Hanging in Andrew Breitbart’s living room is an eight-foot-tall portrait of Abraham Lincoln. The president’s visage — an expressionistic swirl of broad brushstrokes and bright colors — earns the admiration of everyone who sees it, Breitbart notes on the back cover of Ronald Reagan and the American Ideal, a book of paintings by the portrait’s artist, Steve Penley. Yet the muckraker saves his highest compliment for the painter himself. “Penley is one of those patriots who is heeding his country’s call,” Breitbart writes — the call to defend American exceptionalism.

It’s a weighty charge for the 47-year-old artist from Carrollton, Ga. A husband and father of three children, Penley hasn’t always painted with such purpose. These days, however, he produces hundreds of portraits of his favorite historical figures, such as Ronald Reagan and the Founders, to inspire patriotism in his fellow countrymen. “I just love my country,” he tells National Review Online.

Penley started doodling cowboys and Indians while growing up in Macon, Ga., and he continued his artistic diversions through high school. When he enrolled at the University of Georgia, however, he soon realized he “had no other marketable skills,” so he majored in art.

Penley, preppy and unjaded in his khakis and penny loafers, didn’t look the part of a tortured artist. “I remember the first day I walked into art class,” he reminisces. “Everyone stopped and got quiet. It was like an E. F. Hutton commercial.” And then he saw what his classmates were working on. “Their paintings were dark and brown and black and cynical,” he says.

Read the full article here.

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It’s the forced hilarity between James Cameron and Governor Schwarzenegger at the very end of the video that ultimately changed our minds about how we’ll vote on Prop. 23, that swung us over to the dark-side of over-regulation and middle-class job destruction.

How could anyone resist that Rat Packy ring-a-ding-ding rapport?

Over at NRO, however, Mark Krikorian wasn’t as awed as we were:

I don’t know anything about the substance of the issue, though my inclination would be to assume Cameron’s full of it. But what’s interesting is that Cameron is a foreigner, a Canadian citizen, who withdrew his application for U.S. citizenship after Bush won reelection in 2004. So what business does he have telling Americans how to vote on anything? Do Americans appear in Canadian political ads?

James Cameron, full of it?  Mark, please stop believing your lying eyes.

“I would like to point out that those flowers were picked by illegal immigrants & they’re not voting for you, bitch.”

End update.

Class versus crass. Good humor versus the inability to feel your own first name. Well-crafted gamesmanship versus white hot hate.

Bravo, Ms. Angle — you have the makings of a stateswoman, compared to Joyless Behar who has the makings of every man’s ex-wife.

Via NRO, here’s what Joyless received from the Angle campaign today — a thank you note and flowers:

“Joy, Raised $150,000 online yesterday. Thanks for your help. Sincerely, Sharron Angle”

If Barbara Walters had a lick of sense (or class), she’d boot the hate-filled, foul-mouthed Behar and use Angle’s example when looking for a replacement. Feisty, smart, independent, and conservative. But Babs has a left-wing agenda to push, knows her ideas are losers, and fully understands from her years on broadcast television that outnumbering conservatives four-to-one is her only hope.

Giving intolerance and venom a daily platform is a sad way to close a legacy.

Now is not a time to psychoanalyze the attacker by using a media-supplied telescope that already said he was dead, and that there were multiple attackers.  Media: STOP, please.  There will be time to pursue answers and justice after Christmas.  We must remember that family members lost loved ones just before the holidays.  Justice and answers will come with time.

When stories of this kind break, the weatherman becomes the most accurate part of the newscast. We know nothing right now. We know less than nothing because too much of what we’re told is wrong.

All we know is that people are dead and wounded, and families and loved ones are suffering. That’s all that matters right now. The rest is noise.

Proving he fits right in at MSNBC, Donny Deutsch managed to make up three facts in just a few minutes:

Around 2:20 Deutsch tries to sell the load that Hollywood’s made some recent films about American heroes. He knows this isn’t true but says it is anyway. He has to. He has nothing else to fall back on. Miller’s utterly destroyed him, so he blithely says whatever to avoid having to face the truth.

Deutsch is also propagandizing from the very beginning with that “salt on the fire” nonsense about Americanism not selling overseas. We know that’s not true.

Oh, and they are making that Captain America movie. 

Other than that, good job getting John’s name right, Donny.

Ben Shapiro seals the deal with his excellent analysis of G.I. Joe in the age of Obama. Check it out here.