Hollywood donors are high on the list of political donors whose money is presumed lost in an alleged embezzlement scheme that led to the arrest last week of a longtime Democratic operative.

Sony, Disney, News Corp., labor group IATSE and the Motion Picture Assn. of America are among the top donors whose funds have been lost, along with several million dollars in the campaign war chest of California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein (left), according to Opensecrets.org.

Feinstein says her campaign treasury has been “wiped out” by Kinde Durkee, a treasurer and political operative who apparently also misused funds from an unknown number of other politicians’ accounts in the state.

Congresswoman Susan Davis, a Democrat from San Diego area, suggested that Durkee might be “the Bernie Madoff of campaign finance treasurers.”

As the full extent of the damages emerges, the Democratic Party is faced with the unenviable task of going back to donors for more money. L.A. County Democratic Party chair Eric Bauman, who’s also vice chair of the state Democratic Party, told TheWrap that process is already underway.

“I can’t say for sure [who will contribute], but we’ve started to reach out to our friends at Warner Bros., Universal and Sony, and donors like that,” he said.

TheWrap’s investigation of federal election records determined that the major studios, showbiz law firms, guilds like the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees all contributed to Feinstein’s war chest.

Feinstein’s top donors from 2007-12 include IATSE at $30,000, Manatt Phelps and Phillips law firm at $18,750, Sony Corp. at $17,200, Walt Disney Corp. at $16,600, News Corp. at $15,625 and the Motion Picture Assn. of America at $14,700, according to OpenSecrets.org. (Sitting atop the roster was the utility PG&E at $69,100.)

Full article at The Wrap.

When you factor in that Barack Obama is my president, Joe Biden is my vice-president, Nancy Pelosi is next in line, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer are my senators, Brad Sherman is my congressman, Antonio Villaraigosa is my mayor and Jerry Brown is lurking in the wings to be my governor, do you really think I’ll be turning my pen into a plowshare anytime soon?    

But at least now you might have a better handle on why I look back so fondly on what I have come to regard as the good old days when an American’s major complaint was that he had taxation without representation. 

On top of everything else, I live in Los Angeles and have spent most of my adult life laboring in Hollywood, a place that some people regard as less an actual location than a state of mind.  I agree it is a state of mind in the same sense that paranoia and schizophrenia are states of mind. 

After working in the field of entertainment for about 40 years, I swear to you that there are a fair number of normal, decent human beings who work in the industry.  But truth compels me to say that the lower you go in the pecking order, the likelier you are to find them.  That’s not to say that every producer, actor, director and writer, is an arrogant, leftwing, coke-snorting, bottom-feeding egomaniac, but that’s certainly the way to bet. 

Sometimes, when I’m daydreaming about what Hell must be like, I envision a place where every day you wake up and have to go work for someone like Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, nasty sourpusses who think that their every whim should be immediately pandered to and who regard themselves as God, but with a bigger expense account, a larger staff and a better pension plan. 

In short, Pelosi, Frank and Reid and their congressional cronies, could find true happiness working at a TV network, a movie studio or a theatrical agency.  Perhaps you think I’m making this up, but I’m not.  Liberal politicians are doing their best to shove Obamacare down our throats, pretending it’s manna from Heaven, but you may have noticed that they haven’t the slightest intention of leaving their own medical care up to a lottery system.  And can you really blame them?  Do you think Pelosi wants a bunch of strangers deciding if she can get another dozen face lifts?  You think Robert Byrd wants to leave it up to a death panel to determine if it’s time to put the old Ku Kluxer on an ice floe? 

You could call them hypocrites, but I call them Hollywood hopefuls.  They’d fit right in.  This is the town, after all, where people are still whining over the fact that a handful of mediocre actors and hack writers were blacklisted 60 years ago because they were, for the most part, unrepentant Communists whose allegiance was to the evil Soviet Union.  But these same people think nothing of blacklisting writers and directors who have done nothing worse than made the fatal mistake of turning 50. 

Many years ago, radio wit Fred Allen observed that “You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, stick it in the navel of a flea, and still have room left over for two caraway seeds and an agent’s heart.”  I say he was being too kind.  Although I regard myself as basically a loyal person, I’ve had about two dozen agents in my life.  What’s more, in what was a moderately successful TV writing career, by getting my own jobs, I made money for all of them, except the last one.  Which was just as well because she’s the one who went to the slammer for stealing her clients’ money.

 The reason, by the way, I kept leaving agents wasn’t simply because none of them ever earned his or her 10%, but because eventually they all lied to me about what they would do for me or, worse yet, what they had already done. 

In my experience, agents are people who like to have lunch, shmooze with other agents and con young women into having sex with them.  Those are the male agents, of course.  Female agents, on the other hand, like to have lunch, shmooze with other agents and con young women into having sex with them. 

In other words, if a genie somehow managed to switch everyone in Hollywood with everyone in Congress, you would barely notice it.  In fact, aside from the fact that the paparazzi would all have to pack up and move east and that “Henry Waxman: The Musical!” would finally be green-lighted at Universal, life would go on as usual.

I quit being a liberal because I didn’t believe that members of particular minority groups deserved advantages denied to others; that illegal aliens weren’t entitled to anything but a swift kick to the backside; that being a devout Christian didn’t make you a bad person; and that capitalism was a system that worked, while socialism not only didn’t work, but, wherever it was tried, turned into a tyranny.

I honestly don’t know why there are so many liberals today and I certainly can’t imagine why they have such a lousy agenda.  I have come up with a theory, however.  Here in California, roughly 30 years ago, because of budget cuts, a great many people were released from insane asylums.  They wound up living in the streets, which explains the large number of homeless people, even though Democrats would have you believe that those are normal people who simply lost their jobs along the way.

