The Google logo has been blacked out today. Wikipedia, reddit, Mozilla and Twitpic are all blocking access to content.  Even Star Trek icon George Takei has blocked his site.  The moves are displays of cyber-protest against the heavy-handed and ill-conceived Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

From a political and public relations standpoint, this has already been a complete and utter failure for Hollywood and their formerly formidable lobbying arm, the Motion Picture Association of America. Former Sen. Chris Dodd became the new CEO of the MPAA after he realized he would never be re-elected in his home state of Connecticut due to his personal scandals with Countrywide Mortgage and his involvement in the mortgage collapse at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. So naturally, Hollywood hired the failed Senator as their man in Washington. Dodd has been the chief architect of SOPA, which was written with about as much subtlety and constitutional protocol as his equally disastrous Dodd-Frank banking law.

The merits of SOPA and the overall issue of online piracy is a worthy topic, and it can be argued that the federal government should have some hand in policing and enforcing piracy on behalf of private industries and artists who rely on royalties as a major part of their profit structure. These details can and should be debated here and in Washington DC. What is striking about today’s Internet blackout and the over-the-top reaction to it from Dodd is that this arrogant, befuddled and inept former Senator has finally figured out a way to unite the left and the right to focus their passion against a common enemy:  Hollywood.  (more…)

“30 Rock” actor Alec Baldwin is feeling nostalgic for Occupy Wall Street, a movement finally being forcibly removed from several major cities this week.

But Baldwin doesn’t want OWS to go away without learning a key lesson from it. So, he took to the cyber-pages of The Huffington Post to share what OWS has taught him.

And, wouldn’t you know it, he came away with one thoroughly conservative principle at the top of his list – let the market play out sans bailouts:

One important lesson, I believe, is that bailouts of major corporations in any and all industries are counterproductive to long term economic health. And not simply direct infusions of cash as loans, tossed like gargantuan life preservers, in moments of greatest perceived dread. I’m talking about the bailouts the US government gives major corporations every day. The excessive fees forced on customers by certain banks, not to mention the predatory lending practices of the mortgage industry (coupled with the remarkably stupid borrowing of certain homeowners).

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You’re not a conservative if Kim Kardashian making millions for being a half-witted, no-talent reality TV star bothers you. In fact, if you feel “there oughta be a law” somehow regulating, limiting or otherwise controlling in any manner at all how much dough she rakes in from the drooling morons who choose to fling it at her, you are part of the problem.

This woman took very, very little in the way of ability and somehow provided a service – of a kind that frankly baffles me – that millions of people nevertheless want to spend their money on. Regardless, it’s none of your or my business, and it’s especially none of the government’s business.

But now, here comes “Occupy Hollywood,” a hilarious exercise in poetic justice in which the left proposes to chase its own tail by attacking the same cretinous celebrities who have been the first to parrot every commie slogan the bongo-playing degenerates of Occupy Wall Street have misspelled on their placards.

Jo Piazza, the author of some remainder bin perennial titled Celebrity, Inc.: How Famous People Make Money, is leading the bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you-athon with an article in The Huffington Post called “Occupy Hollywood: Why It’s Time To Call Out High-Earning Celebrities.”

For some reason, she thinks what movie stars make is some sort of problem:

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Ooopsie. Looks like all is not honey and roses in the left-wing, out of the mainstream land of Huffington Post. When one of the site’s most popular bloggers and celebrities calls HuffyPo readers stupid, it makes for a tense atmosphere among the out of the stratosphere left.

Alec Baldiwn, famed for his left-wing diatribes — oh, and some acting here and there — took to Twitter once again to criticize the readers and commenters at HuffPo after a gaggle of negative comments posted at the tail end of one of his latest HuffPo screeds.

“The reading comprehension level of the HuffPo comments folks is alarmingly low. I mean, downright awful,” Baldwin lamented.

Now, usually when I write about things like this I go into why the comment by the writer was made, what misconceptions were evinced by his critics, and what his response was to those critics… but it’s Alec Baldwin and Huffington Post we are talking about here. Making sense of anything that goes on there is somewhat impossible, not to mention a waste of time.

Suffice to say, it is interesting to see leftists calling each other names. And this isn’t the only time Alec Baldwin has scolded readers of HuffPo. He’s done it on Twitter before. (more…)

Why Christian symbols? We’re awfully easy pickings. If you’re a rich Hollywood star, offending us takes about as much courage as bringing a case of beer to a frat party.

