Unlike the corrupt mainstream media, Disney Studios has no obligation, moral or otherwise, to inform anyone about the White House throwing a lavish Hollywood-themed party during the depths of the Great Recession. But it is more than a little revealing that just prior to the release of a big-budget adaptation of “Alice In Wonderland,” the studio wouldn’t use a White House event ATTENDED BY THE PRESIDENT AND THE FIRST LADY to help promote the film.

The New York Post:

A White House “Alice in Wonderland” costume ball — put on by Johnny Depp and Hollywood director Tim Burton — proved to be a Mad-as-a-Hatter idea that was never made public for fear of a political backlash during hard economic times, according to a new tell-all.

“The Obamas,” by New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor, tells of the first Halloween party the first couple feted at the White House in 2009. It was so over the top that “Star Wars” creator George Lucas sent the original Chewbacca to mingle with invited guests.

The book reveals how any official announcement of the glittering affair — coming at a time when Tea Party activists and voters furious over the lagging economy, 10-percent unemployment rate, bank bailouts and Obama’s health-care plan were staging protests — quickly vanished down the rabbit hole.

That was in October of 2009, five months prior to the film’s release in March of the following year. And yet, with over a hundred million on the line, the publicity-savvy Disney all but ignored an event that would’ve generated a ton of publicity towards the film and most certainly increased the all-important “awareness” studios crave most in the months leading up to the release of a tentpole such as this one.

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Sony Pictures and Academy Award-winning director Kathryn Bigelow have already had to deal with the nightmare that resulted from the cynical release date of their upcoming film surrounding the hunt for and the killing of Osama bin Laden. The original idea was for Sony to release the dramatization this October, just a few weeks prior to the presidential election. Lame, dishonest  protestations aside, obviously the goal was to use the film to give President Obama a reelection boost, not only with the film itself but also with the complicit news media using the film as an excuse to resurrect one of the President’s only successes (thanks to the Bush Administrations willingness to waterboard). Last month, Sony wisely blinked and pushed the release date to after the election, but that doesn’t change what might have happened prior to that move.

Many have speculated (including me) that Sony, Bigelow, screenwriter Mark  Boal, and the White House all got into bed together to create a propaganda film that would hit theatres with the kind of exquisite timing that is never an accident. It’s no secret Sony, like the rest of Hollywood, is deep in the tank for President FailureTeleprompter, and this $40 to $70 million propaganda film would most certainly serve as an in-kind propaganda contribution  that delivered the kind of deus ex machina that can only be dreamed up in Hollywood. Yesterday, and for very good reason, the story turned once again when the Pentagon and CIA got involved.

Apparently, it’s not just us extreme right-wing Republicans who are concerned over the possibility that the White House might have given the studio and filmmakers classified information they weren’t cleared to receive:

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When it comes to the complicated world of teen bullying, there’s really only one expert of consequence – Lady Gaga.

After all, she’s been vocal on the subject for months now, and she’s clearly done enough field research to put the anti-bullying movement in high gear.

Perhaps that’s why she’s visiting the White House today to lend her expertise to Obama administration staffers on the subject. Who can’t identify with being ostracized for wearing an outfit made of meat to school?

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As a satellite barrels towards Earth this week with impending doom, the references to Northern Exposure are many. I, of course, remember it well. Maggie, my character on Northern Exposure, was giving her boyfriend, Rick, a pilot’s examination. He made a mistake so she did not give him a passing grade. He was distraught and thus ventured to the top of a mountain to meditate. While in this posture, he was hit by a random, falling satellite and killed. Many of Maggie’s boyfriends died untimely deaths and this was a blow, in itself, to Maggie. Fleishman was undaunted, and, daring death, danced with Maggie at the end of the episode. Great writing. Great cast. Great fun. Maggie was a truly unique character; one unmatched then and now.

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I was walking through Lowe’s yesterday to buy a hammer and I saw a tool kit belt that wraps around the waist. I laughed fondly as I remembered that during rehearsals, to “get into character,” I wore one of those tool belts filled with tools. Maggie could fix anything: planes, toilets, dinner – with meat hunted by her own hand.

During the filming and post-production of that episode I was unhappy with the producers, Josh Brand and John Falsey. I had to re-record the dialogue for the scene where Rick’s coffin was revealed and they continuously cut away from my face. The satellite had fused to Rick’s body, so the coffin had pieces of metal coming out of it. I wanted to show some emotion revealing that Maggie was sad that Rick had died. Thus, I had a few tears, conjured by “method acting.” (My favorite actors were all “method actors” – Dustin Hoffman, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Jessica Lange, even Marilyn Monroe.) John and Josh were desperately trying to keep the show in the Monday night “comedy” line-up so my performance had to be restructured via sound booths and editing rooms to be “funny.” Of course, I believed that “the self same well that holds our laughter also holds our tears,” to loosely quote Khalil Gibran but.. so goes the tango and artistry of teamwork.

