“Sarah Palin stalked by rogue liberal media madwoman.”

Jim Treacher asks, “You guys saw Single White Female, right?”

Related: I’m sure Andrea — not to mention Andrew Sullivan — will be doing plenty of counter-surveillance espionage from this location.

Here’s the scene: Bullock’s character is waiting in line to speak to someone about her new son Michael’s legal status.

Fed up, she cuts to the front of the line to ask a question:

“We have been sitting around here for over an hour and when I look around all I see are people shooting the bull and drinking coffee … who’s in charge here?”

The bemused woman behind the desk points to the wall, where a picture of Bush is hanging.

We’ve all been in long lines before, be it at the DMV or other governmental offices. And it doesn’t matter which party – or person – is occupying the White House at the moment.

So the joke makes no sense. All it does is deflate a feel-good movie for no good reason. Maybe the filmmakers realized with Bush out of office time is running out to throw spitballs at Hollywood’s favorite target.

Christian asks ponders if this is “The last sucker punch at Bush”, but I somehow doubt it. John Nolte, the film director who doubles as blogger/editor of Big Hollywood explains the dynamic at work:

Hollywood is high school and if you want to sit at the cool kids’ table (i.e. work) you better fit in, and if you’ve been involved in the writing, directing or producing of a film sympathetic towards the most hated demographic (yes, even more hated than terrorists — again, watch the product) in the 9-0 zip code, you had better inoculate yourself.

And that’s what the gratuitous, unnecessary, jarring, take-you-out-of-the-movie shot at Bush is: an inoculation. The filmmakers want to work again; they want to be invited to all the right parties. But if you’re remembered as the perso involved in bringing to life a movie only Glenn Beck could love, no matter how big of a hit, that’s not a good thing on the ole’ resume’.

There are notable exceptions, but working in Hollywood — an industry built on social interaction — means getting along with Leftists, and Leftists are religious, regional and ideological bigots of the worst order. The smart people involved in the making of “The Blind Side” knew the Bush shot was bad storytelling — was what what John Boot described as ”a non-sequitur nonpareil” — they just felt, for whatever reason (their own bigotry or career survival), that it was worth it.

Hollywood is not money or profit-driven. This is an industry engaged in an ideological war with traditional conservative America that doesn’t mind making a profit, but never will at the expense of the cause. Everyone involved in the making of “Blind Side” knew an unnecessary partisan shot at Bush would turn people off. They all knew they were insulting the very audience the film was marketed at for no reason other than to insult them. But there was absolutely no way in hell this thing was going to see the light of day without something for the Hollywood bigots to snicker over.

As John writes, “This is their sandbox, and there’s a ring to kiss if you want to play.”

Slate magazine is just one of the countless media outlets convulsing with St. Vitus’ Dance over that demonic succubus Sarah Palin. In its reader forum, The Fray, one supposed Palinophobe took dead aim at the former Alaska governor’s writing chops, excerpting the following sentence from her book:

“The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.”

Other readers pounced like wolf-sized Dobermans on an intruder. One guffawed, “That sentence by Sarah Palin could be entered into the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest. It could have a chance at winning a (sic) honorable mention, at any rate.”

But soon, the original contributor confessed: “I probably should have mentioned that the sentence quoted above was not written by Sarah Palin. It’s taken from the first paragraph of ‘Dreams From My Father,’ written by Barack Obama.”

The ruse should have been allowed to fester longer, but the point was made nonetheless: Some people hate Palin first and ask questions later.

Palin’s book was rejected by at least one local book chain in the increasingly reprimitivized Bay Area; PJM’s David Steinberg looks at what titles they carry instead. (Hint: Rosie O’Donnell and Charlie Sheen should be pleased.) Meanwhile, the legacy media, which goes to 11 when it’s time investigate Plain’s autobiography (unlike Obama’s), has taken to picking on her 17-year old fans.

