In May 2010, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg posited that the individual who packed a Nissan Pathfinder full of explosives and parked it in Times Square was likely a homegrown American “with a political agenda who doesn’t like the health care bill or something.”

Fortunately, the car bomb did not detonate.

The terrorist turned out to be Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistan-born U.S. citizen. And, not surprisingly, Shahzad wasn’t upset about the health care bill. After pleading guilty in court he said, “I consider myself a Mujahid, a Muslim-soldier.” He was upset, as he put it, over “American occupation of Muslim Lands.”

Shortly after the attack, Bloomberg prematurely asserted that there was no evidence suggesting the bomber was part of any recognized terror network. Shahzad later told the court he trained with the Pakistani Taliban to learn bomb-making and other related skills.

Could it be that Bloomberg has underestimated the threat of Islamist terror, or is there another agenda?

The issue has again become relevant in recent days. The New York Times ran a series of articles and editorials blaming the NYPD for using the film The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America as part of their counter-terrorism training. (more…)

According to the New York Times, even with upwards of 40 blockbusters released in 3D (meaning much higher ticket prices), box office revenues in North America dropped 4.5% this year. In worse news, overall attendance dropped 5.3%, which means that over the last two years attendance has dropped a whopping 11%. When you lose over 10% of your customers in just two years, something is horribly wrong. When you combine that with plummeting DVD sales, you have an existential problem.

Director Roland Emmerich at his London home

The Times blames much of the problem on the economy, but as anemic as it’s been, the economy has improved some since 2008 and 2009, while attendance and revenues have not. In other words, that’s a stupid excuse. But at least it’s a new excuse. After years of blaming Redbox and piracy, you have to give Hollywood’s media friends credit for coming up with a new way to avoid admitting the obvious: People don’t like Hollywood or their product very much.

Movies are a cyclical business and analysts say that 2010 benefited mightily from holdover sales for “Avatar,” which was released late in 2009 and became one of the most popular movies of all time. A decline of hundreds of millions of dollars is not catastrophic when weighed against the size of the industry. Over all, North American ticket revenue for 2011 is projected to be about $10.1 billion, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles box-office data.

That is only a 4.5 percent falloff from 2010. But studio executives are alarmed by the downturn nonetheless, in part because the real picture is worse than the raw revenue numbers suggest.

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JAMES GARNER’S DAUGHTER OPENS TRIBUTE SITE TO HER AWESOME FATHER

The Mighty James Garner’s daughter, Gigi Garner (a successful talent manager in her own right), has opened a tribute website to her father. She seems to be updating it fairly regularly with a number of terrific family photos and excerpts from Garners’ new memoir “The Garner Files,” which I loved and reviewed here.

Please check the site out.

Anyone who’s been reading me for any amount of time (or who has seen my Twitter wallpaper), knows of my all-consuming affection for all things James Garner, most especially “The Rockford Files.” You can imagine how much this tweet meant to me.

Tell me how it gets any better than that. You can’t, because it doesn’t.

The only bad news is that if this photo on Ms. Garner’s site displays the actor’s real signature, that means I got robbed on Ebay.

Cue my well-rehearsed of-course-I-got-swindled-again Rockford face.

FINALLY: AN HONEST ASSESSMENT OF HOLLYWOOD’S BOX OFFICE BLUES

With all of Hollywood and most of their sycophant entertainment media blaming box office and DVD woes on everything but bad product, this is the rare break from that absurd narrative:

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I remember Morgan best from his brilliant turn as the appropriately named Oily Perkins in the Western-comedy “Support Your Local Sheriff” (1969). RIP, Oily.  – JN

New York Times:

Harry Morgan was born Harry Bratsburg on April 10, 1915, in Detroit. His parents were Norwegian immigrants. After graduating from Muskegon High School, where he played varsity football and was senior class president, he intended to become a lawyer, but debating classes in his pre-law major at the University of Chicago stimulated his interest in the theater. He made his professional acting debut in a summer stock production of “At Mrs. Beam’s” in Mount Kisco, N.Y., and his Broadway debut in 1937 in the original production of “Golden Boy,” starring Luther Adler, in a cast that also included Karl Malden and Lee J. Cobb.

