A good sports reporter will tell you a team may look invincible on paper, but when the game begins anything can happen.

Whoopi Goldberg feels the same way about North Korea’s government.

Goldberg shared her latest profound political thoughts on “The View” earlier today. The all-women panel were pontificating on the sudden death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and the greater geopolitical picture in his absence. That meant the conversation veered toward Communism, and the Oscar-winning Goldberg sounded like she wished she lived in a Communist-run country.

On paper, at least.

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Who wouldn’t want to read a story about how Fox News called those lovable Muppets communists?

Except the piece currently up at The Huffington Post is a lie. No one at Fox News called the Muppets communists – at least according to material quoted in the HuffPo story or via the link provided by the noxious Media Matters. Last time we checked, our dear friends on the left insist “liberal” does not equal “communist.” Did we miss a memo?

Yes, Fox News aired a segment in which the host and a guest called out “The Muppets,” the new film starring those felt and fur characters, for using an evil oil man as its go-to villain. Chris Cooper plays Tex Richman, an oil baron who wants to raze the old Muppet Theater to dig for oil.

In Hollywood, daring to cast a Muslim character can be considered a hate crime, but repeatedly casting businessmen, Christians and Southerners as villains is enlightened.

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Just by virtue of when it was released, “Reds” (1981) has been praised as courageous filmmaking in the age of Reagan.  But thirty years later, what exactly was being praised then and now?

In the bonus features of the commemorative DVD release, Warren Beatty says that he made this film to combat America’s “inordinate fear of communism.”  But the majority of screen time dealing with politics involves those who don’t buy into it.  Eugene O’Neil, played cynically by Jack Nicholson, calls Bolshevism the “latest theocracy.”  Maureen Stapleton’s Emma Goldman early on recoils from the Soviet regime’s abuse of civil liberties.  Reed himself attacks the Bolsheviks for censoring his copy and looks on in horror as the Soviet Army marches by.

Beatty must have realized impassioned support of Leninism wouldn’t have played well with ’80s audiences.  Hence he drastically edits Reed’s political speech down to one word:  in answer to a Democrat’s question about what World War I is about, he says “profits.”  When asked by Louise Bryant what Reed’s views on politics are, Beatty avoids the all-night speech by fast-forwarding to morning, where Reed attempts to embrace Bryant. (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.

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Ed. Note: Greg’s piece was written before Kunis killed the rumor (see below) that she might back out of Sgt. Scott Moore’s invitation. 

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So I love Mila Kunis for two very good reasons.

First off: she accepted the invitation by a young soldier to attend the Marines Ball – and I hope she still plans on going.

But even more, I love her for what she said in a recent GQ interview, while promoting her new flick, called “Friends With Benefits.”

The interviewer asked her if she’d ever been in one of those relationships, herself.

She answered, quote:

Oy. I haven’t, but I can give you my stance on it: It’s like communism-good in theory, in execution it fails. Friends of mine have done it, and it never ends well. Why do people put themselves through that torture?

And so, in just a few sentences, Kunis proved she’s smarter than just about every major movie star combined.

She was able to deflate one common cultural assumption propagated by Hollywood – that casual sex is harmless – while also dismissing a deadly ideology that garners glowing depictions on big screens everywhere.

That puts her head and shoulders above any of the more common Hollywood intellectuals – the type of clowns you see parading their Chomsky books at the local Starbucks.

(I’m talking to you Matt Damon).

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On his Wednesday show, Adam Carolla interviewed Andrew Breitbart to discuss Andrew’s new book, Righteous Indignation. Let me assure you, you’ll LOVE this duo. Andrew’s been a guest on Carolla’s show before, but this was hands down the most entertaining so far.

Check out some of the comments from Carolla’s regular listeners – not surprisingly, some aren’t exactly Breitbart fans (which makes it that much more enjoyable for me, at least).

Carolla tackled topics with Andrew on just about everything – from Righteous Indignation to Communism, the Left’s Racist meme, the racket of building permits and greenwashing, and unions, just to name a few. And a whole lotta LA, which, as Andrew illustrates for us, ain’t what is used to be. The two were on such a rant roll over our waning freedoms, Carolla, who has described himself as having libertarian leanings, almost sounded like another grassroots activist. Who knows? Sounds like he may just have a bit of Presidential appeal. Andrew certainly thought so!

“By the way, are you aware that the Republican Party has nobody running for the presidency right now, and if you had put that out there by mistake and people heard that, and that was your spiel, you would have gone up to Donald Trump level, you would have gone up to 17%?”

