I highly recommend the documentary “His Way” as a testament to one man’s persistence, the value of being optimistic and looking for opportunities when others see problems. In covering a man, Jerry Weintraub, for whom the Bush family helped end anti-Semitic policies at many Kennebunkport, Maine establishments in the 1960s and who counted both Ronald Reagan and Armand Hammer as friends, Douglas McGrath directed one of this past year’s best biographical documentaries.

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In these trying times, this story of one man’s unrelenting efforts to succeed can serve as an inspiration to many. I know “His Way” inspired me. After learning how Jerry cold-called Elvis Presley’s Manager, Colonel Tom Parker, every day for an entire year for the right to take Elvis on tour (for the first time in nearly a decade), I decided to roll the dice and take my own film out on the road to build an audience. Concluding our interview with Douglas McGrath, director of the documentary “His Way,” we talked about more of the film, including the amazing segments on Weintraub’s experiences with Elvis Presley and Colonel Tom Parker and Frank Sinatra.

KW: How did you go about choosing which stories or chapters to cover or not cover from the book?

DM: Well, I didn’t do it that way. I didn’t think of them in terms of chapters. I just thought of them in terms of stories. But, I knew we’d have ninety minutes, an hour and forty-five maybe at most and I just thought, there’s no way to go through everything. I just thought “I’m going to ask about all the stuff I liked the best and the things that were really the big tent poles of his life.” So, I thought I’d better go with the things that really tell us, without repeating it, what his magic was. And the Elvis story is emblematic of his whole career, you know, that tells you how he started with nothing, he persisted. He won the contract, so to speak, the right to take him. He almost blew it. When you think of 20th Century entertainment, particularly musical entertainment and particularly male musical entertainment — you know, you have Elvis and you have Sinatra. Those guys are the big tent poles in that story. (more…)

Prepare to be horribly disappointed.

One comment I read put it best: Too bad Frank Sinatra isn’t alive to kick his ass.

ABC News:

[On his radio show, Howard] Stern then asked Bennett about how America should deal with terrorists, specifically those responsible for the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.

“But who are the terrorists? Are we the terrorists or are they the terrorists? Two wrongs don’t make a right,” Bennett said.

In a soft-spoken voice, the singer disagreed with Stern’s premise that 9/11 terrorists’ actions led to U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“They flew the plane in, but we caused it,” Bennett responded. “Because we were bombing them and they told us to stop.”

Following seconds of silence, Stern said that his guest was “making some good points.”

Before leaving, Bennett recalled an evening in 2005 when he was honored at the Kennedy Center. Meeting President George W. Bush at the event, the singer said that the commander-in-chief shared his opinion about the Iraq War.

“He told me personally that night that, he said, ‘I think I made a mistake,’” Bennett said.

Bennett believed that the president made this revelation because “he had a special liking to me.”

Bush told a lib crooner he made a mistake in Iraq?

Looks like Bennett also left his credibility in San Francisco.

Yeah, this will sell albums.

The world is full of bad people but the good news is that here in America our First Amendment makes it easier to spot them.

Via NBC:

The  festival, “9/11 Reclaiming the Truth, Reclaiming our Future,” is organized by the Northern California 9/11 Truth Alliance, a group that formed shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The lineup of films and speakers kicked off at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland this afternoon, and will continue on Sunday at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco after a march from Justin Herman Plaza to the theater.
   
Similar events are being held in Seattle and in Toronto, and a portion of those events will be broadcast live in the Bay Area as part of the film festival.

The slate of films includes “Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup,” “9/11: Explosive Evidence — Experts Speak Out,” and “We Were Also Killed on 9/11: First Responders.”

“We’ve had rallies every year,” said Northern California 9/11 Truth Alliance co-founder Carol Brouillet. She said the group organized its first film festival in 2004 and has had similar events every year since.

She said the main goal of the festival is to inform attendees about “the disparity between the official version and the actual events.” …

The rub below the fold:

(more…)

The comment section of any blog or internet site is always a re-education. Not about diversity of opinion but about the human condition itself.

No matter how close two people’s opinions might seem to be, eventually there will be a difference of some sort between them.

In short, we are all confronted eventually with the isolation everyone feels because of their own inalterable uniqueness.

Not even Siamese twins can agree about everything.

