Charlie Sheen unleashed his Violent Torpedo of Truth Tour on the Motor City on Saturday night before a crowd that greeted the actor with an adoring standing ovation and concluded with booing and walk-outs.

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9:18 – “Nothing terrifies a troll more than its own reflection,” Sheen continues, before shifting gears into politics. “In a recent poll, they told me I’d bring down that whore [Sarah] Palin. I don’t have time for that nonsense.” [Read about the poll he's referring to here.]

9:20 — People start booing Sheen. Not playing around, but actually booing him. Sheen yells, “I already got your money, dude!”

Until this point, the libertarian in me was truly pulling for Sheen to continue sticking it to the Hollywood Man and fulfilling his own personal definition of #WINNING.  Sheen has probably been “banging” cocaine and porn stars for a couple of decades now, and the fact that it became an international crisis all of a sudden still strikes me as a bit unfair.  We all can imagine that he must have been extremely difficult to work with, but despite all the drugs and all the women, he managed to show up to work and do his job for seven seasons.  That’s actually pretty impressive, in a filthy, depraved sort of way.

I’ve heard reports that “Two and a Half Men,” through international syndication and DVD sales, is worth over $50M per episode to CBS, and maybe even twice that.  Sheen, the big-name star of the program, was making about $2M per episode when this saga began and wanted a bump to around $3M per.  Sure, no one really needs all of that money, but fair is fair, and if he’s the biggest piece of a puzzle worth at least tens of millions of dollars, wasn’t it on CBS to make it work out so that the show could go on?  Forget about the raw values and think about the principle: in all likelihood, Sheen is mathematically worth the extra million per episode for the network and the dozens (hundreds?) of people whose bills are paid by “Men.”

And besides, Money Talks alone should earn the man the benefit of the doubt.

It isn’t black and white, of course, and I don’t mean to defend him–I would love to say that Sheen is only hurting himself, but he has a family, including children, and you can’t just go around trapping porn stars in hotel bathrooms.  Still, the man struck me as a genuine free spirit–a contrarian with a skepticism about the natural order of every-things that made him seem downright insane yet charismatic at the same time.  This even applies to his 9/11 trutherism.  I’m usually quick to dismiss 9/11 truthers as America haters, but my read on Sheen was that he just doesn’t believe what anyone tells him and would rather stir the pot than heed deference to facts.  That would be consistent with everything else in his life.  He lives like a rock star and relishes it–a breath of free-based air, if you will. So why not just pay the man the money and let this go away?

Anyway, it’s painful to feel forced to respond to a remark delivered to get attention by a person who is utterly desperate for it, so I’m not going to overly indulge Sheen or anyone of the other anti-Palin bed-wetters who would enjoy it; after all, the ad hominem attack is provably false and meant to offend people like the ones who frequent this blog, so why bother?  Also, Charlie is Martin Sheen’s son, so we can’t realistically expect him to have reasonable political views.

But what I will say is that I’m disappointed that Sheen, a star who I thought did everything in his power to buck the establishment, has embraced the single most pathetic cliché in Hollywood today: bagging on the mother of five with some of the most caustic words imaginable.

And even in deep-blue Detroit, he was booed for it.  Now that’s what I call Tiger Blood.

Well that is precisely what Slate is suggesting in an entertainment feature about raising a Motor City statue to the Hollywood sci fi movie character Robocop. After all, the Robocop movie was a purposeful slam on the United States and Christianity, not some celebration of her genius. This is exactly what the film’s director has said numerous times. Strange that Slate wants to use a character that presents what it claims is bad about America as something worthy enough to which to build a memorial.

For Slate Patrick Cassels, a 20-something actor, “Internet enthusiast,” and entertainment writer, announced his support of the statue to the violence-soaked movie icon mostly because it is an attack on “Reaganomicss” and corporations. But, as if supporting a paean to Marxism isn’t grating enough for building a statue in an American city, he spends no time at all on the anti-Christian theme of the movie.

Regardless a statue to Robocop is a great idea, Cassels asserts. “Robocop,” Cassels claims, “is a great ambassador for Detroit.” He thinks that a Robocop statue has “something important to say about the place and its plight.”

The film, Cassels says, “addresses some of Detroit’s most challenging issues, issues that were pressing in 1987 and remain so today.” Issues like the decay the city has fallen to, its poverty, and its financial doldrums are sharply drawn in the movie. Cassels is, of course, correct about that. But Cassels pinpoints the wrong reasons why these dire circumstances exist in the real Detroit.

Cassels salutes Robocop because it is Hollywood’s “second-best critique of Reaganomics’ devastating effects on the economy of southeastern Michigan.” But that slam on capitalism is great, says Cassels.

As Carrie Rickey writes in an essay for the film’s Criterion Collection DVD, the movie “gleefully satirizes The Great Communicator’s pet doctrines of free enterprise and privatization.”

