Thanks to Big Hollywood’s Alfonzo Rachel, I witnessed an entertainment miracle going off in Phoenix, Arizona.

This is my third time through the Katt Williams, flame-throwing, soul-burning comic meltdown! 

This is so far beyond having an audience in the palm of your hand, it is an entire American Counter-Revolution!

This must be not only the worst night and foulest nightmare of this heckler’s life, I don’t see how this fool could walk after the justified incineration he waltzed into.

The almost 8 minutes of deliriously savage brilliance rises like a great symphony to culminate in the only possible ecstatic climax: The Star Spangled Banner!!!

This fifth time through for me brings tears to my eyes! Shouts of gratitude!! America is in a major foxhole right now and a pathetic heckler has, indeed, UNITED THE TROOPS!!!!

(more…)

Like you, I’m pretty happy about Katt Williams bushin’ up his tail on a heckler who tried to dis’ America. By telling a Mexican patriot “to go live in Mexico if he thinks it’s better than living in America,” Williams ran the risk of being labeled a sell-out by displaying his patriotism in this PC culture. Yep, Williams pretty much used his microphone as a club, and went to work on this heckler like he was a piñata:

Video is NSFW:

—–

What Katt Williams said to the heckler wasn’t racist, it was long overdue. Sure I’ve been saying the same and I’m sure you have, as well. But it’s nice to hear it coming from someone who has a platform like Williams does. Usually people in his position would rather patronize people like that heckler and try to win them over by acknowledging they’re “disenfranchised.” This allows them to look compassionate and morally superior. But that’s the behavior of a true sellout — selling out the country that allows people to achieve their dreams in exchange for glorifying yourself by soliciting laughter and applause for cursing it.

Katt Williams breathed fire all over that narrative, and God bless him for it.

Ever since I was a kid I’ve heard the racist statement, “Why don’t you go back to Africa”, and I’d have to remind these jackasses, “I can’t go back to a place I’ve never been.”

Furthermore, I’ve never flexed African national pride on people. I’ve never given people a reason to believe I love Africa more than America, so I never deserved the remark.

I love being black, and I love being black in America. Enjoy whatever ethnicity you are! But if you enjoy it to a point where you think your ethnicity makes you superior, then you’re a jackass.

(more…)

Definitely not safe for work but very refreshing….

—–

In this insufferably PC era, defending America and this kind of openly proud patriotism is the very definition of edgy.  Via HuffPo, here’s a portion of the transcript. The audio is pretty garbled in spots:

“… it appears to me, y’all like it over here a lot… If y’all had California and you loved it, then you shouldn’t have given that mothaf*cka up. You should have fought for California, goddamnit, since you love it… Are you Mexican? Do you know where Mexico is? No this ain’t Mexico, it used to be Mexico, motherf*cker, and now it’s Phoenix, goddammit. USA! USA!… No n*gga, do you know where you at? USA! USA!… No n*gga, this is my hood… [security comes] F*ck him! Mothaf*ckas think they can live in this country and pledge allegiance to another country… Do you remember when white people used to say go back to Africa? And we’d have to tell them we don’t want to? So if you love Mexico, bitch, get the f*ck over there! [breaks into the National Anthem]… We were slaves bitch, you just all work like that at the landscapers…”

Naurally, the Huffington Post is all bothered, bewildered and offended by this:

(more…)

 What do you think of when looking at the Hollywood sign? For many, it represents hopes and dreams, the pinnacle of what we aspire to be. For others it could be a relic of the film industry’s history. The sign is one of the most recognizable images in the world; the sight of it ignites thoughts of today’s stars and America’s style of moviemaking. It is “what dreams are made of.” However, it is also what nightmares are made of. The world around the sign both physical and fantastical is represented by one word, Hollywood.

—–

Local filmmaker Hope Anderson set out to chronicle the beginnings of the Beachwood community, where the Hollywood sign resides on top of Mt. Lee. Throughout Under the Hollywood Sign we learn a great deal about how the land was settled, the origins of the film industry, and the local history in terms of the culture of its progressing community as told by residents of Beachwood Canyon. There is a lot more to “Hollywood” than meets the imagination. Below the sign is a small town, deep with history that only adds to the iconic image of the Hollywood sign.

