This week Barabra Streisand emerged from her self -imposed seclusion to grace Larry King and his viewers with her presence on the TV host’s penultimate broadcast.  As the Los Angeles Times put it, the “interview” resembled more of an infomercial for the product that is Barbra Streisand.

In segment after segment Barbra talked about Barbra.  Barbra talked about Obama.  Barbra talked about Barbra.  Barbra talked about Clinton.  And Barbra talked about Barbra.

Larry King dutifully congratulated her on all of her observations.

Here’s one my favorite moments:  When Larry King asked her about the first two years of Barack Obama’s Presidency she laments that President Obama did not use his “executive powers” to unilaterally repeal DADT.  Then, pricelessly, without any sense of self awareness she goes on to praise President Bill Clinton as one of our greatest Presidents.  It would have been at this moment that an actual journalist would have pointed out to Ms. Streisand that President Clinton was the “great” President that instituted the DADT policy that she now wants President Obama to unconstitutionally and unilaterally revoke.  Instead, Mr. King appeared to sit back and admire the beautiful lighting that Ms. Streisand probably supervised prior to the tape rolling.

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Love or hate his politics Jon Stewart is a funny guy. Unlike his comedy compadre Colbert, who has grown tiring with his one joke caricature of conservatives, Stewart does occasionally give a blast to the left as well as the right. The recent “The Race Card is Maxed” sketch with Larry Wilmore is a great example. He is at his best when he is shooting from the hip, being self-deprecating and not taking him too seriously. Is he balanced and evenhanded?  I don’t expect him to be. Just as I would not expect Dennis Miller to be “balanced” when he is on O’Reilly.

It’s no wonder failing and flailing CNN would want to have him on for an hour and promote it heavily. I am sure that his ratings outperformed the recently acquired Spitzer/Parker yawn-fest or any given hour of the ironically named Joy Behar Show on sister network Headline News.  For the past week CNN was pushing the appearance of the Daily Show host on Larry King Live,  as an hour of Jon Stewart Opens Up.

I would have loved to see Stewart open up for an hour however that isn’t what I got. The show got off to a good start when Stewart made fun of the falling rating of CNN and the fact that Larry King was leaving just before the ship went down. I especially liked the riff he did about Piers Morgan replacing King.

Then, unfortunately Mr. King tried to take control of the show and what followed, with the exception of a few moments when Stewart wrested control back, was enough to make me want to watch an hour of Christiane Amanpour do stand up or Andy Griffith shilling seniors for Obamacare on an endless loop. (more…)

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This is why Big Hollywood will never join the shut up and sing choir. As a matter of fact, we’d actually prefer they stop with the singing and talk more. Nope, Hollywoodists can never speak their minds enough to please us. Knowing how those with their hands on the lever of the most powerful propaganda device ever created think is vitally important to exposing, defeating, and best of all, ridiculing them. (more…)

Some of Hollywood’s biggest environmentalist stars got together on Larry King last night, to rally the nation around helping the gulf crisis. A special two-hour show aired on the barely-watched CNN network, to raise money and awareness. The money they raised was a little short, and the awareness they raised was of celebrity ignorance. Much like Obama’s new energy commission, there were very few experts out last night.

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While most telethons are about helping people this one seemed more concerned about the oil soaked animals. In fact two thirds of the proceeds went to environmental activist groups, The Nature Conservancy and the National Wildlife Federation. The United Way was there for the human victims, although very few of the stars seemed concerned about that aspect of the tragedy. Robert Redford made a response so comical; that it looked like it was a SNL skit (I’m saving that for the end).

The best example of the Telethon’s focus was voiced by Chelsea Handler:

“Everybody now is thinking about the animals, and and it’s really scary, especially for anybody, you know, espec… for-for a mill…  a bevy of reasons I mean we have to think about the animals out there. Everybody needs to be thinking about animals.”

Perhaps victims of the Nashville flood could have activated Hollywood behind their disaster had they shown pictures of drowning possums. (more…)

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In 1987, my friend Pete and I – editors on our college’s conservative paper – got the chance to interview Vice Admiral James Stockdale.  You might remember him as Ross Perot’s running mate, the man who asked in one debate, only half in jest, “Who am I?  Why am I here?”

But Admiral Stockdale was not the befuddled clown some hack comics tried to make him out to be.  A brilliant classics scholar, he was also a warrior’s warrior.  His evil North Vietnamese captors tortured him unmercifully – not calling him mean names, not dunking him in water as trained medics watched, but real, savage torture that left his body broken.  But it did not break his American spirit; when the communists decided they wanted to film him for propaganda he calmly took a wooden stool and bashed his own face in so they couldn’t use him.  We saw his Medal of Honor sitting in his study surrounded by books.

Pete and I both later joined the Army, and we both served multiple deployments. I don’t know how it affected Pete, but during Desert Storm I took one round out of one of my M16 magazines and kept it in my top BDU pocket.  I’m no Admiral Stockdale, and I figured if I went through my other 209 rounds I needed some insurance that I wouldn’t be getting captured alive. (more…)

Is Sean Penn doing some good work for Haiti? Yes. At some point, did he opt to advance his own Hollywood image in place of casting the widest relief net possible? Yes. Will he violently threaten those who question his motives in the name of “peace?” That’s a definite possibility. I liked him better when he was rattling his skull with a checkered slip-on.

For those of you who don’t know, Sean Penn has been “making the rounds” to keep the public awarene about Haiti. By “making the rounds” I mean scoring Hollywood elbow-bumping points by appearing on Tinseltown’s golden fanboy show… Larry King Live.