Sadly, this young Cassels fellow, who was not even born during Reagan’s days in office, succumbs to typical left-wing trope. After all, just what party has been in iron-fisted control of Detroit since long before “Reaganomics” were invented? Yes, that’s right: the Democrats. Funny how historically illiterate folks like young Cassels ignore those actually responsible for the destruction of Detroit, its homegrown Democrats, while they reach all the way to Washington DC to find fictional culprits. I guess fiction is a fitting subject for an “entertainment” writer, though.

Cassels goes on to praise Robocop because at the end of the flick the character, “defies his corrupt programming, and seeks vengeance against the crooked millionaires bent on sacrificing the city for their personal gain.” He lauds Robocop because even as he was “conceived as a corporate cog” at the end he “recovers his humanity.”

Robocop may not represent Detroit’s happiest or proudest moments, and while Robocop himself is redeemed in the end, his city is still in rough shape. But he is a fundamentally good citizen trying to better his city while struggling against the larger forces of big business, corruption, and poverty forces that he is sometimes helpless against, sometimes even an unwitting part of, but ultimately better than. (He’s like a character from The Wire, with titanium skin.) Robocop is thus the perfect symbol for Detroit, reflecting both the city’s persistent will to revive itself and the dangers inherent in doing so.

Sadly, Cassels ignores the real subtext of what Robocop creator and the film’s director Paul Verhoeven actually meant to convey with his movie. While it is true that Verhoeven meant Robocop to be an attack on American capitalism, he also meant it to be a slam on Christianity and Jesus Christ.

In an <a href=”http://www.publiusforum.com/2010/04/27/Robocop-director-Robocop-was-an-american-jesus-because-he-kills-people/”>interview with MTV in 2010, Verhoeven admitted what he was really trying to get across with Robocop. The underlying symbolism of Robocop, Verhoeven said, was that the character was an “American Jesus” because his method of righting wrongs was to shoot and kill all evil doers. Robocop was judge, jury and executioner all in one. To Verhoeven that makes him the American Jesus.

The point of Robocop is of course that it is a Christ story. It is about a guy that gets crucified after fifty minutes then is resurrected in the next fifty minutes and then is like the supercop of the world. But is also a Jesus figure as he walks over water at the end. He could walk over the water and say this wonderful line, which is basically, em, to Clarence Boddicker “I am not arresting you any more.” Meaning, “I m going to shoot you.” And that is, of course, the American Jesus.

Verhoeven has what he describes as a life-long fascination with the historical Jesus and even wrote a book on the Savior’s life entitled, Jesus of Nazareth.

In his book Verhoeven makes an infamous claim about the life of Jesus. He contends that, while he does believe that he was the son of Mary, Jesus Christ was also fathered by a Roman rapist and is not the result of a virgin birth.

His feelings about the historical Jesus aside, Verhoeven’s chief vocation remains with the film industry and in his work he views America through a left-wing prism. The main purpose of much of his film work is to show this country in the worst light possible. Verhoeven personifies Andrew Breitbart’s thought that Hollywood’s most common goal is to inject bad into this country.

Now Robocop certainly is an enjoyable film. It is fun to see the steel cowboy steadily righting wrongs and eliminating the bad guys. But we cannot forget that the main theme of Robocop is that the U.S. is a bad, destructive place and that it and Christianity are rotten to the core. That main message is Hollywood’s most cherished message, one played over and over again in film after film.

These negative, anti-American and anti-Christian themes are what Slate writer Patrick Cassels is celebrating. Not much of a reason to raise a statue, is it?

WARNING: Not for the squeamish.

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.

Gran Torino can be viewed as metaphorical microcosm of the Vietnamese conflict with an alternate ending. Eastwood, the quintessential symbol of American independence and strength, helps defend a group of Asian Americans against a gangster group of other Asian Americans. Kowalski’s courage and independence led to his death and the defeat of the gang members. The image of protagonist Thao Vang Lor (Bee Vang) driving in Kowalski’s Gran Torino, left to Thao in his will, cements the “good Hmongs” victory, and ultimate commitment to America. The juxtaposition of this scene, versus Kowalski’s children trying to unload him in an old age home is striking.

Another morality play is occurring today in the real Michigan. Michigan has a 15% unemployment rate. Detroit’s auto industry, which made the 1972 Ford Gran Torino, has been decimated in large part by federal regulations. In classic “anti-comparative advantage” style, a sclerotic EPA required individual auto companies to meet mandated “CAFE” standards. Even if one wanted the nation’s entire car fleet to meet CAFE requirements on average, the EPA implemented it in the most inefficient way possible.

US automakers’ comparative advantage was in SUVs and small trucks. To keep their fleet within mandated averages, they were forced to build unprofitable, uncompetitive small cars. If the Feds just let comparative advantage work, the US auto fleet would have likely met federal CAFE standards without each company being compelled to build every type of car. But Government does not know economics. They simply know better.

