Broadcast TV finally conveyed “Sex and the City” episodes to a wider public, albeit with a bit of editing here and there. The HBO breakout chick-flickette series gathered garlands and huzzahs, and a few brickbats, thru S&C’s long run on cable.  It quickly saturated the post-HBO syndicated broadcast market, and fell short of many assessments by conservative voices.  Much more mainstream than you’d have guessed, and far more than I’d guessed until the saturation distribution reached my eyes and ears.  And analytical synapses.
 
Now comes a summer release of the awaited feature film, with Big and Carrie rumored to wed.  It’s no surprise, if one came to “S&C” the way I did.  Thanks to circumstance, I saw middle episodes before the pilot, running thru the final season on LA outlet broadcast signal, before an unheralded repeat loop showed the series’ original concept.  All the chattering commentary escaped my eyes at its inception, so I risk an overlap with what may have been said way back then, but here goes:
 
Much better, and much more conservative, than one would have guessed. [more]

The problem with ideologues in politics is their attempt to make a science of something that is an art. Unlike Aristotle and Burke, ideologues forget that politics is inexact and that wisdom has been hard won over centuries of experience and thought. There is, really, no science of politics. Of course, the same difficulties apply to ethics.

Ideologues wish that politics and ethics could be made “scientific” or that bright and perfect lines could be drawn between the moral order and politics, but in doing so they are in error. They mistake an art that is very human (politics) for a science. People are not so simple or tractable as matter or energy . . . and they even these are complex enough! Religious extremists simplify too much by merging church and state. Secular radicals pretend there is a self-evident morality that can drawn from “reason” alone. [more]

Do we still have troops in Iraq? Is there still a conflict over there?

If you rely on the so-called mainstream media, you may have difficulty answering those questions these days. As Iraqi and Coalition forces pile up one success after another, Iraq has magically vanished from the headlines.

Want a real "inconvenient truth?" Progress in Iraq is powerful and accelerating.

But that fact isn't helpful to elite media commissars and cadres determined to decide the presidential race over our heads. How dare our troops win? Even worse, Iraqi troops are winning. Daily.

You won't see that above the fold in The New York Times. And forget the Obama-intoxicated news networks - they've adopted his story line that the clock stopped back in 2003. [more]

I loved the Narnia books as a child. My basement turned into Narnian headquarters and a roll out map of the land was the center point. As an adult I have taught the books and re-read them as an antidote to discouraging times.

And these are discouraging times.

Like a miracle, comes a gift to us from Disney and Walden Media. Prince Caspian, the weakest of the seven Narnia books, is a better film (as a film) than the first . . . and I really liked the first... [more]

Because California, and Hollywood in particular, have been the punch line for so many jokes over the years, I suspect that people who don’t live out here assume we can’t possibly be that wacky.  They don’t know the half of it.

In order for you to better understand what conservatives in this neck of the woods have to deal with, I’ll relate a few typical incidents.  The first took place about 10 years ago.  My wife and I were invited to a dinner party by the widow of a screenwriter who’d been my longtime tennis partner.  We were one of six couples.  Which meant that, counting the hostess, there were 13 of us sitting around after dinner.  I recall thinking at the time that this is how superstitions come to be perpetuated. [more]

Theodore Roosevelt was such a dynamic candidate that he towered over the President who chose him as running mate. Even though the popular Rough Rider may have helped William McKinley, there is little doubt that McKinley would have won with just about anybody not criminally insane (or at least known to be criminally insane) on the ticket.

I cannot think of one vice-presidential pick that has won or lost a race by him or Ferraro-self. A vice-presidential pick can do some harm even to a winner (Quayle for Bush), help a loser (Bentson for Dukakis) or he may do no harm, but not help much either (Kemp for Dole, Cheney for Bush). It is even hard to think of a recent case where a vice presidential pick “delivered” a state, unless one is ancient enough to think of 1960 as recent (Johnson helped in Texas by hook and by crook). Edwards could not do it for Kerry to cite on recent example of failure. [more]

The Washington Times recently reported that "the church where Sen. Barack Obama has worshipped for two decades publicly declares that its ministry is founded on a 1960s book that espouses ‘the destruction of the white enemy.’ Trinity United Church of Christ’s Web site says its teachings are based on the black liberation theology of James H. Cone and his 1969 book ‘Black Theology and Black Power.’ …Conrad Worrill, a leader of the Chicago-based National Black United Front, said…’I think most black people would agree that what Jeremiah Wright said is the truth.’"

It sure is ironic, then, that a parishioner of such a church, with the full backing of the church, would be seeking to inhabit the White House.

Or not.

After all, it’s part of a widely noticed but not often spoken of pattern among black Americans. Starting with soda, for example. Most white people drink Coke or Pepsi -- the dark sodas, in other words. But black people consistently prefer Sprite. That is, the clear or ‘white’ soda. ‘Sprite’ even rhymes with ‘white’. [more]

Michael Reagan has given us a grand gift, in a small book collection of his father’s quotes as conservative spokesman, candidate, governor and president. The Common Sense of an Uncommon Man is organized by broad subject titles, but let them cascade over you in a Forum summary of the best and the brightest to adapt to our current, perilous times. With little sidebar observations on occasion, of course:

You can’t be for big government, big taxes, and big bureaucracy and still be for the little guy.
 