“One of the most important aspects of that will be that I’ve never asked to be on television before in my life, with the exception of unintelligible. I asked to be on your show today and you said yes. That’s what’s important, to keep the eye on Haiti. …The eyes of CNN and FoxNews and everybody else, the New York Times stays on this disaster…”

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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…)

Fame is that place where character is rarely able to sustain itself. I don’t know how much character Levi Johnston had as a boy, but as a young man in the grips of the Hollywood culture machine he’s lost it all.

Levi’s story is one that plays out hundreds of times each year in Hollywood. The young either come to La La Land seeking fame, or have the opportunity for it laid in their lap due to circumstances they often times never sought. The wreckage of most rarely see the light of day, much less the pages of Playgirl magazine, they only end up chasing a dream that never comes, in rehab, jail or worse.

When one unknowingly trades character for fame the recipient has only one recourse, attack the catalyst that brought them the opportunity in the first place, in Levi Johnston case it’s Sarah Palin and the mother of his child.

When young men lack positive role models at home, often times they go astray in that long stretch towards manhood, only to end up a tool for whatever hungry machine is in their path, gangs, a White House intern, or the exploitative elements of Hollywood. When a young man’s character fails him, good parents are needed to right the course. Levi Johnston didn’t have that growing up in Alaska. (more…)

Nidal “Gary” Hassan – All-American boy was haunted by memories of Gitmo, ‘Nam, Hiroshima INEVITABLY, ANOTHER SOLDIER SNAPS Distraught pacifist conscientious objector tormented by horrors of war, as far as you know Newsroom experts: stress, violence, stupidity, tragedy a way of life for GIs Former M*A*S*H stars say it’s finally time to disarm the military Hollywood insiders: Sean Penn early favorite for lead in planned Oliver Stone biopic

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Levi Johnston’s shameless exploitation by the liberal media is more than just a convenient cudgel for bashing Sarah Palin.  It’s a modern minstrel show, with “Middle American” substituted for “African-American” as Levi capers for his condescending media “friends” wearing figurative blackface. And just as the minstrel shows of the past were tools to reinforce prejudice, the Levi Johnston show is meant to reinforce the prejudices and smug sense of superiority of its elitist liberal audience.

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Levi is the Kevin Federline of American politics, a good-looking, not-too-bright guy catching a break by impregnating a rising star, or at least one’s daughter, then basking in the reflected glow.  When things went south with Bristol Palin, he found, in a mainstream media eager for anything that might derail the Sarah Palin express, an opportunity to go farther than he ever thought he could.  Movies, modeling, memoirs – anything was possible, they assured him.  Just tell us what we want to hear, Levi – the good stuff, the juicy stuff, the stuff too good to fact check.  Oh, and hand over your dignity while you’re at it. (more…)

In this episode, “NewsBusted” covers:  (more…)

In this episode, “NewsBusted” covers: President Obama, Sonia Sotomayor, New York Times, Clarence Thomas, Nancy Pelosi, General Motors, Al Qaeda, The Goode Family, CNN, Larry King, Same-Sex Marriage, and Zac Efron.

So Elizabeth Edwards was on Larry King last week, doing her best to defend her cad of a husband – while, of course, pumping her book. At one point she maintained that despite his philandering, her husband still did a great thing by bringing up the issue of poverty on the campaign trail. But when the crypt-keeper asked her if her husband would take a DNA test to prove that Reille Hunter’s daughter isn’t his, Elizabeth replied that she had no idea. Finally, when King pushed again about the DNA test, she said, “I don’t need this.”

Now, first of all: I find hard it to believe that this DNA question never came up over breakfast at the Edwards’ home. But no matter – that`s not what boils my bacon. If John, as his wife claims, cares enough about poverty to make it a campaign issue, then why doesn’t he care about the poverty of a single baby? Even more, you’d think Elizabeth – so proud of her husband`s stance – would urge him to take the test, and be a father to a baby who probably needs cash for diapers – and in a few years, hair gel. I mean, the baby can’t hold a job yet – and Edwards is beyond loaded. If you’re going to talk about the despair of poverty, put your money where your big mouth is. (more…)

I wanted to pop in here to let “Big Hollywood” readers know about the just-published spy thriller I wrote with my friend Keith Korman. What is it like? Well, think of an episode of “24″ written by Proust. OK, maybe not quite. But it is a thriller with a point of view. We try to keep the plot moving, while satirizing the chattering class and skewering the imbecilities of America’s political/media culture. The basic plot is that a Mahattan-based, dissolute left-wing journalist (Peter Johnson), who writes for a journal edited by a predatory and impossibly shameless editrix (Josephine von Hildebrand), is sent on a rogue mission to assassinate Iran’s top nuclear scientist by an all-but-forgotten CIA spymaster (Stewart Banquo, of the title). Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and Larry King all make cameo appearances, among many others. The book’s approach is that the best way to fight back against the mainstream-media/conventional-wisdom complex is to laugh at it.

CHAPTER ONE
The Drunk

He sat in a ramshackle office chair staring at the little red light in the video camera and let the little red video light stare right back. Sounds trickled into his head from the earpiece, the familiar theme music of the cable news show six thousand miles away and then that raspy voice from the guy who never missed the chance to ask a creampuff question:

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Celebrities en masse told us over and again just how uniquely qualified Sen. Barack Obama was for the Oval Office. Remember Spike Lee’s famous quote – “You have B.B.: Before Barack and A.B.: After Barack.” Never mind the clear lack of experience. They saw past it. They are pretty smart, after all. They’re famous.

But the backpedaling on their anointed candidate may have already started. Just listen to comedian Bill Maher. Maher, chatting with CNN’s softball pitcher Larry King, began making excuses for his new president this week: (more…)