At such times, philosophers such as France’s Jean Paul Sartre conclude that “Hell is other people!”

“L’enfer est les autres!”

I don’t agree, of course.

What had always been hell for me was the fear and experience of isolation itself.

I then realized how God’s very existence in the lives of men was inspired and maintained by such moments of inevitable isolation.

“Someone or something must and does understand me!”

Then, of course, one’s relationship to such a Something is up to debate.

Does the Something expect something of you, demand something of you and, of course, if you don’t measure up?

Hmmm … what are the consequences?

This is where my immeasurably vital experience with Alcoholics Anonymous comes in: “Let go, let God.”

That is their incantation: “Let go, let God!”

Which means: “Stop asking yourself that stupid question and let God answer it for you and He will.”

And He has.

How?

By erasing the nightmares of anxiety that arose from your asking the stupid questions in the first place.

(more…)

I’ve written several articles skewering HBO for producing political projects destined to air immediately prior to the 2012 election, where the vast majority of the cast and crew are passionate Barack Obama supporters, and where the content is aimed at the Democrat’s two favorite Republican villains: Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney. So, when I sat down to watch HBO’s Too Big to Fail, I prepared myself for the worst. What I didn’t expect was the big surprise awaiting me.

Too Big to Fail, which premieres on HBO on May 23, 2011, features a star studded cast recounting the events that led to the financial crisis and bailouts by the U.S. government in 2008. It is a mini-series packed into a 98-minute made-for-television movie where several essential characters are quickly introduced and where finance and economics are casually discussed. It may help if one has a baseline of knowledge about the crisis before watching the movie. If one doesn’t know who Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner are or what Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, and AIG are, it may prove slightly difficult to follow.

Although the Director, Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential, 8 Mile), was limited to telling a very long and complicated story in a very short amount of time, he was able to skillfully pull it off. Perhaps this is because the screenwriter, Peter Gould (Breaking Bad), deftly adapted Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 2009 prize winning New York Times Bestseller, Too Big to Fail. (more…)

Here’s Jon-Smuggy-McSmirk-ObamaButtBoy-Stewart in April of 2009, sanctimoniously accusing his own country of torture:

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Oh, but wait… Even though, according to –wait for it! wait for it! — MSNBC, “waterboarding aided the bin Laden raid,” below is Jon Stewart yesterday celebrating the results of same waterboarding with proclamations about America being back, uhm, baby. Yep, according to Mr. Stewart, America has its “balls” back, but of course neglects to mention (or doesn’t yet know) that we wouldn’t have without a little of what he described and defines as “torture.”

I guess the results of “torture” and the actions of Cheney’s “secret assassination squad” are all good if Obama gets a poll bounce:

(more…)

ADDED: Dana Loesch has much, much more.

Via Jim Treacher, Stephen Colbert in April of 2009:

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But, but, but, now I’m confused. Last night, Stephen Colbert wildly and without any detectable irony celebrated the results of that same secret, lawless assassination squad that was also using intelligence achieved through “enhanced” interrogations at Gitmo. Oh, wait…

Maybe Colbert is practicing some sort of super secret kind of hipterism where you show no irony at all to increase the power of irony in order to make a devastating political point that… Secret, lawless assassination squads using intelligence achieved through enhanced interrogations at Gitmo are wrong even when they boost a Democrat President’s sagging polls!

That must be it. What else could it be? Did Colbert think we wouldn’t find the 2009 video? No one’s that insulated, are they?

So see if you can detect Colbert’s super secret message below. I couldn’t, but I’m no hipster:

(more…)

DHD:

[Kathryn] Bigelow and Mark Boal, her collaborator on The Hurt Locker, have been mobilizing their film to go into production as their follow-up to that Best Picture Academy Award winner. Their movie as planned was based on an earlier unsuccessful mission to try to kill the Al Qaeda leader responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attack on America as he hid in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. But now they’ve certainly got a celebratory ending to that dramatic story with tonight’s announcement that the U.S. conducted a military operation that killed Bin Laden. …

[B]ack in 2006, Paramount Pictures optioned Jawbreaker, a book by U.S. intelligence operative Gary Berntsen about the December 2001 American-led military mission to hunt and kill Bin Laden right during the opening stages of the 9/11-prompted invasion of Afghanistan that the author as the CIA pointman had helped coordinate with Special Operations Forces. The heavily vetted book detailed how close those forces came to finding and executing Bin Laden in the rugged mountains of Tora Bora until they were pulled back after a decision was made to let Pakistan tribal leaders lead the search — a decision experts felt helped Bin Laden get away. The studio hired The Path To 9/11 scribe Cyrus Nowrasteh to rewrite a first draft by Berntsen’s co-author Ralph Pezzullo, and Oliver Stone had eyed it as a follow-up to his film World Trade Center. But the project stalled.