After moving to California in 1942, he was spotted by a talent scout in a Santa Barbara stock company’s production of William Saroyan’s one-act play “Hello Out There.” Signing a contract with 20th Century Fox, he originally used the screen name Henry Morgan, but changed Henry to Harry in the 1950s to avoid confusion with the radio and television humorist Henry Morgan.

Mr. Morgan attracted attention almost immediately. In “The Ox-Bow Incident” (1943), which starred Henry Fonda, he was praised for his portrayal of a drifter caught up in a lynching in a Western town. Reviewing “A Bell for Adano” (1945), based on John Hersey’s novel about the Army in a liberated Italian town, Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times that Mr. Morgan was “crude and amusing as the captain of M.P.’s.”

He went on to appear in “All My Sons” (1948), based on the Arthur Miller play, with Edward G. Robinson and Burt Lancaster; “The Big Clock” (1948), in which he played a silent, menacing bodyguard to Charles Laughton; “Yellow Sky” (1949), with Gregory Peck and Anne Baxter; and the critically praised western “High Noon” (1952), with Gary Cooper. Among his other notable films were “The Teahouse of the August Moon” (1956), with Marlon Brando and Glenn Ford, and “Inherit the Wind” (1960), with Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, in which he played a small-town Tennessee judge hearing arguments about evolution in the fictionalized version of the Scopes “monkey trial.” In “How the West Was Won” (1962), he played Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.

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The New York Times piece Lee refers to here is the most appalling piece of race-baiting I’ve read in years. You can read my write-up about it at Big Journalism. The reaction the Times was looking for is exactly this kind of thing from Spike Lee. They want high-profile, left-wing black Americans to take after Herman Cain. They want to toxify him as a sell-out in order to hurt his standing among black voters. The Times also wants to make damn sure Tea Party Republicans get no credit for embracing a black man. That would kill a cherished narrative the corrupt MSM has spent two years creating about us being racist.

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New York Times:

James Arness, who burnished the legend of America’s epic West as Marshal Matt Dillon, the laconic peacemaker of Dodge City on “Gunsmoke,” one of the longest-running dramatic series in television history, died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 88.

A family spokeswoman, Ginny Fazer, confirmed the death. Mr. Arness was terribly shy and had almost no training as an actor. A wartime leg wound made it painful for him to mount a horse. But he became the best-known tin star of his era, portraying the towering, weathered marshal for 20 years, from 1955 to 1975. He also made some 50 films and television movies, mostly westerns, in a career that stretched across five decades.

To a generation of television viewers, Mr. Arness and “Gunsmoke” embodied a new, more adult vision of the mythic Old West: a quiet, vulnerable lawman facing not stereotyped villains and clichéd situations but a chaotic frontier freighted with moral judgments and occasional failure. He might be too late to stop a killing. He could save a girl from kidnappers, but not from her father’s brutality.

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Today’s New York Times:

Netflix posted a first-quarter profit of $60.2 million on Monday and said it had added 3.3 million subscribers in the United States in three months’ time, its fastest rate of growth yet.

“It took us four years to get to 3.3 million subscribers,” Reed Hastings, the company’s chief executive, said in an interview Monday evening. “Now we did it in one quarter.”

Mr. Hastings said the online streaming business “is just racing ahead.” But earlier in the day, in a letter to shareholders, the company cautioned that its torrid pace of growth might be tempered in the months ahead. It said it expected to add 1.2 million to 2 million subscribers in the next three months. Netflix shares declined about 5 percent in after-hours trading.

Although some analysts were disappointed by Netflix’s outlook for the second quarter, its results in the first quarter were generally above expectations. At the end of the first quarter, Netflix had 22.8 million subscribers in the United States, giving it as big a footprint as the biggest American cable operator, Comcast, which reported 22.8 million subscribers at the end of last year.

That subscriber milestone was the best proof to date that Netflix has responded more quickly and more effectively than any other media company to customers’ demands for video-on-demand. Yet the milestone is largely symbolic because Comcast and Netflix do not directly compete; Comcast is available only in certain parts of the country, and Netflix is largely supplemental to the services provided by cable and satellite operators.