Why not Islamic images? Where’s that comedic edge and ballsy envelope pushing we’re always being told about when it comes to our Artistic Class? Christians are tired of this self-important posing. Islamists will take your head off. I would think that Islamist intolerance (and racism and sexism and homophobia and fundamentalism) would be a bigger target than than Christian eye rolls.

Well, if nohing else, at least Gervais was good enough to bring the pretension:

 I thought the caption … could be “Stand up for what you believe”.

Doesn’t he mean for “what you don’t believe”?

Actually, he doesn’t. That’s why I call him Gervais an “evangelical atheist.” He’s one of those obnoxious non-believers always pushing his non-belief on you. He’s like a Mooonie without the charm, flowers or airport.

Back to the pretension:

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“The incubation period of the opera (Nixon In China) was rife with serious second-thoughts, by no less than Adams (the composer) himself, who initially resisted the proposal made by Peter Sellars (the director), a progressively radical director whose idea the composer found too risky.” – An excerpt from “Opera Review: John Adams’ ‘Nixon in China’” by Sam Juliano.

Hmmm … the course of Marxist genius never runs smoothly.

If you don’t believe me, read the life of Bertolt Brecht.

However, Peter Sellars’ Marxism, as Wikipedia prefers to translate it, is to be a “progressively radical” artist of some sort.

With President Obama in the White House, it can now be known as “radically Progressive”: the Progressive Clinton as versus the radically Progressive Obama.

Radicalism, a la Van Jones, even as seen through the eyes of the Huffington Post, is the inevitability of the “Progressive” New World Order, whether you like it or not.

There is, however, one impressively dialectical twist in this drama: women such as Alice Goodman, the librettist.

Her Marxist heresy, because of the ministerial collar, is what is sometimes referred to by the KGB  hardliners as the Western Sentimentality of “useful idiots” and the decadent schmaltz seems to have escaped even the intriguingly odd but hawk-eyed Peter Sellars.

Reverend Goodman is still a “Progressive” of the Progressively Baptist Bill Clinton sort. She is actually an ordained Anglican priest; and is now a chaplain at Trinity College, Cambridge.

The initial Wizard of Nixon In China happened to be the director, Peter Sellars.

The real Wizard, however, is Alice Goodman.

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Click here for Part 1 on Ben Shapiro’s Primetime Propaganda, here for Part 2 on Roger L. Simon’s Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine and here for part 3 on David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge.

A new kind of film emerged in the late ‘80s and first half of the 1990s to as an alternative to the mind-numbing noise of the Boomer Blockbusters. Smaller studios like Miramax rose to champion independent films. Generation X auteurs shaped by obsessive home video viewing – Quentin Tarantino, P.T. Anderson, Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith, and Darren Aronofsky – passed on the Hollywood path and instead built careers through low budget, DIY productions. “Reservoir Dogs,” “Sydney,” “El Mariachi,” “Clerks,” and “Pi” launched careers that would lead to Academy Awards and some of the most exciting films of the 1990s and 2000s.

These filmmakers’ origins are true to the generational temperament of their peers.

Children born in the ‘60s and ‘70s did not grow up in the affluence and tranquility of the 1950s consensus. Instead they took a backseat as the Consciousness Revolution of the 1960s raged. It was now when the younger Silent and Boomer Generations rose up to challenge the cultural institutions built and maintained by the GI Generation who fought World War II.

The children of this era were forced to become independent, entrepreneurial, and innovative early on. Unlike the Boomers growing up in the ‘50s and the Millennials in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Gen-Xers were not protected. The adults were too busy with the cultural chaos of the ‘60s and ‘70s to be the parents they should have been. Thus, Gen X knew that they had no one to rely on except for themselves. According to William Strauss and Neil Howe in their histories of American generations, this is standard for “Reactive” generations – and equips them for crises come middle-age. George Washington, John Adams, Ulysses Grant, Dwight Eisenhower, and Harry Truman were all part of “Reactive” generations too. (more…)

If you tuned in to Rush Limbaugh yesterday, you probably caught El Rushbo talking about Andrew’s new book.  Rush reminds us that Andrew, yes, Andrew Breitbart, “was a big lefty until he heard me.”  Me, meaning…Rush Limbaugh.

