evidence needs to support the view that the data shows they are “consistently” misinformed — a term he used not once but three times. It’s simply not true that “every poll” shows that result. So we rate his claim False.

Stewart’s response…

In short: “Yes, I lied, but look at how much Fox lies!”

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Jon Stewart got away with a lot of ridiculous arguments on The Factor last night.  Stewart’s argument that Common wasn’t actually supporting cop killing because he somehow believes that both Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu Jamal are actually innocent of the crime – and therefore should be excused – is both irrelevant and ludicrous.  O’Reilly largely let him get away with it.  Does Stewart think Rashard Mendenhall should be off the hook because he *technically* doesn’t support or sympathize with terrorism if he actually thinks Bin Laden’s hijacked airplanes might not have been the cause of the World Trade Center buildings collapsing?  Attempting to rewrite the history of clearly and unforgivably evil people is decidedly rejected by good and decent people.  Stewart can shove that argument. 

Mendenhall recently lost his endorsement from Champion Sports over a few infamous, perhaps impulsive tweets.  Common wrote a damn love song about convicted cop-killer and domestic terrorist Assata Shakur, went to visit her in Cuba, and named his daughter after her.  I have attached that song at the end of this post, because I want everyone to see exactly what we’re talking about here.  If you name your daughter after a convicted cop-killer, domestic terrorist and violent, militant Black Nationalist, then the song you wrote worshipping said cop-killer was not simply adopting an artistic voice.  If your defense is going to be that you believe she’s really completely innocent, you better have some damn good reasons for believing so if you expect anyone to let it slide. 

Common’s taking sides with Assata Shakur doesn’t have anything to do with his expert legal opinion.  He’s taking sides with Assata Shakur because he apparently worships everything for which she stood – Black Panthers, Black Liberation Army (BLA), ethnic sectarianism, and the great socialist revolution.  He didn’t write a song arguing that even though Assata Shakur joined a reprehensible, racist and violent terrorist organization like the BLA and did a number of awful things with them, in this particular incident there were anomalies in the application of due process.  He wrote a song worshiping her values and her life’s mission. 

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Ken Larrey is working up a piece of analysis now, but I wanted to post the video and throw this question out there…

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Truth be told, watching some on our side make an issue out of Common’s lyrics/poetry kinda depressed me. It’s an argument lost before it can even begin. Artists frequently create characters in their work, most especially songwriters. Did Johnny Cash really shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die? Did Bruce Springsteen really go for a ride where ten innocent people died? Even Common’s call to “burn” Bush can be defended as metaphor. But the real reason this approach depressed me is because it was totally unnecessary. Not as as a poet, not as a singer and not as a character, it’s just a naked fact that Michelle Obama’s White House guest defends convicted cop killers and opposes interracial relationships. Which brings me to my point…

Thank you, Bill O’Reilly:

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Some, like O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, did bring up Common’s open opposition to interracial relationships and his craven support of two convicted cop killers. In other words, on top of the lyrics, there was also a discussion at FNC (and elsewhere) about the full context of this extremely divisive and sometimes repulsive “artist” the White House saw fit to stamp with their approval. But Comedy Central’s “New Murrow” only wanted to discuss Common within a safe-for-Obama context (the lyrics) and in the above video, Bill O’Reilly calls Stewart out for this act of “comedic” intellectual dishonesty.

Naturally, in their journ-o-listic quest to put the story to bed before the full truth gets out, the MSM grabbed hold of Stewart’s dishonest attack on Fox News, labeled it “epic,” pronounced it “ownage” (want to see how corrupt journ-o-lism works? Click this and this), and positioned it as the last word. But this story — and some of this is our fault for making lyrics an issue — still hasn’t been properly told. O’Reilly understands this and to his great credit has no intention of allowing Stewart, the MSM and the White House to wriggle off this hook so easily.

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Find more videos like this on The Activity Pit

Tonight:

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What are we, in round 9 now? Can we go fifteen?

