Late-night host Conan O’Brien takes aim at President Obama’s plans to “streamline” the military through reduced defense spending while the rest of the Congressional budget inflates.

From Team Coco:

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You would think a humor publication would find plenty to mock about Barack Obama.

After all, then-Sen. Barack Obama campaigned in 2008 alongside Greek columns and promised his election would be the moment “when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal …” And let’s not forget the plethora of broken campaign promises, battalions of straw men and class warfare that have come to define the last three years.

Instead, The Onion serves up faux news stories like this:

Obama Openly Asks Nation Why on Earth He Would Want to Serve for Another Term

Yes, the media narrative regarding Obama has officially arrived at a newspaper dedicated to political satire. Liberal humorists would rather protect their own than make us laugh and speak truth to power.

PITTSBURGH—Citing three years of exhausting partisan politics, constant gridlock in Congress, and an overall feeling that the entire nation has “completely lost it,” President Barack Obama openly asked a campaign-rally crowd Tuesday why he’d want to serve another term as president of “this godforsaken country.”

“My fellow Americans, I come to you today to ask, why?” Obama said to 1,200 people gathered inside a gymnasium at Taylor Allderdice High School. “Why can’t our congressional leaders work together to create jobs? Why can’t Wall Street ever be held accountable? And most important, why on God’s green earth would I voluntarily subject myself to this nonsense for another four years?”

Didn’t Obama campaign as a non-partisan healer who would rise above congressional gridlock? And didn’t he enjoy a Democratic Congress for his first two years in office that allowed him to pass virtually anything he pleased?

Now, here come the delusional talking points that could have been uttered by Bill Press or any other reality-challenged liberal pundit.

“I have a pen and some paper right here,” Obama said Wednesday morning at a town hall meeting in Ohio. “Let’s list the pros and cons of being president. Con: There are people out there who literally want to shoot you dead. Con: We live in a country seriously considering a Newt Gingrich White House. Con: You can help 40 million Americans receive health care, sign legislation that regulates a financial system run amok, give the order to kill Osama bin Laden, help topple Muammar Qaddafi’s tyrannical regime without losing the life of one American soldier, end the war in Iraq, repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, stave off a second Great Depression, take out more than 30 top al- Qaeda leaders, and somehow everyone still calls you the next Jimmy Carter.”

And what’s the video link currently at the bottom of the story page: Did the media treat Bachmann unfairly because she’s an insane woman?

Expect much, much more of this as the presidential elections come into sharper focus.

L.A. Times:

During the Friday night premiere of his new film “God Bless America,” writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait sat in an aisle seat in the middle of Toronto’s Ryerson Theatre. His elation and surprise were obvious as the audience responded with rowdy, pumped-up enthusiasm to the film’s wild rants and violent satire.

The movie itself is something of an oddball roadtrip comedy crossed with a furious social critique. After divorced office drone Frank (Joel Murray, recently of “Mad Men”) is told by his doctor he has a brain tumor, he sets off into a downward spiral. Having also lost his job and realizing his increasingly bratty daughter wants nothing to do with him, he projects his frustration out onto the world, setting off on a kill-spree rampage that targets meanness, rudeness and the coarsening of American culture.

Along the way he picks up teenage Roxy (Tara Lynn Barr, in a performance both sweet and psychotic) and takes her under his wing as the family he wishes he had.

Friday night’s audience loudly received Frank and Roxy’s rants on the state of what’s wrong in the world, which included the Kardashians, talk radio and anger-driven TV newcasts, people who say “literally” too much, phones in movie theaters, high-fives and other assorted annoyances. Even such unlikely targets as the writer Diablo Cody and her movie “Juno” come under fire. ”How can we be a civilization if we can’t even be civilized?” asks Frank at one point. …

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If you hadn’t had the opportunity yet, I urge you to head on over to Big Government to check out the Pigford series unfurling today. I would start with Andrew Breitbart’s anchor piece, jump into this superb piece of investigative journalism by Breitbart, Big Peace editor Peter Schweizer and Gary Hewson, and then keep refreshing. Much more there, much more to come.

As someone who’s not a regular watcher of Stephen Colbert I have to say this clip surprised me. I thought he was supposed to be impersonating Bill O’Reilly. All I saw was Jon Stewart in a better suit and nerd-glasses.

