Over the weekend, Nick Broomfield’s anti-Palin doc premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and according to New York Magazine it failed on every conceivable level. There’s an unwritten rule in Hollywood: If you want to succeed and please us, trash Sarah Palin. That Broomfield set out to smear Palin and still failed to win over Toronto says so many bad things about his film one can’t even begin to catalogue them.

Epic fail

NY Mag’s Vulture scores the doc as a Palin versus Broomfield political match and gives the win to the former governor by a crushing seven to one:

Mere months after the release of the Sarah Palin hagio-documentary The Undefeated, British provocateur Nick Broomfield (Kurt & Courtney) arrived at the Toronto International Film Festival with a counter-screed, Sarah Palin: You Betcha! The doc premiered Friday and it looks like it may leave Mama Grizzly–hating liberals sorely unsatisfied: Let’s take a look at Broomfield’s “revelations” and see which, if any, of his punches actually land.

• Broomfield’s drive to Wasilla through the icy Alaskan wilderness is punctuated by a soundtrack so ludicrous — ominous violins, shrill piano notes — that you’d think he was on the hunt for the Abominable Snowman. Once he arrives, Palin’s local fans turn out to be warm and endearing, not a bunch of raging hicks. Point: Palin!

• Broomfield successfully tracks down Mercede Johnston, the candid sister of Palin’s former son-in-law-to-be, Levi. Mercede recounts her brother’s harrowing memories of his traumatic, manipulative appearance onstage with the Palins at the Republican National Convention: “He said it was crazy. And they made him … ” — here comes the bombshell! — ” … shave.” Point: Palin!

And my personal favorite:

(more…)

The Toothless Rottweiler

Big Hollywood has a fairly young audience so I don’t think the pluses and minuses of old age would much interest them. However, my self-appointed assignment here as Sarah Palin’s guard dog has brought me more than a few black comedy dramas as the toothless Rottweiler I am. The attack dog’s “growl” within me starts the second I hear or see anyone looking down on the former governor of Alaska.

Why?

I’m a survivor of parents who chose to have not just one but two abortions.

Learning about abortion at the age of 9 automatically enlists you in the Survivor’s Guilt Club. Toss in an ugly divorce and you have a domestic war zone with two, indelibly damaged “Survivors”, my sister and I. Add “Children of Alcoholics” and, well, we have a play by Eugene O’Neill and August Strindberg, plus Freud’s Oedipal theories running riot in a young artist farmed off at 11 years of age to Prep-School-As-A-Safe-Zone.

Further dramatic details of my upbringing are peppered through my memoir, The Haunted Heaven, available, chapter by chapter, at enterstageright.com.

I have, however, made it into my 71st year and am quite proud of the few achievements that have adorned my life and, thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous, I have made peace with my ten lost years as a drunk in Canada.

(more…)

I was terrified of the prospect of a third party candidate. A three-way, split vote might very well … if the third candidate were viable and interesting … insure the re-election of the worst President in American history, Barack Obama. Nothing would make James Carville happier.

Unless, of course, this third party candidate were Hillary Clinton!

Carville would be strapping on two Colt 45’s, lock n’ load, and mosey on down to the 2012 OK Corral right  behind the Secretary of State. Hillary Clinton is now, if you don’t mind my saying so, Carville’s “Main Man”.

James Carville is not, if you remember, a “Judas” like former Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico.

The Third Party Possibility was a worry I had dispelled awhile ago when Glenn Beck seemed adamant about not running for the Presidency on a Third Party ticket.

Now we have James Carville absolutely certain that someone, so far unnamed, will run against both the Republican and Democratic Candidates.

“I think,” said Glenn Beck in November of 2009,“a third party candidate is going to win in 2012!”

Was Beck talking about himself then?

No.

Beck, in 2009, mentioned Sarah Palin as a third party candidate.

Is Carville echoing the notion?