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This series was inspired by the a six part, video examination of Dimitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony.

Before you go to sleep, however, or bump up another article, stay with me and this article’s title.

The cited video is Michael Tilson Thomas’ exceptional and exceptionally moving tribute to the soul of Dimitri Shostakovich and the hidden meanings within his Fifth Symphony that has profound relevance to the direction we are headed into with the Progressive New World Order.

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The Tilson Thomas complete video is an intensely condensed portrait of Stalin’s Russia. I consider the Tilson Thomas lecture/documentary a “must-see” for anyone viewing America primarily through the eyes of Hollywood and the performing arts.

The Soviet Union ravenously fed on the terror we can find breathing beneath the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony. The nightmare is only there, however, and can only be perceived if we begin to understand the musical code with which Shostakovich is constructing an obligatory deception.

Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony is a lie?

How do you appease a terrorist, the homicidal Communist Joseph Stalin, while, at the same time being true to yourself and your calling as an artist?

With that challenge in mind, why would I ever come up with the title, Bringing America Home Again?

The history of Stalin’s Russia is vitally important as a measure of how far the Progressive New World Order has dragged America and Americans away from their original faith in individual freedom and individual responsibility.

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The idea here is to paint conservatives as prudes and hold tight to that narrative at all costs. The idea here is to pretend there was no legitimate reason for opposing Common’s White House invitation.

When the Left rose up to defend Common’s White House invite, they only focused on criticism of the rapper’s lyrics (which was silly). What they intentionally ignored and continue to ignore is Common’s 2005 statement opposing interracial relationships.

That kind of talk is indefensible unless, of course, you’re a Leftist. And most especially if the airing of such a thing will hurt a Democrat president.

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With the President’s address to a joint session of Congress on September 8, I expect a mildly new turn on an old Progressive tune: “America’s not going anywhere without Karl Marx & Friends!”

America’s increasingly far Left academia has always been “nudging” its way into power. The first great, 20^th Century landmark for these “enlightened despots”, as Voltaire described them, came when a professor of the ordinarily Left-leaning Harvard University, Dr. Henry Kissinger, found his way into the Oval Office of Republican President Richard Nixon.

The not-so-good-doctor seemed to have literally crawled inside the soul of this undeniably insecure but ingeniously manipulative politician, also known as Tricky Dick. Their administration, as we know, came to a rather disgraceful end.

However, Red China’s oldest American friend, Henry Kissinger, knows that his influence from deep connections with Beijing is now as strong as it ever was.

Why?

His “kind”, his “fraternity” from Harvard and the University of Chicago are back!

Above you see a decidedly self-confident, Presidential manipulator, Barack Obama, surrounded by two of his favorite academicians, Samantha Power and Cass Sunstein.

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From the AP:

Daryl Hannah was arrested outside the White House by park police for refusing to move off sidewalk. The sit-in protested a planned oil pipeline from Canada to Texas.

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Rep. Lynn Jenkins, a Republican from Kansas, has introduced a bill that would stop the administration’s use of taxpayer money to help Sony Pictures, director Kathryn Bigelow, and screenwriter Mark Boal produce what is obviously going to be a $50 – $75 million Obama 2012 campaign commercial — and one that is currently (and not coincidentally) scheduled to be released just a few weeks prior to the 2012 election.

Bigelow and Boal

The Hill:

A Republican lawmaker from Kansas wants to prevent the administration from helping Sony make a move about the killing of Osama bin Laden.  

The Stop Subsidizing Hollywood Act introduced by Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-Kan.) would stop the Obama administration from spending taxpayer money to share information about the killing of bin Laden with Sony Pictures, which is looking to release a film about that event in October 2012. 

Jenkins said the bill, introduced on Friday, is necessary because the government has no role to play in helping the movie industry at a time of fiscal crisis.  

“In an era of 9 percent unemployment, trillion dollar deficits, credit downgrades, and record debt ceiling extensions it is unconscionable that tax payer dollars are being used to aid the Hollywood film industry in fact checking and script research,” Jenkins said. “American families have been forced to go through their budgets line by line and look for ways to tighten their belts, and it is time the federal government does the same.”

Sony, Bigelow and Boal have been given every opportunity to do the right thing and push the film’s release date into late December and out of the political arena. They have CHOSEN not to do so. Furthermore, they were the ones who chose to play politics with this film to begin with, not Rep. Jenkins and not anyone on the Right.

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Politico:

Looks as though someone got the DNC memo:

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Man oh man, Jon Stewart has the left-wing spin and talking points down cold, doesn’t he? No one with even a smidgen of intellectual honesty uses the term “revenues increases,” and to blame the Bush tax cuts (or any tax cuts) on the deficit — especially after Obama’s unprecedented spending orgy — is nothing more than pure propaganda.