In an area that was once owned by Mexico and was a place of vast orchards and was famous for its rural appeal, the community began to grow as a spiritual epicenter that reveled in alternative religions. For example, The Theosophical Society sought to combine many denominations but never took off on a large scale due to its tendency for cult-like practices. At the same time, the film industry was on the rise, and quickly. It didn’t take long before Beachwood became home to an emblem that is a celebrity all on its own. (more…)

So Mexican President Felipe Calderon was at the White House Wednesday, where he bashed Arizona’s new immigration law, calling it discriminatory to Mexicans.

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. (more…)

What the hell is going on in this great country of ours?

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. (more…)

In November 1974, Werner Herzog received a most distressing phone call. Lotte Eisner, the beloved doyenne of German cinema, was dying. Part film historian, part published critic, part heroic preservationist, and part muse to the filmmakers struggling to piece together the broken shards of German culture left in the wake of the Nazis, Eisner was a legendary figure in Herzog’s eyes, and had inspired him to persevere through a decade of near-poverty as a struggling director. Now, at seventy-eight years old, she was deathly ill and not expected to survive.

Herzog was in Munich, Eisner in Paris, and their mutual friends implored the thirty-two-year-old director to fly to France post-haste so that he might say his goodbyes while there was still time. But Herzog would have none of it. “This must not be,” he remembered thinking. “German cinema could not do without her now. We would not permit her death.” And so, suddenly afire with what he once called in another context “the fervor and woe of pilgrims and prayers and hopes,” Herzog made a momentous decision: he would set out from his apartment in Munich and walk the five-hundred miles to Paris “in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot.”

Days stretched into weeks as he trod alone through the winter sleet, sometimes breaking into barns or empty cottages to survive the cold nights and taking only a single detour, “to the town of Troyes, because I wanted to walk into the cathedral there.” Finally he arrived exhausted at Eisner’s Paris apartments to find her “still tired and marked by her illness,” but recovering against all odds. She would live nine more years, until at last, “when she was nearly blind, could not walk or read or go out to see films,” she called Herzog back to Paris and told him, “Werner, there is still this spell cast over me that I am not allowed to die. I am tired of life. It would be a good time for me now.” Herzog recalls that, “Jokingly I said, ‘OK, Lotte, I hereby take the spell away,” and three weeks later Lotte Eisner died. (more…)

A couple of weeks ago I was in New York, meeting with network television producers about a series they wanted to run about a story my production team and I have been reporting for more than five years: the narco-insurgency currently wreaking havoc on the U.S. and Mexico.

Just as we all sat down around the conference table, my cell phone rang. Given the importance of the meeting, I normally would have let the call go to voice mail, but when I looked at the number I knew I had to pick it up. This person would not be calling unless it was an absolute emergency. I opened the phone and didn’t even get the “Hello” out of my mouth before a shaken and somewhat scared voice said, “Rusty when can you be here?”

The caller was my most trusted source in Mexico. Slightly stunned by the abrupt nature of the call, I responded inquisitively, “Pretty soon, I should wrap up here in New York in a couple of days, why?”

“We have to talk right away, we have a huge problem down here and you’re in the middle of it,” he exclaimed. (more…)

It was a little after midnight when I crossed over the bridge from Laredo, Texas into the sister city of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. After having my car searched I was cleared through the Mexican Customs’ check point where the military was staged and drove towards my destination. I had a source of mine, a local reporter, call me four hours earlier to tell me to meet him at a specific restaurant at 1 a.m. because he had some photographs and information I was looking for pertaining to a specific series of brutal murders that had taken place in the Laredo corridor.

This wasn’t all that unusual-most of the investigative journalists in Mexico work under intense circumstances given that they often come into information relating to the drug cartels that they either can not, or will not, report on because it would be a death sentence for them, so they give the information to someone like me who will get it aired or published in way that does not connect them.