A friend of mine was asked to a costume ball a short time ago. He slapped some egg on his face and went as a liberal economist. [Don’t you smell rotten, old tired egg every time Paul Krugman yaps in the NY Times?] [more]

A nineteen-year-old Catholic seminarian falls for a twenty-five-year-old female card shark/pool hustler, impregnates her, and marries her.  The seminarian’s mother digs up the pool hustler’s deep, dark past and uses it to convince her to divorce the seminarian, and give up the baby.  Twelve years later, mama/shark/hustler wants her baby back, and she makes plans to do so using the only means at her disposal: playing high-stakes pool.

Compelling films have been constructed on flimsier premises.

Writer and director Chris Eigeman follows his plot outline faithfully to its logical conclusion in Turn the River (rated R for language).  Hard-living Kailey (Famke Janssen) plays poker and pool, smokes drinks, sleeps on pool tables -- and never once eats anything.  Her son, twelve-year-old Gulley (newcomer Jaymie Dornan), meanwhile, divides his time between a stiff and confining Catholic school and his toxic father, David (Matt Ross).  Kailey begins a clandestine correspondence with Gulley with the help of her mentor Quinn (played by a gruff, but loveable, Rip Torn).  Kailey meets Gulley in the park before school every few weeks, exchanges letters with him through Quinn, plays games of pool, and socks away her winnings in the back of her truck. [more]

There are major differences between liberals and conservatives, and that’s why I never know what people such as Barack Obama are talking about when they speak of bringing us all together.  And I suspect that Jeremiah Wright’s surrogate son doesn’t know, either.

For instance, if I support the surge in Iraq and you insist on bringing the troops home by next Thursday, what’s our compromise?  Bringing our troops only partway home?  Say as far as the Canary Islands?

If you’re in favor of same-sex marriages and I happen to think the whole idea is a very silly joke, where’s our common ground?  Doing away with opposite-sex marriages? [more]

If you listen to the scientific materialists in the science establishment, who are training their big guns on a little documentary film called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, you would think that "science" was a static practice that is certain of which presuppositions and procedures it includes and excludes. The way these scientific materialists have it, by definition, doing science must exclude any reference to God, or any supernatural element, when discussing the origin of our material world. Following in the footsteps of the late Carl Sagan, they confidently proclaim: "The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be."

Problems arise for the science establishment when everyday people recognize that when scientists make such statements they suddenly cease to be scientists, and instead are acting as philosophers and theologians. The ability to expose the philosophical and theological underpinnings of the scientific establishment is just one of the reasons why Expelled may be the most important film released this year. But if you want to see it, you’d better hurry. [more]

According liberals, they are tolerant, open-minded, sensitive to complexity and nuance, and wary of simplistic explanations. So why is a column by the liberal Michael Hirsh, in the liberal newsweekly Newsweek, so intolerant, close-minded, simplistic and bigoted?

Hirsh’s piece sounds the alarm over the fact that “Southernism” has taken over the “national dialogue” and has “transformed the sensibility of the country, . . .setting the agenda for our political, social and religious mores.”  What alerted Hirsh to this “Southernization of our national politics” was a piece in The New York Times about the elimination from the American Idol television show of a contestant who in her last performance sang “Jesus Christ Superstar.” According to Hirsh, this song was once the symbol of the triumph of “the new and the openness to innovation” over “nativism and yahooism,” but now its performance cost the contestant a chance at the talent show finals because of its “blasphemy." [more]

I have written two plays for my kids to perform based on the sinking of the Titanic, surely a strange parenting technique, and have been interested in the doomed liner most of my life. One of the plays will be performed this weekend, so if you are near Biola University in Los Angeles, you can get my take on what the sinking of Titanic meant.

For the rest of the cosmos, including the better looking, better educated, and more socially aware that will not condescend to see me cling to my outmoded religion due to economic bitterness by writing a play about the Titanic, there are the movies. [more]

by Steve Finefrock - Hollywood Forum [scriptwriter]

Here’s an informative news analysis:
 
“The session of Congress beginning tomorrow may not do much – a little bread and a few circuses – but it may well vote a 5-cent increase in the gasoline tax, the idea being to repair highways, bridges, and so on, and to put some of the unemployed back to work. Practically everybody says it’s a nice idea. But the Democrats want to spend the money where unemployment is highest; the Republicans want to spend the money where the repairs need to be made. And the two are not always in the same places. … And nobody knows how many of the unemployed know anything about building bridges, roads and tunnels.”
 
How much has changed in the 26 years since ABC’s David Brinkley noted this assessment to the national audience of “This Week”?  And how much have things changed with Georgie Porgie Stephanopolous as TW’s replacement of Brinkley as the show’s host? [more]

A while back, I admitted that John McCain was not among my three favorite candidates for the Republican nomination.  But I went on to say that if he emerged as the standard bearer for the GOP, he would get my vote.  And to tell you the truth, I don’t feel I’ll have to bite the bullet in November so much as maybe gum it a little bit.

Needless to say, I have been hearing from a great many conservative hardliners.  Among the things they’ve called me are sell-out, traitor, closet liberal and a mole for the Democrats.  When a few of them settled for calling me a fool or an idiot, it almost felt like a compliment. [more]