Back to Basics

It’s a lot easier to give Obama’s performance the thumbs-up when you’re not going to be around when the bill comes due:

Betty White says she usually keeps her political views private but in this presidential election strongly favours one candidate.

As the 90-year-old actress prepares to visit the Smithsonian Institution and National Zoo next week, White told The Associated Press she “very, very much favours” President Barack Obama in the election.

The “Golden Girls” star said Friday she is very bi-partisan and has stayed away from politics her whole life. She usually never says who she is for or against because she doesn’t want to turn off any of her fans.

White says in this year’s election, she likes what Obama has done and “how he represents us.”

Great — now the administration will probably be after White to join Andy Griffith in shilling for Obamacare.

Jennifer Lawrence is a real down to earth person.

Pass the squirrel guts on PETA bread, please.The Hunger Games‘ mega-hottie and Oscar nominee Jennifer Lawrence is apparently as cool in real life as she is playing Katniss, a bowhunting super badass survivor girl in the blockbuster movie.
The 21-year-old beauty gutted a squirrel in the most talked about scene for her role in 2010’sWinter’s Bone, (for which she was nominated). The scene was not faked, she told Rolling Stone magazine: “I should say it wasn’t real, for PETA,” she said. “But screw PETA.”
Prior to shooting Winter’s Bone, (a charming little movie RS describes as “a gritty, gothic, murder story set in Ozark meth country”), Lawrence spent a month in Missouri with a rural family shooting rifles and chopping wood in preparation for the role.
Actor Woody Harrelson, (a real hippy earth-cookie and lovable nut job himself), describes co-star Lawrence in the interview, as “the real deal, who’s not trying to be anyone she’s not. She’s just this frickin’ amazing gal from Kentucky who hit it big.”. . .

No matter what happens on this mostly politically-oriented version of Celebrity Jeopardy, it’s unlikely any of the contestants will break Wolf Blitzer’s record.

But you never know what’s going to happen, because Joe Biden has been consulted about the clues:

Jeopardy host Alex Trebek visited the White House on Thursday and took an impromptu tour of the West Wing.

He met press secretary Jay Carney, posed behind the podium in the press briefing room and signed the infamous pool wall in the West Wing basement.

Trebek was at the White House to shoot some B roll and photos for a Power Players tournament the show is filming on Friday and Saturday at Constitution Hall in D.C.

He said he spent some time on Wednesday with Vice President Joe Biden talking about what questions to ask.

Among the categories Biden suggested that might end up on the cutting room floor: “Hair transplant doctors to avoid” and “Stupid things VP’s said prior to 2009.”

“Joepourri” and “When the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor” will make the cut.

Because the cast of “Game Change” is still on vacay, in fairness to the producers of this movie, Jane Fonda was the only far-lefty with acting experience who was available for the part — but only because Sean Penn didn’t fit the dress.

From Variety:

In the midst of recruiting an all-star ensemble for his long-gestating passion project “The Butler,” director Lee Daniels has tapped Jane Fonda to play Nancy Reagan.

Based on a Washington Post report by Wil Haygood, pic follows Eugene Allen, the White House butler whose career started with Harry Truman in 1952 and ended in 1986 with Ronald Reagan.

Forest Whitaker is closing a deal to play Allen, while Oprah Winfrey remains in talks to play his wife. David Oyelowo is in negotiations to play Allen’s son, while Liam Neeson and John Cusack are circling presidential supporting roles as Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, respectively. Fonda will appear in a handful of scenes as the first lady of the United States.

The movie is being written by Danny Strong, who wrote the film adapatation of Game Change — which means the scene that alleges John Hinckley, Jr. acted because he was negatively influenced by one of Sarah Palin’s high school social studies essays should be attributed to artistic license for the sake of story continuity.

In the Washington Post article on which the movie “Butler” is supposedly based, Eugene Allen, who passed away in 2010, had some nice things to say about the Reagans. I’m sure Fonda will make sure those are all accurately conveyed in the script before she formally accepts the part.

Hey, it’s funny and acceptable if white Hollywood liberals participate in it:

Time to play “imagine if a Republican did this”:

Video footage obtained by The Daily Caller shows Hollywood screen legend Tom Hanks and Eagles musician Glenn Frey at a 2004 fundraising auction, playfully interacting with a white man dressed as an African native, complete with blackface makeup and a giant Afro wig.

