—–

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.

While the MSM tells us this ad is currently running in South Carolina….

—–

…that’s only a half-truth, at best. Between their broadcast and Web outlets, it’s the MSM giving this ad somewhere around 99% of its exposure. This is exactly how Obama’s Palace Guards in the world of satire and media work together and, unfortunately, it’s a very effective team.

For instance, if you’ve been holding your nose long enough to read Politico, that jounOlist stinkhole has been positively gushing over Colbert’s antics. One day last week, Colbert’s attack on political speech through his phony presidential campaign ranked as the top three or four stories in Mike Allen’s Morning Playbook — the same Mike Allen who, notoriously, couldn’t bring himself to write about the Anthony Weiner scandal.

There’s nothing funny about what Stephen Colbert is up to. He’s determined to define our frontrunner and to limit unlimited free speech to an elite few like himself. And his most effective weapon is a complicit MSM that shares and amplifies his goals.

We all watched in 2008 as these so-called satirists savaged Sarah Palin and John McCain, but why did we watch? Colbert, Stewart, and “SNL” have miniscule viewerships compared to the American population. But what they did became a major part of the the ‘08 election narrative because the MSM intentionally amplified, viralized, and weaponized clip and clip after clip.

Looks like the only difference this year is that everyone’s getting an early start.

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.

And it makes me wonder if the Supreme Court – and the media – would feel different if the Phelps were to crash a black church carrying signs with the “n-word” all over them. Of course, the Phelps would never do that: the cowards wouldn’t make it out alive.

Mourners are easier pickings.

Which is why they should be protected.

So what’s the solution? Passing laws keeping these weirdos a safe distance away would help. But for the media, it’s time to bring back that old fashioned time-tested practice: shame.

We, the media, must agree to turn our backs on Westboro. Because, if no one reports on a protest, then – like that proverbial tree falling in the forest – it never happened.

And, you know, for the Phelps – being ignored is a punishment worse than hell.

And if you disagree with me, then you sir are worse than Westboro.

Tonight:

Kevin Sorbo!

Brooke Goldstein!

KABC’s John Phillips

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.

—–

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.”

Battle for America is one of the products of that big win. It’s the group’s final film of the year and the one with the least promotion, especially compared to last month’s Newt Gingrich spectacular America at Risk. Bannon’s Fire From the Heartland had the irresistible hook of being all about conservative women; this weekend, it is being screened at the Smart Girl Politics blogger conference at a Hyatt across the Potomac. Bannon’s first film, Generation Zero, premiered at the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tenn.

Read full article here.

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.

—–

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.

The knee-jerk answer for many on the right is that Hollywood’s anti-Americanism stems directly from its well-known liberalism.   They argue that actors like Sean Penn and Danny Glover cozying up to communist despots and Middle-Eastern dictators, and bleeding-hearts like George Clooney and Barbara Streisand campaigning for the Democrat du jour alienate half of the population who might otherwise support their films.  But liberalism in Hollywood is nothing new.  Communist meetings were common fare in Tinseltown throughout the Golden Age, culminating in the McCarthyism of the 1950s.

The difference was that the movies themselves remained pro-American, even if the people making them dreamed of a socialist Utopian, post-national world.

So why did the movies change?  Why did Hollywood stop championing the values of the average American citizen?  Why did the anti-Americanism that used to simmer below the surface of Hollywood finally boil over unchecked?

The answer to the ruin of cinema lies in the same place as the ruin of almost everything else – Government.  In 1948, the Supreme Court decided, in a case called United States v. Paramount Studios, Inc., that the big movie studios could no longer own the movie theaters where their films were played.  To do so, the court ruled, was a violation of the Sherman Anti-trust act of 1890.

Ironically, the United States was both the winner and the loser in this case.  The undoubtedly well-meaning members of the federal government, anxious to prevent a monopoly, did succeed in forcing the studios to divest themselves of their theaters, but the American people were robbed of their direct voice in influencing the films Hollywood would make.

As long as the studios that paid to produce the movies also sold the movies directly to the American people, audience support for a film at the theater was critical to the studio’s bottom-line.  Simply put, the studios could not afford to make movies the American people did not want to see.

