‘The Most Important Role of My Life’

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Sunday night, when Natalie Portman accepted her Oscar, the radiantly pregnant actress concluded her acceptance speech by thanking “my beautiful love,” dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied, for giving her the “most important role of my life.”

As Steven Ertelt of LifeNews.com reports, Portman’s maternal joy rankled some viewers. Lizzie Skurnick Tweeted:

Like, my garbageman could give you your greatest role in life, too, lady.

Perhaps you will be surprised that Skurnick’s blog is called “The Old Hag.” Perhaps not. But Skurnick’s catty putdown of Portman evidently prompted an entire column at Salon by Mary Elizabeth Williams railing against Portman’s assertion of the greater importance of motherhood:

Why, at the pinnacle of one’s professional career, would a person feel the need to undercut it by announcing that there’s something else even more important? Even if you feel that way, why downplay your achievement? Why compare the two, as if a grueling acting role and being a parent were somehow in competition? And remind me — when was the last time a male star gave an acceptance speech calling fatherhood his biggest role?

It’s always something with these ax-grinders, you see? They can’t be content to let Portman have her moment, and celebrate with her the double joy of winning an Oscar and being pregnant, because the ax-grinders can’t stand to see anyone contented and joyful.

Ertelt quoted Wendy Wright of Concerned Women of America: “The selflessness of motherhood is the antithesis of Hollywood narcissism.” Maybe that’s why Portman and other actresses — Hollywood’s had something of a “baby boom” in recent years — relish motherhood: It’s so unlike the selfish superficiality of show business.

But you don’t have to be in Hollywood, or be a mother, to appreciate this. The famous social critic Christopher Lasch once wrote a provocative book about family life called Haven in a Heartless World, the title of which summarizes what the family should be — a loving refuge from the cruelty of a world that has no reason to love us the way our own flesh-and-blood love us. Yet it is anathema to the ax-grinders for any woman to acknowledge a fondness for hearth and home because (at least in the ax-grinders’ disordered minds) a home-loving woman is undermining the feminist sisterhood’s crusade for career equality.

So obviously, when one of the world’s most famous and admired young women gets pregnant, then tearfully thanks the father of her child for giving her the “most important role” of her glamorous life . . . well, yeah, that really required a pushback from the ax-grinders. They’re not happy and they don’t want anyone else to be happy, either.


Revealed: How Liberals Pretend to Be Doing ‘Investigative Journalism’

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Nothing is easier than to fool a liberal, and journalists do this all the time by claiming to have exposed the allegedly nefarious and secretive actions of conservatives when, in fact, (a) conservatives were doing more nefarious than the ordinary business of political advocacy, and (b) the “secrets” supposedly exposed were never secret at all. Such is the story behind this Mother Jones headline today:

Revealed: The Group Behind the Bills that
Could Legalize Killing Abortion Providers

Under that headline, Nick Baumann and Daniel Schulman write:

First, it was South Dakota. Then Nebraska and Iowa. The similarly worded bills, which have quietly cropped up recently in state legislatures, share a common purpose: To expand justifiable homicide statutes to cover killings committed in the defense of an unborn child. Critics of the bills, including law enforcement officials, warn that these measures could invite violence against abortion providers and possibly provide legal cover to the perpetrators of such crimes.
That these measures have emerged simultaneously in a handful of states is no coincidence. It’s part of a campaign orchestrated by a Washington-based anti-abortion group, which has lobbied state lawmakers to introduce legislation that it calls the “Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act” [PDF]. Over the past two years, the group, Americans United for Life, has succeeded in passing versions of this bill in Missouri and Oklahoma.

The article goes on to assert that the bills under consideration in Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota “are far more sweeping” than the laws enacted in Missouri and Oklahoma, justifying the following criticisms:

The bills are so loosely worded, abortion-rights advocates say, that a pregnant woman could seek out an abortion and a boyfriend, husband — or, in some cases, just about anyone — could be justified in using deadly force to stop it.
A Planned Parenthood official testified last week at a hearing on Nebraska’s LB 232 that such legislation “authorizes and protects vigilantes.” . . . “This could be used to incite violence against abortion providers,” said Omaha’s deputy chief of police, David Baker.