(more…)

Bill Maher recently complained that “We can’t throw around the word (sexist) just to stop people like me from point out that Michelle Bachmann, now running second for the Republican presidential nomination, is a dangerous nincompoop.” Hm, sort of sounds like the argument of “racism” used toward Obama detractors doesn’t it? 

This video explains the subject in a little more depth: 

—–

(more…)

I’ve been reading and sending link-love to Rotten Tomatoes for years now  and have never seen them as partisan or even political before. They were just a terrific concept of a site that’s very well executed. Well, not anymore. Looks as though they’re just another member of the club. More childish nonsense from the Left.

From the indispensable Kerry Picket at the Washington Times:

["The Undefeated"] is listed on the popular Rotten Tomatoes movie review website as not only a documentary but also a science fiction and fantasy film.

Hopefully, Rotten Tomatoes will claim this was all just some sort of mistake. Nothing would be more fun than to write  a follow-up investigating that theory with the full list of categories the Palin doc could’ve “accidentally” been placed under. But, you know, it just happened to be “science fiction & fantasy.”

Oh the sarcasm we’ll share.

(more…)

Get your tickets here and request that your local theatre screen the film at the official website.

The impact of Steve Bannon’s feature-length documentary that tells the story of Governor Sarah Palin the MSM intentionally and ruthlessly covered up has already been felt. For the first time in three years the MSM is talking about Palin’s record — her record as a successful and dynamic Chief Executive of Alaska who worked closely with both Republicans and Democrats, took on her own party, and beat Big Oil at their own game.

As Andrew Breitbart put it in a tweet:

How #TheUndefeated Is Working: Tina Brown’s Newsweek cover story portrays Palin as Palin: http://t.co/xQRNgrH

The key to the ultimate effectiveness of a documentary like “The Undefeated” is more than just how many people see it or even who those people are. Certainly that matters to some degree, but so does how the very existence of the documentary changes the national political conversation. Naysayers of the “The Undefeated” dismiss the film’s impact by telling us that only Palinistas are going to bother to buy tickets. In other words, since the film preaches to the choir there will be no new converts. Intentionally or not, that’s a fairly simplistic declaration that doesn’t take into account how the film will impact the political news narrative — an impact that’s already apparent to anyone paying attention.

Thanks to the overwhelming publicity the film has already generated (along with the fortuitous combination of the email dump), for the first time since Palin arrived on the national scene her impressive record as the Chief Executive of Alaska is finally getting some serious media attention. Today in the Daily Caller, Rick Manning has an excellent piece that touches on this very subject. In an editorial titled “Will the New Palin Movie Sway Voters?,” he closes with this: 

Right now, most Americans are desperate for a leader who will be unfazed by the entrenched big-government culture that pervades D.C. regardless of which political party is in charge.

Most Americans look at the crowd of Republican candidates for the presidency and yearn for someone with guts, charisma and accomplishments.

Most Americans want someone who they can trust to do what is right for America regardless of the political risk to their own career.

“The Undefeated” reintroduces America to Sarah Palin, a person who has the exact combination of qualities that Americans know are needed to restore America’s greatness and primacy in the world.

(more…)

—–

Hey, I could get to like this guy (if he wasn’t so mean to Steven Crowder).

Most surprising is that Jon Stewart doesn’t even take a back-handed shot at Governor Palin. In fact, he defends her dislike of the MSM by pointing out that the breathless coverage surrounding the unprecedented fishing expedition of 24,000 emails makes her case.

The joke at Andrea Mitchell’s expense is especially note-worthy.

(more…)

So the perfect narrative for any movie is “David vs. Goliath.”

The whistleblower vs. the evil corporation. the tough reporter vs the corrupt politician.

the half-naked talk show host vs. a team of rambunctious houseboys.

But for the narrative to be accepted, David must be a lib, and Goliath an evil Republican.

So when these roles are reversed, in real life, it confuses the crap out of the mainstream media.

Andrew Breitbart was accused of trying to destroy a Congressman, of fabricating a scandal, of hacking social networks.