I arrived early to the restaurant and since the weather was so pleasant, I decided to take a seat on the patio and have a glass of tea. I sat there for a few minutes when my source arrived and sat down, ordered a drink and handed me a large white envelope. He told me this was everything I had been asking his editor about the day before and that I should be careful how I use them. I thanked him, (by paying him) and we talked for about twenty more minutes and he asked if I could give him a ride home. (more…)

On a hot summer evening, in a bar in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico just across the bridge from Laredo, Texas; a thirty year-old man, on his knees, surrounded by a dozen armed guards, can be heard begging for his life, he cries for one more chance to make it right with the boss, one more chance to see his family—one more chance at life.

His boss happens to be the man who dictates the life and death of every soul in the Laredo corridor, listens to the pleas but has already made up his mind. He stands as judge and jury in this court and it’s clear, he’s heard enough. So he pulls a diamond studded, pearl handled pistol from his belt and slowly hands it over to one of his newest recruits. He tells the recruit to put a bullet in the condemned mans head as he sobs uncontrollably—and so, without hesitation the young man pulls the trigger four times over. (more…)

As she sat on her couch looking back at me, she wipes the tears from behind her glasses and tries to tell me about the night her youngest daughter of 18 years was suddenly and violently taken, never to be heard from again.

Her trembling hands and shaking legs speak volumes of the pain she suffers day-in and day-out, wondering about the fate of her little girl. “Is she alive? Is she dead? Is she cold and hungry? Have they hurt her? If they did kill her, where is her body?” These thoughts race through the grief stricken mind of this single mother a hundred times a day.

Consuelo (not her real name), a 49 year-old mother of four, can hardly speak her daughters’ name before her face flinches with pain and her eyes fill with tears again. “Today is my baby Paula’s 20th birthday [not her real name either]. It’s been over two years and we’ve heard nothing.” With a breath of exasperation, frustration, and more than a hint of resentment she exclaims, “And no one has helped us. No one.”

As horrific as this sounds, this story has been played out hundreds of times in the last five years all across the U.S./Mexican border. Sometimes it ends with the return of the loved one, in some cases alive but in most cases not. Sometimes, like in Consuelo’s case, it never ends. (more…)

The year 2009 has been hyped by the media and political elites as the year of “change” in America. I’ve been filming and reporting on the drug war being waged in Mexico and along our southwest border for over four years and as far as the first six months of 2009 go, even though a lot has happened in that time, not much has changed. On the surface it would seem progress has been made and indeed positive steps have been taken by both the U.S. and Mexican governments. But looking beyond the stories and stats reveals something uglier and more severe that has even the experts questioning the current strategy.

One thing I’ve learned in documenting the drug war is that statistics alone don’t tell the story and for a true picture you have to dig beyond the numbers and the hype to draw a real conclusion of whether progress is being made or not.

The current death toll for this year in Mexico’s war against the cartels just peaked over 2,400. This is about the same number of narco-executions as last year at this time and at this pace we will probably exceed last years toll of 5,400. No real change there. But if you drill down on this number what you find is staggering as it relates to the number of law enforcement officials in the execution tally. Though the exact number of local municipal police is not known for certain because many of the narcos dress up like police to conduct operations, it is reported by intelligence sources that over 1/4 or 600 of these executions have been local, state and federal law enforcement agents. Since the first of the year, thirty-one active federal agents alone have been killed in Mexico. (more…)

On June 3rd Sara Carter and the Washington Times reported, “Al-Qaeda Eyes Anthrax Attack On U.S from Mexico.” The story is based on an Al-Qaeda recruitment video first broadcast back in February on Al Jazeera.  In it, Kuwaiti dissident Abdullah al-Nafisi tells a roomful of people that Al-Qaeda is currently casing the U.S. border with Mexico to see how they could smuggle weapons through border tunnels and into the U.S. (Relax fellas, you don’t need to crawl through tunnels. I can show you whole unguarded roads that go across the river and into the U.S. … unless you really like crawling.)

[Click to enlarge]

Border Ranchers and Texas Law Enforcement have been warning of such a threat for years. For a long while now, ranchers and sheriffs have been reporting incidents of Middle Eastern human smuggling. For some Texas ranchers, stumbling upon Somalis, Eritreans, Bangladeshis or Iraqis is no longer surprising. Zapata County Sheriff Sigfried Gonzales had to reach out to the Israeli Mossad in order to identify Jihadist mercenary patches that were sewn into the inside of clothing recovered in the Texas brush.  (more…)

So a marketing consultant who works for Mayor Bloomberg just resigned after getting into hot water over some stale jokes she made about Mexico at the Huffington Post.