In the video above, Jon Stewart does a good job catching the story up to speed, so rather than me recap, go ahead and press play. What you’re going to see is Stewart doing a lot of hair-splitting and then insist the argument remain narrowly confined to his terms. But the crux of his argument goes something like this: Megyn Kelly says you guys never speed and I caught you speeding. Period. End of argument. Context doesn’t matter. Why you were speeding doesn’t matter. Well, how far is Stewart willing to take that argument? Since someone calling for the death of an elderly woman based on her politics doesn’t qualify as a justifiable reason to, uhm, speed, what does?  What if we find out the HuffPo commenter sports a little Charlie Chaplin mustache? Or what if he’s 95 years-old and made his way to America through South America somewhere around, say, 1949?

But, as always, Stewart is only Captain Literal when it suits him. On goes the clown nose and he then goes on to make it sound as though FNC uses Nazi references as frequently as a teenager uses the word “like.” But then he has to go back years to nail O’Reilly — which brings this argument full circle to where it all started… (more…)

Yesterday, in this piece about Stephen Colbert,I mentioned Jon Stewart’s attack on Fox News but couched it with as much skepticism as possible because, frankly, it didn’t pass the smell test, especially in the area of context.  To have those suspicions confirmed last night by Bill O’Reilly came as no surprise (see the video below). Furthermore, I respectfully disagree with O’Reilly that Stewart should be held to a lower factual standard because he’s a ”satirist.” Stewart isn’t a satirist, he’s a political partisan disguised as a satirist, a man as determined to defeat the right as Nancy Pelosi and Bill Maher. The difference between Pelosi and Maher, though, is that they step into the arena of political battle and fly their flag. At the very least you can respect them for that. They come to wage open war whereas Stewart and Colbert come to throw rocks while wearing the protective shield of a clown nose.

I love our side and there’s really no lower form of life than someone on our side who undermines their own, so I say this to be constructive, not destructive. There are a lot of people on the Right who love Jon Stewart, people I respect, some of whom I know and like. And I agree that Stewart’s very good at what he does (which is why I take him seriously). But a conservative admiring the brilliance of Jon Stewart’s talent is like a boxer admiring the power of Mike Tyson’s punch as he’s beating you senseless. You have to fight back and in that respect, last night O’Reilly did an excellent job of threading a very difficult needle. Stewart is not easy to lay a glove on, but this was a clean hit. (You’ll be glad to know that I am now out of boxing metaphors).

Another point O’Reilly made that should be highlighted, is how the so-called “objective” or “legitimate” media too often takes what Stewart and Colbert do as some kind of gospel. Because Stewart is a “comedian,” the liberal media uses that as an excuse to blow up what he does on their air or online without bothering to fact-check, even when the stakes involve reputations. We’ve seen this before. Nobody watches “Saturday Night Live” but everyone saw Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin impression. With a smirk, and as though it didn’t matter, the left-wing media let Tina Fey do their dirty work on Palin with the endless looping of those SNL clips all in the name of “fun.” Well, it’s not fun, it’s an attempt to dehumanize someone into a national punchline and the media knew it. (more…)

Recap: Radical funder George Soros’s $1 million gift to Media Matters, a left-wing character assassination machine, underwrites its campaign to stigmatize conservative ideas. For weeks Eric Boehlert of Media Matters attacked Glenn Beck because a disturbed viewer plotted to shoot up the offices of the left-wing Tides Foundation. The shooter, Byron Williams, failed, but in December when a fan of Media Matters, the late Florida school board shooter Clay Duke, wreaked havoc, Boehlert and Media Matters remained silent.

Soros is also bankrolling a documentary that celebrates left-wing terrorists who plotted to napalm Republicans at the 2008 GOP convention in Minnesota. Even worse, you too are bankrolling the film through your taxes.

A trailer for the left-wing film Better This World suggests that it depicts David Guy McKay and Bradley Neil Crowder as idealistic activists who, according to the official blurb, “set out to prove the strength of their political convictions to themselves and their mentor.” In fact McKay and Crowder are convicted domestic terrorists who manufactured instruments of death calculated to inflict maximum pain and bodily harm on people whose political views they disagreed with.

You can be sure that if it was right-wing terrorists who were plotting to attack the Democratic National Convention, whoever foiled the conspiracy would be immortalized in film, literature and song as a savior of democracy.