Hanks most recently provided the narration for ”The Road We’ve Traveled,” a 17-minute-long campaign video meant to help President Barack Obama win re-election in November.

The 2004 auction’s routine included a white man in blackface, identified in the footage as investment banker James Montgomery, CEO of the Santa Monica, Calif., firm Montgomery & Co. In addition to blackface makeup and the wig, Montgomery wore a leopard-print toga and an arm band made to look like it consisted of animal teeth.

During a lull in the auction, Frey refers to Montgomery and comments, “See how boring money management and stock investment is, people? It’s not nearly as much fun as, like, professional basketball.”

In response to the video, Congress of Racial Equality national spokesperson Niger Innis has called on President Obama to remove Hanks’ narration from his campaign film. Innis called the incident “an orchestrated, heinous, and racist ‘Stepin Fetchit’ routine that Mr. Hanks was a part of.”

The final item auctioned in the 2004 fundraiser depicted in the video was a large stuffed “trophy gorilla” that came with what Hanks described as a “dowry”: 5,000 shares of pre-IPO stock in Corus Pharmaceuticals, a company whose limited partners included Montgomery’s family trust.

The video shows Montgomery in blackface, holding the stuffed animal and standing with Hanks, while Frey is heard saying into his microphone: “This is as close to diversity as we’ll get at St. Matthew’s.”

Those guys should team up with Ted Danson and take the show on the road where they could help mobilize Obama voters to do battle against those racist Republicans.

If these twits were Romney supporters you’d be looking at the lead story on all the nightly newscasts:

“I love Cuba!” bellowed comedian Jim Belushi last week from a Havana stage. The comedian who cashed-in on his comedian brother’s name was giving a stand-up routine as guest of honor of a regime whose “constitution” mandates two years in prison for any subject overheard cracking a joke about his host.

Jim Belushi was basking as Master of Ceremonies of Cuba’s Cigar Festival, which—while auctioning cigars to millionaire and billionaire businessmen from around the world– raised over one million for the regime that jailed, exiled and murdered most of Cuba’s businessmen. Fidel Castro’s son Tony was chuckling from a ringside seat.

Cuba’s tobacco farmers and cigar makers all had their livelihoods stolen at Soviet gunpoint in 1960. The recalcitrant (people who balked armed at having their life’s work stolen by Stalinists.) were sent to firing squads, torture-chambers, forced labor camps and exile. Shortly afterwards Cuba’s Minister of Industries, Ernesto “Che” Guevara “nationalized” and “consolidated” Cuba’s cigar industry.

“Certainly we execute!” beamed Che Guevara at the UN in December 1964. “And we will continue to execute! This is a war to the death against our revolution’s enemies!” Many of these bullet-riddled enemies had simply resisted the armed theft of their family tobacco farms by Che Guevara’s KGB-trained gunmen.

As he chummed it up with regime apparatchiks in Cuba (where the average annual salary is $230) Jim Belushi was fresh from last month’s $38,500-per-plate Obama fundraiser in Beverly Hills where he shared the honors alongside George Clooney.

Note to Jim Belushi’s agent: Your client’s Cuba visit is probably providing more entertainment to many more Cubans, but in more private venues–and more onerously– without proper compensation. To wit:

“My job was to bug visiting celebrity’s hotel rooms,” says high-ranking Cuban intelligence defector Delfin Fernandez. “With both cameras and listening devices. And famous Americans are the priority objectives of Castro’s intelligence,” says Fernandez. “Most people have no idea they are being watched while they are in Cuba. But their personal activities are filmed under orders from Castro himself.”

And according to some sources, Havana, given the desperation of its brutalized and impoverished residents, has recently topped Bangkok as the world mecca for child sex.

“He [Delfin Fernandez] has not only met some of the most famous men in the world,” says the London Daily Mirror about the Cuban defector, “he’s also spied on them and been witness to some of their most innermost secrets.”

“When the celebrity visitors arrived at the hotels Nacional, Melia Habana and Melia Cohiba,” says Fernandez, “we already had their rooms completely bugged with sophisticated taping equipment. But not just the rooms, we’d also follow the visitors around. Sometimes we covered them 24 hours a day. They had no idea we were tailing them.”

Famous Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar was a special target for this bugging, but nothing of value for Castro came of it. “Everybody already knows I’m a maricon!” Almodovar laughed at Castro’s blackmailers. “So go right ahead! Knock yourselves out!”

