***UPDATE: Sonnie Johnson received an email apology from Kaufman. Unimpressed, she responds.

In the Wall Street Journal, film writer Anthony Kaufman did a fairly straight-forward interview with “The Undefeated” writer/director Steve Bannon. Fine. Good. Proper. Afterwards, though, Kaufman then took to his usual perch at indieWIRE to let his true feelings be known. Mostly, his indieWIRE piece reflects the usual nonsense-complaints coming from the Left over why a documentary specifically produced to tell the story of Governor Palin the MSM refused to tell doesn’t rehash everything the MSM has already rehashed ad nauseum for the last three years.

Blah-blah-blah. Whine-whine-whine. Boo-hoo-hoo. Heaven forbid the public learns the full truth and context about a potential presidential candidate minus everything they’ve already had tattooed on their brain. Then, however, Kaufman gets to this unbelievably offensive and revealing sentence:

For me, the most shocking moment in “The Undefeated,” however, comes with the appearance of a black person about two-thirds of the way through.

No matter how many times I read this (and there’s more), I’m left almost speechless.

Almost.

This “black person” Kaufman references does have a name … and it’s Sonnie Johnson. She’s a person, not a symbol, and she has a mind of her own.  A very good mind.

Before I let Ms. Johnson speak for herself, I’m going to go ahead and call Anthony Kaufman an elitist bigot. You see, the reason the arrival of a black face likely shocked him is probably due to the fact that he’s never bothered to attend a real Tea Party … or maybe Kaufman simply can’t bring himself to recognize Thomas Sowell, Condi Rice, Clarence Thomas, Lloyd Marcus, Sonja Schmidt, Herman Cain, JC Watts, Alan Keyes, Michael Steele, Frances Rice, Jennifer Carroll, Allen West, Martin Luther King, Jackie Robinson, Tim Scott (need I go on…?) as “real black people” due to their awful, sell-out, Uncle Tomming Republican-ness.

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So many big name stars, singers and sports legends have visited Washington over the years, the city is often referred to as “Hollywood on the Potomac.”  So, that’s the title of my new book (available now at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Borders) featuring over 200 photographs and stories that detail the fascination between Hollywood stars and Washington power-players — from Presidents Truman through Obama. 

Here’s an excerpt: (more…)

I like him. And yes, he is funny. If you’re irritated with him for his most recent column defending Janeane Garofalo, you’re going to have to take my word for it. 

Tom posted a column the other day about Garofalo. It was shocking, controversial, outrageous – and maybe a little misunderstood. Tom’s point was essentially this: why get mad at Janeane Garofalo for saying on TV what every liberal already thinks, that anyone who opposes Barack Obama’s policies is only doing so because they are – wait for it! – racist? Getting outraged at liberals who think Republicans are racist is pretty much the equivalent of (God help me as I reach for the most tired, over-used, movie metaphor in the columnist’s bag o’ tricks…) Captain Renault being – wait for it! – shocked, shocked that there was gambling going on in the back of Rick’s Café.  (more…)

Part 1 of what I half-jokingly called my “Manifesto.”

In a fiscal conservative’s utopian dreamworld, there would be no federal funding for the arts (or so many other government agencies or programs for that matter).  This has been our position since the inception of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the early 1970’s.  We’ve been saying that if elected, we would abolish these misguided programs and departments and bring our government back to the bare-bones constitutionally described role that it has and leave everything else to the states.

We’ve held the influential bully pulpit of the presidency for twenty of the past twenty-eight years, and what has happened to the NEA?  It has grown.  While we have stood on principle,  we have also stood on the sidelines.  The founding fathers would be outraged that the federal government is funding art with taxpayer money, but because we are on the sidelines standing on our principles, all of that money is going to the people creating art with messages that undermine our very existence. (more…)