There’s a HUGE left-wing agenda behind what Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert is doing, and it’s a serious agenda that has nothing to do with satire. Colbert’s goal is two-fold: he’s attacking constitutional free speech by attempting to make a mockery of a new Supreme Court ruling that finally allows private citizens and corporations to have as much say in the political process as Stephen Colbert and corporations like, say, Comedy Central. Like the corrupt media, Colbert believes he’s the only multi-millionaire who should have unlimited free speech – free speech, which, in fact, is funded by the multi-national corporation that owns Comedy Central, Viacom.

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The second thing Colbert is doing is using partisan satire to Speak! Truth! To! The! Out! Of! Power! — like Mitt Romney. In order to help the Obama campaign define the GOP frontrunner as a heartless corporatist, Colbert is running commercials like the one below. Naturally, Colbert disguises all of this as nothing more than fun and games, but anyone paying attention knows better, and you can bet Obama’s MSM Palace Guards most certainly know better, which is why left-wing news outlets like Politico and “This Week” are giving a comedian more play than they ever gave Fast and Furious, Solyndra, Jeremiah Wright, the number of people who have stopped trying to find work, or Bill Ayers.

You see, Colbert is a smart guy, and like most left-wing partisans disguised as satirists, he knows that under the conceit of “a humorous break in the news of the day,” the MSM will offer up a ton of print and broadcast time to his attacks on free speech. Colbert knows this because he knows the MSM despises the new Supreme Court ruling for the same reasons he does. The MSM believes that only MSM gajillionaires backed by multi-national corporations should enjoy the right to unlimited political speech. Of course, the MSM also loves the side-order of Republican bashing.

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So yesterday, during our ideas meeting, Andy suggested we do something on the latest Supreme Court ruling, which was in favor of Westboro Baptist Church.

To sum up: The father of a fallen Marine had sued the church, saying their protests were intentionally meant to inflict distress. The Court disagreed, saying these creeps had a right to promote their “message.”

We skipped the story because we felt any mention of Westboro is a win for Westboro.

Which is still true, today.

But I’m bringing them up anyway, because, the ruling sucks.

Look – If you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater – which is an act meant to cause harm – how are the actions of the Phelps any different?

Their whole schtick, after all, is using language and props to incite grieving folks to violence.

That ain’t freedom of speech, it’s a pack of ghouls looking for trouble.

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Slate’s David Weigel:

It’s hard to count the explosions. Battle for America has the sort of pyrotechnics that would make Michael Bay worry about the viewers’ retinas. Some buildings implode as fireballs tumble out the windows. Others crumble into clouds of dust and rubble. A group of dinosaurs, minding their own business, scrambles away from a meteor that causes a mushroom cloud, bringing them all to extinction.

All of this is in the service of a very sober argument about the failures of the 111th Congress.

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Battle for America is the fifth film produced in 2010 by Citizens United and the third by a former mergers-and-acquisitions manager named Stephen K. Bannon. Not too long ago, he was an amateur director. Now, he’s playing his movies at Tea Party events, conventions, and special screenings like the one in Georgetown Thursday night. Citizens United President David Bossie was there, as was the movie’s host, Dick Morris, and Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif. Bannon, wearing a West Point windbreaker (his daughter attended the school), was giddy about what his movies can do to the Democrats.

“We’ve tried to weaponize film,” he said. “And we’ve tried to do in it a certain way to get this view to people who might not necessarily see a political documentary. We made this film for independents and for Reagan Democrats. We’re actually going to take it to Paul Kanjorski’s district,” he said, referring to the Pennsylvania Democrat who’s on the first line of the incumbent deathwatch. “His constituents, those are the kind of people who need to see this.”

Outside the theater, one of the Washington panics of the moment concerns the surge of campaign spending brought on by Citizens United. It was Bossie’s group and its advertisements for Hillary: The Movie, that initiated a lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court. “We won,” Bossie told the premiere audience. “And we want to make use of that.” (more…)

They call the early half of the twentieth century the Golden Age of Hollywood, but it might more aptly be called the American Age.  In those days, the American people had a great love for Hollywood.  On an average week, three quarters of the population turned out to the local theater.

Contrast that with today when, according to a recent poll, fewer than 40 percent of Americans approve of Hollywood, and only ten percent of the population shows up at the theater each week.

