Calling his recent appearance before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration “comedy” may leave Mr. Colbert open to legal action for lying to Congress. There were also several points in his testimony that were of questionable, as he would say, “truthiness.” Political comedy in sketch form is tricky, but as stand-up it is a balancing act that requires great skill. To my mind there are two rules: first you must, as my friend Will Durst says, be an equal-opportunity smart ass. Unless you are willing to slap at both sides of the aisle or only work highly partisan events, you lose at least fifty percent of the audience from the first joke. The second is that no matter who or what you are attacking, it must be funny. Mr. Colbert’s stand-up or sit down in the case of his Congressional gig, fails on both counts. Mr. Colbert’s one-dimensional, highly partisan act has run its course. We get it, Steve — any sincere conservative is a dim witted, xenophobic, racist, Christian numbskull who just doesn’t understand the issues.

It is difficult to take a sketch character and develop it into a more than a series three minute scenes. One only has to look at the number of horrible Saturday Night Live spin off character films that have been made to prove that point. It is even harder to take a character out of the sketch and build it into a stand-up routine. Mr. Colbert has now proved this to be the case…twice.

His recent attempt to use humor to “…draw attention to this important, complicated issue…” was not the first time he has bombed in the Capital. In 2006, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Mr. Colbert tried his character-driven stand up and died a horrible death when he bypassed funny and went to being personally insulting to Mr. Bush and others in attendance. In a rare bipartisan show of support, his act was panned by Republicans and Democrats alike.

Last week, Mr. Colbert started his testimony with a nice piece of self-deprecation saying his appearance might get the hearing moved up to C-SPAN 1. Unfortunately it was downhill from there until the last line of the set. He followed this with a big stretch set-up about obese Americans in order to pay it off with a weak colonoscopy reference. The next joke was a reference comparing illegal immigration to the Israelites’ slavery in Egypt and a bad pun about “food pyramids.”  The problem with this “joke” is that the comparison isn’t accurate. I’m not saying political jokes can’t stretch the facts, but there is a breaking point where the audience doesn’t buy the premise.

This was followed by a series of weak attempts to humorously say that farm work is hard, hot physical labor. I don’t think anyone doubts that. His point is that these are jobs American’s won’t do. Again, the humor is rooted in a falsehood so great that we all know it to be invalid. As a teen I used to cut corn out of soybeans and bale hay. The pay was crap and the hours long. I didn’t do it because I liked it I did it because there was no other way to get money. My father didn’t believe in the welfare system known as an allowance.

Illegal immigration suppresses wages and makes the welfare system the smart choice for unskilled labor. Perhaps Mr. Colbert and his progressive friends are too dim to get that.  Just as “progressives” don’t get that raising the minimum doesn’t lift people out of poverty, it only raises the number we consider being poor. If raising the minimum wage was the answer to everything we could just make the minimum wage $300,000 a year and we would all be rich.

Mr. Colbert did do one thing right; he saved his best joke for the closer.  At the end of his “expert” opinion he said, “I trust that following my testimony – both sides will work together on this issue in the best interest of the American people - as you always do.” Since Mr. Colbert seems to be fond of bad puns, I’ll finish with one; Mr. Colbert’s act has jumped the snark.

With his testimony – strike that – performance at the House judiciary subcommittee on Friday, Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” raised shilling to an artform.

Colbert was invited to testify Friday at House Judiciary Sub-committee hearing on legalizing undocumented farm workers by Democrat Rep. Zoey Lofgren. The duo had worked side-by-side as bean pickers for a day to promote the United Farm Workers’ Take Our Jobs Campaign, which is designed to show Americans that undocumented agriculture workers do jobs that they wouldn’t and therefore deserve to be granted U.S. citizenship.

Instead of testifying on the issue, Colbert performed a comedic bit “in character” using the U.S. Capitol hearings as a TV backdrop. It’s great production value if you can get it, especially if it is at taxpayer expense. (It quickly appeared on Colbert’s cable show.)