After United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc, however, a new entity came into existence -  the Theater Owner.  Now, this third-party sat between the studio who took the risk to make the film, and the audience who would pay to see it.  These theater owners, rightly, had to make money as well, and in addition to the monies they make on popcorn and candy, they used their powerful new positions (the studios cannot survive if they cannot distribute their movies) to demand a huge portion of the ticket revenue – more than half in most cases.

This left the studios forced to look elsewhere for their revenues.  Today’s Hollywood is masterful at finding creative ways to make money.  They have to be.  Since the American theatergoer no longer pays the studios, but the theater owner, the American theatergoer is not Hollywood’s chief concern.

Instead, they look to other markets.  TV, DVD, and the biggest market of all – the foreign market.  Markets, really.  There are 42 of them worldwide with literally billions of potential customers, many of whom have values inconsistent with most of Hollywood’s old audience – the American people – but uniquely sympathetic to the values that Hollywood has always harbored quietly.

So the American people no longer get the movies they want to see because the American people no longer drive the revenue stream.  Government do-gooders, trying to protect the public, created through that pesky detriment of all statist machinations – the Law of Unintended Consequences – a worse problem than the one they sought to solve.

American movies have never been the same.

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). 

Obama’s FEC is following in his footsteps.  Citizens United itself is a 501(c)4 nonprofit advocacy group that produces political films.  It was the government’s attempt to treat their documentary, Hillary: The Movie as a political campaign expenditure that led to the ruling in Citizens United.  

In March, Citizens United asked the FEC for an advisory opinion on whether the production, distribution and marketing of its future films would be regulated by the FEC in violation of the Citizens United decision.  The FEC wrote back with two proposed opinions.  The first was fine.  It suggested that “the costs of producing and distributing Citizens United’s films, along with related marketing activities, are covered by the press exemption from the Act’s definitions of ‘expenditure’ and ‘electioneering communication.’”  They based their logic on a two-step process.  First, they determined that Citizens United was a “press entity” because “Since 2004, Citizens United has produced and distributed fourteen films, with four additional films currently in production.”  Second, they determined that Citizens Untied was not owned or controlled by a political party, political committee, or candidate, and that it was distributing its work to the general public in accordance with prior procedures.  Fair enough. 

The second draft opinion and its alternative argument was far more troubling.  In it, the FEC suggested that while Citizens United’s production, distribution and marketing costs would be exempt from regulation under the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (as amended) if they were related to movies broadcast on television, they would “not be covered by the press exemption to the extent the films are distributed by theatrical release and as DVDs.”  The logic here is peculiar.  The FEC said that “under the Act and the Commission’s regulations, unless a press entity’s facilities are owned or controlled by a political party [etc.] … the costs of distributing any news story, commentary, or editorial distributed through the enumerated media are neither expenditures nor electioneering communications.”  Here’s where the FEC gets dicey, though: they wrote, “Conversely, a news story, commentary, or editorial distributed through facilities other than the enumerated media is generally not covered by the press exemption.”  

In other words, if you are a press entity but you don’t use approved press “facilities” to distribute your product, you can be regulated.  What are approved press “facilities”?  Means of distribution that have been used previously the Citizens United for its documentaries.  This leads to the odd result that while the “distribution of documentary films through the facilities of a broadcast, cable, or satellite television station is the legitimate press function of an entity,” the same does not hold true for DVD and theatrical distribution. 

Tomorrow, the FEC will vote on whether to adopt the first or second version of their advisory opinion. 

The second opinion is a clear slap in the face to the Supreme Court.  While the Supreme Court did not touch on this issue specifically, the main thrust of Citizens United obviously cuts against this type of regulation.  Citizens United was designed to avoid creating false distinctions between press and other corporations, because such distinctions would inevitably end in violation of freedom of the press itself.  Now the FEC is attempting to paint such distinctions once again through the “facilities” language of the Act.  This is just part of a broader attempt to end-run the Citizens United decision.  It will likely end up at the Supreme Court level again, and again the Supreme Court will strike down such administrative fiat.  And the cycle will continue, until we get a Congress that repeals the Act wholesale.

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.

My life is now a miraculous melodrama in which those who would make me and many fellow members of the human family less than ordinary are an indisputable villainy.