Do Tea Partiers want government gone? No.

Do Tea Partiers want to pay zero dollars in taxes? No.

But if you got your news from Jon Stewart, you wouldn’t know that. And God help us all, people do get their news from Jon Stewart.

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Jon Stewart got away with a lot of ridiculous arguments on The Factor last night.  Stewart’s argument that Common wasn’t actually supporting cop killing because he somehow believes that both Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu Jamal are actually innocent of the crime – and therefore should be excused – is both irrelevant and ludicrous.  O’Reilly largely let him get away with it.  Does Stewart think Rashard Mendenhall should be off the hook because he *technically* doesn’t support or sympathize with terrorism if he actually thinks Bin Laden’s hijacked airplanes might not have been the cause of the World Trade Center buildings collapsing?  Attempting to rewrite the history of clearly and unforgivably evil people is decidedly rejected by good and decent people.  Stewart can shove that argument. 

Mendenhall recently lost his endorsement from Champion Sports over a few infamous, perhaps impulsive tweets.  Common wrote a damn love song about convicted cop-killer and domestic terrorist Assata Shakur, went to visit her in Cuba, and named his daughter after her.  I have attached that song at the end of this post, because I want everyone to see exactly what we’re talking about here.  If you name your daughter after a convicted cop-killer, domestic terrorist and violent, militant Black Nationalist, then the song you wrote worshipping said cop-killer was not simply adopting an artistic voice.  If your defense is going to be that you believe she’s really completely innocent, you better have some damn good reasons for believing so if you expect anyone to let it slide. 

Common’s taking sides with Assata Shakur doesn’t have anything to do with his expert legal opinion.  He’s taking sides with Assata Shakur because he apparently worships everything for which she stood – Black Panthers, Black Liberation Army (BLA), ethnic sectarianism, and the great socialist revolution.  He didn’t write a song arguing that even though Assata Shakur joined a reprehensible, racist and violent terrorist organization like the BLA and did a number of awful things with them, in this particular incident there were anomalies in the application of due process.  He wrote a song worshiping her values and her life’s mission. 

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Ken Larrey is working up a piece of analysis now, but I wanted to post the video and throw this question out there…

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I’m going to make some points about the lesser controversies (namely the lyrics issue) surrounding the invitation of rapper/poet “Common” to the Whitehouse, because John Nolte has the larger controversies that were completely ignored by Jon Stewart pretty well covered.

One thing that stuck out to me in Stewart’s attempted takedown of Fox News (or “epic takedown” if you’re a Mediaite straight news guy: notice how the first linked article is entirely opinionated but not distinguished as such as Mediaite claims to do, and the second glosses over convicted cop-killer and FBI-classified domestic terrorist Assata Shakur, aka Joanne Chesimar — also a hero to Common as an “alleged” cop killer). It was the equivalence Stewart attempted to draw between Johnny Cash and Common. Stewart showed George Bush presenting the National Medal of Arts to Johnny Cash (who had written some rough lyrics in his day as well) and then asked emphatically, “What’s the difference?! What’s the difference?!” The answer Stewart was getting at was as subtle as the CB4 rap he played the next day (yeah, this actually exists. I couldn’t stop singing it either):

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Stewart is unsurprisingly asserting that anyone who objects to Common’s Whitehouse invite is either racist or trying to influence people who are, and are holding different standards to Bush’s and Obama’s choice of honorees. But Stewart’s first deception is that while the National Medal of Arts is presented by the President, honorees are selected by the National Endowment for the Arts, not the Whitehouse, so it was not Bush’s decision at all.

More importantly, see if you can find another difference in the two artists and two situations:

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Truth be told, watching some on our side make an issue out of Common’s lyrics/poetry kinda depressed me. It’s an argument lost before it can even begin. Artists frequently create characters in their work, most especially songwriters. Did Johnny Cash really shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die? Did Bruce Springsteen really go for a ride where ten innocent people died? Even Common’s call to “burn” Bush can be defended as metaphor. But the real reason this approach depressed me is because it was totally unnecessary. Not as as a poet, not as a singer and not as a character, it’s just a naked fact that Michelle Obama’s White House guest defends convicted cop killers and opposes interracial relationships. Which brings me to my point…

Thank you, Bill O’Reilly:

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Some, like O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, did bring up Common’s open opposition to interracial relationships and his craven support of two convicted cop killers. In other words, on top of the lyrics, there was also a discussion at FNC (and elsewhere) about the full context of this extremely divisive and sometimes repulsive “artist” the White House saw fit to stamp with their approval. But Comedy Central’s “New Murrow” only wanted to discuss Common within a safe-for-Obama context (the lyrics) and in the above video, Bill O’Reilly calls Stewart out for this act of “comedic” intellectual dishonesty.