For the next fifteen minutes, Colbert performed this shtick before the TV cameras, assorted AP news photographers and irritated members of Congress. Since then, he has been lambasted by pundits and politicians alike as plain “not funny,” “inappropriate,”” “embarrassing” and “disrespectful” of the American people and the valid concerns surrounding the illegal immigration debate in general. Did Lofgren and Pelosi know Colbert would be testifying to Congress as his TV show character? Does Colbert & Co. really care about the criticism? Probably not. He and his political friends got significant mileage from it.

Entertainment stooges serve a number of important strategic shilling purposes for the left-wing of the Democrat party. Here are some characteristics of a left-wing Hollywood shill to be on the lookout for:

#1: Willingness to use the entertainment medium to create hateful stereotypes.

On his cable series, Colbert adopts the staid liberal stereotype of a bigoted right-leaning news pundit and his testimony to the congressional subcommittee was true to form. “But this is America. I don’t want a tomato picked by a Mexican. I want it picked by an American, then sliced by a Guatemalan, and served by a Venezuelan in a spa, where a Chilean gives me a Brazilian,” said Colbert, again attempting to equate racism with those that oppose illegal immigration.

Unfortunately for Colbert, Carol Swain, the African American Vice President of Vanderbilt University and staunch advocate against legalizing undocumented workers had, by virtue of her testimony, given him the intellectual equivalent of a sucker punch. It must have been hard for Colbert to continue his conservative racist-clod persona when a smart African American woman who disagrees substantively with you on the illegal immigration issue is just a few seats away.

#2: Propensity for fact-skipping on national television.

Where Colbert’s testimony was pure venom-filled propaganda, Swain actually offered facts. “I speak today on behalf of millions of Americans who would like to see immigration laws vigorously enforced. I contend that America does not have a shortage of agricultural workers. Instead we have a manufactured crisis by some who would like to ensure a steady supply of cheap labor,” said Swain.

Citing labor economist Philip Martin’s studies, Swain made the case that the high rate of turn-over in agricultural jobs leads undocumented workers to enter the market in other areas. She argued that these workers directly compete with native and legal low-skilled workers for a decreasing number of jobs in an economy of 9.6% unemployment. It is devastating when liberal entertainers are confronted with actual facts.

In fact, the only thing a Hollywood shill can do in response is follow their script – which is what Colbert did. He attempted to offer his colonoscopy into the Congressional Record as evidence. He went on to state that, in his one day experience, that farm work is “really, really hard.” Farm work may be considered hard work, especially by the Hollywood elite standards, but newsflash to Mr. Colbert: Most Americans work difficult and unsavory jobs every single day. They would rather have a tough job than lose their home or their future. It’s not about race. It’s not about hate. It’s about fairness, the rule of law, and what that rule of law is supposed to represent.

# 3: Stands to make considerable gains through political shilling activities.

Colbert’s stunt netted him national media. Every TV network news outlet and every daily newspaper covered his performance – equivalent to millions of dollars in free media. Left-wing politicians also got what they wanted. They got their distorted spin on the illegal immigration story out before the election: Poor undocumented farm workers – they work hard for America, don’t they?

Hollywood protects and promotes political mascots like Colbert, ensuring their longevity far beyond their normal entertainment shelf life. Tina Fey is case in point. During the 2008 general election, Fey’s mocking portrayal of Sarah Palin on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, gave her political mascot status and the gratitude of the Hollywood Left, earning her an untold number of Emmys and other awards.

#4 Suffers from a delusional sense of his/her importance in the political process. (Or sorry, you’re not Glenn Beck).

The lines between entertainment and news have now blurred to nothing. Today, Americans are more likely to get their news from fake news correspondents like Colbert and Jon Stewart than they are from network news correspondents. On the political stage, liberal politicians accord entertainers with a heightened status surpassing a congressman or senator. The result? A skewed perspective of where these comedians and entertainers fit into the political discussion. The entertainers themselves seem to suffer the delusion as well.