“If you flip the equation around and it had been a group of conservatives threatening to use force to prevent those on the Left from meeting, everyone would expect the government to infiltrate them and they would also expect the FBI to stop them and charge them with crimes,” said Brandon Darby, who helped the FBI thwart the planned attack. (Darby’s essay on political violence appeared on Big Government over the past weekend. Read it here.) (more…)

Every year we regular folk are blessed with wisdom from Hollywood’s elite: how to vote, worship, eat, what to drive, raise our kids, who in corporate America is making too much money, and who we should love and who we should hate. All while stars gorge themselves on private jets, third homes, and shaped tofu holiday dinners at 5-star resorts.

While we at Big Hollywood are quick to point out that celebrities can use their soapbox to do some good, but each time they open their mouth to tell us how to behave, they run the risk of losing the magic of their screen persona.  So to help remind you who spoke up on behalf of “all people” this year, here is a rundown of the 10 most asshat celebrity comments of 2010:

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10.  When Whoopi Goldberg went on O’Reilly to discuss her reason for walking off The View (i.e. plug her new book Is It Just Me?: Or is it nuts out there?”) rather than defend her position about the world having a “Muslim problem,” the two also touched on the issue of whether a Jewish kid or a Muslim kid is more likely to be bullied in the US because of his religion.  O’Reilly had the facts but like most good, Hollywood liberals, Whoopi just said, “I don’t believe it.”

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9. Mel Gibson finds himself on the list for having a long history of racist rants, drunk or not. He gets an extra asshat mention for not checking for a wire when being honest in the face of a Russian. (more…)

When Whoopi Goldberg appeared as a guest on Fox News’ Huckabee show on November 21st, except for being a bit more caustic than normal, she was her usual arrogant self. For example, after making it clear that she was unapologetic for storming off the set of The View on October 14th, when Bill O’Reilly dared use the words “terrorists” and Muslims in the sentence, she also added that she’s never said anything “on television about somebody or an issue that [she] wished [she] hadn’t…said.” (I find such positing untenable because Whoopi is known to state one thing as her bona fide position at 5 o’clock, then turn around and state the complete opposite as her position at 6.)

She’s done this with racism, and now she’s doing it with the distinction between fact and opinion.

For instance, when Whoopi told Governor Mike Huckabee she doesn’t regret anything she’s said, she was at least willing to admit she’s said things that were controversial. But she said she stood behind them because they were all representative of her “opinion.”

Goldberg’s defense of her statements, admittedly based on “opinion,” proved ironic at best, considering the FACT that she spent a considerable portion of the Huckabee interview attacking bloggers for “[saying] endless stuff” for which they “don’t have to fact check.” In other words, she attacked bloggers for making statements based on opinion.

Moreover, when Goldberg appeared on Fox News’s O’Reilly on November 23rd, she rejected facts O’Reilly presented to her. From the fact that the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941; to the fact that “90 percent of the terrorists” in the world are Muslim to the fact that Jews are still a more persecuted people group than any other, Goldberg sidestepped all by regurgitating the same liberal talking points again and again. She finally dismissed O’Reilly’s points altogether by saying that she and he “disagreed.” (Ironically, in her appearance on Huckabee two days prior to O’Reilly, Goldberg said: “I think fact outweighs assumption. So if you have facts in your hands, then you can talk.” Yet when O’Reilly had facts “in [his] hand,” Goldberg rejected them because they weren’t congruent with her worldview.) (more…)

The Law & Order franchise has always made a fetish of being “ripped from the headlines.” Law & Order: SVU—the popular, sexed-up spin-off of the now-retired original—seems particularly intent on cramming up-to-date political commentary into every hour-long episode.

Remember Terri Schiavo? If you don’t, you can refresh your memory with SVU Episode 7×08. Want to hear your favorite detectives debate the standards of Army recruiters? That’s 11×08. And don’t miss 11×10, in which a man kills “anchor babies” of immigrants and claims he did it because he was brainwashed by a right-wing television personality. (Bill O’Reilly was not a fan of that episode.)  And then there’s the October 13th  episode.

Here’s the “plot”: a beautiful blonde woman named Lindsay is found dead. The detectives investigate. It turns out that Lindsay had a lot of enemies. See, Lindsay was a PR representative for a big soda company—and, of course, soda kills children.