From my personal experience, the American Progressive Movement has endeavored to paint what is traditionally American into an increasingly vilified form of irrelevance.

Meanwhile, the Progressives now move from legalized abortion to Health Care Death Panels.

It’s progress, you see.

It is actually thanatos, the love of death … as versus eros and agape, the love of life … that is being offered as the best solution to the problems of life.

More on those wonderfully ancient words in later excerpts of this offering.

It is, indeed, the replacement of a Judeo-Christian God with the Marxist God of Science.

To Karl Marx even his suicidal economic theories were a science.

Now with Global Warming, a tyrannizing delusion arising from Marxist Science, we’re in the last big chapter of the Bible.

Revelations.

And we’re the Good Guys!

This is as certain as the goodness of the Allies versus the evil of the Nazi, Fascist and Imperialized Japanese Axis.

Instead of the Axis we face Red Islam, Communist Jihads best represented by our unquestionably mortal enemy, Osama bin Laden and the equally Marxist imprint that President Barack Obama would like to leave upon not just the earth, but all of Mankind.

This cast of good guys and bad guys is so clear, so eternally indelible, that this editorial series of mine may soon turn into either a Batman/Superman epic or into The Ordinary Miracle of G.I. Joe.

Those to the rescue, however, are in the millions and, yes, most of them are The Ordinary Miracles of the Tea Party Movement.

With that intensely short introduction, let me begin my American recollections, not necessarily in chronological order.

Much of this will be an improvisation which I am occasionally good at.

Let’s start with my first introduction to Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood.

Yes, many of you were there and, of course, Big Hollywood’s interest in me was its discovery of my persistently dedicated commitment, through my writings for enterstageright.com, my immense trust in the proven power of not the American Constitution but her Declaration of Independence and its “inalienable” tribute to our “Creator.”

I am, indeed, a self-described, pro-life, Catholic libertarian.

Catholic libertarian may seem like a contradiction in terms.

However, when you compare my own form of faith to the Progressive Catholic hypocrisy of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, their pro-abortion defilement of a Judeo-Christian, five thousand year old commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”?!

Well … here’s my first Moriarty Pause in this possibly endless trip down memory lane.

I sigh and take a breath to recover from the cardinal sins committed every passing second by the Biden/Pelosi hypocrisy.

“Ye hypocrites!”

“Ye lawyers, you heap on people pains that you yourselves could not endure!”

That’s my rather Dionysian version of Christ engaging in a counter-revolutionary but very French pastime entitled J’accuse!

Ye Progressives!

You heap on your citizens, and their future generations, agonies which you, as Congressmen, Congresswomen and White House CEO’s cannot, will not and could never, in your most hypocritically brave or falsely humble moments, endure!

If you don’t like my Dionysian Catholicism blame it on the Jesuits who fed me Greek and Latin for two to four years.

My vocation in the theater was ordained by the Black Robes as certainly as they themselves were ordained priests.

Meanwhile, back amidst the counter-revolutionary dens of Big Hollywood, I have the great privilege of not only having a Tea Party audience but the very Third Millennium freedom to carry on a post-editorial conversation via an entirely state-of-the-art Town-Hall Meeting.

And we all have the courage to “go on the record!”

Life is good.

It is and can be so good that Christ’s words are confirmed daily.

“Unless ye become like little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

What is our counter-revolution but the classic child’s exclamation, “The Emperor has no clothes … and our President obviously cannot tell the truth about anything.”

His “transparency” is a big, fat, juicy, utterly irreversible, historically recorded Lie!

Now there’s a truth that cannot only set you free, it can release you into a whole new level of catharsis.

I also highlight that word because it, along with thanatos, eros and agape, will return repeatedly as the main force and rules of evidence for unseating the entire American Progressive Movement.

Send Progressivism back to France, where the whole, Communist nightmare began!

Here is my lesson for the day.

There has been a human genius so old that the “enlightened despots” of Harvard think it so antiquated that it no longer has contemporary relevance, except as a foil for their Progressive Comparative History Lessons, their “teachable moments”, their vision of Mankind’s inevitably scientific progress to the clearly envisioned destination: The Completion of The Progressive, One-Thousand-Year Plan For All of Humanity.

