Kennedy sat down with Reason.tv’s Tim Cavanaugh to discuss efforts by the ATF to prevent gun vendors from selling firearms to medical marijuana users, the strain of right-wing political thinking running throughout alt-rock and punk of the ’80s and ’90s, what it’s like working in Hollywood when you’re not a liberal, and her political evolution from conservative to libertarian.

Interview by Tim Cavanaugh. Shot by Zach Weissmueller, Tracy Oppenheimer, and Sharif Matar. Edited by Weissmueller.

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Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife of 25 years, Maria Shriver, announced Monday that they are separating.

More entertainment-related videos at BBTV.

I’m not someone who believes in the magic of controversy to automatically drive people to watch something they normally wouldn’t, but there’s always been public interest in the Kennedy family and at the very least this uproar has upped the profile of the mini. You also have this built-in interest backed by respected talent with successful track records. “24″ co-creator Joel Surnow is the Executive Producer and there’s a number of high-profile, critically acclaimed actors in lead roles, including Greg Kinnear as President Kennedy, Barry Pepper as Bobby and Tom Wilkinson as Joe Sr. Furthermore, some real good can come out this and not just for the miniseries.

The Kennedys | Movie Trailer | Review

The four-year old independent ReelzChannel now has an opportunity with a product they normally wouldn’t have been considered for, to break out and and make a name and brand for themselves. The more entertainment outlets not owned by politically-connected multi-nationals (AETN is owned by NBC-Universal, Disney, etc.), the better it is for our democracy. This is also an opportunity for 60 million people to see the mini. That might be a smaller pool than the History Channel has, but it’s more than double the number of HBO subscribers, a network that passed on the project.

The other good to come out of this is that now we know for certain that the The History Channel really isn’t The History Channel. The same network that said “The Kennedys” didn’t meet their standards is is the same network that attempted to mainstream that degenerate anti-American liar of a historian we call Howard Zinn. No institution with any kind of accuracy standards would do such a thing and so now we know they are The Left-Wing History Channel.

As a history buff and someone who remains awed by Joel Surnow’s ability to tell a compelling multi-part story, I would be looking forward to seeing this even if there hadn’t been controversy. But now what we have here is the delicious opportunity to not only get lost in what promises to be damn good television but also to stick a subversive finger in the eye of The Man while doing so. 

 Just try and keep me away.

The Hollywood Reporter:

The controversial miniseries will have its world premiere on April 3.

After a three-week journey, The Kennedys has found a home.

The controversial miniseries will world premiere on April 3 on the ReelzChannel, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

Producers of the ambitious project from 24 executive producer Joel Surnow and writer Stephen Kronish have struck a deal with the independent, family-owned cable network to air the 8-part miniseires, which was abruptly yanked from the History channel on January 7 amid pressure from the Kennedys over its depiction of the political family. At the time, History owner A&E Television Networks told THR that “after viewing the final product in its totality, we have concluded this dramatic interpretation is not a fit for the History brand.”

But it is certainly a fit for ReelzChannel, a 4-year old independent cable channel owned by Minnesota-based Hubbard Communications that is available in 60 million homes nationwide on services including DirecTV, Dish Network, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Comcast and Charter Communications.

Sources say the company stepped up with a big financial commitment for the lavish $30 million miniseries starring Greg Kinnear and Katie Holmes and produced by Asylum Entertainment and Muse Entertainment.

Full story here.

Why it’s a left-wing film

Where to begin.

With this particular film, discussing “why” it was made is more important and revealing than digging into the specific politics of it all.  Director Oliver Stone’s brilliantly structured, brilliantly shot, brilliantly written, brilliantly edited (to say the least), and brilliantly directed,  wet dream of left-wing wish-fulfillment is the greatest pack of charismatic lies ever filmed, but there is simply not enough bandwidth on these here Internets to document and deconstruct the what and how of those lies. 

If you haven’t read Gerald Posner’s “Case Closed,” please do so. It is, in my opinion, the definitive investigation of the Kennedy assassination and a withering rebuttal to Stone’s paranoid political revisionism. In the years since it was published, computer technology and new revelations have only strengthened Posner’s case. Unlike Stone’s willfully dishonest narrative, Posner is exhaustive, thorough and logical. But like Stone, Posner tells one helluva compelling story. “Case Closed” is a great read that also happens to be painstakingly thorough in proving that on one terrible November day in 1963, President John F. Kennedy was murdered by a lone, left-wing, Castro-supporting Marxist.