Oh yeah – Carolla’s also not a big fan of Maxine Waters. Not. At. All. Which reminds me, this audio is NSFW.

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Looks as though the times really are a-changing:

Counter-culture hero and 1960s protest singer-songwriter Bob Dylan got a rapturous welcome from fans on Wednesday at his first ever concert in China, despite having agreed to sing only an approved set designed not to offend political sensitivities.

Famous for his songs against injustice and for civil liberties and pacifism, Dylan struck a cautious line in Beijing and did not sing anything that might have overtly offended China’s Communist rulers, like “The Times They Are A-Changin”.  …Promoters tried to bring Dylan to China last year, but the Culture Ministry did not give its approval, as is required for any concert in the country.

China’s agreement this year came with the proviso that Dylan “performed with the approved content”, according to a brief statement issued last month by the ministry, which gave no other details.

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At the 83rd Academy Awards, a small movie entitled “The Way Back” competed against “Barney’s Version” and “The Wolfman” in the category of best makeup. Although “The Wolfman” went home with the prize, it was good to see “The Way Back” recognized at the award show. I only wish that this under-appreciated movie, which was inspired by the true story of a group of men who escaped a Siberian prison camp and walked over 4000 miles to freedom, received more recognition from the Academy.

“The Way Back” isn’t your typical Hollywood movie. The story focuses on the long trek the men took to escape the prison camp that they were forced into. The drama shows these men as they try to survive in brutal weather and harsh conditions. Their journey is dreary and long but their story is worth seeing for its focus on freedom and on man’s fight to overcome injustice.

Jim Sturgess plays Janusz, a young man who is betrayed by his wife and sent to the camp early on. Janusz quickly learns that looking out for others isn’t the best way to survive there. The weather is freezing and the food is scarce and some prisoners don’t bother caring for the weaker prisoners knowing that many of them won’t survive much longer. Mr. Smith (Ed Harris), a fellow inmate, tells Janusz to only look out for himself.  At one point, Smith even says, “We’ve all done terrible things to survive,” and you can tell he means it. Janusz eventually befriends Smith and the two join several others in a plan to escape and journey to safety. (more…)

Image Entertainment and Enduring Freedom Productions have released a new documentary for the 100th anniversary of statesman Ronald Reagan’s birth. “Ronald Reagan: An American Journey” is an inspiring and heartfelt look at who President Reagan was, and at the instances that made his legacy eternal. The film is packed with archival footage of Reagan at his best, capturing those transcendent moments in his presidency that made him great and keep him relevant today.

In 103 minutes, this documentary gives Americans, especially young ones like me who know little of Reagan’s presidency, a complete summary of the historic highlights of Reagan’s eight years in office within its national and international context. The film doesn’t shy away from mistakes Reagan may have made. It isn’t overly worshiping. It simply presents Reagan in his own words, honoring a man who changed the world.

The film begins by putting Reagan’s presidency in its historical setting: a nation pulled apart by warring liberals and conservatives; where Vietnam savagely cut America in two, Nixon’s Watergate had tarnished the GOP, and Carter’s foreign policy had left Democrats looking weak. Reagan brought the nation together by giving Americans a mission: to defeat a true opponent – the U.S.S.R. (more…)

Communism is responsible for more deaths in the 20th Century than both world wars, yet liberals have defended it for decades. A new book by Grove City College professor and top Reagan scholar Paul Kengor – Dupes – documents this, showing how Communists used liberals to further their efforts in the U.S. This book masterfully documents dupes in the U.S. from the Hill to (my focus here) Hollywood.

Kengor’s strength is research (the book’s introduction alone lists 35 citations), and Dupes authoritatively identifies both dupes and true Communists in Hollywood, documenting them down to their Communist Party USA registration card numbers and how many times they wrote for Communist publications.

Take playwright extraordinaire Arthur Miller, for example. It is widely accepted that “The Crucible” is about McCarthyism. Beyond that, today’s educators have allowed what Senator Joe McCarthy and his “witch hunts” found to blend with the work of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In reality, they were entirely separate.

Kengor points out that the falsely titled “HUAC,” (a recent New Yorker article, which gives a good review of former Communist Elia Kazan, used the “HUAC” abbreviation too) which suggests the committee was the actual un-American organization, was chaired by Democrats for much of its existence, and it was attacked for its work by Communists regardless of who was in charge. (more…)

Much has been made about James Agee’s affectionate judgment of Buster Keaton: “Keaton worked strictly for laughs, but his work came from so far inside a curious and original spirit that he achieved a great deal besides, especially in his feature-length comedies. . . he was the only major comedian who kept sentiment almost entirely out of his work, and he brought pure physical comedy to its greatest heights.”