These accusations were pushed by the left, and a carnal Congressman.

So when Breitbart took the stage at Anthony Weiner’s presser, it may have been one of the greatest, “speaking truth to power” moments ever: Breitbart vindicated himself, and Weiner imploded.

As I tweeted earlier, if Breitbart were a leftist, Sean Penn would die to play him. But since he’s not: I guess it’s Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

Because this battle doesn’t fit one’s assumptions, just ignore it, or mock it.

And, as Jon Stewart says about Weiner, ‘We sometimes forget these people are human’.

Remember him saying that about Palin, Cheney and Bush?

No?

(more…)

I’ve written several articles skewering HBO for producing political projects destined to air immediately prior to the 2012 election, where the vast majority of the cast and crew are passionate Barack Obama supporters, and where the content is aimed at the Democrat’s two favorite Republican villains: Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney. So, when I sat down to watch HBO’s Too Big to Fail, I prepared myself for the worst. What I didn’t expect was the big surprise awaiting me.

Too Big to Fail, which premieres on HBO on May 23, 2011, features a star studded cast recounting the events that led to the financial crisis and bailouts by the U.S. government in 2008. It is a mini-series packed into a 98-minute made-for-television movie where several essential characters are quickly introduced and where finance and economics are casually discussed. It may help if one has a baseline of knowledge about the crisis before watching the movie. If one doesn’t know who Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner are or what Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, and AIG are, it may prove slightly difficult to follow.

Although the Director, Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential, 8 Mile), was limited to telling a very long and complicated story in a very short amount of time, he was able to skillfully pull it off. Perhaps this is because the screenwriter, Peter Gould (Breaking Bad), deftly adapted Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 2009 prize winning New York Times Bestseller, Too Big to Fail. (more…)

—–

It’s like Chevy Chase doing an impersonation of Chevy Chase doing an impersonation of Gerald Ford (which I loved, by the way).

The best Chase could summon in defense of He Who Hit 41% Today, was an excuse that sounds an awful lot like what the Right was warning us about in 2008:

“It’s too early to tell. He’s young. Maybe he has not anticipated or hadn’t yet anticipated, with perspective, a way to gauge what’s going to be most important to the electorate and to people as he came in because he’s young. Perhaps he came in with all sorts of great thoughts and found out that in fact, in order to make things happen he had to deal with upper most issues as it were that were political[.]”

Shorter Chase: Obama has no idea what the hell he’s doing but we expect him to do better next time.

Wars, tax cuts for the rich, Gitmo open, military tribunals on, gas prices spiking, jobless claims up, a health care bill growing less popular by the day, and everyday citizens organizing and taking it to the streets for the first time in generations.

Quick question, Mr. Chase:

(more…)

(more…)

Stacy Drake at Conservatives for Palin:

Jim Geraghty has penned an article criticizing Governor Palin for a law she signed in 2008 that offers tax breaks to film companies who do business in Alaska. Geraghty states that the production company for “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” took part in the program and that it might be “problematic” for the governor “on the campaign trail.”

He writes:

It isn’t too hard to imagine this becoming problematic for Sarah Palin on the campaign trail, as noted by the Tax Foundation:

In case you missed it, small government crusader and Tea Party favorite Sarah Palin’s TLC reality show “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” received a $1.2 million subsidy from the state of Alaska. The show spent $3.6 million on production in the state, meaning that Alaskan taxpayers covered a third of the cost of the show. The show will apparently not have a second season.

Everything Palin has done has been perfectly legal, but it looks problematic for a crusader for small government to end up collecting a seven-figure paycheck from an endeavor that received a seven-figure subsidy, all set up by a program she signed into law. Of course, Palin set up the subsidy in 2008, and the TLC series wasn’t filmed until the summer of 2010, after Palin resigned as governor.

Which begs the question…. What’s the problem?