Now, to be clear: the jokes that Betsy Perry made in the post were about Mexico. Not Mexicans.

There is a difference, people.

The jokes included a bit about “drinking the water,” a line about as old as Montezuma, and his revenge. She also brought up the drug gang problems, as well as the kidnappings and, of course, the swine flu. Now, the stuff she said about all this was neither particularly insightful or funny – but the last time I checked, that is not a cause for losing your job. If that were the case, Janeane Garafalo would be living under a bridge. (more…)

In this episode, “NewsBusted” covers: Swine Flu, Mexico, Supreme Court Justice David Souter. Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Arlen Specter, President Obama’s press conference, Chrysler, George Stephanopoulos, Sean Penn, and Daily Show Host Jon Stewart.

YouTube

So I`ve been thinking that this whole immigration issue is like Easter Sunday at my family`s house. A bunch of people start showing up – a lot of them, mind you, I really don`t want to see. But the reason why I don`t want to see them has nothing to do with race, it has to do with being human. Human beings are weird creatures in that we resist things that aren`t comfortable – so when someone drops by unannounced, or perhaps with a date you immediately assume is pompous, stupid and covered in cheap cologne – you take an instant dislike. Essentially, we’re an irritable bunch, and the people we take it out on are the those unfamiliar types that show up without a proper invite.

But here`s what I know about parties: I`ve thrown a crapload of them, and yes, most of the time I’ve been drunk. But the key to a good party is accepting people into the throng not because of what they can do for you, but because they can`t do anything for you…yet.

You just never know. (more…)

I have been a proud conservative Republican my entire life. My father and Jimmy Carter saw to that. My first vote ever was for Ronald Reagan in 1980, and I have never voted for a Democrat. Ever. Even today, the reasons for my being so have not changed, despite the media’s and liberal Democrats’ tireless efforts to discredit my belief system. Though the times may change, core principles never do. I have also served this nation proudly in uniform for six years, and don’t regret a minute of it.

In the early 1980s, my military service brought me to some of the darker corners of the world. I spent time in South Korea and Marcos’ Philippines when both countries were under martial law. Knowing I could be shot just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time really woke me up to what exactly it is we have here in America. Seeing a thousand Vietnamese Boat People pulled out of the South China Sea in one day only reinforced my belief in America, Sweet Land of Liberty.

Today, the Party of Lincoln and Reagan appears to be in political disarray, which is why I am writing this OpEd now. Yet many promising developments, along with some huge mistakes by Congress and the Obama Administration, have opened many new doors for us. If only we will enter. (more…)

The first time you face armed, foreign troops on American soil, something inside you changes. You experience a cold, hard sensation deep in your core. There is an internal shift as the reality sinks in that despite having the strongest military in the world, there are Americans who are not safe on their home soil.

Obama and Mexican President Calderón

I experienced that shift on a cold October night in 2005, when, at a distance of approximately 21 yards, we filmed armed, uniformed soldiers escorting a mule train into the United States.

Guardsmen from Tennessee experienced it in the same location 15 months later when soldiers from Mexico advanced on their observation post. The foreign troops twice attempted to flank the Guardsmen. The Guardsmen were twice ordered to observe and fall back until reinforcements arrived. (more…)

In times past there was a prevailing wisdom that the violence stemming from the drug war equated to just one drug dealer killing another and after they finished killing each other off, things would go back to being peaceful and all would be well— this theory is no longer valid. The escalated violence and corruption the cartels are exhibiting today are quickly eroding Mexico and its democratic institutions to the point that they have caused a serious shift in the entire geopolitical landscape and represent the greatest threat to national security to both the U.S. and Mexico.

One of the more disturbing aspects of the narco-insurgency in North America is the effect it is having on the free press in Mexico. Our own history has proven that exposing the truth in a free press has done more for positive change in government and corporate accountability in our nation than perhaps any other single component, but that simply does not fit in the world of terror that the narcos create and perpetuate. Hardly a single Mexican media outlet in the country operates freely and without fear when it comes to reporting on the narcos and their activities. (more…)