The utterly obscene political opportunism we saw rise like a stench from the Left and their media allies within hours of last week’s mass murder in Tuscon, is useful in understanding “why” Stone was so driven to realize in motion picture form his anti-American web of audacious historical perversion. When truth and history and facts and decency aren’t on your side, it becomes all about the narrative. The Narrative is its own beast, something that transcends the pesky details of right, wrong, true or false. Whether it’s history, economics, character assassination, or pretty much anything… He who controls the narrative, controls truth.

Simply put, the Left cannot psychologically or emotionally reconcile their undying hatred of the Vietnam War with their undying love for the same president who escalated our involvement in that war. And the Left most certainly cannot psychologically or emotionally reconcile that one of their very own — a strident, left-wing Castro lover — assassinated that same beloved president.  

So this leaves Leftists like Oliver Stone with two choices. They can either allow the truth of Kennedy’s overt and covert enthusiasm for fighting Communism in Vietnam and his death at the hands of one of their fellow travelers to compute — in which case their skulls will explode, or they can make a whole bunch of shit up to forget that in the month before his death, Kennedy told Walter Cronkite:

“If we withdrew from Vietnam, the Communists would control Vietnam. Pretty soon, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Malaya, would go…”

That’s right Lefties, when you sneer at the Domino Theory, you sneer at Camelot. Same with “trickle-down economics,” but we’ll save that for another day.

The Left making a whole bunch of shit up in order to hold tight to their beliefs and control the narrative is nothing new and occurs on a daily basis in ways both big and small. Three days ago, Jon Stewart did it to Sarah Palin and over the last two years we’ve been told raising taxes grows the economy, unemployment benefits create jobs, cold weather proves there’s Global Warming, Glenn Beck’s chalkboard is dangerous, enforcing the law in Arizona is racism, and Politico and Mediaite are objective news organizations. Every day and with a straight face we are told up is down, a lie is truth and that people don’t kill people, political maps the killer has never seen do.

Going back to the Vietnam War, the left has been so thorough in Ministry of Truthing that conflict that it is now conventional wisdom that America lost that war militarily, when we did not. And even though three-million innocent people died as a direct result, it is not common knowledge that Congressional Democrats cutting aid to our Cambodian and South Vietnamese allies, ushered in that holocaust … and truly lost the war.

The narrative. The narrative. The narrative.

Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” which lays the assassination of an American president at the feet of the American military, military contractors, the CIA, a group of anti-Castro homosexuals, the political Right, Lyndon Johnson — everyone except Oswald — is all about controlling the narrative.

Thankfully, Stone failed. The interest “JFK” spurred in re-examining the case backfired on the Oscar-winner and the results pretty much put the conspiracy theories to rest. Purely by accident, decades after the fact, Stone’s feverish masterwork of memory-holing and revisionism finally allowed the country to move on. Well, let me amend that. Because one of the Left’s primary tactics is to wear the other side down. What I meant to say was, it failed for now.  

Why it’s a great film

As someone who has tried and mostly failed at making films and writing screenplays, to witness a master director working at a level few will ever reach and in the process perfectly harness his wild ambition and tame it into something hypnotically spellbinding, lucid and coherent, is a once in a generation occurrence. “JFK” is not only the best film of the 1990s, it is the single most impressive piece of conspiracy storytelling I have ever seen.

Picture where Stone started. Picture that first day when he sat down to try and bring all the disparate pieces of his political insanity into one cohesive narrative. He not only had to pull all those pieces together, he had to fit them together, and then fit that into the classic three-act structure. From there he had to develop a protagonist to take us through it all, turn the mystery itself into the antagonist, give his main characters emotional arcs, stay far enough ahead of the audience so that we keep watching (but not so far ahead that we get lost), and then hold that vision together through the sausage mill known as production and post-production. Add to that a kaleidoscope of film stocks and styles, a production design that does more than looks the way it should — it feels the way it should, and by far the best performance of Kevin Costner’s career.