To wit, Colbert and Stewart are now hosting dueling rallies on October 30th at the Washington Monument. Theirs is a reaction to conservative TV commentator Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor Rally on September 28, the force of which shocked the mainstream media and entertainment industry. The success of the Restoring Honor Rally has helped unravel the perception that conservatism is a fringe philosophy repugnant to the group, which is why Colbert and Stewart have been called on to counter it.

Groupthink, a term coined by social psychologist Irving Janis, describes this phenomenon perfectly. Groupthink occurs when a group makes faulty decisions due to group pressures. Celebrity share and perpetuate stereotypes publicly, using their entertainment platform, to guide decisions. They exhibit other negative outcomes that Irving defined: They attempt to exercise direct pressure on others when they fail to conform. They fail to seek expert opinions and are selective in their information gathering process. This mentality explains why conservatives are demonized by Hollywood and why Fox News and the Tea Party movement are the bogeymen of liberal progressivism this election cycle and every election cycle. They are Americans who have failed to conform to the group.

In short, Colbert and Stewart’s shilling game hasn’t work on everyone. Let’s hope that it never will.

More specifically, it’s you and the other 69% or so of American citizens who agree that we should have a say in who does and doesn’t come into our country by enforcing our immigration laws.  There’s been a lot written about the race war angle of Machete, including a lot of back-pedaling from writer/director Robert Rodriguez himself.  But it’s hard to see this script as anything but a sick MEChA-approved fantasy in which every Anglo man is a slobbering borderline savage who tortures Mexicans when not slaughtering them outright, and every Anglo woman a nymphomaniac yearning to strip down and have a crack at our hero Machete’s macho Mexican manhood.

—–

Perhaps Rodriguez isn’t making an explicit plea for racial warfare, but Rodriguez’s crude racial stereotypes make Hitler’s Der Stürmer propaganda look like a subtle, sophisticated and affectionate commentary on Jewish culture.  The script does not bat an eye as Machete butchers nearly every Anglo, innocent or “guilty,” who is unfortunate enough to cross his path.  In the end, there is no doubt that Rodriguez is making the most overtly, outrageously and unrepentantly racist film in modern Hollywood history.

But Rodriguez does deserve props for one thing – in purely technical terms, this is one of the best-written scripts I’ve ever seen.  It is vivid, coherent and flows smoothly, unlike the majority of unreadable Final Draft failures out there.  There is not an ounce of flab.  The “jokes” mostly fall flat, but Rodriguez will likely direct it with flair and style.  It’s just too bad this movie combines the racial insights of a 1942 Robert Byrd with the collective moral sense of Enron’s Board of Directors.

Okay, the plot. The movie started as a fake trailer inside the largely unseen Grindhouse.  It’s been expanded to fill 98 minutes, largely through the addition of more explosions, more bloodshed, and more breasts.  Machete is a Mexican federale who gets sold out and left for dead by his compadres.  Working as an illegal day laborer, an American business man pays him to kill a senator because the senator wants to ship the illegals home and all American businesses – in this fantasy world – run solely on illegal labor.  Machete again gets sold out and left for dead by his compadres, which seems to be a theme, and promptly goes on a killing spree against pretty much everyone.  Also, many, many girls shed their clothes.  The end.

The cast is pretty solid for such a sordid little flick.  Danny Trejo is Machete, and I’m hard-pressed to begrudge this great supporting actor the chance to headline a major movie because I think it is a moral sewer.  If that was the test, pretty much no one in Hollywood would be headlining anything.  Every casting director’s inexplicable go-to “tough girl” Michelle Rodriguez is in it, playing the same boring character she’s played in every other role she’s ever done.  When it comes to always playing the same character she’s just like Michael Cera, except more masculine.

Jessica Alba is as beautiful as she is mindless and left-wing in real life.  And she is very, very beautiful.  Another lefty, Robert De Niro, fritters away still more of the nearly infinite goodwill he earned from Heat in yet another crummy role, this one as the red-neck, immigrant-hating senator.  Does Bobby owe his bookie or something?

