I know the 9/11 imagery is always hard to take in. I still get a lump in my throat when I see it, but that could just be my meningitis. I do think it’s necessary however, to show the tragic imagery so that people don’t forget how fired up they were in the following months. It’s time to get fired up again. It’s time to honor the deceased by proactively fighting against government waste and forcing their hand into action. There’s no excuse for Ground Zero to look the way it does today… Unless Mothra stopped by. He ruins everything.

(more…)

By now I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of other reviews about “The Blind Side,” currently in theaters, including this one by BH’s own Cam Cannon. I hope you can stand to read one more.

I saw “The Blind Side” last Friday evening with my younger daughter. Arriving half an hour before showtime, I was surprised to see that the theater was already about three quarters full and we ended up sitting down near the front, where my daughter usually begs to sit and I reply, “No, let’s sit somewhere near the middle.” Sure it was a long holiday weekend and people were looking for something to do, but as it was the second weekend, I took this as a positive sign. Word of mouth has a way of killing films that deserve to die quickly, especially in the age of Facebook and Twitter.

Not having read the book, I could judge the movie on its own merits. As BH readers already know, “The Blind Side” tells the true story of football phenom Michael Oher, then a fatherless black teen from the projects of Memphis with a crack-addicted mother and who, despite being accepted into a tony Christian school, ends up homeless. He is seen wandering out in the cold by Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy, a well-to-do couple from the other side of the tracks, who take him in and eventually make him a part of their family. (more…)

Help me out here. What’s crazier – the abysmal failure the stimulus has been in Los Angeles County (like everywhere else) or how outrageously wasteful the plan was to begin with?

Los Angeles County’s take of stimulus funds is by far the largest in California, which has received $18.5 billion in ARRA funds, intended to create 110,219.36 jobs statewide — a pricey rate of $168,264.08 per job.

But Hollywood is a different story entirely. Hollywood — the geographic Hollywood as found on Thomas Guide map page 593 — has received $23,338,327 in grants, loans and contracting. This money has created just 20.57 jobs. That’s $1,134,580.80 per job. And as interviews with recipients reveal, even that tiny jobs claim is clearly false, with many of the claims of newly created positions either impossible to verify or lower than reported.

Not even 20 full-time jobs have been created in Hollywood proper.

(more…)

I received Michael Covel’s new documentary, Broke: The New American Dream [trailer - website] in the mail about a week ago, and watched it in one sitting.  The film describes itself as “a vivid, honest, often humorous and always insightful look at our struggle with investments and retirement.”  The film is vivid and often humorous – it is peppered with slivers of good advice from 1950s financial films and cartoons – and, in the mold of documentarians like Michael Moore, it focuses mainly on people and less on specifics.  That said, Broke isn’t a complete breakdown of what happened and how we got here, or how we’ll get out of it. 

Broke is an ambitious movie, covering ground from the subprime meltdown to the relationship between the stock market and the “irrational exuberance” targeted by Professor Robert Schiller.  For all its ambition, the film does come off as a bit scattered, mixing personal stories with broader (and often vaguer) points about the nature of the financial markets.  If you’re looking for a detailed analysis of real estate finance or an explanation of the mismanagement by the federal government and Wall Street, you’re not likely to find it here – this is more of a media critique, and a critique of the American mindset that we should “get rich quick” through the market rather than doing our research.  (more…)