When Arnold Schwarzenegger burst onto the political scene a couple of decades ago, he was a Republican pol’s dream: an icon of mostly liberal Hollywood willing to admit he had conservative convictions. But in the ensuing years, Schwarzenegger trampled on many of those dreams, staking out positions in elective office on immigration, cap-and-trade, and law and order that flew in the face of conservative ideology.

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And his post-gubernatorial admission of a secret affair with his housekeeper — that resulted in a love child he hid from his wife, Maria Shriver, and their children — all but shatters the family values image he tried to sustain.

The question now on most minds: Can the Terminator find a strategy to return to prominence and utter his most famous acting line, ‘I’ll be back’, once again?

I caught up with one of Hollywood’s most powerful and prominent PR players, Michael Levine, to ask that very question. He thinks the Terminator is, well, terminated.

Levine’s firm has represented a Who’s Who of American culture — from Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson to Joe Lieberman, John McCain and Bill Clinton. In short, America’s rich and powerful turn to him for advice when in crisis.

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So just a day after the Republicans won big, President Obama ran screaming from the “cap and trade” program like it was a hooker with herpes.

Remember, this was his solution for global warming: curb carbon emissions by hiking the price of electricity and gas, forcing us to use less.

Well, that’s deader than the nerves in Nancy Pelosi’s face.

Says Obama:

“Cap-and-trade was just one way of skinning the cat. It was a means, not an end. I`m going to be looking for other means to address this problem.”

And with that, we owe massive gratitude to the American people.

By going to the polls and yanking one house away from Obama’s control, they – in effect – blocked the largest tax increase in history.

That’s what cap and trade was: the higher prices it guaranteed would have showed up in our electricity bill, gas stations, and in everything we buy. According to the Heritage Foundation, it would have cost the economy 161 billion dollars in 2020 – or $1,870 per family of 4. By 2035, that number jumps to $6,800. (more…)

Inciting is usually a telegraphed endeavor, with rhetoric yelled to an audience through a megaphone held by a coarse, weathered hand. But it can also be delivered subtly, with a soft voice and a wink, in the name of doing good.

Subtlety is necessary if a federal agency intends to incite activists to take action on the hot issues of the moment. This approach is what we see when we look at the most recent documents acquired by a Freedom of Information Act  (FOIA) request of the controversial August 10th conference call.

President Obama with Former NEA Communication Director Yosi Sergant

Readers of Big Hollywood may recall an article published in late August entitled “National Endowment for the Art of Persuasion?” that described an August 10th conference call organized by the White House, the NEA, and the Corporation for National and Community Service. As stated during the conference call, the goal was to bring together a group of pro-Obama artists to push the President and his agenda, with United We Serve as the first proposed effort. During the call, Yosi Sergant, then Communications Director for the NEA, encouraged artists to create art on the vehemently debated issues of health care, energy, and the environment.  (more…)

A while ago, I wrote a piece titled “Blowing the Whistle on Waxman.”  In case you missed it, I explained that Henry Waxman and I had been friends beginning almost 50 years ago at UCLA.  I also said that we had seen each other infrequently over the intervening years once he went to Sacramento as a state assemblyman and later to Washington as a member of Congress. 

Over the years, I moved politically from left to right, while Henry moved from left to far left to over the edge.  Still, I had a soft spot for him and, as a result, refrained from including his name when I would list the usual suspects, those left-wingers like Pelosi, Reid, Rangel, Boxer and Murtha, who were doing their utmost to destroy America. (more…)

I have come clean in the past about having been friends with Rep. Henry Waxman.  We had met in the late 1950s at UCLA and wound up spending a lot of time over the following decade playing cards.  In fact, once, some years later, I received a phone call from a guy profiling Waxman for the Washington Post.  He wanted my impression of the young, pre-Congressional fellow.  I told him that Henry was a terrible poker player, but was very astute at hearts.  I said it made perfect sense because poker is a cut-throat game, every man for himself, whereas hearts is a game that involves constantly changing alliances.  I regarded it as a perfect metaphor for a career in politics.

I knew from personal experience that Henry was a fish when it came to poker, but it was some time later that I found out how truly awful he was.  Before being elected to Congress, he had gone to Sacramento as a state assemblyman.  Wherever politicians congregate, you will find two things — poker games and lobbyists.  As you can imagine, lobbyists are not there to win money from those they spend their lives trying to influence.  But it seems that Henry was so inept that, in spite of their best efforts, they kept beating him.  This so embarrassed the lobbyists that they finally banished him from the game.  (more…)

It was so much fun watching the ACORN people try and spin their way out of oblivion for the last couple of weeks.  After the first video was posted on Big Government.com they, of course, claimed it was an isolated incident and that the filmmakers were kicked out of numerous other ACORN offices.  When that proved to be false, they tried in vain to claim that the videos were faked and that their employees were the victims of CGI or something and not of their own stupidity and corruption.  When that didn’t work they claimed that the filmmakers, Andrew Breitbart and the entire Fox News network were racist.  Yawn.