You should know that the script’s unremitting violence is truly horrifying.  If this movie is even remotely faithful to the script, it’ll look like a guided tour through Ed Gein’s basement after a pissed-off Jackson Pollack had come through with a bucket of candy apple red Dutch Boy, a fifth of Jack Daniels and a snoot full of Bolivian coke.

That reminds me.  Lindsay Lohan is in it too, so the drug-addled tramp movie-going demographic out there will have a rooting interest.

The underlying message of Machete, other than that all Anglos must die, echoes the unyielding stance of modern American liberalism that we, as a nation, are somehow morally foreclosed from performing the most basic function of a sovereign government – securing our borders.  This is expressed throughout, but particularly in recurring scenes of  “Minutemen” randomly hunting and killing illegals. I don’t expect hardcore realism from a movie called Machete, but if Rodriguez and his ilk actually cared for illegals more than as simple props in their long-running left-wing production of Why America Sucks, they might want to address the uncomfortable fact that the only people brutalizing Mexican illegals are other Mexicans.

Maybe they ought to premier Machete in Washington.  After all, over half of our Congressmen and Senators seem to think its premises are solid.  I’m still trying the get over the sight of the Democrats on their feet applauding that foreign tinpot Calderon for disrespecting our country.  However, by the time the elections roll around I’ll probably see that footage again, oh, about 10,000 times as it becomes the centerpiece of any number of Republican campaign ads.  Of course, I would not put it past the bondage club-patronizing halfwits in positions of authority at the RNC and elsewhere in the GOP establishment to talk themselves into a consensus that criticizing the liberals for siding with some foreigner against other Americans is somehow beyond the pale of respectable campaign discourse.

Called on the fact that this is shaping up to be to the reconquista nuts’ equivalent of what Birth of a Nation was to the Klan, Rodriguez has lately been arguing that his movie is just an “over-the-top” satire, though it’s unclear what he’s satirizing.  He claims his changed to the script in the final edit, though the recent trailer created by Rodriguez himself shows that any changes he made actually seem to have made the movie more racially inflammatory, not less.  Certainly, credulous media sources – including fanboy poster-behemoth Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News – have provided him cover while conservative critics like Big Hollwood’s own John Nolte have justifiably slammed him.

But Rodriguez can’t have his churros and eat them too – his movie vilifies a specific ethnic group and celebrates the indiscriminate slaughter of its members.  Come on Robbie, embrace your inner David Duke!  If you really believe your nonsense – and you do – make your racist movie and take your chances at the box office!

And yes, we’re hitting Rodriguez coming and going.  He’s a wimp for buckling under and altering his vision and he’s a half-wit for having that vision in the first place.  “Unfair,” cry the kind of people who think their application of their arbitrary and self-serving standard of “fairness” to an issue compels me to accept their shaky premises, “Rodriguez can’t win if you criticize him for his script and then also for changing it!”  Sure he can win – he can stop believing stupid things.  It’s actually astonishingly easy to do, Robert – just find a conservative and ask him how not to be an idiot.

The simple fact is that the Machete script is stunning in its overt racism.  If the designated villains were Black, not Anglo, you’d instinctively check your calendar to see if you had suddenly been sent back in time to 1958 Mississippi.

Yeah, the word “racism” gets tossed around all too much.  It’s gone from a term referring to a grossly stupid and un-American mindset where an individual’s worth is based solely upon his ancestry to an all-purpose debate-stopper employed by liberals who find themselves flailing against a tsunami of observable facts and empirical evidence demonstrating the total bankruptcy of their ideology.  But the rampant, almost presumptive, misuse of the term “racism” does not mean that there is no such thing as racism.

There is, and it’s on display on the pages of Robert Rodriguez’s Machete script.  In its pages, every Anglo man is a monster who deserves a brutal death and every Anglo woman is a whore.  As a purely technical expression of the screenwriting art, it is a model of form and technique just as Birth of a Nation was a technical masterpiece of the film-making art.  And, again like Birth of a Nation, whatever its technical qualities, Machete is also a hateful, morally bankrupt disgrace.