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Ed. Note: This is a ‘logue from last week.

So, on this rainy evening, I do what I often do: wonder what Nicholas Kristof is concerned about.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to wonder, for long.

The New York Times writer was on Morning Joe – the tv show, not the hand massager – discussing today’s hearings looking at radicalism among American Muslims.

There, he said he had a problem with the hearing, because it makes us look like big meanies.

He said, “I’m sure that at mosques around this country, especially the more radical mosques, this is going to be seen as one more evidence that people are picking on us.”

Now, I gotta give Kristof credit, because he said what’s on the minds of all our nation’s spineless media.

And that is: protecting people is far less important than protecting feelings.

Which, first of all, is rude to Muslims. See, I think the average Muslim can appreciate concerns about terrorism. Tip-toeing around them is offensive, for it implies they aren’t civilized enough to deal with it. I think it’s pretty obvious they would embrace the conversation, rather than be excluded because of their religion.

And as for the “more radical mosques” that Kristof worries about – their feelings don’t rate. They already want us dead. Kristof seems to be saying, the best way to deal with a bully is to mollify him.

But how?

Should we visit these radical mosques with gift baskets?

I wouldn’t know what to put in them. “World’s greatest jihadist” coffee mugs?

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So it goes when Hollywood begins to suspect it has made a mistake. — New York Times

Not a moral mistake, mind you. A PR mistake. A tactical mistake. Oops, our ties to a ruthless dictator’s son might look bad! Man, this town sure loves them some dictators.

I’m ready for my close-up, Liberal Hollywood

Today’s New York Times:

Things have gotten chilly here for Natural Selection, the film production company backed by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s son Saadi.

On its office line, a recorded message has been the only answer for much of the last week.

Outside the company’s suite on Sunset Boulevard — across the street from the Hustler store and under a billboard promoting the Jerry Weintraub documentary “His Way” — a parking spot identified as Natural Selection’s is blocked by a battered white van with four flat tires. (An attendant’s notice taped to the back is dated Feb. 2.)

And Mathew Beckerman, the producer who made a splash in Variety last year with word that he had rounded up $100 million in financing for the company from Mr. Qaddafi and others, is suddenly getting a very cold shoulder.

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In the video above, there’s really no way to tell if Whoopi Goldberg has a point or not. This 2,000+ word piece written by Manohla Daris and A.O. Scott is, to put it simply, a mess. Does this even make any sense?

Real change seemed to have come to movies or at least the Academy, which had given statuettes to a total of seven black actors in the previous 73 years. After Mr. Washington and Ms. Berry, there would be Jamie Foxx and Forest Whitaker (both best actors); Morgan Freeman (best supporting actor); Jennifer Hudson and Mo’Nique (best supporting actresses).  The consolidation of a black presence in the movies and television did not signal the arrival of a postracial Hollywood any more than the election of Barack Obama in 2008 spelled the end of America’s 400-year-old racial drama. But it was possible, over much of the past decade, to believe that a few of the old demons of suspicion and exclusion might finally be laid to rest.

I’m assuming that’s the section Whoopi feels snubbed by, but the wording is so confusing there’s really no way to tell if she should’ve been included there or not. 

Anyway, what Daris and Scott are trying to do here is write one of those self-important “what does it all mean” articles about the lack of a Black Oscar nominee this year, and as much as I relish seeing left-wing Hollywood cook in their own PC juices, the article sucks. Once Obama’s brought into the argument, you know there’s no argument … or point. I’ve tried to read the piece three times now and still have no idea what the 2,000 words are trying to say.

One year without a Black Oscar nominee does not a “what does it all mean” article justify.

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You think I contaminated myself, you think I did that? 

Why it’s a left-wing film

For my money, nothing exposes the left for the anti-capitalist, anti-progress socialists they really are more than their opposition to nuclear power. Here’s an energy source that overcomes all their objections regarding safe, clean, and renewable and still they vehemently oppose it with the worst kind of hysterical scare tactics. In this respect you can’t even label them “European Socialists” because there are nearly 200 nuclear power plants currently powering Europe, over 50 in France alone, and yet here in America — thanks mainly to environmental fear-mongering — we only have a little over a hundred.