NEA’s Yosi Sergant

Monday, we have the NEA under the microscope.  The Obama Administration was caught red-handed (is that “racist”?) funneling tax payer dollars into an official propaganda department.  I can’t wait to see what the excuse will be this time.

These people have mastered the art of defending the indefensible.

Let’s set aside the stupidity of this move.  Anyone familiar with the NEA knows that it pretty much exists to fund leftist propaganda disguised as art.  Officially coordinating it is a bit redundant. (more…)

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The news is really unbelievable these days. All that I once thought were core American values and traditions are now being washed away in a sea of propaganda and political attacks from the radical Left, which now rules supreme and knows it. The Left in power is now waging an ideological war not only against conservatives, but any dissenting Americans who get in their way. Worst of all, they are using the full machinery of the government and their Lefty media lapdogs to do it all, and in the same fashion as Ahmadinejad’s government is demonizing the Green protesters in Iran.

It is chilling to witness, in the United States of America of all places. Civil political discourse is a thing of the past. You cannot oppose ObamaCare without being a swastika-waving corporate Nazi stooge. Never mind the fact that no one will tell us exactly where all the hospitals, doctors, and nurses to treat 50 million new patients will magically materialize from, or how it will all be paid for.
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After a long day at work on a commercial shoot, I decided to unwind with a little internet and cable television. Politics and punditry are my hobby, not my main source of income, so I indulge in a little cable news and internet sites as time permits. I’ve always felt it important to see the world outside the “echo chamber” of like-minded folks, so my television sits for far too many hours on MSNBC and the Huffington Post is bookmarked on my browser.

What struck me from a few hours of watching leftist television and reading leftist gobbledygook is how far detached from reality these people are. It’s not a simple case of them having a few points wrong, or looking at things from a bizarrely biased perspective; they truly make statements and cling to ideas that have no basis in reality. As conservatives struggle to find apt metaphors to explain their opponent’s mindsets and delusions, I think I may have figured it out.

The left in our country is high.  Completely stoned out of their minds. (more…)

Polish American Walt Kowalski, played to anti-hero perfection by Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino, stands against corruption and lawlessness and wins. But not before sacrificing his life. Kowalski is a Korean War veteran and retired auto worker living outside of Detroit. He is old and tired, and just wants to be left alone after the death of his wife. But fate and duty had other ideas. He carries a long held guilt over killing a surrendering soldier in the Korean War. His death redeems, not just his soul, but the soul of his town.

Events lead Kowalski to resist a local takeover by a Hmong youth gang. The Hmong are an ethnic Southeast Asian people, primarily from Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. In real life Michigan, they are among the fastest growing immigrants. Many Hmong people emigrated from South Vietnam after Democrats shamelessly withdrew monetary support from South Vietnam in 1974. The Paris Peace Agreements thus became toothless and North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam. “Boat people” fled Vietnam and the insane, murderous Pol Pot created the Cambodian Killing Fields. (more…)

Sometimes, I must confess, I find myself feeling like one of those cursed individuals like Job and Sisyphus.  In my case, the curse takes the form of trying to be rational in a mad world.  My particular albatross is trying to make sense of the liberal mind.  No sooner do I try to delve into it than I pop out on the other side.  It’s as shallow as a midget’s footbath. 

For instance, I understand why liberals opposed invading Iraq.  It was because George W. Bush instigated it.  They voiced no objections when Bill Clinton took us into Somalia and Kosovo, and now that Obama has expanded the war in Afghanistan, you don’t hear them whining that it’s a quagmire, that the Afghanis had nothing to do with 9/11 or demanding that Obama spell out his exit strategy and specify the date of withdrawal.  But, given all that, I would have thought that at least the tree-huggers would have campaigned for regime change in Iraq, based not on Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds and his history of torture and rape, God forbid, but for having set fire to the oil fields of Kuwait in 1991, probably the worst man-made ecological disaster in history.  (more…)

I recently wrote a critique of the art community’s lack of dissent in the face of many controversial decisions made by the current administration. Entitled “The Artist Formerly Known as Dissident,” one of the key points argued in the article was the potential danger associated with the use of the art community as a tool of the state. Little did I know how quickly this concern would be elevated to an outright probability. 

Sometime between when I finished the critique and when it went live online, I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to take part in a conference call that invited a group of rising artist and art community luminaries “to help lay a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda – health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.”  (more…)

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Imagine the glee I felt when I heard that my wonderfully approachable (yeah, right) Congressman, Henry Waxman, was making a rare visit on August 21st to the district he represents.  He wants to hear from us, his loyal constituents, at a town hall style discussion at UCLA focusing on the Cap and Trade legislation.

As a citizen, candidate, and voter in Mr. Waxman’s district, I thought that this would be a plum of a chance for Rep. Waxman to hear what’s on my mind.

That is when it got weird.

Firstly, I found out that one had to RSVP to the event to reserve a space. OK, I thought, Henry Waxman’s personal popularity has never been higher and people really want to be around him so his magic can rub off on them. Maybe they expect quite a throng and thus must have crowd control in place to make sure that the event runs smoothly. (more…)

I suspect that because George Bush and Condoleezza Rice were so respectful of Muslims, constantly telling us that theirs is a religion of peace, some otherwise sensible Americans actually began to believe it.  Now we have a president who not only kowtows to a Saudi prince, but carries on as if Israeli homes are more threatening than Iranian nukes.

