Tag Archives: Hollywood

Changing Cultures Result In Changing Laws

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During the 1920’s and pretty much through the 1980’s smoking was portrayed as glamorous. From the 1920’s to the 1950’s Hollywood movies collaborated with film studios to place their products on screen, and they even paid movie stars to appear in cigarette advertising campaigns. Cigarette ads showed couples on exotic beaches or exotic tourist locations. The effort was made to associate cigarettes with travel, success, and glamor. In 1966, America began to require warning labels on cigarette packages. In 1970, cigarette advertising was banned from television and radio. In the 1980’s America began to ban smoking on airplanes. At first the ban only applied to smaller planes. In 1988, President Reagan signed a bill that banned smoking on airplanes. Beginning in the 1970’s, there was an effort to de-glamorize smoking. Anti-smoking ads appeared on television showing people in the hospital wasting away from cancer and lung disease. Restaurants set up non-smoking areas (later removed, sending smokers outside). Gradually smokers were deprived of their right to smoke and looked down upon. (I say this as an observer–I never smoked). Advertising and cultural pressure worked–in 1965, 45 percent of Americans were smokers. In 2015, that number was 15.2 percent. There is one small caveat though–in 1915, a nationwide survey  showed that the use of pot has surpassed cigarette smoking for the first time (article here). In 2020, 12.5 percent of Americans smoked. The culture changed, and gradually Americans changed their behavior. I would like to see the same thing happen with abortion now that Roe versus Wade has been overturned.

Because Roe versus Wade has been overturned, each state is allowed to make its own laws on abortion. It will be illegal in some states and abortion up until birth will be legal in other states. It’s time we tell the truth about abortion (just like it was a while before the tobacco companies told the truth about cigarettes). Just as the tobacco industry was a powerful lobby with lots of money to donate to political campaigns, Planned Parenthood (the leading abortion provider in the country), through related organizations donates large amounts of money to political campaigns and funds large amounts of political advertising and other advertising.

Planned Parenthood says that the child is simply a blob of tissue. Science has known for a long time that is not true. Planned Parenthood doesn’t mention the emotional scars many women experience after an abortion. Planned Parenthood doesn’t tell you about the increased risk of breast cancer in women who have had abortions. Planned Parenthood doesn’t tell you that an abortion is like any other medical procedure in that it carries risks. I personally know a number of women who were not able to have children after a legal abortion because of the scarring.

It’s time for the facts about abortion to be publicly shouted so that the culture surrounding abortion can change. I want abortion to be as socially unacceptable as smoking. Crisis Pregnancy Centers need to be supported, and pregnant women in a difficult situation need to get whatever help they need. There needs to be a reasonable alternative to getting an abortion, and the abortion industry needs to go bankrupt.

 

Rules For The Little People

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Yesterday The Gateway Pundit reported the following:

Hollywood Stars Attending Video Music Awards From Out of State will Not be Subject to New York’s 14-Day Quarantine Mandate

This infuriates me. I live in North Carolina and can’t visit my grandchildren without a two-week quarantine, but Hollywood stars are not subject to quarantine. So the coronavirus only attacks people that don’t have a lot of influence?

The article notes:

Hollywood stars traveling to New York City from out of state for the MTV Video Music Awards will have the special privilege of skipping the state’s 14-day quarantine mandate.

Under Governor Andrew Cuomo’s mandate, anyone who travels to New York from any of the 34 ‘high risk’ states must quarantine for 14 days. Violators may be fined up to $10,000 or jailed for 15 days.

The article quotes The New York Post:

But unlike other travelers, the VMA musicians, singers and dancers won’t have to follow a state rule to quarantine for 14 days if they come to New York from any of 34 states, including California and Florida, with average COVID infection rates exceeding 10 percent.

Under an executive order by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, anyone who violates the quarantine order is subject to a fine up to $10,000 or up to 15 days in jail.

But the state Department of Health has granted the VMAs a semi-exemption to the quarantine rule.

To receive the exemption, the VMAs agreed to police itself with “rigorous safety protocols including testing and screening and compliance checks by a special compliance officer.”

The article also reminds us of another recent privileged class that was except from coronavirus rules:

Democrat Mayor of DC Muriel Bowser exempted Democrat lawmakers returning from Rep. John Lewis’s funeral from the mandatory 14-day quarantine.

I live in a section of North Carolina that has a low rate of the virus. Why am I not allowed to visit my grandchildren?

It’s Always A Good Idea To Follow The Money

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Hot Air posted an article yesterday about the money that funded the March for Our Lives. The March for Our Lives took place on March 24, 2018, in response to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting on February 14, 2018. Isn’t it amazing how people managed to organize and put all that together in about five weeks?

