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Critics: ‘The Purge’ an attack on Tea Party, NRA (+video)

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Photo Credit: Fox News

In the new Ethan Hawke thriller “The Purge,” the year is 2022, and the United States is run by a bunch of multinational corporations called the “New Founding Fathers of America.” The nation is ravaged by crime and overcrowded prisons, so in a quest to curb overpopulation and get rid of unsavories, the government has sanctioned an annual 12-hour period where anything goes in the streets.

Known as “The Purge,” all criminal activity – including murder, brutal violence and in this movie, a sinister home invasion – is legal, all emergency services and calls are suspended, and the only rules are that harming high-ranking government officials and using “Class 4” weaponry (bombs and grenades) are strictly prohibited.

But while the plot may seem on its surface like any of hundreds of other futuristic hellscape directorial visions from “Clockwork Orange” to “Oblivion,” “The Purge” has been dubbed by some a thinly veiled attack on the Tea Party and National Rifle Association, and has some critics rolling their eyes.

“Director James DeMonaco makes it clear the movie is a direct attack on the NRA, an organization filled with millions of law-abiding gun owners. The loony left’s reflexive hatred of the 2nd Amendment is founded in the concept that people who don’t break the law are somehow evil for exercising the Constitutional rights,” Dan Gainor, VP of Business and Culture at the Media Research Institute told FOX411’s Pop Tarts column. “’The Purge’ is also an obvious attack on the Tea Party and Christians.”

In an interview with Bloody Disgusting, DeMonaco said the leadership of his 2022 United States was indeed based on the NRA, although he tried to use a light touch.
“I layered in these New Founding Fathers, this regime that we voted into power at some point, some kind of NRA-thing that took over the country,” he said. “But I kind of left that to the audience. I think sometimes in my writing I try to spoon feed too much, it’s better to let the audience make their own decisions on things.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Russell Brand: Blame Madness, Not Islam, for Woolwich Attack

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Photo Credit: Breitbart Nutty British star Russell Brand took to the pages of The Sun today to pretend that there is no relationship between radical Islam and the murder of British soldier Lee Rigby by Islamists in Woolwich. Brand tweeted within hours of the murder, “That bloke is a nut. A nut who happens to be Muslim. Blaming Muslims for this is like blaming Hitler’s moustache for the Holocaust.”

Actually, Russell, it isn’t. Blaming Islamism for what happened to Lee Rigby is sort of like blaming Nazism for the Holocaust. In other words, it’s accurate. But Brand believes that only the insane take murderous action. “In spite of his dispassionate intoning the subject is not rational,” licensed psychiatrist Brand wrote in The Sun. “Of course he’s not rational, he’s just murdered a stranger in the street, he says, because of a book. In my view that man’s severely mentally ill and has found a convenient conduit for his insanity – in this case the Koran.”

Brand actually compared the Islamist murderers to John Lennon’s murderer, Mark Chapman, who said he was inspired by The Catcher in the Rye. Neither book, said Brand, could be linked with murder. “I’ve read that book and I’ve read some of the Koran, and nothing in either of them has compelled me to do violence,” wrote Brand.

Except, of course, that there isn’t an entire movement of would-be murderers and murder-sympathizers who claim their authority from Salinger. There are millions of such would-be murderers and murder supporters around the globe who claim authority from the Koran.

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Jim Caviezel: A Rare Pro-life Star in Hollywood

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Photo Credit: LifeNewsJim Caviezel, famed for his role as Christ in The Passion of the Christ, and currently starring as the leading man in TV’s Person of Interest, is no stranger to being, well, different in Hollywood. From his publicly Catholic faith to his committed pro-life views, he stands in stark contrast to the typical movie star.

Caviezel’s personal life is even more remarkable than his incredible on-screen talent. Taking the road less traveled, Jim and his wife Kerri have adopted two children from China, both of whom had special needs.

Their first adopted child, Bo, came to the Caviezels after a traumatic first five years of life. The little boy had a brain tumor and had been abandoned before he was taken in by an orphanage and subsequently adopted by his loving parents. Bo is a remarkably boisterous child, and with the love he has received from Jim and Kerri, it is hard to believe that just a few short years ago he was struggling to survive in a hostile environment.

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Amid Scandals, White House Announces Star-Studded Concert in East Room (+video)

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Photo Credit: APAmid sequester and scandal in Washington, the White House announced Friday that the president and first lady will be hosting another concert as part of their “In Performance at the White House” series later this month.

The event will be held in the East Room of the White House and honor singer and songwriter Carole King, who will be awarded the 2013 Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. King will be the first woman to receive the award, the White House noted in their announcement.

The program — to be streamed on the White House website and broadcast on PBS stations the evening of May 28 — will also feature performances by Gloria Estefan, Billy Joel, Jesse McCartney, Emeli Sandé, James Taylor, Trisha Yearwood and King herself.