YouTube

By the way, great news!  Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World has been hovering between #1 and #2 on the Amazon Bestseller’s List in Non-Fiction, and between #10 and #12 Overall. Congratulations, Andrew!!!

Check out Andrew’s list of upcoming appearances and other press coverage.

There are apparently people out there who not only find Lady GaGa’s music appealing but, further, find her a powerful and insightful musical voice for a new generation.  These people are idiots, and the fact that most of these morons can vote goes a long way to explaining why so many Democrats keep getting reelected.

It’s not just that her music is bad – though it is, an intermittently catchy collection of overproduced beats laid over nonsense lyrics that would embarrass a slow-witted high school sophomore.  It’s not just that her singing is reminiscent of the hum of a dental drill, a monotonous, atonal mind-chisel that – when combined with her inane lyrics – reminds one of the chanting of some unholy love child of Rain Man and Tiny Tim.  

And it’s not just that she’s pretentious, presenting herself as the sorta-androgynous spoke-being for a coterie of alleged nonconformists whose nonconformity is expressed via rigid conformity to GaGa’s vision of pseudo-transgressive fashions and brain-dead self-affirming slogans.

No, the biggest problem with Lady GaGa isn’t that she’s another lame pop star.  It’s that she’s so damn boring.

As an act of personal sacrifice, I listened to the sneak release of her latest song, an atrocity called “Judas.”  If you want to share my pain, be my guest, but don’t say you weren’t warned.  The Huffington Post, your number one source for all things that suck, is right on top of the earthshaking cultural event that is “Judas”:

The song and video are told from Mary Magdelene’s perspective, with lyrics such as, “When he comes to me, I am ready/ I’ll wash his feet with my hair if he needs/ Forgive him when his tongue lies through his brain/ Even after three times, he betrays me/ I’ll bring him down, a king with no crown…”

Wow.  Heavy.  I guess I’m supposed to be one of those bourgeois squares whose mind is going to be blown by GagGa’s willingness to take on those terrifying Christians.  I’m here to report, however, that the only thing that blows is the song.

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John Hawkins of RightWing News recently interviewed Andrew Breitbart about his new book.  It’s a fun interview and a great read!

I always find it fascinating when people who used to be liberal say they turned to the right. That happened with you. Can you tell us about it?

Well, it’s a cliché from the left to the right. And it’s usually a story of opportunism in those few cases where the people move from the right to the left. It’s almost embarrassing to go back into my liberal background because it was about as shallow a belief system as humanly possible. It was go-along to get-along social. It was living in Los Angeles, being young, and single, and flowing with the trendy liberal crowd.

When I started to work in Hollywood at a fairly low level delivering scripts around town, listening to AM talk radio, I at first listened to it as a novelty. But I started to have certain things in my life going on such as living in a rent controlled apartment, having listened to the Clarence Thomas hearings, the OJ Simpson trial — I just started to see trends in my personal experiences that ran so contrary to what the media narratives were. At first I was flummoxed by it and then I just started to listen to certain people on the radio who were more clear thinking than the professors that I had in college.

I remember thinking when I was in college that a lot of these known Chomsky-like, verbose high lefty thinkers made absolutely no sense but I thought that was my problem. So when I started to listen to conservative thinkers and to read conservative thinkers, there was a clarity of thought. It wasn’t muddled. It wasn’t confusing. It started to make sense at an intellectual level and tie into the values that my parents gave me when I was a young kid that I diverted from when I was in high school.

So it was basically a reconnecting with everything that my parents attempted to instill in me in my youth. It has made me sleep a lot better at night, being centered and oriented with human nature as opposed to living in a world of self loathing nihilism, trying to undo human nature, and trying to create a path towards an unrealistic utopia.

Now, you were recently banned from the front page of The Huffington Post….

Oh, the tragedy of my life.

(Laughs) It is, it is. Apparently you made some sort of ad hominem attack on Van Jones and The Huffington Post has a policy against that. It must have been in place for at least two minutes or so before you were banned. Can you talk about that?

Read the entire review at RightWing News.

Check out Andrew’s list of upcoming appearances and other press coverage.

You must not read any further before you click here.

According to America Online, Andrew Breitbart will no longer be published on the Huffington Post front page due to a policy (no one knew about)  that HuffPo spokesman Mario Ruiz dropped completely out of nowhere on March 24. Among other things, Breitbart called 9/11 truther Van Jones a “commie punk” during an interview with the Daily Caller and now, according to Ruiz, AOL suddenly has a policy prohibiting front page placement on the Huffington Post whenever one of their contributors engages in what they consider to be ad hominem … even if it’s not on the Huffington Post.  