“JFK” is a lie, but it is unquestionably art and its creator a one-of-a-kind artist.

Is “JFK” the greatest story ever told, the most compelling, the most memorable? No. But the achievement of pulling it off simply blows my mind. For 205 minutes (I’ve never seen the theatrical cut), Stone takes your hand and walks you through the chronological psychology of a reverse-engineered conspiracy; an exploded bomb of motives, shadowy movements, dueling agendas — and then he puts the pieces all back together and makes it tick with precision. The fact that none of it is true is meaningless. Within the world of a frenzied imagination desperate to rationalize the irrational, Stone creates his own logic and truth. Everything incredible becomes credible and every new revelation something that somehow helps to connect dots that have no business being together. It is wizardry, black magic, a practicing of the dark arts you can’t look away from.

The film lover in me mourns the loss of this Oliver Stone, the vibrant, provocative, fearless visionary with the supernatural power to bring to life whatever his aggressively dynamic mind can think up.

The patriot in me wishes the son-of-a-bitch was never born.

And therein lies the enduring conflict of my love/hate affair with the medium of the modern-day motion picture, and those who dabble in it. Every one of the 25 films on this list is a wonderful drug, an exhilarating  two-hour journey into another world that completely removes me from my present reality. And for that relief and escape, I am truly grateful. But within our bigger moral world, part of me wishes those films had never been made.

And as far as the magnificent artists who created this magnificent art… Think of all the good they could do.

Countdown in full.

Brothers John, Robert and Teddy, the most prominent Kennedy’s of recent generations, are presented as stars of virtue, wisdom and social justice. There was no mention of their collective philandering, JFK’s duplicitous withholding of air cover for the Bay of Pigs invaders dooming them; John and Robert’s involvement in CIA attempts to assassinate Castro which may have factored into JFK’s Dallas murder, or Teddy’s scandalous and cowardly leaving of Mary Jo Kopechne to die in his car after he’d crashed it into a waterway off Chappaquiddick Island.

And there are other skeletons in the closet left out of this documentary like suspicions that Robert may have had something to do with Marilyn Monroe’s murder. The famous Hollywood star had had affairs with both John and Robert.

I’m not saying the Kennedy’s are guilty as charged in each of these accusations. But there is evidence and to leave these controversies out of any program about this important clan gives a distorted picture to viewers, like the young, who have little to no knowledge of the Kennedy’s and therefore get a wrong view of history. And we all know what that means: Those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.

The two hour “documentary” was made by Robert Kline, a Hollywood producer and writer, from Thomas Maier’s book of the same name. I don’t know either’s politics. But the presentation was the kind of propaganda that perpetuates myth. The film of the brothers is wonderful. They are handsome and vibrant, articulate and cool. They play touch football on the grounds of their mansions. John suffers the heartbreak of losing a child. But does that make him a good statesman or have much to anything to do with morality or judgement?

At points in the show where Conservatives or Republicans were mentioned or shown, they are consistently disparaged. When JFK ran against Nixon, the narrator says Kennedy, smiling fetchingly, was made for TV; Nixon, dark-jowled, scowling, wasn’t. They show a picture of Nixon anxiously trying to shake Kennedy’s hand who absently and disdainfully looks at the outstretched hand, finally taking it.

There is the proverbial section on civil rights. JFK and Robert are shown as champions of justice fighting a mean and vicious George Wallace, governor of Alabama stopping Blacks from entering Alabama schools. No mention that Wallace was a Democrat or that the main obstacle to civil rights for Blacks in Congress at that time was the block of Southern Democrats. President Kennedy was the first president to recognize civil rights as a moral issue, intones the narrator. Only a mumbling reference by Nicholas Katzenbach, JFK’s attorney general, that President Eisenhower, a Republican, had earlier integrated the armed forces and thereby had actually started the political march for civil rights.

JFK is lauded for his courage and total win in backing down Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile crises of 1962. No mention that in a secret deal JFK agreed to get rid of missiles the US had in Turkey – and that’s how he won the crises.