The best part: when he said he wants “a border that will unite us instead of dividing us.” Uh, sounds nice – but aren’t borders the physical manifestation of division? Isn’t division… the point?

But he said this in Spanish – which to me is kinda divisive, since I took two years of it in school and was too drunk at the time to remember any of it. Nonetheless, our President gamely threw Arizona under the bus – no surprise since he never read the damn law, anyway.

We also discussed the new law in Arizona which is a misdirected effort, a misdirected expression of frustration over our broken immigration system which has raised concerns in both our countries. Today, I want every American to know that my administration has devoted unprecedented resources in personnel and technology to securing our border.  Illegal immigration is down, not up, and we will continue to do what’s necessary to secure our shared border.

All hail modern American diplomacy. Earlier this week, one of our jackass diplomats groveled before the Chinese – who kill dissidents for fun – over our human rights violations. And then, of course, the UN – who, on our dime, allow misogynists, thugs and dictators to sit on commissions – said Arizona violates international standards. I supposed if we started raping more, we’d fit the UN criteria.

And now Calderon comes here to tell us we discriminate – simply because we want what Mexico already has – a border.

It makes me wonder how he’d feel if I came to Mexico and condemned his Gestapo-like immigration laws. Like I said before, anyone deported from Mexico who tries to return, can be jailed for up to ten years. And foreigners can be banned if they upset “the equilibrium of the national demographics,” are judged harmful to “economic or national interests,” or if “they are not physically or mentally healthy.”

Now that’s divisive!

But no one cares – because no one’s trying to get into Mexico. Instead of obsessing over our laws, Felipe should ask himself why his countrymen are dying, literally, to come here.

It’s definitely not for the Mexican food.

I’ve eaten at Chevy’s.

Tonight!

Comedian Paul Provenza!

Imogen Lloyd Webber!

Ron Geraci!

and Father Jonathan!

First, let me say I am sick and tired of The Left destroying the values this country was built on. And not being held accountable! I see the attacks made daily and most are oblivious. If your child was drowning would you just sit there and sip a mint julep? We are all fiddling as our country is being capsized. Like on the Titanic, the quintet keeps playing as the ship sinks.

Italian immigrants arrive at Ellis Island

We are a generation that has been psycho-babbled into oblivion. We accept and make excuses for behavior that should not be tolerated. When I was growing up in my fathers house, if I did not obey my parent’s rules I would have been asked to leave. Today, we all go to group therapy and discuss how we can make a compromise and before you know it the parents are the ones who are asked to leave.

My family were immigrants. My grandparents came from Italy. Did you know that the most lynchings in American history were done to Italian immigrants? Did you know that Italian immigrants were treated like dirt? That we were shunned, spit on, killed, whipped, and treated like animals? We were called “guineas, wops, dagos.” It was thought that all Italians were criminals, part of the mafia. All because our names ended in a vowel and we had darker skin.

Yes, my friends, the Italian people were racially profiled. And sometimes, we still are. I will attest to that. But did Italians bitch and cry and complain about America and its rules? No, Italians most certainly did not.

They were told to learn the language and we did. We were told to salute the stars and strips and we did. Gladly. We embraced America, not resent it. We did not have a victimized mentality. My fathers father came here from Sicily and joined the US infantry during World War I. He was wounded twice and received an Oak Leaf Cluster and a Purple Heart. And as difficult as it was for him, he learned English. He sang The Star-Spangled Banner in broken English, not the Giovanezza in Italian.

Don’t get me wrong, we are proud being of Italian descent and have close ties to our cultural heritage, but we are Americans first and foremost. Period. The same happened to the Irish, Jews, Blacks and others. But I cannot speak for what they went through, only what happened to my family and other Italian immigrants.

