While the public is staying away in droves from “Rendition,” “Lions for Lambs” and “In the Valley of Elah,” audiences are really avoiding “Redacted,” De Palma’s picture about US soldiers who rape a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, then kill her and her family. The message movie was produced by NBA Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who insisted on deleting grisly images of Iraqi war casualties from the montage at the film’s end. Cuban offered to sell the film back to De Palma at cost, but the director was too smart to go for that deal. “Redacted” - which “could be the worst movie I’ve ever seen,” said critic Michael Medved -took in just $25,628 in its opening weekend in 15 theaters, which means roughly 3,000 people saw it in the entire country.
Just in time for Thanksgiving, the vile movie “Redacted” is opening in a few theaters this week. The film, financed by billionaire Mark Cuban and directed by far-left bomb thrower Brian DePalma, features drunken American soldiers in Iraq raping and murdering a 14-year-old girl and then slaughtering her family.
As stated in this space two months ago, a depiction like this will be displayed prominently on jihadi Web sites, and will be used as a recruiting tool by terrorists. No doubt.
Both DePalma and Cuban are unrepentant and apparently could not care less about putting U.S. troops in even more danger. Cuban opines that it is wrong to condemn the film without seeing it, but that’s incredible nonsense. No one denies the movie puts American soldiers in the worst light possible. As one reader emailed, “Saying you can’t condemn ‘Redacted’ without seeing it is like saying you can’t condemn crystal meth without taking it.”
So what’s to be done here? In a free society, Mark Cuban is entitled to make this despicable movie. Our military people have fought and died to give him that right. Isn’t that ironic? Cuban uses his freedom and his money, made in America, to put our troops at further risk. How does the guy live with himself?
This isn’t about the Iraq war or the war on terror. This is about fellow citizens. Even during the ultra-contentious Vietnam conflict, Hollywood didn’t make films that aided the enemy.
One of the most famous faces of communism is getting a makeover this week, with a new poster designed to teach students the whole story about Cuban revolutionary icon Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
“The Victims of Che Guevera” poster, produced by the Young America’s Foundation, centers on a collage that uses tiny photos of those killed by Cuba’s communist regime to compose the face of the Marxist guerrilla, who has become a popular T-shirt icon.
“Che is one of the heroes that the left idolizes,” said Patrick X. Coyle, vice president of YAF. “But a lot of kids don’t know anything about him. We thought this would be a great way to highlight his atrocities…”
The Che poster was the brainchild of YAF President Ron Robinson and created by designer Jonathan Briggs.
“We worked with Umberto Fontova, author of ‘Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him,’ and he helped us acquire the images” of victims of Cuban communism, Mr. Coyle said…
A famous photo of Guevara by Alberto Korda was made into a poster that adorned the walls of many student radicals in the U.S. during the era in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
Guevara was “an international terrorist and mass murderer,” the YAF poster declares.
It’s no accident, Mr. Coyle suggests, that Guevara T-shirts are worn by students on so many campuses today. “Colleges and universities are the last holdouts of Marxist ideas,” he said.
[Guevara] was a psychopath with a central role in Cuba’s 1961 mass executions in the “year of the wall.” Guevara signed at least 600 death warrants and executed children against firing squad walls; he was responsible for at least 2,000 deaths.
After that, the Argentine-born communist organized Cuba’s gulag. His violence was so over the top it scared even Castro, who eventually sent him away to fight mercenary wars in Africa.
“There are very few people over the generations who have ideas that are sufficiently original to materially alter the direction of civilization. Milton is one of those very few people.” –Alan Greenspan
….
Nobel Laureate economist and Red Planet hero Milton Friedman passed away one year ago this week at age 94. He was, as Thomas Sowell once said, “one of the very few intellectuals with both genius and common sense.”
The Dallas Federal Reserve has now released a 2005 interview done between Dallas Fed president and CEO Richard W. Fisher and Dr. Friedman. In this clip Dr. Friedman discusses the Federal Reserve’s past mistakes (causing the Great Depression) and Paul Volcker’s and Alan Greenspan’s roles in stabilizing inflation and price levels.
Highly recommended viewing.
The interview is in 4 parts. The rest can be viewed by going here.
Teachers at a primary school have been ordered to dress up as Muslims to promote multi-culturalism.
The West Midlands school is belatedly celebrating the Muslim festival of Eid and told its pupils and teachers to don traditional Muslim dress for the day.
All 257 pupils, most of whom are Christians, and 41 teachers - two of whom are Muslims - dressed up.
A morning assembly was held to mark the event and an afternoon party was strictly for women only, because Muslim husbands object to wives mixing with other men.
Sally Bloomer, head of Rufford primary school in Lye, West Midlands, told The Sun: “I have not heard of any complaints. It’s all part of a diversity project to promote multi-culturalism.”
But a relative of one of the staff reportedly said: “Who would put their job on the line? They have been told they have to embrace the day to show their diversity. But they are not all happy.”
Anti-Semitism is rife within Britain’s Muslim community. Islamic bookshops sell copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the notorious czarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; as an undercover TV documentary revealed in January, imams routinely preach anti-Jewish sermons. Opinion polls show that nearly two-fifths of Britain’s Muslims believe that the Jewish community in Britain is a legitimate target “as part of the ongoing struggle for justice in the Middle East”; that more than half believe that British Jews have “too much influence over the direction of UK foreign policy”; and that no fewer than 46 percent think that the Jewish community is “in league with Freemasons to control the media and politics.”
But anti-Semitism has also become respectable in mainstream British society. “Anti-Jewish themes and remarks are gaining acceptability in some quarters in public and private discourse in Britain and there is a danger that this trend will become more and more mainstream,” reported a Parliamentary inquiry last year. “It is this phenomenon that has contributed to an atmosphere where Jews have become more anxious and more vulnerable to abuse and attack than at any other time for a generation or longer.”
At the heart of this ugly development is a new variety of anti-Semitism, aimed primarily not at the Jewish religion, and not at a purported Jewish race, but at the Jewish state. Zionism is now a dirty word in Britain, and opposition to Israel has become a fig leaf for a resurgence of the oldest hatred.
“If a tax cut increases government revenues, you haven’t cut taxes enough.” –Milton Friedman
As the late Mr. Friedman explained, when you cut taxes for the achievers and high income earners, you make it easier for those achievers to create more new money. As a result, the government ends up collecting even more money under a lower tax rate.
The Bush economy continues to prove this theory correct but you’d never know it from reading most American newspapers. Heritage Foundation’s Robert Bluey: All the Bad News That’s Fit to Print
The U.S. budget deficit fell to the lowest level in five years last week, but three of America’s leading newspapers — the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times — couldn’t find the space to mention the dramatic drop.
Journalists who have spent years trashing President Bush’s tax cuts appeared to suddenly lose interest when the budget picture brightened. That’s not surprising, however, considering that mainstream reporters frequently ignore upbeat economic news…
Despite the pessimistic attitude of the press, the U.S. economy keeps ticking. Last week’s encouraging news about the deficit was another indication that the economy is prospering thanks to Bush’s tax cuts, which encouraged economic growth and, as a result, brought in higher revenues to the federal treasury…
The deficit now stands at $163 billion or 1.2 percent of the economy. That’s half of the 40-year average of 2.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). By comparison, during former President Ronald Reagan’s administration, the deficit averaged 4.2 percent of GDP.
For three consecutive years under Bush, the deficit has fallen by $250 billion, putting the federal treasury on course for a surplus in 2012.
Tom Blumer at Newsbusters: “Does anyone seriously believe that the news would have been almost completely ignored if the deficit had instead gone up?”