Fine. I totally disagree with the policy, but we live in a free country and AOL can choose to run their business however they like. There could be a problem, though, if what the publicly traded AOL is really up to here is a form of ideological blacklisting. Will only Breitbart be held to this standard? Will only conservatives? Or will every HuffPo contributor who engages in ad hominem be forced to sit in the back of the blog? Which brings me to…

All together now: How do you solve a problem like Bill Maher?

First, let’s back up just a bit.

Since AOL dropped this “Back of the Blog” policy on Breitbart, we and many others have had no problem gathering together glaring examples of AOL/HuffPo front page authors, not only participating in the worst kind of ad hominem elsewhere, but also — incredibly! — on the front page of the Huffington Post. Which means that only two possibilities exist for what’s going on here. Either 9/11 truther Van Jones has convinced AOL to single out individuals he doesn’t like for “Back of the Blog” discrimination, or he convinced AOL to start a brand new rule. 

Which brings us back to Mr. Maher…

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So at that bug lamp for bozos known as the Huffington Post, media mogul Russell Simmons says opposition to the mosque being built near Ground Zero amounts to bigotry, or more specifically, Islamophobia.
He writes:

…in my backyard, I have no tolerance for a new fear-mongering, hateful rhetoric that has sprung up over the proposed …center ….we know that we must fight Antisemitism and Islamaphobia together ….Let us pass this test with grace and dignity. As I will not stand for any sort of Islamaphobia in my backyard.

Now, this is a key point – because, like Simmons, I also think fear of Islam plays a role. But the fear lurks within folks like Simmons who fear ticking off Islam, or worse – looking intolerant.

And also – it’s a fear of debate. Rather than argue against my point that it’s simply obnoxious to build the mosque, they’d rather reflexively belch “race!”

Islamophobia?

Please. (more…)

NewsBusters reports that four members of the pro-life group Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust got their hands on free tickets to the Jimmy Kimmel Show the other night and caused enough of a disruption during taping that the police escorted them out. The youth group is trying to call attention to that fact that on June 25th, while peacefully picketing outside of Grauman’s Chinese  Theatre, a film crew hired by the Kimmel Show turned a hot spotlight on one of their members, Ryan Bueler. It was an astonishing act of cruelty that’s just now starting to make the rounds online.

Because the victim of the “light-fry” was a young anti-abortion protester and not a terrorist determined to massacre as many innocent Americans as possible, the Huffington Post can’t quite bring themselves to condemn the act, and as if they’re proud of their unique ability to summon brazen hypocrisy, Fishbowl LA writes:

Groups like these live for attention and we have mixed feelings about giving it to them. But the video does look pretty bad.

Fishbowl LA covers a city and industry that is all about groups that “live for attention,” but only now are they having “mixed feelings” about giving into such a thing. (more…)

I once suggested to Big Hollywood editor John Nolte that to draw a tidal wave of comments we needed to somehow figure out a piece where I simultaneously attack birthers, praise Sarah Palin, and raise issues involving Star Trek.  Now, I guess I’d have to somehow work in drug legalization, too. 

—–

The tsunami hit in the wake of my recent column on Sting, Soros and their pro-drug partnership, which both cast doubt on the sacred truths of the very vocal drug legalization fans and defied George Soros.  Accordingly, I had to be stopped.  What happened next tells us much about the tactics, techniques and procedures we will come up against fighting for our culture – and how we can fight back.

The counter-attack came first came in the form of over 400 angry comments from drug legalizers (oh, sorry – “decrimminalizers”) and bong-fueled Twitter tweets from hemp-focused lay-abouts.  Next came columns by Huffington Post nonentities and other dope-o-centric fellow travelers.  Topping it off came at least one semi-veiled threat.  (more…)

Every time Alec Baldwin opens his rather large pie hole I feel like Strother Martin in the movie “Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid.”  There is a scene where Butch and the Kid are riding down a mountain with Martin who plays the boss of a mining camp. They are looking for bad guys at every turn. Martin tells the guys there is very little chance of being robbed while they are going to get the payroll and them utters, “Morons! I am surrounded by morons!”