Recently, a friend of mine, who is a teacher, told me about a stunning exchange that took place during one of his classes when the issue of immigration came up. One of the students, who was clearly left leaning, said, “It’s not fair when the only work they can get is at McDonald’s or as drug dealers.” While my friend, the teacher, considered how best to respond to this, another student, of Hispanic origin, yelled out, “That is a load of BULL. I came here from Mexico six years ago, legally, and I have a car, a good job, my own house, and I LOVE this country.”

What happens is people are told to be victims, and because of this they become victims. It’s conditioning. If you grew up saying, “God damn America,” then that’s how you’re likely to feel. So, instead of helping the immigrant population assimilate into America, they are told that this is really their land and they were given a raw deal. Blah blah blah. It fits right in with the grand old Marxist scheme and breeds nothing but resentment and danger. That’s right, while eating your ice cream a big bad police officer will come in and snatch that cone out of your hand and throw you in jail. How the heck can we have an Attorney General who is pissing on Arizona immigration law? And when asked if he has read it, he admits that he only scanned it and hasn’t even been briefed yet.

We are witnessing right now all the difficulty over immigration. It is as if both parties have put their heads in the sand, because no one wants to lose the vote. The left panders so cleverly, like a pusher enabling entitlements. The right is afraid of appearing insensitive. So nothing is done. No one knows what to do?

Let’s start with securing the borders. Whatever it takes. Next give one month for every illegal to declare themselves under no penalty. Once they are declared, they must learn English. Start English classes immediately for a small fee. We can get volunteers to teach them. If they have no criminal record and wish to stay, good.

They then must declare allegiance to the United States, and the US only. They will be able to work, but they will then wait in line to become citizens until all those who applied legally are accepted. Then they move up based on the amount of time they were here. Finally, they must perform community service for coming here illegally. I don’t care if it’s one hour a week for ten years, but some kind of formula like this.

And let’s stop this “racial” profiling bullshit. Who cares? It’s really “criminal” profiling, but The Left shouts, “Watch out for racial profiling!” Another one of the great buzzwords to manipulate the system and have people live in fear. Well, you know what, if it saves lives, then please, profile away. The arguments from The Left has little to do with the Constitution, but everything to do with tearing the very fabric of American society to sheds.

Pelosi, Reid, Obama… go govern in another country. Get out of American politics because you are seditious in your behavior in upholding our constitution. President Obama is sounding more and more like a South American dictator then the President of the United States. Mr. President, you are trying to reshape America through the prism of your father’s eyes. Remember, you went to a congregation where “God damn America” was the battle cry.

Look, I like Obama. I happen to think he’s a terrific leader… just not for the America our founders intended.

Old glory is under attack. Teachers punish students for wearing the American flag or drawing pictures of it. When I grew up, my teachers were patriots, not subversive. What a difference a few decades make. It is time the line is drawn in the sand. If our tax dollars are going to public schools, I want a say in what is taught and who is doing the teaching.

Wake up, Americans. The time has come for all of us to stop apologizing for being Americans. “E pluribus unum.” — “Out of many, one.” Celebrate, not tear us apart.

Wake up. It is now the responsibility of every man, woman, and child who does not want a Marxist society to take an active part in government and protect our country.

Wake up. We are under attack… and it is from within.

I mean, I’m not that into Arizonan’s opinions on whether taxi fares in NYC should be raised. This is the same thing. “All politics is local,” the libs love to say.

Take these U.N. human rights experts – an oxymoron, emphasis on moron. According to them, Arizona’s new law on illegal immigration could violate international standards, whatever that means.

They claim “a disturbing pattern of legislative activity hostile to ethnic minorities and immigrants has been established…that may allow for police action targeting individuals on the basis of their perceived ethnic origin.”

Of course, they leave out the fact that the law already exists (hence the term illegal immigration), or that – as of yet – there hasn’t been an incidence of this so-called targeted police action.

But that’s not my point anyway. Whether you love the law or hate it – the U.N. spouting off on this crap is like Hitler giving advice on Hanukah shopping.