Because it is tax payer funded, PBS has a duty to show both sides of the spectrum. It did not live up to that duty in last night’s “The Kennedy’s: America’s Emerald Kings.” Given its continual bias to the Left, as evidenced most recently by its firing of Fox News commentator Juan Williams for giving both sides, I doubt that it ever will.

After the History channel said it would not air a controversial miniseries on the Kennedy family, producers were already seeking another television home.The Showtime pay cable network has been approached to air the eight-part series, a spokesman said on Saturday.

Adam McKay wearing Aaron Sorkin’s glasses and his little sister’s scarf…

On the pages of the Huffington Post, the uber-wealthy “Anchorman” director tries to hide his class warfare (something only wealthy liberals can afford to wage because the rest of us count on the “rich” to hire us and buy our goods) as some sort of concern over the federal deficit, which is the very definition of disingenuous:

As disappointing as Obama has turned out to be I think he still knows that $110 billion more added to the deficit in the next two years is a bad idea.

And yet McKay registered no righteous HuffPo indignation, not a peep of HuffPo hand-wringing over what ObamaCare and the $800 billion union/bureaucrat giveaway we now call The Failed Stimulus would do to the deficit. In fact, over at McKay’s “Funny or Die,” Big Movie Star support for the budget-busting ObamaCare bill (that makes $110 billion look like piggy bank shakings) was everywhere.

Adam McKay cares about the deficit like I care about the upcoming “Tron” sequel.

McKay and the legions of dishonest Leftists like him only care about the deficit when such a posture works as convenient propaganda in order to sound like fiscal hawks and further their socialist agenda. McKay doesn’t even care how silly and hypocritical he looks because the shame gene is non-existent in these folks. Reading the likes of McKay fret over a $130 billion deficit increase is like watching the Little Dutch Boy put his finger in the dyke after its burst and then stand there with a smug look that says, “I am selfless and amazing.”

And let us never forget that McKay is a proud and well-loved member of an entertainment industry that constantly has its filthy, greedy hands grasping out and its powerful lobbyists swarming throughout this great nation of ours in a quest for more of our money. This is an industry that chases corporate welfare and tax breaks for its rich self like hobos chase dollar bills tied to fishing string. The argument is that Hollywood needs those tax cuts to create jobs. Well, duh; and whether they’re hiring or purchasing, so do those making over $250,000 a year.

Why does Hollywood only believe in trickle-down Reaganomics when they’re the ones receiving the tax breaks.

That, my friends, is a rhetorical question.

I’m not rich, have never been close to being rich and now that I’m on the darkside of 40, I doubt I ever will be rich. I lack the brains, I lack the ambition, and as long as my pretty wife is healthy and my TV is working what more does a fella need? But I do understand how the world works. I watched firsthand as Reagan’s massive across-the-board tax cuts not only spurred 30 years of unprecedented prosperity (interrupted only by two shallow recessions) and — and this is important – DOUBLED TREASURY REVENUES in just a few years. And guess who also believed in the exact same economic principles as Reagan and got the exact same results? President Kennedy.

It’s also worth mentioning that while the percentage of the income the wealthy were paying in taxes went down, the wealthy’s overall tax burden increased substantially. For example, between 1981 and 1988 the top ten percent saw their burden increase by 48%.

Maybe this is what McKay and his selfish ilk are really worried about?

If Obama’s epic fail of a stimulus has taught us anything it’s that money in the hands of the government is at best useless in spurring the economy, while Reagan and Kennedy taught us that money in the hands of the American  people will always bring a sputtering economy roaring back to life and in turn raise treasury revenues.

Let’s review:

• Tax increases don’t increase tax revenues.
• A good economy increases tax revenues.
• If you want a good economy, decrease taxes.
• This isn’t rocket science.
• This is good for America.
• This is why the Left hates it so.

But here’s my message to McKay and all Hollywood lefties suddenly concerned with the deficit…

Lead. By. Example.

You won’t do it with Global Cooling Global Warming Climate Change, but maybe you will here.

NEWSFLASH: You don’t need to run around in some helpless puppy-dog circle waiting for the government to raise your taxes.