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Like many of the readers and contributors at Big Hollywood, Declaration Entertainment is interested in why this change, this sharp reduction in approval and attendance, took place.  Undoubtedly it is a complex issue with many variables over a long period of time.  The advent of television and home video, digital downloads and piracy are all factors.  So too is the explosion of other forms of media entertainment, from video games to the Internet.  But while these changes in landscape have unquestionably cut into the dominance of the Hollywood theatrical experience in terms of the sheer numbers of viewers, they do not seem to explain the reduction in affinity.

To understand Hollywood’s dismal approval ratings – better than Congress, of course, but horrid none-the-less – other factors must be considered. (more…)

After the Supreme Court decided against his favored position in 1832, Andrew Jackson supposedly explained, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”  The idea was that the judiciary had the power to make pronouncements, but only the executive branch had the power to carry them out. 

This March, the Federal Elections Commission under President Obama began channeling Jackson.  We had hints that this would happen after the Supreme Court decided in Citizens United v. FEC that restrictions on corporate funding of independent political broadcasts were prohibited by the First Amendment; that ruling also held that nonprofit groups like Citizens United could freely produce and distribute their documentaries. 

Obama quickly responded by targeting the Supreme Court itself, boldly (and wrongly) proclaiming in his State of the Union Address, “Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections.”  Members of the Supreme Court were sitting directly in front of him at the time (one, Justice Samuel Alito, had the unmitigated temerity to shake his head softly when Obama lied about the ruling).  (more…)

For me the human being is a miracle.

For Progressive Americans, however, because of the particularly Progressive Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade Decision of 1973, the human being has become less than ordinary.

The human being is now an easily disposable or aborted threat to the ideals of a Progressive New World Order.

With this “fundamental transformation of the United States of America,” as President Barack Obama has reminded us, I begin the first excerpt of a possibly endless series entitled, The Ordinary Miracle.

As a self-imposed exile, my life’s journey from my birthplace in Detroit, Michigan to Canada is a bit longer than the mild jaunt across the Ambassador Bridge from Detroit to Windsor, Ontario.

The country I left under the subtly unconstitutional care of Bill and Hillary Clinton has now exploded into the incipiently treasonous arrogance of the Obama Nation. (more…)

Can any of you remember a time when so many creative film artists in Hollywood shit where they eat by endlessly voicing such outspoken contempt and loathing for the majority of the American people, our history and our way of life? I can’t. Now I’m not talking about Hollywood Lefties going off on political tangents like at HuffPo. We do the same damn thing here. I’m talking fighting words as defined in the Chaplinsky ruling. Too many fighting words coming out of Lefty Hollywood these days.

I don’t know about you, but I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take them anymore. Prime example. Sean Penn calling for the arrest of anyone who tags dictator Hugo Chavez as a dictator. That must now include the mass arrest of the entire leadership of the OAS, which just slammed Pennhead’s hero El Chavista on his horrific human rights record. I will say it: that statement is as un-American as it gets, and is dictatorial in itself. Those are fighting words, IMHO. Tell me where I’m wrong.

Then we had Tom Hanks effectively saying that the Japanese and Americans wanted to destroy each other only because they were different breeds of racists. That intellectually vacuous statement not only slanders America’s most honorable record in the war against a genocidal Imperial Japan, it slanders the sacred memory of every US service member who fought and died in that conflict. As a Navy veteran myself, and the son of an Army veteran of Normandy Beach on D-Day? Fighting words. (more…)

You see, Hollywoodists like “Step Brothers” director Adam McKay believe that only the Huffington Post, George Soros, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NBC, NPR, The New York Times, The L.A. Times, Big Labor Unions, and GE (through NBC and MSNBC)  should be allowed to use unlimited resources to affect the outcome of political campaigns.

Corporations, big and small, however, just need to shut the hell up. Unless, of course, that corporation is MSNBC or any of those listed above. Confusing, right? Well, thank heaven (and Citizens United) that five wise men on the Supreme Court also went, “Huh?”

You would think that no one would be a bigger champion of an unfettered First Amendment than a leftist Hollywood director. But if you think that, you haven’t been paying attention.

Two separate looks at how the landmark SCOTUS decision is playing out. You decide which point of view is most concerned about the health of our democracy…

Hollywood director Adam McKay:

What the Supreme Court — specifically Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Kennedy — has done, is nothing short of a violent coup for the corporations to seize control of our government. There’s no violence yet, but it will come in the form of many more profit-driven corporate wars in the molds of Vietnam and Iraq and the jailing of millions more non-violent offenders to fuel the corporate built and run prisons. Not to mention dramatic rises in the crime rate as the middle class completely disappears.

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I didn’t set out to create a film that would go to the Supreme Court and change electoral/political history.