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word – The Great White Wail
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

Anyway, in the Comedy Central Dynamic Duo’s usual role of being incurious, knee-jerk protectors of all things Big Fat Federal Government, all you have here is Colbert fulfilling that role with the usual-usual we see from the left. In three words his argument is: race-race-race. Colbert’s not interested in the facts or anyone’s point of view or arguments – unless, of course, they fit his tight little leftist narrative. His idea of satire is thimble deep; if someone says a minority group was oppressed, we must write a check and write it now… 

And anyone who disagrees is racially insensitive. LMAO! (more…)

As I watched my favorite morning news show today, an item came up which caused me to execute a perfect Danny Thomas “spit-take.”  Today is the publication date for President Obama’s new children’s book billed as “a moving tribute to thirteen groundbreaking Americans and the ideals that have shaped our nation.”   The content of the book didn’t cause my reaction, nor was it that what Obama would describe as the “ideals that have shaped our nation,” would probably be unrecognizable to our founding fathers.  The publication of the President’s book made me angry but it had nothing to do with the President’s progressive politics and everything to do with the title of his book; Of Thee I Sing.

There is only one true Of Thee I Sing, a musical that first appeared on Broadway almost seventy years ago and (in my humble opinion) is one of the most biting political satires ever written. In fact, Of Thee I Sing was the first successful American musical with a consistently satiric tone.  The writers and the cast were unsure of what the public’s reception would be, prompting one of the writers of the book, George S. Kaufman, to quip “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.”

Written at the beginning of the great depression, Of Thee I Sing lampoons a political system too tied up in personalities and silly little issues to fix the country’s economy. The creative team behind the musical was a Broadway All-Star team.  The book was written by George S. Kaufman (You Can’t Take it With You) and Morrie Ryskind. The team’s previous collaboration was Animal Crackers, a Broadway musical written for the Marx Brothers (Ryskind went on to write many of the Marx Brothers movies). Music and lyrics were written by George and Ira Gershwin.  George Gershwin was perhaps America’s greatest composer, writing everything from musicals, to opera, to classical music and ballet.   Ira Gershwin is one of the American musical’s greatest lyricists, who wrote for both stage and screen (including the original A Star is Born).

Of Thee I Sing was the first musical ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Unfortunately though the score is an essential part of the play, George Gershwin was was not recognized by the Pulitzer committee.

The play tells the story of presidential candidate John P. Wintergreen,” he’s the man the people choose, loves the Irish and the Jews.” For Vice President the choice is Alexander Throttlebottom, who throughout the play keeps trying to get into meetings and rallies, but gets thrown out because no one knows who he is.

Thanks to political bosses Louis Lippman and Francis X. Gilhooley, newspaper magnate Matthew Arnold Fulton, Senators Carver Jones and Robert E. Lyons – Wintergreen’s chosen platform was the politically safe “love platform.”  The party bosses also decide that Wintergreen should get married, so they hold a beauty pageant to select a bride for him. The winner is the sultry southern belle Diana Deveraux. (more…)

The takeaway from the three clips below is that when you have to explain yourself, you’re losing — and Stewart is desperately having to explain himself. Rachel Maddow obviously likes and admires Stewart but doesn’t buy his above-it-allery for a second or, in a desperate effort to retain his clown nose, his latest spin that he’s being criticized for not getting out on the playing field as opposed to — and this is the subtext of Maddow’s criticism — admitting he already is.

Maybe Stewart isn’t being dishonest. Maybe the left-wing comedian honestly doesn’t see himself for what he is — a political warrior for the Left disguised as a lofty satirist. Does the “Daily Show’ host not possess enough self-awareness to understand that when you have to run around doing rehabilitation interviews that maybe it’s not everyone else who’s got it wrong?

‘Restore Sanity” was a bridge too far and damaged Stewart’s brand. HE became the story and whether by design or due to a crippling inability to turn anything resembling a penetrating insight onto himself, the disingenuous posturing finally caught up to him. Blame it on a raging case of Beck-Envy.

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When musician (and regular Big Hollywood contributor) Ezra Dulis hears music that’s either anti-Christian or anti-Capitalist he longs for a creative response. But said response too often comes in the form of a pithy bumper sticker or conservative song parody.

“There’s really nothing of the same caliber from our side,” the openly conservative Dulis laments. Now, the Washington, PA. resident is trying to do something about it. Dulis’ musical career finds him alternating between protest music and odes to eternal love.

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His new EP “Politics, v. 1” uses crunchy musical riffs to roast the Obama administration and speak to a center-right nation that rarely hears music reflecting its core beliefs.  He also hopes to stretch the boundaries of political music while embracing its true counter-culture roots.