“Fidel Castro is a special connoisseur of these tapings and videos,” Fernandez says. “Especially of the really famous.”

And not even his closest “friends” are safe from this bugging. The best example is Castro’s longtime “friend” Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

If you’re Obama looking for a director for your campaign film (the trailer was recently released, featuring narration from Tom Hanks), you’d want somebody who not only has tasted the Kool Aid, but who has swallowed so much of it that they’ve overdosed on Hope & Change and will forever be seeing visions of rainbows, gumdrops and unicorns.

Team Obama’s choice was Davis Guggenheim, who directed Al Gore’s epic adventure of misinformation “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Best part: The only negative about Obama? Too many accomplishments!

Here’s a guy who lives in a “tripping with the Bradys” kind of world.

I wonder if Bill and Hill will get any residuals for being the inspirations for this new show:

At the epicenter of the drama is the divorced former First Lady, who’s the current Secretary of State, having recently lost the presidential nomination.

Elaine Barrish – that’s the name of Weaver’s character – has got a philandering ex-husband; she’s also got twin sons, and The Good One is her chief of staff.

Barrish struggles to keep her family together while simultaneously dealing with the crises of the State Department. USA had ordered six episodes of the series, for which it has just cast the actress best known for “Aliens,” and “Avatar,” and “Working Girl,” and “The Year of Living Dangerously.”

The series premiere covers straw that broke the camel’s back of the “fictional” couple’s marriage. In the episode, which is entitled “I was just cleaning it and it went off,” watch for cameos by characters named “Harmonica Flutinsky” and “Flick Norris,” as well as an appearance by the re-set button.

For conservatives and traditionalists, unusual good news from Hollywood—in terms of both weekend box-office results and, amazingly enough, the Oscar ceremonies.

Among all new films released Friday, Act of Valor counted as the runaway winner, with the public eagerly endorsing a breathlessly paced, passionately pro-military, hyper-patriotic action film about heroic Navy SEALs protecting the public from diabolical cooperation between Islamo-Nazis and drug cartels. The movie delivered its stunningly choreographed scenes of combat on a miniscule budget of $12 million, earning back more than twice that amount ($24.7 million, an impressive $8,128 per screen) in just its first three days in release. By comparison, the top new release from the big studios, Jennifer Aniston’s intermittently amusing hippie-commune comedy, Wanderlust, earned just $6.6 million and a $3,297 average per screen.

Like The Hurt Locker, the Oscar-winning Best Picture from 2008, Act of Valor attempted to give moviegoers an intimate, visceral sense of personal participation in danger and combat, but unlike The Hurt Locker, this new film connected with a mass audience—earning considerably more in its first three days than its much-acclaimed predecessor brought home in its entire run.

The box-office returns suggest that the public viewed buying tickets for Act of Valor as a means of openly supporting our noble troops and endorsing their work, while The Hurt Locker seemed to express pity for its bomb-defusing military professionals—honorable but damaged guys trapped in their dubious mission in Iraq. The new film views sacrifice and service as heroic (if occasionally tragic), while the Oscar winner from two years ago emphasized the ugliness and brutality of combat. The sharply contrasting ticket sales make it clear which point of view the public prefers.

Moreover, Act of Valor’s commercial triumph comes in the face of overwhelmingly negative reviews—with most critics dismissive of a project that began as a Navy recruiting film and uses real-life SEALs (and their families) rather than professional actors to play all the daring special operators in the fictional story. It’s true that the movie offers little in the way of nuance or shades of gray, but for many of us who pay close attention to the ongoing efforts of elite counterterror units, the daily struggle against some of the most depraved and monstrous forces on earth is indeed a clear-cut battle of good versus evil.

No one expects this stirring but uncomplicated action film to figure prominently in next year’s Oscar race, but the results of this year’s Academy Awards celebration should provide further encouragement for those seeking signs of new respect for traditional values.

None of this year’s nine Best Picture nominees (The Artist, The Descendants, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Help, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, Moneyball, The Tree of Life, and War Horse) counted as dark, nihilistic, or shocking—like some of last year’s leading contenders, including Black Swan, 127 Hours, and Winter’s Bone. None of this year’s major nominees featured the overt left-wing political messages of other recent Oscar favorites like Avatar or Milk, and all of this year’s Best Picture possibilities took affectionate, admiring views of marriage, romance, family, and community, with Moneyball also honoring baseball and business, while War Horse glorified some of the same battlefield virtues depicted in Act of Valor.