Even after the state became more solvent, it became almost impossible to get these poor souls back into institutions where they could be fed, clothed and given their meds, because the ACLU lawyers fought for their inalienable right to starve, freeze and use the sidewalks of your city as their combination bedroom, living room and bathroom.

Inevitably, they also got to vote.  As a result, the likes of Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Gray Davis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Antonio Villaraigosa, Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown, wound up winning all the major elections.  I mean, the truth is, you’d have to be crazy to vote for those people.

I have to suspect that a similar scenario took place all over the country.  How else to explain that two-thirds of Americans actually believe that Barack Obama’s policies will save our economy?  I’m not even a Christian, but I find it bizarre that people who pooh-pooh the idea that Christ raised the dead or walked on water are totally convinced that a guy who’s tossing trillions of dollars into the air is a financial miracle worker.  Talk about blind faith!

It makes me wonder if these same people, were they facing personal bankruptcy, would think that the answer to their own financial difficulties would be to give their wife an American Express card and drop her off at Tiffany’s.

If liberals aren’t simply insane, they surely must be hypocrites.  Why else would they insist that spending eight years bashing President Bush and comparing him, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, to the Nazi High Command was patriotic, but merely questioning President Obama’s qualifications, judgment and policies, makes one a racist?

Also, how is it that when, between 2000 and 2006, when the GOP had control of the Oval Office, the House and the Senate, on those rare occasions they didn’t do the bidding of Ted Kennedy, John Murtha or Charles Schumer, they were condemned as divisive?  However, when Obama and his left-wing cronies rushed through a trillion dollar stimulus package and a pork-filled budget over Republican objections, nobody in their crowd cried “Foul!” or insisted on reaching across the aisle for a group hug and a few choruses of “Kumbaya”?

Before anyone bothers sending an e-mail reminding me that three Republican senators voted with the Democrats on the stimulus bill, I haven’t forgotten.  But, let’s face it — the two ladies from Maine are merely the east coast version of Boxer and Feinstein.  As for Arlen Specter, I suspect that along the way, he’ll switch to the Extraterrestial Party if, as he inches closer to being a hundred years old, he decides that’s his best chance of winning an election.

I know that people such as Sen. Specter and Sen. Jeffords would have us believe that they switched parties because of their principles, but I would prefer it if they only said such silly things in the hope of making me laugh.  That’s because I love to laugh, but I hate being taken for a fool.  I mean, really, Jim Jeffords wakes up one day when he’s 67 years old and Specter opens his eyes at the age of 79 and suddenly decide that the GOP isn’t as conservative as they’d like, so the solution is to link left arms with the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank?

Something else that makes me wonder if, in a nicer, kinder world, liberals wouldn’t be housed in a warm place where they’d be kept safely away from sharp objects and voting booths, is their notion of what constitutes torture.  In my world, cutting off Daniel Pearl’s head, throwing Anne Frank in an oven or having to listen to Chris Matthews, is torture.  But by no means is it playing loud music, keeping people awake, making them share space with a caterpillar or even dousing them with water, in order to get them to cough up information that might prevent another 9/11 or keep American soldiers from being ambushed.

Only a liberal could confuse actual torture with college hazing.  I suspect there are members of fraternities who could share more harrowing tales than the Islamics with their Korans, their three squares and their personal prayer mats at Gitmo.

Another difference that seems to escape liberals is that it’s torture when the only purpose is to cause pain, not when it’s done in order to pry important information from terrorists.

It’s bad enough that any number of self-righteous academics kept military recruiters off college campuses, pretending that their objection stemmed from the army’s don’t ask/don’t tell policy, and not simply because left-wingers hate anything and everything that smacks of patriotism.

In much the same way, those on the Left have led a crusade against the Boy Scouts of America because, so they say, they oppose the policy of not allowing gay men to be Scout leaders and take young boys into the woods on camping trips.  Sensible people regard that as a sensible policy.  It’s not to suggest that every gay man is a pedophile, but simply recognizing that most pedophiles are gay men.  Just as every Muslim is not a terrorist, just about every terrorist these days is a Muslim.  So, why should parents take any unnecessary chances with their most precious possessions just so no one’s feelings get hurt?

Liberals don’t really care about homosexuals, by the way, unless they themselves happen to be gay.  The truth is liberals rarely serve in the military now that service is voluntary and they don’t usually let their kids join the Boy Scouts, not because they’re offended by the aforementioned policy, but because the group fosters faith-based and patriotic ideals.

If you want a perfect example of liberal hypocrisy, consider the recent beauty pageant when someone who calls himself, in homage to Paris Hilton, Perez Hilton (born Mario Lavenderia), who had no business even being on stage, got to ask Miss California, Carrie Prejean, how she felt about same-sex marriages.  Her honest answer probably cost her the victory, while earning her the respect of most fair and decent Americans.

What I find so telling about the incident was that in California, the reason that the same-sex marriage measure was defeated on the November ballot was because 70% of blacks voted that way.  But gay activists only demonstrated outside Catholic and Mormon churches and businesses.  Furthermore, I guarantee that if Miss Prejean had been black, instead of a blue-eyed blonde, Mr. Hilton wouldn’t have dared open his ugly little yap.

It’s also worth noting that President Obama gave the exact same answer to the exact same question during the campaign, and yet the gays voted overwhelmingly for him.  Which certainly suggests that, thanks to the insane asylums being relatively empty these days, honesty can cost you a tiara, but not the presidency.