“I want to make music that can be enjoyed by someone who isn’t right wing. I’m trying to make it something that can last beyond an election season,“ says Dulis, who compares his music to acts like My Bloody Valentine. “We need to embrace an underdog status through that … and make something contemporary and immediate.’

Dulis, a videographer by trade, isn’t looking to drag the Left through the mud via his melodies. (more…)

The irony of the most anti-capitalist industry in America begging for tax credits/incentives/welfare in order to keep pumping out their anti-corporate/American product is just too rich. Nevertheless, from this story, it’s obvious “Machete” creator Robert Rodriguez is very much counting on mucho tax dollars to make his film… And may still receive them:

Oddly, Machete may have been shot in a different state if not for Perry, who signed a bill last year giving his office the ability to grant larger tax incentives to lure filmmakers to shoot in Texas.

Perry signed the bill at an April 2009 ceremony at Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios. Rodriguez told The Associated Press at the time that, without the bill, he would have had to move the production of projects including Machete to another state.

“Thanks to this bill, I don’t have to go shoot out of the state,” Rodriguez said.

Censorship must die!

Amazing what you can do with a cup of truth mixed with a dash of exaggeration….  We’ve been pretty hard on “The Onion,” and deservedly so, but some credit is due here for their decision to target an obvious Obama weak spot, his reliance on a teleprompter:

Obama’s Home Teleprompter Malfunctions During Family Dinner

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Big Hollywood’s Alexander Marlow has written a spot-on assessment of “Saturday Night Live’s” skit about Obama. This video clip of Chevy Chase on CNN bolsters Marlow’s claim and reveals the truth behind “SNL’s” political parodies: 

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To paraphrase Groucho Marx, a child of five could improve on this immensely.  Anyone could make these parodies of Obama funnier.  Obama’s mannerisms, speech patterns, physical oddities (ears) etc. are ripe for satire. Add Michelle Obama and Joe Biden to the mix and it only gets better.  The audience would be rolling in the aisles. Obama presents a comedy writer with the potential for endless comedic situations.  Obama is a unique character who offers a buffet of satire, pregnant with possibilities. (more…)

Though Thomas Jefferson never said, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism,” the well-applied use of satire is certainly one of the highest forms of dissent.  Jonathan Swift, after all, is more remembered for his grim irony in castigating the British and Irish for their collective humanitarian failures than for any contributions to the culinary arts.

Mad Magazine reigns supreme in creating a satirical crucible through which all subjects, social, cultural, political, artistic and philosophical typically pass.  The difference between valid satire and mere mockery being, of course, the elements of truth contained therein, it is sometimes difficult to rule out former as as being buried so deeply in the latter as to be inconsequential, particularly during political campaigns.  The editors of Mad would likely say that if such a line is drawn, they erase it, but nonetheless credibility rests on facts in satirical endeavors, humor being in the manner of delivery.  (more…)

It amounted to breaking news for CNN`s Wolf Blitzer: Saturday Night Live doing a skit, in which they skewer Barack Obama. It was a concept so profoundly distasteful, that it left Wolf incredulous – worse than when he was humiliated on Jeopardy.

At any rate, this first ever comprehensive fact-check of an SNL skit might be the strangest piece of media analysis I’ve ever seen.

Check it out, check-it-outers. (ROLL TAPE)

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Now, wouldn`t you know, according to CNN`s analysis, the skit “missed the mark.” This is a not a fair portrayal, they whine – which is not surprising, coming from a network blinded by the President`s pocket lint. But forgive me for being both flabbered and gasted, but have you ever seen a news network review a comedy sketch for fairness? Did CNN ever do this when SNL went after Bush, Palin, or any other Republican? (more…)

It’s bad enough that one of the snarkiest comedy outlets around, The Onion, can’t seem to find anything funny about President Barack Obama. But the faux newspaper hit a new low this week by insulting former President Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s Disease and his economic record in one nasty twofer.

Week after week The Onion bends over backward not to satirize The One. That’s keeping in line with most of today’s cowardly comics, from David Letterman to Bill Maher.

Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” has shown some interest in pursuing the president’s comic potential, but it comes in fits and starts. But The Onion’s latest attempt at humor is both vicious and wrongheaded. (more…)

A lot has been written lately about how comedy writers are having a hard time finding humor in President Obama. “He’s just too competent,” they say.

The answer is obvious. They, on the left, are having trouble making fun of the left.