What is wrong with our leaders?  Are they worried that they won’t be invited to those cool Ramadan parties?  The Islamists have been actively at war with us for 30 years and generally at war with western civilization for well over a thousand years, and still we pay lip service to these people in a way we never did with Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan or the Soviet Union.  Is it because the Muslims commit sadism and murder in the name of religion and not country?  If anything, I would think that would make their evil acts all the more contemptible. (more…)

It has been six months since the Administration took office and the far left have taken complete control of the government.  Has our capitalist past been improved upon?  Or, is the socialism we have had thrust upon us making us worse off?  Has the foreign policy of appeasement and apology made the world a safer place?  To put it more simply, are you better off now than you were six months ago?  Unfortunately, the answer is not only “no,” but “much worse.” 

When the President took office in January, the entire world was full of “Hope.”  The far left and moderates that put him there were hoping for “Change.”  Well, they got the change, but I do not think they were “hoping” to get the type of change they got.  (more…)

The term “Jump the Shark” has been with us for a while. The clever metaphor is used for the moment when something of cultural significance begins to lose its luster, and descends into lameness.  It is a reference to the T.V. show “Happy Days,” specifically the episode when Fonzie water skied over shark infested waters.   This is the precise moment where the show began to decline.

Republicans and conservatives are dancing with glee every time a new poll comes out showing Obama’s poll numbers going down faster than a Hilton (Perez or Paris) after a nice dinner and a couple of cocktails. The support for things like Universal Health Care, closing Gitmo, and Cap and Trade are sinking even faster. Yet, that’s not the whole story.  Something else is going on here.  Something that begs the question: Has Liberalism “Jumped the Shark”?

Ehhhh…

Over the last sixty days or so, we’ve seen some amazing things. We saw a “wise Latina,” a self-described “affirmative action baby” claim that her statements were taken out of context or merely “meant to inspire,” and that race has nothing to do with her job performance. The White House has re-branded the $787 billion “stimulus package” a “stabilization package.” Our Vice-President, devious genius that he is, stated that we need to, “crazy as it sounds,” spend like lunatics to avoid bankruptcy. A gay blogger and gay civil rights champion called a black guy “the worst thing [he] could think of…a faggot.” We saw our government allow Iranian protesters, who peacefully challenged a rigged election, get shot in the street. Concurrently, we demanded that a tin-pot dictator be reinstated after his government got wise to his schemes and legally booted him. (more…)

It used to be that the most important job in the world was to “raise awareness.” Everyday we were told how important it was to do it for issues like AIDS, global warming, and indoor plumbing. But just as raising awareness had become fulltime jobs for millions of people bearing clipboards and acne, in some very important arenas the crusade is now being undermined. Destroyed, even.

Look at the issues that will potentially devastate your bank account. There, “raising awareness” no longer matters. It happened first with the stimulus bill.  It was far more important to push that mess through than it was to actually read it. Nationalized health care? Beyond knowing that we need it right now – what else is there? And what of this cap and trade muck? It’s way too dry – too bad there aren’t any Cliffs Notes. (more…)

In speaking to the American Nurse Association in the Rose Garden today, Mr. Obama, speaking of the urgent need to pass his hugely exorbitant and grossly ineffective health care bill, said, “”We need to buck up people here,” Obama said. “That’s what nurses do. It’s time for us to buck up the Congress. We need to get this done…”

And I agree – that the President is doing his level best to buck this country up. 

His bucked-up foreign policy has signaled weakness to our detractors and encouraged aggression from those who would destroy us. 

He bucked up our financial institutions by taking control of over 600 banks.  He bucked up the automotive industry with at first his bail-outs with strings, and firing CEO’s, and placing stipulations, regulations and mandates on formerly private companies.  (more…)

The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, more commonly known as the Cap and Trade Bill, is dangerous for the country and potentially disastrous for the economy.  I cannot say this more simply.  This bill which is designed to lower emissions and stop global warming will do nothing except raise the average Americans’ expenses and cause the loss of many American jobs. 

The bill passed in the House last week by a margin of less than ten votes.  The vote was mostly among party lines.  However, many Democrats sensing its disastrous consequences actually voted against it.  In fact, if it were not for eight liberal minded Republicans, the bill would have failed. It is going to the Senate shortly and must be stopped there at all costs.  As for those eight Republicans, I suggest they start looking for employment themselves. 

Global warming is allegedly caused by the burning of fossil fuels.  This Cap and Trade bill is supposed to lower emissions caused by such energy sources.  It is the dream of former Vice President Al Gore who has made a mini-industry out of global warming and who does nothing personally to stop it.  This typical Democratic hypocrite burns more carbon based fuels than 10 average Americans and yet he claims that we, as a country, are not doing enough to stop this potential disaster to the planet.  I wonder when the last time he flew on a commercial airline was.  But, that’s another column completely.  (more…)