Well, so they say, and I have no interest in refereeing this controversy. My point is that there is nothing at all secretive about Americans United for Life’s role in promoting these laws. The model legislation for the “Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act” is featured on AUL’s Web site, and providing model legislation and legal advice is a specialty that AUL proudly proclaims on its Web site:

AUL attorneys are highly-regarded experts on pro-life legal language and the Constitution, consulting on bills and amendments across the country. In addition, our model legislation enables legislators to easily introduce bills without needing to research and write the bills themselves, helping ensure that their efforts will have the desired impact and withstand judicial scrutiny. . . .
We are continually working to help legislators enact new pro-life laws that will go into effect and not be unnecessarily tied up in court . . . . To do that, we educate legislators on the issues and provide them with model legislation and legal advice on legislative language. We work hand-in-hand with legislators to minimize avoidable problems . . .

So it isn’t as if Baumann and Schulman had to go sleuthing around to figure out that AUL was advising state legislators on these measures. I’d dare say there isn’t a single piece of successful pro-life legislation anywhere in the United States that hasn’t had some imput from AUL. That’s what they do.

As to the claim that the pro-life bills in South Dakota, Iowa and Nebraska are a backdoor means of declaring “open season” on abortion providers, AUL denies any such intent:

“Research shows that pregnant women are more likely to be victims of domestic abuse,” said Denise Burke, AUL’s vice president of legal affairs. “It is tragic that the pro-abortion lobby maligns efforts to protect these women.”
In a statement, Burke cited statistics about violence toward pregnant women, including a 1998 study that found “pregnant women are 60.6 percent more likely to be beaten than women who are not pregnant.” Burke said “a pregnant woman is more likely to be a victim of homicide than to die of any other cause. And case after case has demonstrated that husbands or boyfriends are often the perpetrators of pregnancy-associated violence and that this violence is often directed at the unborn child or intended to end or jeopardize the pregnancy.”

That’s from my article at The American Spectator, but unlike the Mother Jones writers, I don’t claim to that my reporting has “revealed” anything — those quotes came from a press release on the AUL Web site.

Quick, somebody call the Pulitzer Committee!

Oh, and tell them I’m willing to share my award with Steve Ertelt, who got the same AUL press release.

UPDATE: Looks like it will be a three-way split on that Pulitzer: Bryan Preston got the same press release.

Charlie Sheen, Victim

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Last week, Charlie Sheen got himself denounced by the Anti-Defamation League after a radio interview in which he mocked Two and a Half Men producer Chuck Lorre as “Chaim Levine” (for the record, Lorre’s birth name is Charles Levine). Not surprisingly, CBS responded by canceling the rest of the show’s season.

Evidently unsatisfied with partial career destruction, Sheen announced that he would sue Lorre, CBS and Warner Brothers, and went on NBC’s Today show and ABC’s Good Morning America to let loose with yet more unhinged manic rants:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

From the Good Morning America interview:

“I get in trouble for being honest . . . I’m extremely old-fashioned. I’m a nobleman. I’m chivalrous. . . . I woke up and decided, y’know, I’ve been kicked around, I’ve been criticized. . . . People misinterpret my passion for anger. . . . They’re on a battlefield and they let their emotion and their ego — basically, they stomped on their diapers. They’re in breach [of contract], they’re in radical breach, and I’m like, ‘Sorry, guys, you screwed up.’ . . . . I’m out of a job. I’ve got a whole family to support and love. . . . I’m here to collect. They’re going to lose. They’re going to lose in a courtroom, so I would recommend that they do an out-of-court settlement.”

From his Today show interview:

“I don’t think people are ready for the message I’m delivering. . . . [He and CBS are] definitely at war. . . . The war is that they are trying to destroy my family, and I take great umbrage at that, and defeat is not an option. They picked a fight with a warlock. . . . They’re trying to take all my money and leave me with no means to support my family. It’s not rocket science.”

Addressing himself to Lorre, Sheen then recited a series of questions, including: “What [scripts] would we have shot, had you not ordered the suits into my home to shut down my party?” Sheen then read, for Lorre’s supposed benefit, from the handbook of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Watching Sheen on these video — thin, pallid, bleary-eyed, sweaty — ought to convince anyone who has any experience dealing with the mentally ill that, whatever his substance abuse issues, Sheen’s real problem is a narcissistic personality disorder. On the one hand, he wallows in self-pitying victimhood (his enemies wrongfully persecuting him) while on the other hand, in his grandiose moments, Sheen imagines that he will emerge victorious from this “battle.” It’s truly frightening to watch someone destroy himself in this manner.

