George Lucas: Hollywood Didn’t Want To Fund ‘Red Tails’ Because Of Its Black Cast (VIDEO)

In an appearance on The Daily Show last night, George Lucas said that he had trouble getting funding for his new movie, “Red Tails,” because of its black cast. . .

“It’s because it’s an all-black movie. There’s no major white roles in it at all…I showed it to all of them and they said no. We don’t know how to market a movie like this.”

“Red Tails,” which stars Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Terrence Howard, is based on the Tuskegee Airmen, the group of pioneering black pilots who fought in the United States’ segregated armed forces during World War II.

Watch interview with Jon Stewart here . . .

Jon Stewart Rips GOPs Hypocritical ‘Class Warfare’ With Mitt Romney (VIDEO)

While there has been much infighting among the six remaining candidates, Jon Stewart realized Monday night that there’s one thing they pretty much can all agree on: “Class warfare” against the rich — excuse me, job creators — is wrong, unless we’re talking about Mitt Romney.

Watch video here . . . 

Mitt Romney Quotes Lesbian Poet Concerned About Income Inequality On The Stump

Mitt Romney regularly incorporates lyrics from “America the Beautiful” into his stump speeches. Little does he probably realize that the hymn was written by a progressive feminist lesbian who composed it to critique country’s greed, excess, and growing economic inequality. The original third-verse lyrics Katharine Lee Bates wrote in 1894 were as follows:

America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!

Read more . . .

Salman Rushdie: Christopher Hitchens (Vanity Fair, Feb 2012)

Laughter and Hitchens were inseparable companions, and comedy was one of the most powerful weapons in his arsenal. . .

Behind the laughter was what his friend Ian McEwan called “his Rolls-Royce mind,” that organ of improbable erudition and frequently brilliant, though occasionally flawed, perception. The Hitch mind was indeed a sleek and purring machine trimmed with elegant fittings, but his was not a rarefied sensibility. He was an intellectual with the instincts of a street brawler, never happier than when engaged in moral or political fisticuffs. . .

On his sixty-second birthday – his last birthday, a painful phrase to write – I had been with him and Carol and other comrades at the Houston home of his friend Michael Zilkha, and we had been photographed standing on either side of a bust of Voltaire. That photograph is now one of my most treasured possessions; me and the two Voltaires, one of stone and one still very much alive. Now they are both gone, and one can only try to believe, as the philosopher Pangloss insisted to Candide in the elder Voltaire’s masterpiece, that “everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.”

It doesn’t feel like that today.

Read more . . . 

The 2012 US presidential campaign begins: A cynical exercise in duping the people

The January 3 Iowa caucus, the first contest for the Republican presidential nomination, marks the official beginning of 2012 US election campaign, an exercise in mass deception whose purpose is to legitimize the individual whom the financial aristocracy chooses as its political champion for the next four years. . .

As for the candidates themselves, it would be hard to come up with a more reactionary collection of corporate flunkeys, religious fanatics and influence peddlers. . .

The election provides the illusion of choice, but there are no fundamental differences between the two corporate-controlled political parties. Both the Democrats and the Republicans defend the wealth of the super-rich and the worldwide interests of American imperialism.

From the standpoint of working people, it does not matter in the slightest whether Barack Obama is reelected to a second term in the White House or replaced by any of his Republican challengers. The next president, whatever his name or party, will function as the representative of the political, military and corporate elite that controls all the levers of power. . .

US elections have increasingly become a media spectacle aimed at distracting the population while the political establishment shifts further and further to the right. . .

Both [big business parties] are committed to the defense of corporate interests and obey their real masters in the financial oligarchy, regardless of what they say to the voters in the course of an election campaign.

Read more . . . 

Greta Christina: Christopher Hitchens’ Brother, Atheists Reject Religion So They Can Be Decadent

People engage in pretty much the same sexual acts, with the same frequency, whether they’re believers or atheists. Religion and atheism does affect people’s sex lives — sexual guilt diminishes, and sexual satisfaction increases, when people let go of religion. But the actual details of people’s physical sex lives, on average, don’t change. . .

. . . [S]ocieties with high rates of atheism are also, overwhelmingly, societies with high rates of happiness, stability, and social functioning. They’re societies with some of the lowest rates of violent crime in the world, some of the lowest levels of corruption, excellent educational systems, strong economies, well-supported arts, free health care, egalitarian social policies, and more. . .

. . . Peter Hitchens is full of shit[!]

Read more . . .

Quote: Smedley Butler, On U.S. Military Adventurism

Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 – June 21, 1940)
Major General in the U.S. Marine Corps, Outspoken Critic of U.S. Military Adventurism, Most decorated Marine in U.S. history at the time of his death.

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
~ Socialist newspaper Common Sense, 1935