But what about us? We have a bigger problem. How are we supposed to make fun of the left?

When I get together for coffee with my fellow pragmatic, reality based, sort-of-right-wing comedy writers (many of whom still speak in hushed tones here in Manhattan, as they are still in the closet), I find I have nothing to poke fun at as I scan the morning papers. I used to relish tearing apart an op-ed from the Times or a column from Slate in front of my buddies, but lately I am left wanting. There is nothing funny anymore. One cannot parody a parody.

Here, let’s try. Take a look at this Sally Quinn article in The Washington Post, in which she “defends” Michelle Obama, after saying that “She has come under attack for exposing her arms.” (Has she? Did Sally Quinn just make that up? Could you find me someone who has done that?)

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Nobody wants to be mocked.  And if you’re a rock star, surrounded by sycophants for the better part of 35 years, it must be especially hard to deal with being mocked.  It makes sense, then, that Don Henley does not like the parody of his song “Boys of Summer,” penned by Chuck DeVore, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, and Justin Hart, his advisor.  But Henley’s copyright-infringement lawsuit is far bigger than one rock star or his feelings.  Henley’s lawsuit undermines the First Amendment right to speak freely.  

 

Don Henley makes no effort to hide his political leanings.  In addition to performing at scores of fundraisers, Henley has given about $750,000 to partisan, liberal causes, including $10,000 to Barack Obama and $9,000 to DeVore’s soon-to-be opponent, Barbara Boxer.  Henley also exploits his music to advance a liberal, political agenda. 

Henley’s “Boys of Summer” is no exception.  On the surface, “Boys of Summer” is a wistful look at an old romance, a fling between two kids, now grown, who have moved on with their lives.  But the song also has a clear political message.  Henley says that the second verse of the song-the one with the famous line about seeing “a Dead Head sticker on a Cadillac”-was about the essential failure of Sixties’ politics: “I don’t think we changed a damn thing, frankly….  After all our marching and shouting and screaming didn’t work, we withdrew and became yuppies and got into the Me Decade.”  (more…)

April 29, 2009. 100 days. In case you were in a sensory deprivation tank, you probably know full well that Wednesday was the 100th day of the Obama Administration, and most of the news shows used it as an excuse to give Him the same exact grade they would have given Him for His first day in office.

That grade is completely unchanged by all the goofs and blunders made by this handsome community organizer, who was rushed into an office that was clearly over His head. Their grade was unbesmirched by the other grades given to Him by Wall Street, the President of France,  the North Korean missile launchers, or by four Somali pirates. (The same pirates who were allowed to humiliate the US Navy for three days before the Commander in Chief gave the order to shoot.)

What a great day to do another Late Night Review, and an opportunity to grade the Nation’s Premiere Satirists on their 100 days. In the time since the last review, we saw not only the aforementioned tense situations; but also an Air Force One flyover that created a panic, one heck of a carbon footprint, and a third of a million dollar addition to the deficit, all for the sake of a pretty photograph.

Certainly there must be something worth making fun of by now. We saw Obama calling for an end to privacy, giving a gag gift the Queen, and a bow to the Saudi King. We learned that He works out three hours a day (no wonder He needs a teleprompter to stay current), and thinks Austrian is a language. He again proved that Harvard isn’t so good at teaching American History, claiming He was only three months old during the Bay of Pigs. No news there, He didn’t think He was in government when the deficit occurred either. (more…)

Since yesterday evening, when news of lawsuit filed against me by aging liberal rockers Don Henley and Mike Campbell first broke, online comments to me have been running hot and heavy.  Fairly emblematic of the “fan” mail: “i hope you get in a car wreck and die.” 

Understanding that the DailyKos crowd can never be quieted (save for my untimely demise in a speeding vehicle), I do think it important to set forth what we did with the two parody songs I wrote to be sung in style of Don Henley’s works. 

 
I penned “After the Hope of November is Gone” based on Mr. Henley’s “The Boys of Summer” with parodic eye.  One can clearly see my intended skewering of Henley and his ilk’s well known liberalism in the lines:  (more…)

FILM PROJECTOR

thlthlthlthlthlthlthlthlthlthlthlthl

ROLL TITLES

“It Could Happen Here!”

A PRESENTATION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY

JANET NAPOLITANO, DIRECTOR

IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
AND THE HOUSE ANTI-TAX ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE

AN IOWAHAWK EDUCATIONAL FILMS PRODUCTION

 

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march music (more…)