Obama’s “new environmental energy plan,” the Waxman-Markey “Cap and Trade” bill, is a ruse. It is not an energy bill, but a regressive consumption tax in disguise. It is favored by Wall Street, George Soros, Al Gore, GE and other corporatists looking for subsidies paid for by the tax payer. Cap and Trade is the ultimate economic destruction machine. The bill passed the House of Representatives this summer by six votes, 219-213. Forty-four Democrats voted against it. The Senate has not yet voted.

Michigan Congressman Thaddeus McCotter, a real life political “Kowalski” and GOP Policy Committee Chair, opposed this monstrosity. He is among a group of opponents being targeted for attack in the next few weeks. Others include House Minority Whip Eric Cantor and Missouri’s Roy Blount. The campaigns are funded by Soros’ groups MoveOn.Org and Americans United for Change. The attack is preposterous, as this video shows (Groups target GOP on cap-and-trade). What is the goal of the bill?

The goal of the bill is to replace cheap energy with expensive energy. This is called “saving the environment.” This is accomplished by requiring consumers to purchase more expensive electricity, biomass power for example, while also paying taxes to subsidize these enterprises. As we consume more expensive energy, the same amount of labor and capital creates less output. Even if one believed the ridiculous 1.7 million “green job” increase advertised, it doesn’t factor the lost jobs from lower productivity and higher energy costs. The manufacturing heavy states and big users of energy, like Michigan, are clearly poised to be the big losers in such legislation. They are already seeking “exemptions” from regulations because of the bill’s potential economic devastation (Michigan Economic Impact on the State from the Waxman-Markey Bill).

Meanwhile, Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs, and self important financial traders like George Soros, strongly support this legislation because they get to buy and sell “CO2 credits.” The rationale is this legislation will combat “global warming.” Climatologist Chip Knappenberger estimates the best case impact of the bill would be to lower global temperature by “0.1″ degree centigrade in the year 2100. This bill does not address global warming. The bill’s costs exceed its “benefits” by a factor of at least ten, using the UN’s officially approved climate models. This means lost jobs and/or lost real income. This is also why Greenpeace joined with pro-growth conservatives and opposed it. The whole thing is a sham.

So why do Democrats want this bill? They want to raise your taxes under the cover of “climate change” reform. It also gives Government the power to decide which industries get benefited more heavily than others. It is part of the transformation from a free society to a government controlled society. This is yet another highway toward the ultimate c goal of centralized government planning.

McCotter understands, like Walter Kowalski, what it means to be an American. A great American can be a first generation “Hmong” from Vietnam, like Gran Torino’s Thao Vang Lor. Conversely, a treasonous American can be born in Chicago to great advantage, like Weatherman terrorist and Obama supporter Bill Ayers. This speech by Congressman McCotter provides a very clear vision of what America is and should be about. Let’s not permit anti-American fakes, like George Soros, sacrifice McCotter’s (or Cantor’s or Blount’s) “political life” by trying to pull the wool over our eyes. “Green jobs” are a wolf’s tax in sheep’s clothing.

Frommer says he’ll consider whether “tourists should safeguard themselves” by avoiding the crime-ridden hellhole that is the Grand Canyon. After I read about this, I decided to do a search to see if Frommer ever made similar pronouncements about other cities or states. I wondered if he had ever told people to avoid Washington DC, where, according to a US Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2004 report – that place topped the entire country in crime.

Zilch. Nor could I find any such commentary, regarding Detroit, Memphis or Miami – the only large cities in the US with more than 950 violent crimes per 100,000 people, according to FBI’s 2008 crime report. And what of President Obama’s very own Chicago, a city experiencing a dramatic uptick in shootings, muggings and other violent gang activity? Did Frommer warn travelers away from that bullet-ridden borough?

Nope. Fact is, Frommer went after Arizona, because it’s an easy target. It’s just a buncha white rednecks with guns, even if one of the white rednecks is uh, black. And it fed Frommer’s ego: voicing an opinion in sync with the liberal, like-minded media provides him, for a brief moment, an elevated sense of self.

But I sympathize. All he does all day is make travel guides.

Maybe he should get out more.

Tonight, we’ve got Jim Nortion, Faith Salie and Tucker Carlson, and Mad Men’s Rich Sommer!

In this episode, “NewsBusted” covers: Iraq, Detroit, J. Crew, Obama daughters, Hall of Presidents at Walt Disney World, school lunch czar, Al Franken, C-SPAN, Harry Potter, Rupert Grint, Twitter, and the Cincinnati Bengals’ Chad Johnson.