So Madoff Should Have Gone Into Something Respectable With His Penchant For Falsehood; Say, Global Warming

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by Smitty (h/t Lucianne)

Ol’ Bernie is so bent as to be nearly admirable for his panache:

In a series of phone interviews with New York magazine, Madoff repeatedly said he wasn’t trying to justify what he did – and then he repeatedly tried to justify what he did.

“These people probably would’ve lost all that money in the market,” he said from prison in Butner, N.C., where he just wrapped up the first year of his 150-year sentence.

He blamed his clients – the fat cats and charities and foundations who lost billions in his bogus investment fund – for failing to question how he kept making steady profits even in down years.

“These banks and these funds had to know there were problems,” Madoff said.

He noted that he never explained his strategies or methods.

“I absolutely refused to do it. I said, ‘You don’t like it, take your money out,’ which of course they never did,” he said.

He says he told all of his investors not to risk any money they couldn’t afford to lose. But, he said, “everyone was greedy.”

In a purely Darwinian sense, I can nearly agree with the guy. Except that he lied. Systematically. Nature in the raw doesn’t really have any accounting for concepts such as truth, or God, or the notion of any judgement existing past the final heartbeat. The Madoffs of the world will always get theirs, if not on the mortal plain.
Airplane! justice, of the sort that Madoff argues, is something at which we laugh:

‘Piss Karl’: Rove’s Genius Media Strategy

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Ben Smith points out that New York magazine hired “Piss Christ” photographer Andres Serrano to do a portrait of Karl Rove, and I wonder if Rove expected the resulting profile feature by Joe Hagan to include such sentences as this:

The woman, Karen Johnson, is a lobbyist rumored to have been Rove’s mistress before his divorce from his second wife in 2009.

Given that Rove is a major “get,” he might have told the editors at New York: “Sure, I’d be glad to do the story, if you will give the assignment to Matt Continetti or John McCormack or . . .”

Never mind. Rove’s a genius, and needs no advice from mere mortals.

Oh, Noes! Moammar Qaddafi Abandoned by ‘Voluptuous Blonde’ Ukrainian Nurse

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In January, we told you about Galyna, the “voluptuous blonde” Ukrainian nurse whose . . . um, services to Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi were described by the U.S. ambassador in a diplomatic cable obtained by WikiLeaks. Now, we have a sure sign that the situation in Tripoli has reached dire proportions:

Galyna Kolotnytska returned to Kiev on Sunday morning on a plane with 185 other Ukrainian evacuees, including other medics, Ukrainian media reported.

Lauren Frayer at AOL News has more:

Neighbors spotted her later that day going shopping with her mother outside Kiev.
Reporters surrounded her simple, ground-floor apartment there, until her adult daughter Tetyana emerged to address them.
“Please understand, Mom is so tired right now. Let her have some rest,” the daughter told Agence France-Presse and others, hinting that her mother, who spent nine years in Libya, may speak out at a later date.

Expect Qaddafi to quit soon, because let’s face it: What’s the point of being a brutal dictator if you don’t have a voluptuous blonde Ukrainian nurse to attend your . . . um, medical needs?

UPDATE: Linked by Tigerhawk and by Sean Higgins at JeremyLott.net. Thanks!

Another Year, More ‘Why Do The Oscar Ratings Resemble Those Of CNN?’

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by Smitty

Props to Matt Drudge for keeping a straight face for the ‘unexpected’ bad ratings.  Should they bring in the president’s speech writers, one wonders?

Not even inverting the image could breath interest into it.

We understand that, in a globalized movie market, the rest of the world is entertained by the sight of Hollywood pissing down the American back.
Could it possibly be that the American public does not believe Hollywood’s claims of rain?

Just as the Tea Parties are giving American politics a facelift, so too are outfits like Declaration Entertainment and Little Miss Attila’s own Right Network handling the cultural end of things.  If you’re not already supporting DE and RN, then you know what you need to do.

Do you hear that, ye misbegotten pack of Hollywood clowns?  Keep whistling past the graveyard, you losers.