Update: And stay at home fathers:

After introducing [George] Lopez on her CNN Headline News program last night, [Joy] Behar played a clip of Lopez’s HBO special in which he said, “There are a lot of politicians that would be Latinos and a lot now who are Latino. Sarah Palin, Latina. Believe me. She’s got all the signs. She works and her husband don’t.”  [sic -- Ed]

Later in the segment, after commenting about Palin’s lack of experience, Lopez stated, “I mean, the concept of Todd Palin being a stay-at-home dad-listen Joy, when I was a kid, those guys were called bums.”

“Uh-huh. They’re still called bums,” agreed Behar.

You stay classy, CNN.

Update: More CNN classiness here.

Don’t interpret passage of the watered-down Kanjorski amendment as the peak of the “break up the banks” movement. It may be about to get some new allies on the right, folks tired of Big Government, Big Money and crony capitalism.

For the moment, though, it was arguably the best that Representative Paul Kanjorski, a Pennsylvania Democrat, [and Mr. New New Deal himself -- Ed] could have gotten through the House Financial Services Committee. All the committee Republicans and even some of the Democrats voted against it. And even in its much-diminished state, the Kanjorksi amendment would likely be weakened further in the Senate. At the same time, the Obama administration seems little interested in such pre-emptive powers.

Wall Street, however, is hardly getting any more popular with Main Street. The Goldman Sachs Apology Tour is evidence of that. And there are mid-term elections in less than a year. Republican candidates will probably do well as high unemployment continues to drive voter anger at incumbents. As Gallup diplomatically puts it, “Republicans seem well-positioned to win back some of their congressional losses in 2006 and 2008.”  More accurately, fear of losing the House is now running high among congressional Dems.

And all those new Republicans are likely to be infused with the ethos of the Tea Party movement: anti-TARP, anti-Fed (the House GOP is already there on this), anti-bailouts and anti-Wall Street. It could be a group of newcomers, as John McCain recently said, that is populist, protectionist when it comes to China and the yuan and pro-financial regulation.

Sarah Palin could be a harbinger. Although she diligently promotes the wonder-working power of Reaganomics in her autobiography, she also warns about “the return of corporatism – government collusion and co-option of big business.” [More on corporatism here -- Ed]

Nice of Time magazine to unwittingly prime the pump for such a campaign:

(Headline via the cool, objective journalists at AP.)

*Or not.

Related: The president tells the troops, “You guys make a pretty good photo op.” As Tom Blumer writes, “Let’s See How This Obamism Gets Covered.”

]]> http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2009/11/19/the-clothes-have-no-emperor-3/feed/ 4 http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2009/11/19/obama-i-wish-information-didn%e2%80%99t-flow-so-freely/ http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2009/11/19/obama-i-wish-information-didn%e2%80%99t-flow-so-freely/#comments Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:21:26 +0000 Ed Driscoll http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/?p=25526 As the TechPresident blog noted recently, Obama’s admitting that he’s never used Twitter is a reminder that his campaigned lied when it demonized John McCain for being out of touch with the Internet. (Despite the YouTube and blog-savvy nature of the McCain camp doing much to keep his campaign competitive during the summer of 2008.)

In his NRO column today, Jay Nordlinger adds:

In China, a student asked President Obama, “Should we be able to use Twitter freely?” You and I might have said, “Yes.” President Obama began, “Well, first of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone.” He went on, “I should be honest. As president of the United States, there are times where I wish information didn’t flow so freely, because then I wouldn’t have to listen to people criticizing me all the time.” Yet “in the United States, information is free.” And “I have a lot of critics . . . who can say all kinds of things about me.” And “I actually think that that makes our democracy stronger and it makes me a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don’t want to hear.”

You could argue that this is a clever, nuanced answer — not too brash. But isn’t the answer weirdly me-centric, Obama-centric? And doesn’t he argue from pragmatism — “It makes me a better leader”? How about principle: the principle of free speech, freedom of expression?

I really think a simple “yes” might have been better.

One more thing: Obama said, “There are times where I wish information didn’t flow so freely.” Did he mean that, or was that just a matter of rhetoric?