Thursday morning, the 21st of January found me climbing off an airplane in Las Vegas.  By the time the day was over Senator-elect Scott Brown was in Washington, Air America was dead, Keith Olbermann’s head had exploded (twice), and Citizens United v. FEC had overturned a century of campaign finance law. It seemed appropriate that it was snowing in Las Vegas. 

David Bossie: Chairman of the Board and President, Citizens United

First of all let me clear up any possible misunderstandings: I do not consider myself a great writer/director.  I have no connections in Hollywood. I don’t come from money or familial fame.  I have no patrons in politics.  I don’t have a degree from some hot film school or Ivy League institution. I’m not a genius or political wunderkind.  And, I don’t pretend that any of you have seen the film that spawned this Supreme Court case.  So, what does that make me? I think that makes me about like most Americans. 

I’ve been fascinated by the furor and fury over the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC.  It’s curious to be affiliated with, “the most irresponsible decision by the Supreme Court since the Dred Scott decision.”  The left has screamed bloody murder about the demise of democracy.  The left-brain has so firmly fixed the idea that “corporation” = evil, villainy, torture (George Bush), into its autonomic system that a clear reading of the case and decision is impossible for them.  (more…)

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands: one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”  

An Arkansas fifth-grader made news recently by claiming there is no “liberty and justice for all” in America as his reason for refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance during his school’s daily patriotic exercises. 

Red Skelton could’ve taught him a thing or two:

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Of course, the Supreme Court ruled in 1943 that as long as such dissent is practiced in a non-disruptive manner a student is acting well within his Constitutional rights — his faulty reasoning for the dissent being irrelevant — and he may not be compelled to participate by either the school, or the state. 

Teachers and administrators are strictly prohibited from singling out such peaceful dissent for discipline, admonishment or public ridicule.  (more…)

“I’m looking through you, where did you go? I thought I knew you, what did I know? You don’t look different, but you have changed. I’m looking through you, you’re not the same.” — Lennon/McCartney: “Rubber Soul,” 1965

When Sonia Sotomayor was nominated in May, I wrote a satirical essay for Big Hollywood called The ‘Magic Latina’. The title was a send up of the “Magic Negro,” or “Magical Negro,” a fictional stereotype common in film and literature. The “Magic Negro” has been criticized by white and black commentators alike. Blacks, most famously Spike Lee, but many others, view the role as ultimately degrading. As Rita Kempley, writing for DVRepublic, said about the “Magic Negro,” “What’s the deal with all the holy roles?” The core of the critique is that the characters are given special powers and/or underlying mysticism. It is not that the characters per se are so bad.  The perception is that this kind of character, the selfless and powerful, insightful, and sometimes magical being, is always black, has no “interior life”, and is always serving white people. To name a few at random, they include such famous stars as Hattie McDaniel (“Gone with the Wind”), Sidney Poitier (“The Defiant Ones”), Morgan Freeman (“Shawshank Redemption,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Bruce Almighty”), and Laurence Fishburne (“The Matrix”). (more…)

Why is it that when liberals want to advocate their ideas before the American public, they suddenly take on conservative language and become completely disingenuous about their intentions?  Democrats always claim to have the better ideas when it comes to leading America forward, and yet, their refusal to sell their ideas for what they are, big-government liberalism, shows that they may believe Americans think otherwise. 

Whether it is Barack Obama promising to cut 95% of Americans’ taxes, instead of admitting that he wants be expand the government’s role in redistributing wealth, or the Democrats’ support of the misnomer Employee Free Choice Act, which removes an employee’s right to a secret ballot in union elections, liberals always disguise their leftist agendas with conservative talking points.  I will happily support the Democrats the day they actually advocate meaningful tax reform, and support workers’ rights over the monopoly of overgrown unions. (more…)

In speaking to the American Nurse Association in the Rose Garden today, Mr. Obama, speaking of the urgent need to pass his hugely exorbitant and grossly ineffective health care bill, said, “”We need to buck up people here,” Obama said. “That’s what nurses do. It’s time for us to buck up the Congress. We need to get this done…”

And I agree – that the President is doing his level best to buck this country up. 

His bucked-up foreign policy has signaled weakness to our detractors and encouraged aggression from those who would destroy us. 