The same leftists opposed to this provably safe answer to many of our energy problems somehow have no problem social-engineering all of us into the rolling coffin of a Smart Car, and if given the personal choice between living next to an enviro-wacko approved hydroelectric dam or an evil nuclear power plant, give me Three Mile Island any day. The failure of dams and levees feels like an annual event, whereas Chernobyl (which was really a failure of socialism) happened over 25 years ago.

Director Mike Nichols’ “Silkwood” is obviously a Hollywood broadside in favor of the anti-nuke movement, making a folk hero out of a personally troubled labor union activist who supposedly was just about to dramatically deliver the final blow to her employer, real-life energy company Kerr-McGee, before being involved in a fatal but “mysterious” car accident. No documents were found on her at the scene, but the legend of Karen Silkwood tells us that just before she died on the evening of November 13, 1974, this brave whistle-blower was just miles away from delivering documents to the New York Times that proved all kinds of corporate misdeeds involving missing weapons-grade plutonium, faulty nuclear reactor fuel rods, and a number of employee safety issues. (more…)

The New York Times:

Did the bill pledging federal funds for the health care of 9/11 responders become law in the waning hours of the 111th Congress only because a comedian took it up as a personal cause?

And does that make that comedian, Jon Stewart — despite all his protestations that what he does has nothing to do with journalism — the modern-day equivalent of Edward R. Murrow?

Certainly many supporters, including New York’s two senators, as well as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, played critical roles in turning around what looked like a hopeless situation after a filibuster by Republican senators on Dec. 10 seemed to derail the bill.

But some of those who stand to benefit from the bill have no doubt about what — and who — turned the momentum around. …

Mr. Bloomberg, a frequent guest on “The Daily Show,” also recognized Mr. Stewart’s role.

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A couple of days before his suspension, Keith Olbermann sat for an interview with the New York Times to discuss this and that, and here’s what the Indefinitely Suspended “Countdown” anchor had to say about Jon Stewart’s above-it-all-ery:

NYT: You wrote on Twitter that Stewart had jumped the shark. Are you suggesting his show is in decline?

Olbermann: I said he jumped a small shark. If he believes he has no political viewpoint, that’s ludicrous. For him to now say, ‘‘I’m not in the media, I’m not poised in this world of political expression, I never take gratuitous shots at people or go over the top and I’m not particularly pointed in one direction,’’ each of those things was ludicrous.

And this is how Jon Stewart effectively turned himself into a joke over the past few months. Even Olbermann sees through the clown nose and is willing to publicly point and scoff. Stewart drained a ton of political and moral capital with his “Restore Sanity” rally, and especially with his wildly hypocritical and sanctimonious lecture at the end. 

The whole affair was a lose-lose for Stewart. His ratings might have gotten a bump but the Dems still got hammered in the midterms and in the process of hoping to stop that Stewart built a glass house and lost the power he once held to shame others. Now he’s just another marginalized, left-wing comedian with a show that attracts less than 5% of the population –even Keith Olbermann sees that.   (more…)

JournoList scandal is back and prepare for it to be a driving force in the news for quite some time. The Daily Caller published an article tonight indicating they’ve obtained emails from the JournoList and the initial details are as damning as we expected when the list-serv, founded by the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein in 2007, surfaced with the Dave Weigel kerfuffle last month.

Snippets from the article below, but make sure to read the whole thing at the Daily Caller and return to Big Journalism early and often as we unpack the details that emerge and track the fallout from this seminal event in the history of left-wing media bias. It’s unclear exactly what the Daily Caller has, but there’s certainly no indication from this article they’ve already laid all their cards out on the table.

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.” (more…)

One of George Stevens’ filmmaking maxims was: “The camera is not the instrument. People are always the instrument.” Nowhere in his oeuvre is this more evident than in Shane, perhaps the most peculiarly cast A-grade Western in Hollywood history.