In other words, The New World Order.

The last Progressive of that ilk was Adolf Hitler.

We have seen and spoken of … repeatedly … the image of our President looking down his flared nostrils at us, and we’ve heard the words that accompany such arrogant certainty.

“The fundamental transformation of the United States of America!”

Within one year of office, President Obama has been captured in photos that make some of Mussolini’s grandstanding grimaces look reticent.

Oh, before I leave off, I will leave a “teaser” for you, one previously left on the response blog for my editorial, Bradley’s.

“Who is the new Jane Fonda?”

I’ll await your guesses with a few hints in future offerings from this, my apparently autobiographical series, The Ordinary Miracle.

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.

And now, actress Megan Mullally believes that Jay Leno’s attempts to attract red state viewers is “insane.” Is it? Gee, I thought Hollywood studios, networks and creative film artists sought the widest audiences possible. Aren’t we all Americans here? I guess not, huh? How do all you red staters feel being effectively declared insane by the esteemed Dr. Mullally? Fighting words? I believe it is time they are met head on and challenged. My answer? Impact statements. By that I mean Americans making a punitive statement to said Tinseltown offenders to let them know just how numerous and offended we are. We accomplish that through temporary one-time boycotts of the offenders’ projects.

Here is The Plan. It is too late to make an impact statement on the premiere of the Hanks/Spielberg HBO series The Pacific. But it is not too late to make a statement on Episode Two next Sunday night. Here is how we let Mr. Hanks know of our rank offense at his fighting words re the Pacific War. This Sunday, don’t watch it. For one night. Don’t even TiVo it. Then next week, everybody tune it in whether you were going to watch it or not. The ratings dips and jumps will send a very clear message. If it helps, think of it as being The Joker for a Day. Be an Agent of Chaos in the ratings! That work for ya?

I consider that a very balanced yet powerful response. As to Mr. Penn, he has four upcoming film projects, none of which has an official release date. One is Fair Game, the story of Joseph Wilson and the Valerie Plame “scandal.” No impact statement necessary there. I’ll bet five-to-one that film is DOA at the box office. Bush-bashing is so yesterday. No, the only juicy prospect in Mr. Penn’s future is the Farrelly Brothers’ reboot of The Three Stooges. I say totally avoid the film on its release weekend. Give him a taste of what rectal cancer at the box office feels like. Make him scream.

As to Ms. Mullally, there doesn’t seem to be much of anything of hers at IMDB that won’t collapse financially or ratings-wise of its own accord. You can beat a dead horse, but what’s the point? Perhaps that’s why she said what she did. You know. Get in good with Sean Penn and Tom Hanks. I’ll keep an eye on Ms. Mullally and any impact statement-worthy projects she may get attached to.

I never forget fighting words. Ever. And I will do my part. I fully intend to contact every major US veterans’ organization on the matter of The Pacific, and will recommend they make an impact statement of their own this coming Sunday. Will you do your part? Is missing one TV show or opening weekend at the box office too much to ask in response to fighting words by those creative film artists most concerned with the project’s financial and viewership success?

Lastly, a blackly comic punchline. A spec script I have been laboring on for eighteen months, my fourth, is finally wrapping this week and going to market after rewrites based on coverage. That’s why I’ve been mostly MIA as of late. I know. Alex Perez, aka Hollywood Scab Writer, probably has a better shot at the Biz than I will after this. But I’m a writer. I write. Telling me to stop writing is like telling a charter NAMBLA Member in Good Standing to lay off the young boys. It ain’t happening.

I may have to move on to another field of writing in the end, but at least I take a clear conscience with me. I also take with me a huge, loving and most supportive family, lots of great  friends, and a lot of most promising young people I have befriended who adore me as I do them. I even have today’s Oscar Schindler for LGBTs and some real gay advocates on my side via my reporting on the LGBT human rights horrorshows in Iran and Iraq. Not like the professional fakes at HRC. Larger point being, I am an Army of One. I may never get rich in Hollywood, but I will never be poor with all I have, either. In point of fact I am already rich, and there is nothing Lefty Hollywood can do to hurt me in the slightest. What’s another word for nothing left to lose again? I’m sure our Founding Fathers knew.