He bucked up our financial institutions by taking control of over 600 banks.  He bucked up the automotive industry with at first his bail-outs with strings, and firing CEO’s, and placing stipulations, regulations and mandates on formerly private companies.  (more…)

Reverse Discrimination, according to Wikipedia, is defined as, “the practice of favoring members of a historically disadvantaged group at the expense of members of a historically advantaged group.”  Since the 1964 Civil Rights Act when the phrase came into usage, it has been practiced in many different ways.  Some examples include employment practices and college admissions.  A more euphemistic way of saying reverse discrimination would be “affirmative action.”  However you say it, it is still discrimination plain and simple.

The United States Supreme Court tackled the issue in the seminal case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 US 265 (1978).  In that case, the Court found that race could only be one of numerous factors in determining admission to a university.  It stated that the University of California policy was unconstitutional, but that the policy used by Harvard was a valid type of affirmative action.  The result was that Mr. Bakke was admitted to medical school and became a respected physician. (more…)

Just in time for Hollywood’s Blockbuster Summer season, the west coast is scheduled for a limited engagement legal premiere of sorts. This week on June 25th, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will host the latest episode in the saga of the long-running litigation between the estates of Anna Nicole Smith and oil baron J. Howard Marshall.

This remarkable drama demonstrates the lasting power of a lawsuit that has outlasted the life and death of Anna Nicole Smith and her former husband, billionaire oil man J. Howard Marshall II. As the litigation against the estate of her former husband goes on without them both, the absurdity of the case grows clearer. (more…)

John C. Calhoun, father of the confederacy, said about the ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence: “there is not a word of truth in the whole proposition, as expressed and generally understood.” These sentiments were echoed by Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Roger B. Taney. Writing the majority opinion for Scott v Sanford, Taney also denied the veracity of the founding noting, “…the Declaration of Independence shows that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument.”

It is a continuing source of fascination that the new left has chosen this view of the founding, replete with its historical inaccuracies, while the political right has adopted that of Abraham Lincoln and Justice John Marshall Harlan. It was Harlan who wrote in his famous dissent in Plessey v Ferguson that “Our Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”

This brings us to the current controversy surrounding the president’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court. (more…)

If someone like Beethoven had a vision of the future and realized the impact his music had on humanity, would he be able to compose with the same fortitude and confidence, or rather, would the pressure of the realization of his own importance would eventually render him dysfunctional? 

I don’t confuse this hypothetical inquiry with Beethoven’s realization of his genius. I’m sure he knew of his own greatness. This is different, though, from the pressure that one may experience if his or her genius is also perceived in its historic context and significance. 

In other words, would Beethoven be able to remain Beethoven if, well, he was conscious of the fact that he was Beethoven, (or Beethoven the way he is perceived today)?

These musings of mine could easily be dismissed as exercises in futility or outbursts of excessive if not useless imagination if they were not so coincidental with the policies and style of our current government and prevailing cultural mindset.  (more…)

Alright, let’s see a show of hands, how many of you think that Sonia Sotomayor got nominated for the big job because she is, hands down without a doubt, the best qualified judge in America. Exactly! If our friends on the left are honest we can all agree that there are three reasons she got the nod: she is liberal, she is Hispanic, and she is a woman.

Is there any clear thinking conservative out there who thought that President Obama might actually try to fill this job opening that has the best benefits package in history with someone who might be, in some small way, acceptable to the right? This is the one appointment that cannot have any concession to conservatives. You can dislike Judge Sotomayor for her racial comments, that’s fair. You can look at her troubling record and the number of times she has been overturned on appeal and question her legal acumen. However, no intellectually honest conservative or liberal can deny that judges make policy and law in this country. Starting with the guy who takes your donations to local government for speeding right up to the First Street Nine, judges have the final word. In the game we like to call America, judges have all the marbles. Justice may be blind but she has a big mouth and when she speaks you must listen. (more…)

This week’s Washington Times column:

With Barack Obama, many Americans had hoped to get a post-racial president. With Mr. Obama’s pick of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace David H. Souter on the Supreme Court, it looks less and less like they got one.

President Obama – a man we still hardly know – clearly subscribes to the notion that we should judge each other not just on the content of our character, but also by the color of our skin.

We’ve had warning signs before. Remember the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.?

As for the outrage du jour, the call for Sotomayor to apologize for making a racist comment in a 2001 speech is silly. She said what she meant, and she meant what she said: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” (more…)

And so within hours of posting my Gregalogue, a bilious blogger did what bilious bloggers do best: call me a racist. Which is awesome, because it proves my point. In the world of racial politics, all you have to do is call someone a racist, and you win! 

Game over. 

And now, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs is pretty much doing the same thing preemptively, telling critics of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to watch what they say when it comes to her confirmation hearing. This is amazing, only because there was no need to say it at all.  (more…)