Take Mexico’s Jorge Bustamante – whose must be pissed that it’s a crime to be in the U.S. illegally. Just like Mexico. In fact, you could end up in jail for years if you’re caught there illegally. Here’s a tip Busta: focus on why so many of your citizens are coming here, instead of staying there. Something tells me the human rights abuses are a tad worse – if by tad, you mean “Eso es pura mierda.”

And of course, there’s Farida Shaheed. She’s from Pakistan – a shining human rights beacon. As long as you overlook persecution of women, gays, children, religious minorities, non-Muslims, Muslims and sexually harassed goats. But why worry too much about thousands of “honor killings,” when a Phoenix cop just asked a Hispanic for his license because of a busted tail light.

Shaheed, don’t like it, mocking the flash car.

What else can I say about UN human rights experts?

That they’re worth every penny. (they’re unpaid.)

And if you disagree with me, you’re a racistas homófobos.

Tonight, a killer lineup!

S.E. Cupp!

Dr. Marc Lamont Hill!

Jesse Joyce!

Dr. Michael Baden!

Uh oh.

Translation: he means “stupid.”

See, “misguided” is a word used by people who know better than you. Calling something “misguided” is an intellectual exercise in superiority–even if they don’t call you stupid, they really, really want to.

Too bad Obama has no other plan that’s less stupid. And the Arizona bill is what happens when there is no plan: a plan gets made.

It reminds me of something a really smart guy said on Hannity last week.

Roll Sot:

“Until you make it easier for them to get in legally you have to make it as difficult as possible for them to get in illegally. It’s that simple.”

It really is that simple.

Let’s play it again, but slower, in case you didn’t get it the first time.

(play it again, but really slow)

He really is an underused source of brilliance at Fox News.

Anyway, until we create a front door for these folks, we have to make sneaking in a window harder than hell. Amnesty doesn’t do that. Amnesty just says – “everyone in… is in!” That does not control the tide.

The fact is, it’s called illegal immigration, because it’s illegal. And Arizona has chosen to deal with what we already call illegal. And while, on its surface, it appears mean – it’s not. It’s actually a beginning. It pushes the debate forward to a place where we can finally develop a system that gets all the wonderful, hardworking people in.

And most are hardworking. And most are wonderful. Seriously, most of these folks killing themselves to come here are more deserving than half of the jerks born here. I’m referring to anyone who stinks of patchouli, uses clubbing as a verb (except in Alaska), thinks graffiti is art, owns their own sex tape, once dated Paris Hilton, listens to Dave Matthews, claims they’re in Mensa, plays Frisbee golf, known to wear a speedo, carries a tiny dog in a purse, blames America for everything, enjoys performance art, thinks yogurt is food, cries while whale watching, majored in any form of gender studies, cares more about death row inmates than their victims, and thinks I can’t bench press twice my own weight. (I can, or I used to, anyway).

And if you disagree with me, you’re a racist homophobe who eats donated organs.

Tonight we’ve got

Jim Norton!

Mike Baker!

newcomer nice lady, Kinsey Schofield! 

and Andrew WK sings the news!

I’ll be getting into that in detail in another series of articles, but we’re here to talk about Hollywood. Hollywood was once a conservative town run by immigrants who believed in the American way. Many of the stars fought in WWII and acted in patriotic movies. But there was a labor struggle in Hollywood starting with the unions, which began to get infiltrated by communists and socialists in the 1930s. They made more and more demands of the studios that they didn’t like. In 1947, the studio bosses decided to take advantage of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), with which Senator Joseph McCarthy had no direct involvement despite misinformation to the contrary. The Hollywood studio bosses wanted to bust up the unions and the method they used was the HUAC investigations and the blacklist.

Instead of solving their problem, it created a backlash which fills many members of Hollywood with bitterness to this day. It created a whole mythology and a flawed rationale for some to reject all things conservative, even though conservative politics was not really the issue at all. A sort of ideological purge began to take hold in Hollywood. Those with conservative leanings were made to feel so unwelcome that to this day many of them keep their politics to themselves. As Charlton Heston often said, “There are more conservatives in the closet in Hollywood than gays.”