As with the Age of Industrialization’s dawning, this Age of Globalization’s advent is a time of promise and peril, wherein many Americans’ cherished way of life is being “creatively destroyed” by a tsunami of merciless changes seemingly beyond control.  The very concept of a sovereign nation-state is besieged by the discordant forces of disorder – and without order, there is no justice or freedom for the people. 

In most American lifetimes, only societal tumult of the late Sixties and early Seventies is comparable, if not equivalent.  Then, it was the “Destructive Generation” (as David Horowitz has termed the Hippy-Boomers) who assailed our nation’s traditional cultural, political and economic institutions.  Out of this madness arose a hero to restore order, justice and liberty:  Detective Harry Callahan. 

Stripping away the character’s now clichéd Byronic veneer of an alienated anti-hero, Detective Callahan was at heart a harkening to the traditional Irish beat cop.  The beat was different, but the challenges – imposing order upon disorder – were not.  A deeply conservative figure for his times, it was no accident that Detective Callahan served as a law enforcement officer in San Francisco, the time period’s epitome of societal disorder and cultural disintegration.  Here, in the radical New Left’s psychedelic citadel, “Dirty Harry” Callahan made his stand for tradition and the imposition of order to secure justice and freedom for law-abiding citizens.  

Audiences still revere him for it. 

Forty years on, Dirty Harry Callahan is retired and San Francisco’s New Left hippies have “evolved” into “limousine liberal” Boomers.  But the forces of disorder have found a new home; and traditional Americans have found a new hero determined to preserve their cherished way of life amidst the chaos. 

Walt Kowalski lives in what America perceives to be its present epitome of disorder and decay, Detroit.  He harkens to the traditional Polish United Auto Worker member who helped make Detroit America’s engine of prosperity and “Arsenal of Democracy.”  Born at the tail end of the “Greatest Generation,” Mr. Kowalski served his nation in Korea, the “Forgotten War,” before becoming an auto worker.  He lived through the heyday of Detroit as a prosperous manufacturing community of two million.  He’s witnessed its decline into a shell city of 850,000 people sifting through the ruins of what the myopic cynically deem “post-industrial America.”  Mr. Kowalski’s Yuppie, suburbanite kids are trying to get him to abandon his hard-earned piece of the American dream and move into what he would call an “old folks home.”  Despite the deterioration of his neighborhood, which mirrors the larger city, he refuses.  Indeed, when a neighborhood youth tries to steal Kowalski’s prized Gran Torino, this cultural conservative rises to instill order upon disorder to secure justice and liberty within his community.  In the process, he also transcends his own ugly prejudices by realizing his neighbors are fellow human beings and allies in the struggle to defend their shared and cherished way of life. 

Of course, while his life is devoted to conserving the permanent things that provide meaning to his life – his honor, independence, home and the proud symbol of his life’s labors, his Gran Torino – Mr. Kowalski is far from a modern Republican.  He probably holds all politicians in contempt (another wise trait).  As a retired U.A.W. member, he would most likely vote for Democrats.  However, he is undoubtedly representative of the culturally conservative blue-collar workers who supported the last President who brought order out of chaos and constructive change out of decline – Ronald Reagan.  Thus, Mr. Kowalski personifies the voter driven away by ideological, Globalist Republicans. 

Ironically, Walt Kowalski’s fictional attempt to conserve his cherished way of life is being performed in what amounts to a very bad – but very real – off-off-Broadway quality production in Washington, D.C.  In this “drama in real life” the heart of American manufacturing – the domestic auto industry – is fighting for survival.  For the people of beleaguered, abused Detroit, this is their Walt Kowalski moment.  They are not fighting merely to preserve an industry or a regional economy.  In the face of the callous disregard for the human cost of “creative destruction” advocated by ideologically driven Republicans and radical environmentalists, Detroiters are fighting to conserve a cherished way of life from being swept away by the amoral flood-tide of Globalization.  

If Detroit goes down and America’s domestic manufacturing base is scrapped, the rest of the country may well simply shrug its shoulders at the inevitability of the loss in this Brave New World economy.  Like Walt Kowalski’s kids who would blithely stow their “old man” in a human warehouse, most American’s believe they are “post-Detroit.” 

They are wrong, because right now no one is post-disorder.  If the rest of the nation facilitates the decimation of Detroit through malign neglect, deeper social, economic and political chaos will accelerate and spread from the Motor City to the rest of America.  The “limo libs,” the globalist Gucci “conservatives,” and all arm chair ideologues will pale before the deluge and drown in their streams of intellectual adolescence.  All the while as the waters rise, an anxious citizenry will call out for intelligent, mature leaders – flesh and blood, heart and soul Gran Torino Conservatives – devoted to creatively achieving constructive change amidst Globalization’s chaos 

Until these Gran Torino conservatives arrive to restore order, justice and freedom to our American home, “Fasten your seat belts.  It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

United States Representative Thaddeus G. McCotter (MI-11) is the Chair of the Republican House Policy Committee