The article reports that according to The Washington Free Beacon:

The March For Our Lives Action Fund, a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organization launched in the aftermath of the deadly 2018 shootings at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, is bankrolled almost entirely by large donations in excess of $100,000. The group reported $17,879,150 in contributions and grants over the course of 2018, its first year of operations. Ninety-five percent of those contributions came from 36 donations between $100,000 and $3,504,717—a grand total of $16,922,331.

The group’s 990 tax form shows another 38 donations totaling between $5,000 and $100,000, which together accounted for an additional $876,114 of revenue. The remainder, just 0.5 percent of total receipts, came from those giving less than $5,000.

The group isn’t required to release the names of its donors but the Free Beacon notes that Marc Benioff and Eli Broad each donated a million dollars. Influence Watch has a list of some of the other big-name donors including Steven Spielberg and his wife who gave a combined million dollars:

A number of celebrities gave financial support to the organization: George and Amal Clooney, Oprah Winfrey, Jeffrey and Marilyn Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg, and Kate Capshaw each donated $500,000 for the event. The clothing company Gucci donated $500,000 to the movement. Actress Sara Ramirez notably donated $20,000 to the GoFundMe page. Professional basketball player Dwayne Wade also donated $200,000 to the organization.

All of that doesn’t include the largest contribution by far which came from CNN in the form of an endless stream of air time and online promotion for the Parkland kids, culminating in that awful special in which the Parkland kids and Sheriff Scott Israel were pitted against Dana Loesch and Marco Rubio.

The WFB story also includes a rundown of what the money was spent on. The largest chunk (nearly $8 million) went to funding the March itself. Another $4 million went to a 24-state tour to register young voters.

It is somewhat amazing to me that many Hollywood celebrities who are guarded by men with guns are perfectly willing to support taking guns away from ordinary citizens who are not guarded by men with guns.

Wisdom Proven True

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Yesterday The Washington Times posted an article stating what many Americans knew all along–Vice-President Mike Pence was right when he said that he has a rule never to be alone with a woman who is not his wife. Think how many recent scandals we would have avoided if Hollywood, newscasters, and politicians followed that rule.

The article notes:

Vice President Mike Pence was roundly ridiculed when it was revealed that he makes an effort never to be alone with a woman who is not his wife, but the policy is looking less prudish and more sensible as accusations of sexual misconduct against powerful men proliferate.

Accusations first surfaced last month against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and have since reverberated through Hollywood, the media and government at every level. On Wednesday, Matt Lauer, a longtime host of NBC’s “Today,” and Minnesota Public Radio’s Garrison Keillor were fired by their respective organizations amid accusations of improper behavior.

Joseph Backholm, president of the Family Policy Institute of Washington, said the spate of sexual misconduct accusations makes it “increasingly obvious that we need to re-evaluate our boundaries.”

The article notes:

The entry of women into the workforce since World War II, followed by the sexual revolution and the erasure of well-established sexual mores, has left men and women with little guidance as to how to interact in the workplace, Mr. Richards said.

“We now find ourselves trying to kind of create rules after discovering fallout from these dramatic social changes,” Mr. Richards said. “It’s not as if Pence’s rule is written in stone; different people have different rules that are similar to this. But I know many Christian organizations and Christian ministries that have rules more or less like Mike Pence’s in place for all employees.”

In addition to guarding against infidelity and other sexual misconduct, Mr. Richards said, the Pence rule preserves the reputations of all parties involved.

“It’s as much or more about preserving the reputations of himself and other women,” he said. “A simple guardrail is absolutely reasonable if you want to prevent the rumor mill from starting, let alone even worse sexual transgressions.”

There are some obvious things that could have been done to prevent some of this and some obvious questions about the actions of some of the people involved. Why did Matt Lauer have a button under his desk that would allow him to lock the door to his dressing room without leaving his chair? Why did Harvey Weinstein conduct meetings with women in hotel rooms wearing only his bathrobe? Did their employers or the people they were accountable to know of their behavior? Was there anyone Harvey Weinstein was accountable to? Where did these men get the idea that it was okay for them to do the things they did? Did they not believe that societal norms and social graces applied to them?

Where these actions are proven, there have to be consequences. Those consequences need to be consistent in the political and the corporate world. It will be interesting to see if they are. Meanwhile, the wisdom of Vice-President Pence is apparent.

 

Free Speech?

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One of the foundations of our representative republic is free speech. This can be a very mixed blessing. We have the right to speak freely–we don’t have the right not to be offended. Some of our politicians have rather thin skins.

Yesterday Judicial Watch reported that the Laugh Factor, a comedy club in Hollywood, has been contacted by the Hillary Clinton campaign because of a short video (less than three minutes) of a performance at the club which targets Hillary Clinton which is posted on the website of the club. Jamie Masada, who owns the club, says that a Clinton campaign staffer called him and threatened to put him out of business if he didn’t take down the video. The campaign also demanded personal contact information on the performers in the recording.