I also have a bit of a fan base here at Big Hollywood. Love you too, Jimmy Arone! It is we who are are the true Hollywood rebels now, with clear ideals and senses of mission and purpose. It is the Lefty Hollywood establishment that is totally fucked, ideologically floundering and completely out of touch with the American people.  All I’m saying is that it is time to lay down some dope smacks as fighting words demand. Can I get an Amen, some tuned-out TVs and deferred movie attendance on that?

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.

What (I’ll write their names again, because they should not be forgotten) Roberts, Thomas, Scalia, Alito and Kennedy are guilty of is treason. There is no other name for it. Using very flimsy law, they have betrayed the very idea of our nation, a nation founded on checks and balances as a way to dilute concentrated power. Because time and time again it has corrupted and distorted. We saw the devastating effects of big business’s hold on government with the robber barons and the Great Depression in the early 20th century, but the corporations reconstituted and waited with an inhuman silver-dude-from-Terminator-2-like patience.

Steve Chapman in Real Clear Politics:

The result was not in much doubt after the justices heard the [Citizens United] case. The government lawyer defending the statute was asked: If movies financed by corporations may be banned because they express opinions on candidates, how about books?

“It’s a 500-page book, and at the end it says, ‘So vote for X,’ the government could ban that?” asked Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. Replied the Justice Department attorney, “Well, if it says ‘vote for X,’ it would be express advocacy and it would be covered by the pre-existing Federal Election Campaign Act provision.”

If the corporation wanted to publish such a book, he continued, “we could prohibit the publication of the book using corporate treasury funds.” We could prohibit the publication of the book. …

Once you grant the government that sort of power, it is bound to expand. Newspapers could be forbidden to make endorsements. Right now, media companies are exempt from the ban. But why should a newspaper be free to spend money urging voters to support a candidate, while other companies are not?

Critics fear that freed from constraints, giant corporations will burn vast sums to help or hurt politicians. In reality, most business people are not about to plunge into divisive election campaigns, for fear of antagonizing customers.

And there’s your disconnect between Hollywood and the real world. “Antagonizing customers” isn’t considered a bad thing in Tinseltown. There it’s called a resume enhancer. And McKay is certainly lost on this point, as well. His film “Step Brothers” opens with a partisan joke ridiculing George W. Bush.

Bravo! Bravo! Bravo! to Citizens United for winning a landmark victory crucial to a healthy, robust political debate. And it looks as though we also owe you our thanks for helping to once again smoke out these Hollywood types as the Fascists-In-Waiting they really are.

NOTE: Please file this post in your folder marked: Gee, Why Does Hollywood Love Hugo, Fidel, and Che?

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. 

Even President Obama seems to forget that he crushed McCain in corporate dollar contribution totals. In fact, Goldman Sachs was his largest corporate contributor.  The press screams about unfettered lobbyists as if they are the zombies from 28 Days and yet fail to connect the fact that lobbying has seen its greatest proliferation under our present President (this from the candidate who promised to get rid of lobbyists).  CU v. FEC represents everything wrong with America when viewed through the left lens.  However, my experience as the director of the film at the eye of the storm, does nothing but reaffirm everything that I believe is good about America. 

Making Hillary The Movie gave an opportunity to an unremarkable American to tell the stories of other, more remarkable, Americans whose lives intersected with Hillary Clinton.  I didn’t set out to create a film that would go to the Supreme Court and change electoral/political history.  I just wanted to find interesting stories from people not unlike you and me and record them.  One of the most difficult parts of making a film is deciding what to leave in and what to take out.  With then Senator Clinton, that problem was exponentially magnified.  One of the Clintons’ former associates described them as a tornado destroying everything in their path.  There was, indeed, a wide swath of destroyed institutions, credibility, and human lives to sift through in the wake of the Clintons.  We could have cut a weeklong mini-series with the amount of material we had.  Rather we settled on a handful of personal stories from people not very different from you or me—people whose lives were crushed in the Hillary Clinton vortex.  

