HBO’s Bill Maher is known for being outrageous. And usually, his outrageousness is directed at things most Americans would place under the heading of “Traditional Values.” For this reason, a large swath of our population long ago chalked Maher up as a liberal ideologue and went on about their business.

However, it now seems that at times Maher wants to be taken seriously as a sane, social critic, and sometimes he actually has something interesting  to say, as when he recently spoke out against Islam’s continued encroachment into the Western world. Maher worries about Islam’s spread because he believes Western values are “better” than Islamic ones. And when given every chance to retract or recant such statements, Maher instead insists that the correctness of his statement is proven by the fact that Christians and Jews laugh off criticism of their religions, while Muslims make “death threats to cartoonists.”

But there’s an inconsistency in Maher’s social criticism, and it lies in the fact that he appears too ideological to allow himself to fully follow his own maxims or embrace his own truisms. For instance, after fighting off accusations of racism (for his comments about Islam), Maher told his detractors: “It’s not because of [their] race, it’s because of [their] religion.” Is this not something Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and dare I say Juan Williams, have all said as well?

This is a well reasoned, succinct, and demonstrable point of view.

But after saying it, Maher was so bothered by the impact the Tea Party had on the 2010 midterm elections that he turned around and compared Americans to dogs: arguing that they “cannot understand actual words,” but instead only understand “fear.” (Here Maher makes the same mistake that Sheryl Crow made when she lashed out at Tea Partiers by saying: “These people…really don’t even know what the issues are, they’re just swept up in the fear of it and the anger of it.”)

First of all, I would argue that the Tea Party was not driven by fear as much as by principles (although the argument could be made that they did fear further damage to this country by Democrats if Republicans didn’t win in 2010). (more…)

It’s rare enough these days to see a movie in which one story is well-told, much less two stories. It’s even more rare when a filmmaker is able to balance two completely different plotlines and make both equally enjoyable and compelling. Yet with her new film “Julie & Julia,” writer-director Nora Ephron (“Sleepless in Seattle,” “You’ve Got Mail”) pulls off such feats so impressively that the movie could possibly wind up with an Oscar nomination at the end of the year now that the Academy has expanded the awards to ten nominations and will likely finally include a couple of comedies each year.

“Julie & Julia” follows the amusingly parallel lives of chef Julia Child (played by Meryl Streep), who achieved worldwide fame while revolutionizing the art of cooking starting in the ‘50s, and Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a young New York City woman searching for identity in 2002. Powell longs to be a successful writer like her friends and yet is trapped processing insurance claims from victims of the World Trade Center attacks. (more…)

So posters of President Obama made up as Heath Ledger’s Joker with ‘Socialism’ written below it have been showing up around L.A – and it’s being greeted with the usual outrage you’d expect from people who get outraged. Some are calling it racist, others are calling it “mean spirited and dangerous,” while I call it boring, boring, and oh yeah: boring.

The website Newsbusters points out the silliness behind the outrage – after all, President Bush has been depicted as far worse – he’s been portrayed as everything from a bloodsucking vampire in the Village Voice, to the Joker in Vanity Fair, to God forbid, a Republican- everywhere else. No one seemed to mind then. And while people like Bill Maher point out that Obama has been only at this job for six months (whereas Bush earned the bile over eight years) and therefore any criticism is unfair – that’s pure batpoop. Hatred for Bu$hitler began the moment he took office, and the vile lefties only knew Sarah Palin for a few weeks before they were wearing t-shirts with her face and a vulgar word (begins with ‘C’ and rhymes with bunt) beneath it. (more…)