The article describes the performance as somewhat crass and including some profanity, but that does not disqualify it from being free speech. Anyone who does not approve of the language or the content has the option of turning it off–that’s part of what free speech is about.

The article reports:

Masada told Judicial Watch that, as soon as the video got posted on the Laugh Factory website, he received a phone call from a “prominent” person inside Clinton’s campaign. “He said the video was disgusting and asked who put me up to this,” Masada said. The Clinton staffer, who Masada did not want to identify, also demanded to know the names and phone numbers of the comedians that appear in the video. Masada refused and hung up. He insists that the comedy stage is a sanctuary for freedom of speech no matter who is offended. “Just last night we had (Emmy-award winner) Dana Carvey doing Donald Trump and it was hilarious,” Masada said.

Can you imaging Donald Trump doing this in response to all the jokes about his hair? This should be a red flag for anyone planning to vote for Hillary. The lady is thin-skinned and not above threatening someone to avoid bad press–even if it comes under the heading of comedy.

The Gosnell Movie Will Be Made

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Breitbart.com is reporting today that the filmmakers of the Gosnell movie have reached their $2.1 million goal on the indiegogo website, and will be able to make the movie. See rightwinggranny.com for previous information on this project.

The article at Breitbart.com reports:

The movie will focus on Gosnell’s horrific actions in connection to his 40-years operating an abortion practice. The atrocities reported during his trial were mostly ignored or downplayed by national news outlets. That, in part was why the filmmakers behind the project were motivated to create the film. They also want people to remember the lives lost at the hands of the Philadelphia abortionist.

“The media and Hollywood normally love serial killers. There are movies and whole TV series devoted to the genre but for some reason there were no plans to tell the truth about Kermit Gosnell and his crimes. We were determined to change that and to show that their was a public appetite for this truth to be told and that’s why we decided to crowdfund the project,” filmmaker Phelim McAleer said in a statement.

I wonder if all the people who are fighting for ‘the right to choose’ understand the repercussions of setting no limits on that right.

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The Gosnell Movie

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Indiegogo is the website for information on the Gosnell movie. The website is raising money to produce the movie. In case you are not aware, Dr. Kermit Gosnell is the most prolific serial killer in American History, but almost no one knows who he is.

Here are some excerpts from the Grand Jury testimony on the case that are posted on the site:

This case is about a doctor who killed babies … What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable, babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors …. Over the years, many people came to know that something was going on here. But no one put a stop to it.   (Report of the Grand Jury)

The neonatologist testified… If a baby moves, it is alive. Equally troubling, it feels a “tremendous amount of pain” when its spinal cord is severed. So, the fact that Baby Boy A. continued to move after his spinal cord was cut with scissors means that he did not die instantly. Maybe the cord was not completely severed. In any case, his few moments of life were spent in excruciating pain.   (Report of the Grand Jury) 

The article describes the purpose of the Indiegogo website:

But here’s the catch. We’ve set the budget. But if we fail to raise our target budget, Indiegogo will return all the funds, we will received nothing and the film will never be made.

Indiegogo allows us to bypass the Hollywood studios and the usual funding sources for movies.

Hollywood never would fund a movie such as this.

We funded our last film FrackNation using crowdfunding.

Please visit the website and make whatever donation you can so that this movie will be made. Unfortunately in America, free speech is not always free.

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Using The IRS To Silence Free Speech

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Yesterday the New York Times posted an article about an organization formed in Hollywood called Friends of Abe. The group of about 1,500 conservative people in the entertainment industry has applied for tax-exempt status. The group has kept a low-profile in order to avoid the possibility of a conservative black list that would result in their not being hired to work in their industry.

The article reports:

Now the Internal Revenue Service is reviewing the group’s activities in connection with its application for tax-exempt status. Last week, federal tax authorities presented the group with a 10-point request for detailed information about its meetings with politicians like Paul D. Ryan, Thaddeus McCotter and Herman Cain, among other matters, according to people briefed on the inquiry.

The article further reports:

The group is not currently designated tax-exempt, but it behaves as a nonprofit and has almost no formal structure, people briefed on the matter said. The I.R.S. review will determine whether Friends of Abe receives tax-exempt status that would provide legal footing similar to that of the People for the American Way Foundation, a progressive group fostered by the television producer Norman Lear and others. If not, Friends of Abe could resort to the courts, or it might simply operate as a nonprofit, but it would be unable to receive tax-deductible contributions.

I hate to by cynical about this (but I am), but it would be nice if Friends of Abe were treated the same way as People for the American Way. Unfortunately under President Obama, the IRS is as much a political tool as an agency to collect taxes.