It all started with a memo from Paramount Studios, where the director was currently under contract: “Herewith story and treatment entitled Shane, which we would like you to consider for one of your two remaining pictures. . . This property is now being supervised by one of our studio producers, but no serious problem would be involved in re-assigning it to you, and we are prepared to do so if you like it. . .” Stevens did like it, and soon began reading both the novel and existing script, marking them up with marginal notes that contained the seeds of dialogue and shots that would go on to become immortal.

As packaged, the movie was set to star Alan Ladd, Paramount’s most popular star — only John Wayne eclipsed Ladd’s popularity in moviegoer polls during those heady years. But Stevens initially considered other options. Many of his jotted notes about the character of Shane referenced “Monty,” showing that Stevens was thinking of using Montgomery Clift, the young, tight-jawed brooder then appearing in the director’s tragic love story A Place in the Sun (1951). Gregory Peck was also in the running. Meanwhile, author Jack Schaefer wanted “a dark, deadly person” — someone more like tough-guy gangster actor George Raft — to portray his hero. For the part of Joe Starrett, the homesteader and father of the young boy, names like Broderick Crawford, Burt Lancaster, and William Holden were bandied about. (more…)

I have just received word that the New York Times is preparing to go public with a list of names of Americans covertly working in Afghanistan providing force protection for our troops, as well as the rest of our Coalition Forces.  If the Times actually see this through, the red ink they are drowning in will be nothing compared to the blood their entire organization will be covered with.  Make no mistake, the Times is about to cause casualty rates in Afghanistan to skyrocket.  Each and every American should be outraged. 

As chronicled here, here, here, and here the Central Intelligence Agency via the New York Times has been waging a nasty proxy war against the Department of Defense over its use of former military and intelligence personnel to do what the CIA is both incapable and unwilling to do: gather the much needed intelligence that keeps our troops safe.  

According to Washington Post columnist, David Ignatius, “[T]he U.S. military has long been unhappy about the quality of CIA intelligence in Afghanistan,” and the senior military intelligence officer in Afghanistan, Maj Gen Michael T. Flynn went so far as to publish a stunning report calling for, “sweeping changes to the way the intelligence community thinks about itself.”  (more…)

No one has ever accused Alec Baldwin of being a rocket scientist, but apparently the actor fancies himself a nuclear physicist. At least that’s the logical conclusion to draw based on his post over at HuffPo entitled “The Human Cost of Nuclear Power.” The actor assumes his new role with gusto, metaphorically donning a lab coat to explain what he believes are the inherent dangers of nuclear power, but his bizarre conclusions and the outdated, discredited research he cites suggests that a straightjacket would be his better fashion choice. 

Let’s start with a question that illustrates just how far the limb that Baldwin is precariously balancing upon extends: what kind of power plant emits the most radiation? The correct answer isn’t the obvious answer. According to the Department of Energy, coal fired power plants emit about one hundred times more radiation, per unit of energy produced, than nuclear plants, chiefly because coal naturally contains trace amounts of radioactive compounds and, unlike nukes, they’re not designed with radioactive shields. Before anyone living near a coal fired power plant runs screaming for the door, I should hasten to add this is still an incredibly tiny amount of radiation, about 1/10,000th of all the radiation that an average person is exposed to each year. Natural sources, by far, make the biggest radioactive contributions to our lives. Nothing else is even close. 

As the focal point of his argument, the actor cites a study that has been the subject of more criticism than Baldwin’s daughter receives from her dad via voice-mail. The Radiation and Public Health Project’s so-called “tooth fairy” study purported to demonstrate a link between cancer and proximity to nuclear power plants, based on supposedly elevated levels of a radioactive element (strontium 90) found in children’s teeth. Without boring you with the details, the study was so poorly conducted and conclusions drawn so wildly unsupportable that even the New York Times could barely suppress an editorial smirk while covering the story. A host of peer-reviewed studies have thoroughly debunked the supposed link between nuclear power and injurious health effects. Nonetheless, the Radiation and Public Health Project is near and dear to Baldwin’s liberal heart, so the facts be damned. Nuclear power is dangerous! Anyone who has seen the China Syndrome ought to know that.  (more…)