Now there was nothing special about making a film on Hillary Clinton that lead to the Supreme Court.  It could’ve been a film about any political figure.  In fact, in 2004, there was a false start in the direction of a court confrontation when Citizens United’s film Celsius 41.11 elicited a finding from the FEC.  Michael Moore’s film was also cited and release patterns for the films had to comply with applicable election/campaign finance law. Citizens United Executive Producer, Dave Bossie, kept making political films realizing that if he threw enough gas on the McCain-Feingold-free-speech fire, eventually the FEC would bite.  And bite they did.  The rest is history. 

Looking back more than two years since we finished the film, I’m amazed by the ride.  I met and became friends with political and social figures who have impacted the march of nations.  I shot in the location where our first president bid farewell to his troops.  I shared the grief of fathers for sacrificed sons and sons for murdered fathers.  I got to finish a film without a studio’s demands or government’s interference. I harshly criticized, in a public forum, a former First Lady and President and never feared reprisal upon me or upon my family.  I watched as an expression of political speech from a small group of citizens had its day in front of the highest court in the land.  I sat in the chambers of the Supreme Court next to people who had travelled all night to be present to hear the arguments.  I watched as a new Justice sat on the bench for the first time.  I saw the gears of our Constitutional machine work and churn to render justice and took for granted that at the end of that process, no buildings burned; no blood was shed.  Whatever opinions may be, relative to the application of the ruling, there can be no doubt that the journey of this average citizen unequivocally attests to the greatness of the country in which those rulings will be applied. 

Don’t agree?…you can make your own movie. 

I rest my case.

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. 

Any teacher or administrator doing so should swiftly and forthrightly be subjected to reprimand or discipline including assignment to an appropriate Teacher Quality Enhancement Training program in order to mitigate any future injustices on their part. 

The Pledge itself takes all of fifteen seconds to recite — which is likely a main reason most states and public school boards ascribe it for compliance with their respective education codes, policies and regulations — yet the Pledge, as with standardized patriotic exercises, is designated to inculcate patriotic values upon our nation’s children. 

These values — i.e., love of and devotion to country — include American Exceptionalism, which secures even the Liberty and human rights to dissent against that very love and devotion. 

Contrary to popular opinion however, dissent is obviously not de facto the ‘highest form of patriotism.’ 

As Socrates warns the ages in Plato’s Republic:

“[D]emocracy has her own good [Freedom], of which the insatiable desire brings her to dissolution… the father grows accustomed to descend to the level of his sons and to fear them, and the son is on a level with his father, he having no respect or reverence for either of his parents; and this is his freedom… the truth being that the excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction… above all in forms of government… The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.”

Is it an excess of liberty that incites a fifth-grader to irrational dissent against a pro forma patriotic exercise, and in the process tell his substitute teacher to “go jump off a bridge”?

Perhaps, but that is for his parents to decide, the Supreme Court moots further argument.

There is however a parallel issue that might be worthy of consideration:

Can state and local school boards compel teachers to lead the Pledge of Allegiance in their classrooms?

The Supreme Court held in Newdow v. Elk Grove 2004 that, yes, in fact they can:

Congress prescribed a Pledge of Allegiance, the State… required patriotic observances in its schools, and the School District chose to comply by requiring teacher-led recital of the Pledge of Allegiance by willing students.

Hopefully teachers unions and under-their-thumb school boards won’t exploit this latest attack against the Pledge as a destructive excuse to reject and undermine its original intent, i.e., allegiance to the American Republic in all her glory and the values inculcation thereof.

Hopefully as well, outside political advocacy groups will be barred as sponsors of so-called “Tolerance Through Education” programs that intrude outside Lawyer/Facilitators — without prior parental notification – into classrooms as a means of creating political correctness Pledges of Tolerance that students can be shamed to abide, while concurrently pressured to diminish the traditional Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America.

Whenever public schools ignore or revise long-standing Patriotic Exercises policy requiring simply the Pledge, or Star Spangled Banner, replacing those with near meaningless vagaries like “Appropriate patriotic exercises also include, but are not limited to, songs, poems, quotations and discussions related to the development of citizenship in a democracy” one begins to wonder whether rulebooks are any longer worth the paper they’re printed on.

What values should the required daily patriotic exercises in public schools inculcate in American students?