Raise your own damn taxes in three easy steps:

1. To help federal and state deficits, refuse all production tax breaks, credits, etc.

2. Increase your own personal income and business taxes by simply doing the math and making a donation to…

Gifts to the United States
U.S. Department of the Treasury
Credit Accounting Branch
3700 East-West Highway, Room 622D
Hyattsville, MD 20782

3. Until steps one and two are completed, please stop embarrassing your hypocrite, socialist selves.

The rosy and heartfelt depictions of “Teddy” this week have seemed to me like intercepted transmissions from an alternate universe, where infidelity, drunkenness, cowardice, and saving your own sorry ass at all costs are virtues. Alec Baldwin even went so far as to assert that Sen. Kennedy might have been as great a legislator as Rep. Barney Frank. While that might seem ridiculous to the people in Massachusetts who keep voting for Barney year after year, I just took it as the usual hyperbole that mourners indulge in while grieving the death of one of their heroes. But a couple of statements by Teddy’s apologists took me aback:

Yet if one weighs the life of a single young woman against the accomplishments of the man President Obama has called the greatest Democratic senator in history, what is one to think?
– Joyce Carol Oates

So it doesn’t automatically make someone (aka, me) a … troll for asking what Mary Jo Kopechne would have had to say about Ted’s death, and what she’d have thought of the life and career that are being (rightfully) heralded. Who knows — maybe she’d feel it was worth it. – Melissa Lafsky

Let me get this straight, Joyce: Mary Jo Kopechne’s life was not as important as Sen. Kennedy’s subsequent career? And furthermore, Melissa, correct me if I am misunderstanding you here, but Mary Jo might have felt that her life was worth forfeiting so that Teddy could go on to co-author an education bill, or to destroy the career of Robert Bork, or to protect the rights of women to abort unwanted fetuses?

I seem to remember a certain female reporter remarking, after the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal broke, that she would be willing to perform a “Lewinsky” on Pres. Clinton simply because of his stand on abortion rights.   But I suspect that, even for her, suffocating in a submerged car for four or five hours might just be a Martha’s Vineyard bridge too far.

From what far-flung galaxy does this kind of thinking emanate? How can seemingly sensible, articulate, and intelligent people argue that the death of an individual due to the recklessness, cowardice, and selfishness of another person might be “worth it” because of the politics of the perpetrator? Does the fact that Kennedy supported liberal policies in the years after he fled the scene of an accident and allowed a young woman to die redeem him?

And for someone seriously to posit (obviously without consulting the victim, since her un-televised funeral occurred about 40 years ago) that Mary Jo might have been willing to take one for the team — to give up all the possibilities of her life fully realized, the offices she might have attained, the children she may have had, the lessons she may have taught them, the achievements they might have accomplished, every single unpredictable aspect of her life erased — in order to protect the political career of Ted Kennedy? As if -– let’s be realistic–the Senator who might have replaced Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, after he had been (rightfully) incarcerated and his political career (rightfully) ended, would not have supported the exact same policies? Like the voters of Massachusetts who have effectively bestowed lifetime legislative careers upon Barney and Teddy would suddenly have sent us a Jesse?

But then I realized that this mindset is not from an alternate universe. It is from ours, and we have seen it before. We have seen it in godless countries like the USSR, and Cambodia, and the PRC, and in Nazi Germany. We have have seen it everywhere that individual human lives have been deemed expendable, and that all decisions must be made based on how they affect the State.

If one does not believe in a divine aspect to each human life, then any particular individual’s life is expendable if it serves the “greater good.” Furthermore, if we are not creations of God, then the greater good is determined by whatever political policies one happens to support. In other words, if there is no sacrosanct belief that an individual human life is a gift from a Creator, then any inconvenient life is expendable as long as it serves the current political will.

Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, Castro, Idi Amin, Hussein, Guevara, and all the countless murderous dictators and thugs throughout history who have held onto power by murdering inconvenient people have made the same argument: the murdered were expendable, unimportant, and the greater good was served.

Is there now any wonder why most Americans do not want Statists like the deceased Sen. Edward Kennedy and his apologists and supporters in charge of our most vital commodity, our health care? If an individual human life is evaluated by its worth or cost to the State  rather than by accepting its part in a plan far beyond our earthly understanding, then all of us are negotiable and, ultimately, expendable. And to their credit, it is logically consistent: if we are detrimental or costly to the State, and there is no divine reason to respect us, then we should be killed or mercifully given a cheaper pain pill if it serves the greater good.