Former MCA/Universal chief Lew Wasserman was famous for his politics. Like many in Hollywood, he picked the Democrats as the party to favor in the hopes that they would favor his company. Like lemmings, the industry followed his example.

Small wonder Wasserman felt a natural affinity for Lyndon Johnson. Facing a relentless Justice Department investigation in the early 1960s, Wasserman discovered the river of power that flowed from channeling Hollywood money to Democratic candidates. LBJ’s 1964 campaign marked his elevation into the top ranks of Democratic fund-raisers. In The Power and the Glitter, his 1990 book on Hollywood and politics, Ronald Brownstein writes, “Wasserman, Hollywood’s toughest operator, eased into this rugged environment as if he were born to it.”

But Wasserman, unlike the left-wing Malibu Democrats, was never an ideologue, as evidenced by his 1968 support for Hubert Humphrey. From Johnson to Clinton, his cause was making sure that the film industry had a pipeline to a Democratic White House. In his equation of politics with business, in his understanding that money buys access, Wasserman was no different than the conservative Texas oilmen who bankrolled the rise of LBJ.

Wasserman was known for punishing those in town didn’t support the Democrats. When studio heads set such examples, the minions often follow suit. So many Hollywood people started supporting Democrats, not just in Washington but the state of California. They funneled millions into the campaigns of people like Jerry Brown, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, etc. The state became bluer over time. When Hollywood darling President Bill Clinton closed a lot of military bases in California, it helped to push the state more into the Democrat column. And lax immigration policies favored by Democrats, who see illegal aliens as their future voters, hurt Republicans in the state even more. Especially when the Republicans tried to fight back against the huge costs illegal aliens placed on the state budget.

Progressives believe in the nanny state. They’ve ushered in a quasi-Victorian age where more and more things become banned. Where your every action is dictated to by the state. California keeps creating laws to micro-manage its citizens’ every move. And all of that bureaucracy costs money. As a result, the government has become increasingly voracious when it comes to taxes and fines. They fine people for anything they can think of and tax them when they’re not fining them.

This makes the cost of living in California too much for the working class and the poor, not to mention the rich who are tired of being soaked. Business and talent are flocking away from the state. Hollywood productions are forced to relocate to more affordable climes. Which means the city of Los Angeles, which has largely depended on the Hollywood cash cow for most of the last 80 years, is starting to feel the pain. Hollywood is a vast industry that employs thousands of people. It helps fund many more ancillary businesses from the restaurants to the gardeners to the baristas at the coffee shops. When the money in Hollywood dries up so do a lot of the businesses that employ people, like out of work actors and writers. And when that happens, things gets ugly.

The end result is the state of California is on a collision course with bankruptcy. Hollywood helped bring about the end of its own glory. America was once looked on by the world as a savior. It rescued millions from the oppression of the Nazis and Communism. But Hollywood started cranking out movies starting in the late 60s that “deconstructed” the American myths. More and more films portrayed the government as evil, the military as butchers, America as oppressors. Not surprisingly, anti-Americanism started to spread around the world.

The irony of progressives is they attack the very government they created. The oppressive government which spies on our every movie in Hollywood films is less the product of the cold war conservatives and more the product of big government-loving statists. And that’s a progressive ideology. Not a conservative one.

The cost of running a government the progressive way is too expensive to take care of anyone well. It only exploits and robs revenues the citizens as much as inhumanly possible. The people are given inferior benefits as a bribe for their acceptance. They’re bribed with their own money or the money of those who could have given them a good job, if the state wasn’t bilking them first.

If Hollywood wants to return to its former success, it needs to stop deluding itself and start supporting those who would make the business climate good for them again.The leaders in California that the progressives support are not helping little guy. They are making them destitute. And if Hollywood doesn’t get smarter fast, they will meet them on the way down.