(more…)

Essentially, what Michael Moore and Roseanne Barr are saying here (though she argues with him before she appears to agree on principle) is that America shouldn’t have gone into Libya because George W. Bush destroyed the trust the world had in us. And so, as a consequence, the number one priority for our Pentagon and military is that they should take a “time out” and stop doing anything until the world trusts and loves us again.

Translation? Sitting on our hands as untold thousands of civilians are butchered in the Middle East will help rebuild the trust the people in the Middle East have in us.

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I’m always impressed by how compassionate the likes of a Michael Moore can sound as he speaks evil. To him the Pentagon taking a ”time out” takes precedent over saving thousands of innocent lives. Moore can lie all he wants, he can say the French should have taken the lead in Libya, but he knows full well that the French are incapable of summoning the kind of military might necessary to do what needed to be done last week. There’s plenty to criticize regarding Obama’s stunning lack of leadership, clarity and commitment, but the idea of America standing helplessly by as a potentially historic Middle East uprising is gunned down and butchered, is unthinkable.

It was the same with these people and the war in Iraq. I had no problem with those who opposed the war before we went in. But once we were there, once the Iraqi people stood up and voted for our side, we had and have a moral obligation to stand with them until they can take over the security of their country. And yet, knowing the consequence of an American withdrawal on the Iraqi civilian population, knowing what the death squads and terrorists would do to  millions of innocents who trusted us, wicked people like Michael Moore and, yes, Barack Obama still did everything in their power to make that happen.

(more…)

The comedian is Ross Bennett. Do you think he’s telling the truth, that Obama supporters are so intolerant they give the entertainer grief over any hit The One takes? I think so. I think people understand the power of mockery, the power it has to undermine a public figure. They’ve understood it since the mid-70s when Chevy Chase turned the otherwise athletic Gerald Ford into a klutz. Did this narrative hurt Ford’s chances against Jimmy Carter? It certainly didn’t help.

No one, however, understands this power better than the entertainers, which is why most of them are reluctant to go after Obama in any way that might leave a mark. Look no further than “Saturday Night Live” and their intentionally awful Obama impersonator. They’ve obviously chosen to sacrifice laughs for fear of laying a glove on their guy.  When it comes to Palin, Bush, or any Republican, however, the gloves come completely off. The whole idea is to do damage, is to diminish and dehumanize their political enemies into a punchline.

(more…)

Yes, you are.

Today from Rasmussen Reports:

Political activist Michael Moore was an Oscar winner several years ago for a documentary film and has made several high-profile films since then[.] … 48% of adults have an unfavorable opinion of him. Thirty-four percent (34%) view him favorably. These findings include Very Favorables of 13% and Very Unfavorables of 31% for Moore who was most recently in the news when he appeared with protesting public union workers in Wisconsin. Seventeen percent (17%) have no opinion of Moore.

Contrast that with what Rasmussen found during the last full month of George W. Bush’s presidency, December of 2008, when the embattled president’s approval rating sat at 35% – one point higher than media darling, “everyman,” Michael Moore. Of course, Bush’s approval ratings have rebounded since. He even beats Obama in some match-ups.

Stuff like this probably doesn’t help Moore. Or this. Or this. Or this.

Maybe now we know why the Oscar-winner’s last two films flopped so hard.

Guess what else is less popular than Bush during his last month of office…?