(more…)

Though notorious for my lousy memory, anyone who’s ever shared this experience will understand why I’ll never forget my first phone call with Andrew Breitbart. It’s hard to believe almost three years have passed so quickly, but I do remember the conversation like it was yesterday. At the time I was trying to squeak out a living at a website of my own that was pretty much devoted to my vision-less complaining about the terrible effect left-wing politics was having on my beloved motion picture industry. On a good day, I maybe got 5,000 hits but things were so financially dire that something had to give — and by “something had to give,” I mean, “I was a month away from going back to bill collecting.”

Then the email came: Please call me. *phone number* –Andrew Breitbart.

I knew of Andrew and had only met him very briefly once before but that day we talked for over two hours and if I were smarter, anything close to charismatic, and capable of being a visionary, it would’ve been like talking to myself. By that time I had already been trying to sound the alarm about what was happening in Hollywood for nearly three years. Certainly there were people who appreciated it, but 5,000 hits a day does not a movement make. But here was this guy on the other end of the phone speaking about it with more passion and insight than I had ever heard before: This is about America. This is about a blacklist. This is about a diversity of opinion at the pop culture table. This is about my kids. This is about truth, justice, and the American way. Out of anyone else’s mouth this would’ve sounded corny as hell, but from Andrew it sounded like The Ramones had entered the building.

So there was that, and then there was the vision. A media empire of BIG sites. Over ten of them: Big Government, Big Journalism, Big Peace, Big Education, Big Israel, and my personal favorite, Big Soros. But it would have to start with Big Hollywood, he said, because nothing was more important than the culture. If you couldn’t win a seat at the table of pop culture, the others won’t matter. Everything is downstream from Hollywood — and not just politics. Hollywood shapes our children, our country, and most importantly, it shapes how the world sees our country. Unless we gain a foothold on that beach, the rest of the invasion will fail.

(more…)

The CBS drama The Good Wife, a politically charged soap-opera-like series, is coming under fire for naming its Sarah Palin-boosting character after America’s most infamous domestic terrorist, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

Matthew Vadum of the Washington-based Capital Research Center says that naming the character “McVeigh” conjures an unmistakable inference. “Calling a character ‘Kurt McVeigh’ conjures up unmistakable images of mass murdering terrorist Timothy McVeigh. Hollywood screenwriters don’t live in a cultural vacuum; they help to create American culture,” Vadum told Fox News.

Even as the TV producers claim that they weren’t trying to discredit Sarah Palin by naming a character that supports her in its series after America’s most murderous homegrown terrorist, they also admit that they purposefully chose the name to invoke anti-government sentiment in the show’s other characters.

Using quite a bit of spin, executive producer/co-creator, Robert King said, “The Kurt McVeigh character was introduced mid-season our first year, and at that time, he was given a name that was intended to play into the anti-conservative prejudices of the more liberal [character in the show].”

That is an interesting formulation of motive, isn’t it? On one hand the show’s producers are trying to claim that the name was not used to invoke a murderous, real-life namesake, yet on the other hand they admit that the name was picked to provoke the “liberal” character to refer to that very madman. You can’t have it both ways, Mr. King. Either you meant the name to make viewers think of the murderous Timothy McVeigh, or you didn’t.

(more…)

THR:

TV Guide confirmed that Griffin will play Tammy Jean, a conservative home-schooling Tea Party candidate rumored to be based on Sarah Palin, while Devine will take on the role of a stripper-turned-nun named Sister Mary Constance.

(more…)

After last night’s Super Bowl I watched “The Social Network” again, this time with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s obsessively dark rage towards Governor Sarah Palin in mind. The first time I saw director David Fincher’s cold but compelling story involving all the emotional and legal entanglements behind the founding of Facebook, I wasn’t aware of Sorkin’s platinum membership in the HeManConservativeWomanRager’s Club. I knew he was a jerk, everyone knows that, but this strange, twisted need of his to publicly demean and humiliate Governor Palin hadn’t yet revealed itself and with that in mind, it added a whole new subtext to a story that even some liberal critics found unsettling for its almost universally degrading portrayal of women.