In case you aren’t familiar with some of Mr. Baldwin’s more erudite comments, let me walk you down the memory lane of some of his greatest hits. Way back in 1998, Mr. Baldwin called for the killing of a federal official. Here’s the quote:

I’m thinking to myself if we were in other countries, we would all, right now, all of us together, . . . would go down to Washington and we would stone [Republican U.S. Representative] Henry Hyde to death! We would stone him to death! Wait! . . . Shut up! No, shut up! I’m not finished. We would stone Henry Hyde to death, and we would go to their homes and we’d kill their wives and their children. We would kill their families.

He later claimed he was “joking.” (more…)

The Los Angeles Times has a sordid history of race baiting in its effort to pump up its progressive bonafides, despite a historic lack of diversity in their own staff. Their latest diatribe is a recent attack on Hollywood for “whitewashing” the Prince of Persia and The Last Airbender. They were quickly followed in lock step by the Huffington Post, publishing an AP article that seemed to be cribbed from the Times. And then the industry blog The Wrap took things a step further by calling this a “White Summer” for the “lack of diversity” in Hollywood films this season. Hear that Eddie Murphy, Jackie Chan, Common, Jaden Smith, Queen Latifah? You don’t have any movies this summer. Uh, wait.

Here’s the crux of their discontent. Prince of Persia and The Last Airbender have male leads played by white actors; Jake Gyllenhaal in Prince of Persia and Noah Ringer as Aang in ‘The Last Airbender. So, like the predictable hacks they are, they jumped on the racism argument. Dancing around the “R” word by reciting the industry’s history of casting white actors in non-white roles.

Yes, that did happen a lot in the past, and it does happen on occasion now. But here’s where the stupidity starts. Persians, aka Iranians, are ethnically white. In fact, most people of Eurasian stock are considered ethnically white. Casting a white actor as a Persian is hardly a racially insensitive move. And the Last Airbender is directed by Indian-American M. Night Shyamalan, who took exception to the criticisms his movie has gotten on this subject. (more…)

Deepak Chopra is a deep thinker. Fooled you! Apparently some people think he is, however, foremost among them himself. And possibly his friends at the Huffington Post, where they recently posted not the usual pseudo- spiritual blabber he peddles on Oprah but rather a critique of Sarah Palin, the Tea Parties, Evil Right Wingers, and ultimately the entire American people. No, really. And it is quite an interesting piece, but not for the reasons our guru suspects. 

Chopra begins, complaining about Sarah Palin’s latest ‘seductive untruth’ delivered at the Tea Party convention: 

Her complaint about the Christmas bomber “lawyering up” wasn’t about finding the right policy against terrorists. It was a come-on to the Tea Party’s prejudices, egging them to believe that what Muttalab deserved was a dose of good old fashioned torture.   (more…)

**Update 2/11, 11:54 PM PST: Ebert thus far refusing to retract.**

As Big Hollywood readers know, Roger Ebert’s foray into the political realm via twitter had a major setback this week: articles from Pam Meister and John Nolte prompted him to tweet he would suspend usage of the word “teabagger.” Onward and upward!  Or not…

Two hours ago from the time this post was written, Ebert tweeted:

The link is to an article which was cross-posted at the Huffington Post. Problem is, the Huffington Post version of the article had been previously corrected:

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post misstated the color of a bracelet Sarah Palin wore during a Tea Party appearance. Palin’s bracelet was not black, as was reported by several news outlets, and is not meant to memorialize her son Track Palin, but rather to honor his service, according to Herobracelets.org.

Professor Ebert spread misinformation to impugn Sarah Palin after it had been debunked at, of all sites, the Huffington Post.  We ask him to publicly retract this statement via twitter.

So the Lancet, a British medical journal named after a really sharp object, retracted a horrible study attempting to link measle vaccines to autism.

Now this would really be great news, if the study had not come out, oh, 12 years ago. It’s really scary that it took a medical journal over a decade to admit what nearly everyone else with a working brain knew: the study had more gaping holes in it than Tom Sizemore’s septum.

But sadly, although the study author has also been discredited for this harmful crud, it doesn’t matter. People who believe in junk science will continue to believe in junk science, because their egos won’t allow any other option. And so they will continue preaching to parents a dangerous and false belief that ends up killing kids.

I speak of Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, and all the saps at the Huffington Post who by their own earnest idiocy, misled the public into skipping vaccinations. The potential result: measles outbreaks all over the globe – and ultimately, dead kids.

It’s hard to make jokes about that, so I won’t. (more…)