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“Death of a President,” the documentary-style speculative fiction about the assassination of the 43rd President of the United States, is seamless, intelligent and maybe even necessary to an understanding of George W. Bush’s role in the world today[.] — Jim Emerson on RogerEbert.com

Anyone who’s studied the left for any period of time knew that before the blood had even dried on the sidewalks of Arizona Saturday, that the mainstream media would force us into a terrible choice. After the assassin’s monstrous attack, the decent thing to do would’ve been to come together as a nation to mourn the dead and pray for the survivors. Politics, and most especially political opportunism, should be the last thing on anyone’s mind. But the left, unfortunately, isn’t just anyone. They are who they are and that they would feast on the fresh corpses of the innocent in order to win a couple of political news cycles was obvious. And so those of us who would’ve preferred to go nowhere near the arena of politics when it came to this appalling attack on our country and our democracy, were forced to make sure 1995 didn’t repeat itself, the year President Clinton used the Oklahoma City bombing for partisan gain against his own political enemies.

Joining in on this feast with the likes of Andrew Sullivan, Salon’s Joan Walsh, George Soros’ Eric Boehlert, the very Sheriff charged with protecting Rep. Giffords, Paul Krugman, Markos Moulitsas, and their allies in the media were, naturally, the dregs of the entertainment industry’s humanity barrel, who could barely contain their excitement over an opportunity to to attack the right, Sarah Palin, and call for  – as they always do when given the opportunity – restrictions on speech.

The following is just a taste: (more…)

While Bush was busy taking care of his base and professing his love for our troops, he proposed cutting combat soldiers’ pay by 33% and assistance to their families by 60%.

Why it’s a left-wing film

Writer/director Michael Moore’s paranoid pack of audaciously demagogic lies dropped on the world in the heat of an American presidential election and an ongoing war in Iraq. Just for starters, the film says outright or insinuates that Iraq under Saddam was some sort of paradise, George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000 after thousands of black people weren’t allowed to vote, Bush covered up for the bin Laden family after the 9/11 attacks, and the Bush family’s friendship and business ties in the Middle East were a large part of the motivation behind waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan. After that, fill in your own blanks using the left’s greatest crazy hits: Diebold, Halliburton, WMD, Mission Accomplished, “My Pet Goat,” and then wrap it all in the hard candy shell of a whole lot of troop-bashing through the insidious use of anecdotal evidence.

No wonder Moore received a 20 minute standing ovation at Cannes.

It was the summer of 2004 and for argument’s sake let’s say that Moore attacking a sitting president with provable lies is the price of an open democracy. However… Let us never forget that in 2004 Iraq was a country where the civilian population had already turned out to vote (under a very real threat of violence and at a percentage higher than our own presidential election) for the American plan of self-governance. Therefore, and I don’t say this lightly, Moore’s calculated use of the awesome power of cinematic sound and fury to undermine the war was an act of outright evil. In fact, I have no doubt that Moore is so morally twisted that when Osama bin Laden seemed to quote “Fahrenheit 9/11″ in a video dropped just days before the 2004 presidential election, the Oscar-winner took some pride in the recognition.

For those of you who haven’t seen today’s pick, imagine a film widely released next year into 868 theatres that receives overwhelming critical praise, grosses an astonishing $222 million, receives all kinds of awards love (Moore’s unquenchable ego screwed his own Oscar chances),and all kinds of mainstream political support, but… Puts forth the theory that President Obama is a Manchurian candidate — a foreign-born Muslim terrorist-sympathizer in league with the likes of Bill Ayers and Louis Farrakhan to bring down the United States from within.

That’s what a “Fahrenheit 9/11″ equivalent would look like today.

(more…)

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Sure do wish the Bush administration would have instituted this TSA screening and pat down program, then right and left alike would’ve come together to put some reason back into the airport screening process. Just as — other than not being socialist enough — Obama can do nothing wrong in the eyes of these ideologues, Bush could do nothing right and we all would’ve been on the same side with this one.

The good thing though is that we now have the View Brigade comparing peaceful civil disobedience to Islamic terrorism.

New rules from Babs’ Henhouse: any protest against big government and/or big corporations now places said protesters on the same moral standing as suicide bombers and those who attacked us on 9/11. (more…)

Once a year the portrait of Chairman Mao that hangs above Tiananmen Gate is replaced by a new one. Who the artist is has never been disclosed.  For Napoleon, Jacque-Louis David was his favorite painter and the man most responsible for creating his iconic image. Artists like these do not toil away at their craft because they love their leader, they are told to paint. That’s what makes Obama art so dangerous, the artists do it for love. In the last election the public plastered the image of Obama to America with the same hormonal glee that I did when I nailed Farah Fawcett to my childhood wall. 