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Sued Over Argo

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“Argo” won the Academy Award for Best Picture this year. The film tells the story of six Americans smuggled out of Iran after the Iranian revolution. The movie is not entirely accurate–it’s a movie–but the basic story follows the history of the events (for some details on what is true and what is not, see rightwinggranny.com).

The Associated Press is reporting today that Iran is planning to sue Hollywood, claiming that the movie portrays the country of Iran in an unrealistic way.

The article reports:

The decision on the lawsuit came after a group of Iranian cultural officials and movie critics screened the film in a closed audience in a Tehran theater late Monday.

The gathering, titled “The Hoax of Hollywood,” discussed various legal aspects of filing a lawsuit, media reports said, without providing details. It remains unclear what specific charges Iran could raise and what court Tehran could turn to if the action goes ahead.

Those at the meeting dismissed “Argo” as a “violation of international cultural norms.” A statement issued after the gathering said that “awarding an anti-Iran movie is a propaganda attack against our nation and entire humanity.”

The statement did not clarify how the movie was allegedly unrealistic, but officials have accused “Argo” of depicting Iranians as “too violent.”

I have no way of knowing if the violence depicted in “Argo” is exactly what happened. I do know that there were some areas in the movie that represent the ‘poetic license’ of the filmmakers. I also know that the people who were in Iran during the 1979 revolution and the news photographs from that time indicate that the violence shown was typical of what went on.

The thing to keep in mind here is the effort on the part of the Iranian government to stop any art or speech that portrays them in a negative light. Freedom of speech in Iran died in the revolution of 1979. The violence that was depicted in “Argo” was part of that picture.

 

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Hollywood Gets Rewarded For Its Support Of President Obama

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Money talks. I hate to be cynical, but money talks. Breitbart.com reported yesterday that the production tax incentives favorable to the domestic entertainment industry enacted by Congress in 2004, extended in 2008 and scheduled to expire in 2011, have been extended through 2013. The bill passed to avoid the fiscal cliff increases taxes on 77 percent of Americans, but Hollywood gets a tax break.

The article reports:

The original tax incentive applied to productions costing less than $15 million to make ($20 million in low-income areas). The 2008 extension applies to all films, up to a deduction of $15 million (or $20 million in low-income areas). The incentive is especially generous to television series; it applies to each TV episode.

Hollywood players routinely beg the government to raise their taxes so they can pay their “fair share.” 

Yet the industry moves new productions to places where existing tax breaks help its bottom line. That means plenty of shows and films are shot in states like New Mexico, which feature highly favorable tax rates, as well as destinations north of the border with similar perks.

It really is time to find some honest legislators to redo the tax code. I believe that there are a few men of principle in our government; unfortunately there are too few of them to accomplish what needs to be done.

Does Anyone Actually Believe This ?

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Shamrock Texas Tornado

Shamrock Texas Tornado (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Real Clear Politics reported yesterday on a statement made by Senator Dick Durbin earlier this week.

The Senator stated:

“It’s your money or your life. We are either going to dedicate ourselves to a cleaner, more livable planet and accept the initial investment necessary or we’re going to pay a heavier price in terms of loss of human life, damage and costs associated with it.”

This statement was made in response to the recent tornadoes in Texas. There are a few problems with the statement. I don’t think any American politician supports pollution–I just don’t.

I might be a good idea to remember that hurricanes and tornadoes have been with us for a long time. Out of curiosity I looked up the Rhode Island hurricane of 1938 (I couldn’t remember the year). In reading the article, I found a reference to the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635. In 1939, Hollywood produced “The Wizard of Oz.” Obviously, someone familiar with tornadoes wrote the script. In the 1930’s America did not have the highways and power generating plants that it has now, and weather was still happening. Imagine. Again, I support clean air, but I don’t like being threatened.

This is simply another attempt to convince the American people that the government needs to take more of their money.

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Why Is Someone Burning Cars In Los Angeles ?

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français: voiture cabriolet hotchkiss Biarritz...

Image via Wikipedia

Today’s Los Angeles Times is reporting that there have been 40 arsonist-caused fires across Los Angeles in the past three days. Most of the fires were started on cars, some later spread to buildings.

The article reports:

Authorities said they remained unsure whether the fires were the work of one arsonist or several people, perhaps including copycats. Although the majority of the fires have occurred in the Hollywood area, some also were reported in the San Fernando Valley, Westside and as far south as Lennox near the 105 Freeway.

The article states that a security camera at the location of one of the fires may have gotten a picture of the person who lit the fire. The article also states that: 

Police were broadcasting a description of a white man in his mid-30s with a receding hairline and a ponytail.

Hopefully the person (or people) responsible for this can be found quickly and brought to justice.

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