I’m pretty sure he meant it.

What on earth was Sarah Palin thinking when she posed in a pair of teeny-tiny gym shorts for a photograph that ended up on the cover of Newsweek — a cover she has called “sexist”? Perhaps she was thinking that her image would only appear in the magazine she was posing for, Runner’s World, and nowhere else, at least not for months and months. If so, she had good reason — since, as DailyFinance has learned, the photographer who shot the picture violated his contract by reselling them to Newsweek.

That photographer, Brian Adams, could not immediately be reached, and his agent, Kelly Price, declined to comment, saying, “I keep all of my clients’ business private.” But a spokeswoman for Runner’s World confirms that Adams’s contract contained a clause stipulating that his photos of Palin would be under embargo for a period of one year following publication — meaning until August 2010. “Runner’s World did not provide Newsweek with its cover image,” the spokeswoman said. “It was provided to Newsweek by the photographer’s stock agency, without Runner’s World’s knowledge or permission.” The spokeswoman declined to say whether Runner’s World intends to respond to Adams’s breach of contract with legal action.

I guess Jill Greenberg had another assignment that week.

In addition to the sexism of the cover, as a couple of Blogospheric Photoshop parodies of the Newsweek cover highlight, one of the problems that the legacy media faces, as it continues to push liberal narrative journalism over anything even approaching objective reporting is that it’s entirely predictable. Republicans are inevitably the bad guys; Democrats are invariably smart and cool (and Newsweek really made itself look even sillier than usual last month trying to defend Joe Biden), and since the reader knows exactly what to expect, there’s no real reason to buy the magazine. Or as Andrew Ferguson wrote earlier this year:

While flipping the pages of the new Newsweek, it began to occur to everybody that, hey, this is a pretty stupid idea for a magazine. Are there really 1.5 million magazine readers–the number of subscribers Jon has promised advertisers–who want a liberal opinion magazine written by liberals who don’t want to admit they’re liberals? Last week everybody looked at one another and pondered a world without Newsweek.

This sort of approach is fine, and understandable, for political magazines such as the New Republic, National Review, and Ferguson’s own Weekly Standard, where the reader expects to find partisan worldviews that match his own, but when applied to what once thought of as news, commits a cardinal sin of journalism:

It’s boring.

]]> http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2009/11/18/palin-photographer-breached-contract-with-sale-to-newsweek/feed/ 4 http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2009/11/18/and-speaking-of-the-pinchurian-candidate/ http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2009/11/18/and-speaking-of-the-pinchurian-candidate/#comments Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:59:59 +0000 Ed Driscoll http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/?p=25511 This post by Clay Waters of Newsbusters dovetails perfectly with my Silicon Graffiti video today:

There’s liberal hypocrisy on the part of New York Times economics columnist and left-wing blog-follower Paul Krugman in his Monday nytimes.com blog post, “Proposed extensions of Godwin’s Law.”

Leading into a discussion of how he thinks people should discuss inflation and interest rates, Krugman said:

Godwin’s Law — which says that in any sufficiently long online discussion, someone will compare his opponent to Hitler — is often interpreted to mean that if you do, in fact, start making Nazi comparisons, you’ve lost the argument and can no longer be taken seriously. I’m all for that. (Does this mean that we should no longer take any significant figure in the Republican Party seriously? Yes, it does.)

Not only is that way overstated (Krugman provides no actual examples), it’s also pretty bold, given that Krugman takes seriously and often utilizes ideas from left-wing blog sites like Daily Kos, where comparing President George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler was pretty much the password for entry.

And such concern for civil debate didn’t stop Krugman from comparing conservative host Rush Limbaugh to Communist dictator Joseph Stalin in an April 13 column:

Speaking of Mr. Limbaugh: the most impressive thing about his role right now is the fealty he is able to demand from the rest of the right. The abject apologies he has extracted from Republican politicians who briefly dared to criticize him have been right out of Stalinist show trials.

Since when has the Times had a problem with show trials?