As for me, I agree more with another critic, Roger Ebert, who once wrote that Keaton’s movies, “seen as a group, are like a sustained act of optimism in the face of adversity; surprising how, without asking, he earns our admiration and tenderness.” Marshaling all of the critical gumption he’s earned over the years, Ebert also calls Keaton, “the greatest actor-director in the history of the cinema, and that includes Orson Welles.”

Keaton chalked up a large part of his success to changes undertaken while maturing out of his early, vaudeville-inspired shorts with Fatty Arbuckle (a subject we’ll address in a future FCML series). When first making features, their longer length dictated fundamental adjustments in the way his comedy and cinema interacted. “One of the first decisions I made,” Keaton wrote in his autobiography, “was to cut out custard pie throwing. . . no pie was ever thrown in a Buster Keaton feature. We also discontinued what we called impossible gags or cartoon gags. . . I realized that my feature comedies would succeed best when the audience took the plot seriously enough to root for me as I indomitably worked my way out of mounting perils.”

That quiet indomitable spirit, what Ebert calls his “sustained act of optimism,” separates Buster Keaton’s stone-faced everyman from the other great comedic characters of the age.  Take Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp — at base a hobo, petty thief, and conniving opportunist, his humor derived from his boundless ingenuity in skirting the law, and his pathos came from being an oppressed victim of a cruel society. Late in life, Keaton remembered… (more…)

You had to hide it somewhere that no one would find it:  your very first record, tape, CD– whatever medium– that Mom and Dad didn’t approve of.  You had to listen to it through headphones or when they were out of the house.  You had to do this because you knew it was an act of rebellion; your parents did not want you hearing that music performed that way with those lyrics, and you decided that you wouldn’t obey them.  According to the new documentary Rockin’ The Wall, that simple moment of defiance, experienced collectively by the citizens of the Soviet Union, contributed to and may have even defined the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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Co-produced by Big Hollywood contributor Larry Schweikart, who first wrote about this issue in his book 7 Events That Made America America, and narrated by Adam Baldwin, Rockin’ the Wall gives viewers an intimate look into life in East Berlin, where citizens were restricted by a literal concrete wall from the same free enterprise and thought that their neighbors in the Western half of the city enjoyed.  Commentators in the film range from bow tie-wearing historians to shaggy-haired rock musicians, with the most interesting tidbits coming from individuals who had lived under Soviet rule in East Berlin (some of whom escaped before the wall fell).  Noting that this was the first time in history where walls were used to keep citizens in rather than invaders out, the film conveys a palpable feeling of the quiet rebellion simmering against a regime so petty as to restrict women from putting their hair in ponytails.

The film’s thesis, that rock and roll music brought down the wall, seems spurious at first.  After its fast-paced introduction, we’re treated to a montage of aged musicians opining on the nature of rock and roll, how it embodies liberty and rebellion, and we’re thinking, “Okay, but how does this relate to–” right as director Marc Leif unleashes a barrage of information that convincingly portrays rock music as the driving force of anti-Communist subversion.  We learn about Radio Free Europe, whose modern music penetrated the wall and was forbidden by the Soviets.  We learn about the black market for Western records, where demand was so high that a single LP could cost 1/10th of a week’s wages.  We learn about the conferences for young people warning them of the physical and mental dangers of rock and roll.

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So, I’m sitting in my local diner staring at a pair of gorgeous breasts that are hovering over my husband’s face as the twenty year old waitress takes our lunch order.  She purrs, “Ready?”  I think she just winked at him.  He pretends not to notice.  I am in the middle of a good story about my wonderful, recent trip to the AZ Freedom Rally II.

After an eternity, the gorgeous, young boobs leave and I resume my tale, ” …the greatest thing about this crucial moment in history is the fact that I am meeting the greatest people on earth…David Saucedo was in jail three years ago…he met Jesus, had an about-face and is now a Christian conservative rapper on the Tea Party Express IV.  

His new rapper name is Polatik.  He owns a construction company and runs a ministry in Waco, TX.  Spending two days with him is like being at a 48 hour Bible study.  He can’t stop talking about his new faith, his new life, his recent reading of the Federalist papers and The Constitution, the Bible, his new wife and two babies…one of which has leukemia.  Yes, Lianna has leukemia and is getting chemo right now and losing her hair.  David is trusting God for her healing. He shows me her picture on his I Phone. He put his life and now, his precious daughter’s life into his Father’s hands.  He is vibrant and real and shimmering with enthusiasm for helping others and helping our country get back on track.”  I’m glowing just from being near him.  Paul nods. We both think about Romans 8:28.