But thankfully,  not all of the things we learned about Sen. Edward Kennedy during his three day beatification were so serious. It seems that Teddy himself, magnanimous, glamorous party animal that he was, had a light-hearted side. Good old Teddy reportedly loved him some Chappaquiddick jokes. That crazy rascal was always asking if anybody had heard any new ones! What a great, funny, self-deprecating guy that Lion of the Senate was! Well, I guess he wouldn’t mind if we tell a few now, in remembrance of his endearing ability to laugh at himself.

My personal favorite Ted Kennedy joke is dated, as it pertains to the First Gulf War, in 1991, when America and its allies won the war in a few days, with almost no casualties:

Q:  What’s the difference between Ted Kennedy and the Iraqi army?
A:   Ted Kennedy has actually killed somebody.

What a good one! Boy, I sure hope that good old Teddy Kennedy got a chance to hear that gem before he met his Creator. If he did, I’ll bet he just laughed and laughed.

Moon rocks the imagination as it presents a totally plausible, realistic way of utilizing space for practical purposes — in this case, mining for eco-desirable Helium 3 energy from the lunar surface.  Jones strove for science-fact over fiction in researching many minute details of the script.  He even screened the film before a panel of NASA scientists — many of whom are working on making fantasy into fact. 

Before reading any further — be advised: don’t see Moon to learn about science, but DO see it! It’s a fascinating film featuring an Academy Award-worthy performance by Sam Rockwell. 

Now, back to reality… In 2004, President George W. Bush called for a return to the Moon to build a base — it would be a prelude to something even greater: a mission to Mars.  He noted words from astronaut Eugene Cernan, who traveled with the last Apollo mission: “We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.” With that, scores of engineers, scientists and experts made headway designing, building and planning America’s next endeavour to explore space, they were ready to accomplish the mission. 

Should President Obama decide to continue with the 2004 Bush plan, enterprising Americans would need to invent many of the things featured in Jones’ film.  And for Obama, who is presiding over one of the worst economic crisis in history, an invigorating Kennedy-esque call to space would present a granddaddy of a stimulus package — jobs created, factories built, innovation; to say nothing of stimulating the truly priceless things like learning, inspiring a generation and advancing the species. 

But don’t pack your moon boots quite yet – Obama has organized a committee to review the entire space program and make recommendations sometime in August. He has left many to guess his agenda for America’s space program.  What would have happened if Columbus or Magellan stood around waiting for a group of consultants to return findings?  Thank goodness President Kennedy didn’t wait to hear committee recommendations of his idea — we would have never made it to the Moon.  So, we’re left to wait — along with the rest of NASA — while this committee discusses, studies and contemplates.  Call it the community organizer’s guide to the galaxy …  it just might get us going nowhere fast. 

Moon writer-director Jones is a self-described sci-fi nut having been inspired as a child by great films such as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and Ridley Scott’s Alien.  Those films, like many other 60’s, 70’s and 80’s sci-fi fare, helped feed the world’s growing appetite for all things space — I know, because my younger brother and I grew up in the Lucas/Spielberg-golden age of sci-fi.  With the 1969 Moon landing, and the Apollo missions thereafter, a huge milestone was met, and imaginations exploded — people wanted to learn what else could be ‘out there?’ How could we travel into space in the future? What would life in space be like? 

Moon portrays the same questions NASA faces building a moon base, or traveling to Mars — loneliness, mental stamina, human endurance.  To say nothing of imagining real-life possibilities such as fusion power, mining for clean energy and living in artificial environments (as well as some truly mind-blowing plot twists). 

It should come as little surprise that Jones thought up this film.  After all, he is the son of David Bowie — the man who gave us “Space Oddity” and Ziggy Stardust.  Bowie was fascinated by humans landing on the Moon and translated that into brilliant art and music.  Come to think of it, without the Moonshot, we never would have Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” cell phones, microwave ovens — or juice bags for the kids!  The demonstration of American grit and ingenuity instilled the nation with pride, confidence and solidified American technology and willpower as the envy of the world.  We could use a little bit of all that right about now… 

So, what will it be President Obama: One giant leap… forward or backward?