Barack Obama told voters everything they needed to know about who he was, but mesmerized by his image, America didn’t listen, and now finds itself in a dirty shirt underlined by a faded message.  

The artistic images of Obama are no accident and they can come from only one place. A place so deprived of rational thinking that when the brain has a vision, it sees itself changing the world with every turn of its cog. I’m speaking of the American contemporary art scene. 

Salvador Dali once famously said, “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.” Artist on the left produce nothing, disguised as something, hoping the masses will imitate it. When Sheppard Fairey stole the image of Obama from an AP photo and created the “Hope” poster – he knew what he was doing. That’s what makes Fairey so brilliant, he knows how to sell an image without being told. My respect for Fairey comes from his willingness to tell you up front that his art is propaganda.  (more…)

So NBC’s chief war correspondent Richard Engel claims that if the U.S. had not invaded Iraq, things would still be bad, but not as bad as before. His reasoning: Saddam Hussein would still be in power, but, “he was probably getting more moderate.”

So, what does he mean by “moderate?”

I suppose, maybe, “only gassing half as many Kurds?”

 
 Kurds gassed by “The Moderate”

Perhaps he was going to instruct his sons to only rape women on “every other weekend.”

Or maybe, to help the environment, he’ll only electrocute citizens using recycled car batteries.

Anypoop – Engel’s wrong. He makes the point that Saddam would be more accommodating, but you can’t be more accommodating than when you’re dead. I think even Saddam would agree, if he were alive. But he’s dead, so he can’t.

In that sense, I guess he’s not that accommodating (which does poke a hole in my theory). (more…)

A recent article from Big Hollywood’s Jeffrey Jena alerted me to an article in the American Prospect where Paul Waldman is recycling the meme that there is nothing funny about the current President. Utter nonsense. Every human is fallible, and from those flaws the funny gushes; flowing like the effluence of a major national disaster, under an incompetent Administration.

To say there’s nothing funny about this President is elevating him to the level of a deity, the way leaders are looked at in some third world totalitarian state. I’m quite certain that North Koreans cannot see anything funny about Kim Jong, Il, although the majority of the world thinks he is as entertaining as a circus midget. Ditto for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Paul Waldman’s piece is just another apology for the inability of the American Humor Industry to construct a proper satire on this President; a topic as ripe for satire as November apples. It’s such a shame, too.  Epic ineptitude has been a comedic staple since before the Three Stooges, all the way through to the era of Tim Allen. When Moe Larry and Curly are accidently mistaken for plumbers, you just know there’s going to be a flood. (more…)

There are three important things going on in “The Tillman Story” (in selected theatres today), two of which almost make the conspiracy-mongering documentary worth your time. The first and best is the opportunity to get to know better the extraordinary and extraordinarily complicated and interesting Pat Tillman. In the best sense of the word, this was a fierce and fiercely passionate man — fierce on the football field, fierce on the battlefield, and fierce in his personal beliefs. This was also a man who only ever dated one woman, the woman he would marry the same week he enlisted; and my guess is that Tillman was the kind of man and husband who found leaving the fame of professional football much easier than leaving his young bride. 

You also meet Tillman’s family; his parents, brother and wife – a decent, loving, inconsolable group dealing with the terrible loss of someone they obviously loved and miss very much. This is a family furious with a United States government who didn’t know all the facts before they told the story of Tillman’s death to them, and to the American people. And as far as that goes, they are right to be angry. 

Unfortunately, you also witness a partisan filmmaker attempting to prop up the absurd anti-Bush conspiracy theory that it wasn’t the ever-reliable incompetence of government bureaucracy that caused what was probably the second worst day in this family’s life – the day they were told Tillman had been killed in a friendly fire incident, but rather a sinister plot hatched by the Administration and the Pentagon to use Tillman’s death as a flag-waving symbol to bolster military recruitment and support for the war. The Tillman family agrees wholeheartedly with this conspiracy, believes that the memory of their heroic son was maliciously abused in this way. But with all due respect to them (and they are due our respect), neither logic nor facts come close to making that case.    (more…)