The beautiful 20 year old breasts return and I am distracted from my story again.  My husband pretends not to notice the breasts. The owner of the breasts places our food on the table.  I notice her third button has been strategically unbuttoned.  I clear my throat and continue, “Paul, I sent my letter to the Miami Herald.  Do you want to read it?”  Paul knows he must pay attention to me so he pushes his plate aside, slowly places his glasses on his nose and reads… (more…)

Scores of people gathered this weekend on the national mall as part of the One Nation Working Together rally, offering, in the words of one of the event’s featured speakers, NAACP President Ben Jealous, “the antidote to the Tea Party,” and promoting liberal answers to issues ranging from job creation to immigration, to education and the environment – namely, more government intervention and higher taxes and regulation.

Actually, the attendance was easily in the tens of thousands, but sometimes it’s fun to take a cue from the MSM and just understate any fact that doesn’t serve your narrative.

Still, despite the impressive numbers, the predominately white rally does differ from Glenn Beck’s recent Restore Honor rally, and the Tea Party movement in general, in one way that illuminates the core difference between left and right.

Specifically, the Tea Party tends to be a movement of individuals, each pursuing their own interests, self-organizing in defense of their own rights, whereas the One Nation Working Together rally was the product of partnerships between over 400 labor, civil-rights, and other liberal organizations, many of whom bussed in their members by the thousands to bolster their numbers.

If there is any better picture of the top-down, coercive nature of liberalism than their approach to “grass roots” organizing, I’m not sure what it is. (more…)

I have never heard Tom Petty talk politics. When it comes to performers, that generally is a good thing.

Last week my wife and I took our kids, 13 and 11, to see Petty and the Heartbreakers. Having seen them a few times before, they put on a predictably tremendous show, (though doing “Jammin’ Me” and “Change of Heart” would have been great). Mike Campbell, Petty, and crew belted out raw, old fashion rock and direct, soulful, no nonsense lyrics. Awesome.

As the band played “Refugee” I couldn’t help but focus on the audience, including my children, singing in unison “everybody’s got to fight to be free.” Like many Petty lyrics, its a simple, direct, powerful line; easily repeated but probably rarely internalized.

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We, as Americans, do have to fight to be free.

The upcoming generations need to understand that. Our grandparents had to fight to be free of Nazism. Our parents and my generation (though we can discuss The Who at another time) fought to be free of Soviet style communism.

But for this generation and the at least the next, not only do we have to fight to be free of radical Islam but more insidiously we have to fight to be free from the tyranny of our own federal and even local governments’ designs on our liberty. We, who are parents, have a responsibility to educate our children. Our freedoms are threatened by those within and without. (more…)

The Great Catholic Scandal!

Hmmm … does this really have to do with child abuse or, to use the Reagan perspective, are these arrests and possibly further imprisonments of high level Catholic authorities “bargaining chips” to convince the Catholic Church that her ban on abortion should be … how shall I say … “seriously reconsidered?”

All is politics these days … and all will be used to further the political game.

However, considering the Catholic Church’s major hand in overturning the Polish Communist State, the “game” is decidedly beyond politics.

The increasingly deadly Game has been a not-so-Cold War for quite some time.

Unfortunately, it is now not only Catholics versus Communists. (more…)

A curious aspect of the Bond legend is that Ian Fleming’s socialite wife despised the character. She went so far as to host upper-crust parties at which she and her lettered friends — literary giants such as Cyril Connolly, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Evelyn Waugh — cattily disparaged her husband’s popular creation as embarrassingly lowbrow, the English equivalent of American pulp fiction (and thus the modern heir to the “Boy’s Weeklies” of Orwell’s famous essay). “Utterly despicable,” was Muggeridge’s quoted verdict in Time magazine soon after Fleming’s death. “[Bond is] obsequious to his superiors, pretentious in his tastes, callous and brutal in his ways, with strong undertones of sadism, and an unspeakable cad in his relations with women, towards whom sexual appetite represents the only approach.”

During the same period, various Leftist writers began penning spy stories of their own in reaction to Fleming’s potent brew of unapologetic clubhouse masculinity (smoking, drinking, gambling, golfing, seducing) and unqualified patriotism, favoring a more, shall we say, morally nuanced look at the Cold War. Author John “The United States of America has gone mad” le Carré, then finding fame with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963 — good guys die, bad guys win, yay!), considered Fleming’s books “cultural pornography,” and mused that in the real world Bond’s “misty, patriotic ideas” would hardly prevent him from betraying his country at the first opportunity. “Because if the money was better,” le Carré snickered with certainty, “the booze freer, and women easier in Moscow, he’d be off like a shot.”