Naturally, in their journ-o-listic quest to put the story to bed before the full truth gets out, the MSM grabbed hold of Stewart’s dishonest attack on Fox News, labeled it “epic,” pronounced it “ownage” (want to see how corrupt journ-o-lism works? Click this and this), and positioned it as the last word. But this story — and some of this is our fault for making lyrics an issue — still hasn’t been properly told. O’Reilly understands this and to his great credit has no intention of allowing Stewart, the MSM and the White House to wriggle off this hook so easily.

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Oh what fun it is to watch the journ-o-lism at work. The White House invites a guest openly opposed to interracial relationships and our satirists and MSM ignores it … incredibly, that’s not something written two hundred years ago.

Jon Stewart does what he’s trained to do here and that’s further the media’s dishonest narratives. Here he joins the MSM in the willful ignoring of Common’s opposition — not in a rap, not in a poem, not in a song — to interracial relationships – unless of course, he’s just using women of certain races as objects of his own sexual gratification.

Hilariously, the Left now sees racism in everything except, you know, racism.

Below is an excellent report on the issue from — gasp! — Fox News that does what Stewart refuses, adds the proper context to the story, including an outraged police representative not at all happy with an “artist” who defends cop killers receiving the White House stamp of approval (I guess Jon Stewart’s a big supporter of first responders until he’s not).

The best part of the Fox segment, however, is Governor Palin reminding us that leftist nonsense forced First Lady Laura Bush to cancel a White House poetry event in 2003.

UPDATE:  This post originally excerpted an article from the Daily Caller saying Common was scratched from his White House performance.

From Politico:

Rapper and poet Common may have incited controversy this week when the White House invited him to perform at a poetry event.

After all, he has rapped about shooting police and has written lyrics calling for the “burn[ing] of former President George W. Bush.”

But Common kept things pretty tame when he took the stage in the East Room at Wednesday night’s “Evening of Poetry” along with other musicians, poets and artists.

The hip hop artist — dressed in a slate gray suit — delivered lyrics to a rap song that began with words from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and also included praise for the president who was seated in front of him.

“I woke up with the sunshine, a sunshine I’d never seen,” he began, reciting his poem without any hip-hop beats. “There was light at the end of it, reminding me to forever dream. I was dreaming I walked into the White House with love on my sleeve and love for each and every one of you remind you to believe.”

Concluding the poem, he went on to mention President Obama by name: “One King’s Dream, He was able to Barack us.”

Common did not acknowledge any of the controversy surrounding his performance. Before leaving the stage, he simply said, “Thank you very much, I appreciate being here.”

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Did we wake up in 1850 today, where criticizing someone who attempts to justify and/or rationalize their disappointment and feelings of betrayal over a Black friend marrying a Caucasian woman somehow makes you a “pissy, little jerk”? (And what wonderful language allowed on a publication run by Colby Hall, a guy who this very day got himself completely bent over this.) 

Apparently, we did wake up in that country. Here’s Mediaite’s Jon Bershad:

The subject of black men dating white women is a very sensitive one in the African American community. While interracial relationships were taboo in white communities in the past, that was because racist white people felt that black romantic partners weren’t “good enough.” When a black man dates a white woman today, it is still taboo for many blacks because they fear it reenforces that old idea. That’s why there are so many Evil White Women playing the role of mistress or girlfriend in the works of black entertainers like Tyler Perry. It’s a cliche and Scott was merely trying to discover the reason for its prevalence.

Well, this most certainly sounds like a typical leftie speaking on behalf of the “African American community,” but if you read singer Jill Scott’s full piece, you might disagree that the Grammy winner and White House guest was “merely trying to discover the reason for its prevalence.” Here’s a quote not included in the Mediaite piece:

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What the MSM and the White House did just a few minutes ago while asking and responding to questions about rapper Common being invited by Michelle Obama for a night of poetry is, as always, one in the same. Rather than focus on a 2005 interview where Common openly opposed interracial relationships, everything’s being couched in the safer (for Obama) arena of “artistic license” — as just another Right v. Left battle in the culture war.

Common at the NAACP Image Awards

While Big Hollywood reported on the Common story when it broke, there was no editorializing until I came across this particular interview. I do get that artists/rappers/singers create characters in their work and as a defender of artistic expression, I had no real energy towards the issue until I came across the interview. An artist using his or her work to express the unacceptable is one thing. An individual openly declaring opposition to interracial relationships is naked racism and something else entirely.

For obvious reasons, however, no one wants to talk about what Common the man said in an interview, they want to focus on Common the artist. Watch what both the Washington Post and the White House do here…

The Washington Post:

Common is one of many artists expected at the White House’s “An Evening of Poetry” Wednesday evening, but his invitation has started a minor culture war, in light of lyrics like “Burn a Bush ’cause for peace he don’t push no button.” And also stuff we can’t print here.

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