“Lindsay Elding and all the soda companies know their products are poison,” one angry (but sympathetic) lobbyist tells the detectives. When one detective protests gently that lack-of-exercise—not soda—is to blame for childhood obesity, the lobbyist is indignant. “Ask Davy Gamm’s mother,” he says. “She’ll tell you what soda did to her son.”

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World War II was my war. We fought the Germans. They were the enemy. There was a German problem. Of course, if we had stopped to think about it, which we didn’t because we were too busy trying to win the war, we would have realized that not every German wanted to fight us; maybe not even a majority of them did. But they didn’t oppose the Nazi extremists who had taken over their government and attacked us in the name of German racial superiority. I’m sure a lot of Germans agreed with Hitler. But those who were against him, didn’t dare speak up. A few did, of course, like the great German patriot Reverend Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He spoke out against the Nazi thugs. For his pains he was put into a concentration camp and died there.

Jihadist thugs are now attacking us in the name of Islam. No doubt there are a lot of Islamic believers who don’t support this. But like the Germans in World War II, they are not speaking up… for good reason of course, as there was a good reason back in the days of the Third Reich. But because they aren’t speaking up to oppose what is being done in their name, the world has a Muslim problem. Everybody knows this. Not many public figures dare to say it out loud. Some public figures don’t want to know it, much less say it out loud.

Bill O’Reilly, who has taken great pains in recent years to position himself as a centrist, has now had the courage to say out loud what everybody knows. The predictable cries of outrage have ensued. Juan Williams, a true blue liberal who has no doubt outraged his bosses at NPR for years by appearing on Fox, even if it was to espouse their cause, is now paying the price for O’Reilly. They couldn’t fire him; he doesn’t work for them. Juan does, so out he went. (more…)

Funny how no one bothered to storm off the set while Whoopi defended fugitive child “not-rape-rape” rapist Roman Polanski.

A couple of weeks ago at a press conference for her new movie The Switch Jennifer Aniston said, “Women are realizing it more and more knowing that they don’t have to settle with a man just to have that child.”  And with that, the starlet might have dealt a crushing blow to her own film.

After Aniston’s ill-advised political posturing, Bill O’Reilly picked up on the quote and riffed off it on his FoxNews show.  Key quote:

Aniston can hire a battery of people to help her, but she cannot hire a dad, OK? And Dads bring a psychology to children that is, in this society, I believe, underemphasized. I think men get hosed all day long in the parental arena.

This is, of course, right on the money.  Since the right to abort a fetus was dubbed “a woman’s right to choose,” feminists, the welfare state, and deadbeat dads across America have done their level best to marginalize the role a father plays in a child’s life.  And finally, in 2010, Jennifer Aniston proclaims that men are officially unnecessary for child rearing. (more…)

Recently, FOX NEWS’ Bill O’Reilly interviewed Sylvester Stallone about his immensely popular movie, “The Expendables.” As I watched the interaction between O’Reilly and Stallone, it was readily apparent that Stallone was cut from a different cloth than many inside Hollywood: he loves this country and he’s proud to be an American.

The interview took place because the L.A. Times took a critical stance against “The Expendables,” reporting that Stallone created it to promote “apple-pie patriotism” among movie-goers. When O’Reilly asked Stallone if exploiting such patriotism was the intention behind the film, Stallone laughed and said no. He said it was a movie where “good guys…take out the trash.” After pausing he then said: “It’s pretty simple, [if] you’re bad you’ve got to go.” Other than this, Stallone said the move emphasizes a redemption of sorts, inasmuch as “The Expendables” ultimately risk their own lives (on screen) to do something good for somebody, and by so doing, get “their morality back.”

As O’Reilly reiterated other criticisms that have been aimed at “The Expendables,” Stallone said he didn’t mind people focusing on the fact that the characters in the movie “are patriots” and “are proud to be Americans.”  Stallone did say he had read some criticisms where people tried to say the movie communicated a veiled disapproval of our military and CIA actions abroad, and that it put the “focal point on our intrusion into other countries around the world” and how “we tend to over-extend our boundaries.” But Stallone shot all that blather down by saying “I don’t believe that at all.” (i.e., he doesn’t believe our armed forces and intelligence ops are running around the world making things worse rather than better.) (more…)