Into this maelstrom of anti-Fleming derision came a little volume called The James Bond Dossier (1965), penned by a more notorious member of the English literati, academic-cum-novelist Kingsley Amis. A savagely witty writer, a world-class drunkard, and a conflicted serial adulterer (all qualities shared, you may recall from our previous installment, with Bond’s creator), the overarching critical statement of his book was simple enough: “Inside that conservative dark-blue worsted suit and under the same skin as a bearer of the hard-earned double-o prefix there lurks an intruder from another age,” a “Byronic hero,” who “is lonely, melancholy, of fine natural physique, which has become in some way ravaged, of similarly fine but ravaged countenance, dark and brooding in expression, of a cold or cynical veneer, above all enigmatic, in possession of a sinister secret.” (more…)

“We will obtain the liberty of the Cuban people.” — Doctor Oscar Elias Biscet

Filmmaker Jordan Allott’s documentary, “Oscar’s Cuba” paints a compelling portrait of Cuban dissident Oscar Elias Biscet, whom Armando Valladares, former Reagan administration Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission and himself a former political prisoner of the Castro dictatorship, cites as the most important living figure in the struggle for Cuban liberty.

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In 1998 Doctor Biscet dared to publish a report in which he interviewed many Cuban mothers who testified that their infants had been born alive and then killed by the regime. The totalitarian regime that controls Cuba views problematic pregnancies or unhealthy infants as a threat to their much-touted low infant mortality rates. Cuba has the highest abortion rates in our hemisphere, with 6 in 10 pregnancies ending in abortion. Thanks to Dr Biscet, we now know that many of these abortions were not the choice of the mothers involved, that said abortions were coerced, and indeed that many of these infants were born alive…then terminated. When Dr. Biscet made this issue a matter of public record, he gave the regime a black eye. The regime was not going to let this go unpunished. Dr Biscet continued to speak out for human rights and democracy on the island, and he paid a price for it: in 1998 and 1999 he was arrested more than 20 times.

On March 18, 2003, seven years ago today, Dr Biscet was arrested along with more than 70 other dissidents in what has come to be called “la Primavera Negra,” the Black Spring of 2003.  He was sentenced to a 25-year sentence, which he is currently serving in the notorious Combinado del Este prison outside of Havana. Dr. Biscet spends much of his time in solitary confinement, incarcerated in an underground cell. Yet Biscet endures, and continues to defy the regime. (more…)

Part I of this series can be found here.

Steven Soderbergh made certain his new movie, “Che,” about the life of revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, couldn’t be attacked — at least on a factual level. (CNN Entertainment, January 1, 2009)

“I didn’t mind someone saying, ‘Well, your take on him, I don’t really like,’ or ‘You’ve left these things out and included these things.’ That’s fine,” Soderbergh said. “What I didn’t want was for somebody to be able to look at a scene and say, ‘That never happened.’ “(CNN Entertainment, January 1, 2009)

Well, Mr Soderbergh (and CNN), pull up a chair.

Soderbergh’s movie shows Che Guevara steely-eyed and snarling with defiance during his capture. Why, only seconds before, Che’s very M-2 carbine had been blasted from his hands and rendered useless by a fascist machine gun burst!

Then the bravely grimacing Guevara jerks out his pistol and blasts his very last bullets at the approaching hordes of CIA-lackey soldiers!

The (typical) viewer gapes at the spectacle. His eyes mist and lips tremble at Soderbergh and del Toro’s impeccable depiction of such undaunted pluck and valor.

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I was a mere teenager in the fifties when it was broadcast widely that the Chinese “don’t really have the same love of life that we do.”

Apparently the Americans at Jonestown were part Chinese, eh?

Here is the Last Will and Testament of Jonestown: 

Dear Comrade Timofeyev, 

“The following is a letter of instructions regarding all of our assets that we want to leave to the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. 

Enclosed in this letter are letters which instruct the banks to send the cashiers checks to you. I am doing this on behalf of Peoples Temple because we, as communists, want our money to be of benefit for help to oppressed peoples all over the world, or in any way that your decision-making body sees fit. 

The letters included listed accounts with balances totaling in excess of $7.3 million to be transferred to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 

Hmmm …. Communism. (more…)