The furor has has since died down, but immediately after the Oscar-nominated film was released more than one critic pointed out that the female characters in “The Social Network” are mostly beautiful sluts, beautiful crazies or barely-clothed set dressing always getting high or drunk and more than willing to give it up on their knees in a men’s bathroom.  There’s also the main character, Facebook Co-counder Mark Zuckerberg, who’s portrayed as a insecure man seething with hostility towards women, especially after he’s dumped by his girlfriend in the opening scene. Sorkin would have us believe that what drove Zuckerberg to create Facebook was a desire to prove himself to that very same girl, while in reality Zuckerberg claims he was with the same girlfriend he has now during that time — an Asian girl named Priscilla Chan (and it’s a couple of Asian girls who take the worst beatings in Sorkin’s film).

 Defending his work, Sorkin wrote the following:

I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people. These aren’t the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the 80’s. They’re very angry that the cheerleader still wants to go out with the quarterback instead of the men (boys) who are running the universe right now. The women they surround themselves with aren’t women who challenge them (and frankly, no woman who could challenge them would be interested in being anywhere near them.)

You can read a devastating response to that here.

But in other words, Sorkin punts and blames all of Harvard for what many perceived as the film’s disturbing misogyny (but I thought Harvard was a progressive school?). You see, it’s not Sorkin who has hostility issues towards women, he was simply portraying reality, portraying how intellectuals are bitterly angry that all the pretty girls still want nothing to do with them even though they perceive themselves as Masters of the Universe. Insert: record scratch.

In light of Sorkin’s seethingly vitriolic personal attacks on Governor Palin, does that sound a little close to home?

(more…)

Uncharacteristically, Jon Stewart is pretty late with his latest intellectually dishonest attempt to dehumanize Sarah Palin into a punchline. This phony Sputnik kerfuffle was settled last week. For those of you who only get your news from The Daily Show, I’ll set the stage and try to keep the words below three syllables: As is always the case, whenever Palin says a word, the left-wing media loses their collective minds and then proceeds to make fools of themselves looking for some way to further the dishonest narrative that the former governor is dumb or mean or crazy or all three. Stewart is a main player in this nasty business of character assassination but again, this entire matter was settled last week by our own Peter Schweizer, the Editor-In-Chief of Big Peace and a man who knows of what he speaks. First, let’s go to Stewart’s left-wing spin:

Now, let’s look at the facts. Last week, immediately after Palin’s appearance on Greta, Steve Stromberg at the Washington Post used the same dishonest arguments as Stewart to ridicule Palin. This is when Peter Schweizer, someone whose knowledge base, unlike Stromberg’s, extends beyond Wikipedia, stepped in. Here’s his main point, but you’ll want to read the whole thing:
 

Palin’s other point is that Sputnik was the sort of government bureaucratic program that got the Soviet Union in trouble;  it’s an example of what eventually did them in.  Citing Wikipedia (what journalistic ingenuity!),  Stromberg argues that actually the Soviet Union didn’t have a debt problem until some “thirty years after” Sputnik.  Perhaps instead of relying on Wikipedia,  Stromberg might have consulted Robert Gates’ book From the Shadows which chronicles, in part, his career as a Soviet analyst at the CIA.  (Just in case they are unaware at the Post, this is the same Robert Gates who is now the Secretary of Defense.)  On page 173, he accurately points out that the CIA knew early on of the “Soviet economic crisis.  From the late 1950s, CIA had clearly described the chronic weaknesses as well as the formidable military power of the Soviet Union.”  Hmmm.  Do you think this “chronic weaknesses might have had something to do with excessive bureaucracies and the size of government? Note to Stromberg:  you will have to close Wikipedia and actually crack a book for this one.

Note to Jon Stewart: you will want to close the Washington Post and actually crack a book for this one. Maybe Palin can lend you whatever she’s reading. (more…)