In 2002, Carole King sang “You’ve Got a Friend” for Cuban dictator Fidel Castro at a warming-relations dinner in Havana.

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RNC's Celeb Plan Falls Flat in Hollywood

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Photo Credit: Reuters

The Republican National Committee is meeting this week in the most touristy part of Tinseltown, but it’s apparent the “Celebrity Task Force” recommended by last month’s “autopsy” report isn’t going to happen.

The proposed task force was the most mocked of 219 suggestions from a five-member committee tasked with looking into why the party fared so poorly in 2012.

“The Party is seen as old and detached from pop culture,” the group said. “Establish an RNC Celebrity Task Force of personalities in the entertainment industry to host events for the RNC and allow donors to participate in entertainment events as a way to attract younger voters.”

The Doonesbury comic strip this week has been devoted entirely to parodying the Republican struggle to find A-list celebrities who might participate in such a task force, and comedian Stephen Colbert ridiculed the idea in a buzzed-about sketch.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said in an interview that he’s focused on the mechanics of winning elections – building a ground operation, improving outreach to minorities and investing in technology.

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Indoctrinating US Kids: Batgirl Comic Character Comes out as Transgendered

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Photo Credit: Breitbart

DC Comics’ Batgirl number 19 has a little bit more in store for fans than just crime fighting. This month readers also get a bit of controversy with their womp-slam-bang as a character introduced in 2011 comes out as both transgender and bisexual.

After DC rebooted its franchise in 2011 in an attempt to reconcile its decades of loose character arcs and confusing back histories, Batgirl’s alter ego (Barbara Gordon) moved out of her father’s home (Batman’s Commissioner James Gordon) and moved in with a roommate named Alysia Yeoh.

Yeoh was presented as an Occupy Wall Street-styled female activist, bartender and fine artist. She was of Singaporean descent and sported an undisclosed secret. This month’s issue reveals that secret. In a face-to-face discussion, Barbara Gordon and her roommate have a serious chat in which roommate Yeoh reveals that she is really a he and bisexual as well.

So, Batgirl number 19 marks the debut as the very first “real-world” transgendered character in all of mainstream comics. By “Real-world” that means a character that is merely transgendered in the “real-world” sense, not changed via some sort of superhero-styled transformation.

Over the last few years, the LGBTQ community has been favored with a plethora of gay characters in mainstream comics, of course. There are also a whole raft of gay and transgendered characters in comics from smaller, independent comics publishers as well as adult-oriented titles. But this marks as the first transgendered character to come to mainstream superhero comics.

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Jane Fonda Tells Veterans Boycotting Her Movie 'The Butler' to 'Get a Life'

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Photo Credit: Reuters

When Jane Fonda was cast as former First Lady Nancy Reagan in Lee Daniels’ forthcoming film “The Butler,” some Reagan fans were not pleased. Now, with the biographical due to hit theaters in October, a movement to boycott the movie is gaining some momentum.

Larry Reyes, a Navy veteran and founder of the “Boycott Hanoi Jane Playing Nancy Reagan” Facebook page has been particularly vocal about the casting decision, given Fonda’s past frolicking with the enemy during the Vietnam War.

“Growing up in a military family I heard my father and uncles talk about what Jane did, so from an early age I knew about her history with the war and how upset veterans were about it. Yet it amazed me that people just turned their backs and kept supporting her exercise videos and movies. I made a commitment early on not to support her projects,” Reyes told FOX411’s Pop Tarts column.

“Then when I heard she was going to play such a well-liked and highly respected president’s wife, it got to me. They (the filmmakers) knew by picking Jane for the part they were going to stir up some stuff. I’m not a conservative or a liberal, I’m an American. And that was a slap in the face.”

This week, Fonda had a simple message for Reyes and the page’s fans.

“Get a life.”

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The Axis of Torpor: Against Waging War as an NGO.

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Photo Credit: National Review

I greatly enjoy the new Hollywood genre in which dysfunctional American families fly to a foreign city and slaughter large numbers of the inhabitants as a kind of bonding experience. Liam Neeson takes his estranged wife and their teenage daughter for just such a vacation in Taken 2, in which the spectacular mountain of corpses in Istanbul brings the family back together again and ends with them (spoiler alert) enjoying a chocolate malt back at the soda fountain in California and getting to know the daughter’s new boyfriend. “Don’t shoot this one, Dad,” she cautions. “I really like him.” And they all have a good chuckle over it. In Die Hard 5 or whatever we’re up to, Bruce Willis and his estranged son fly to Moscow and do to the Russians what Neeson does to the Turks and Albanians. I gather that in the forthcoming Finding Nemo 2 Marlin and Dory’s marriage is going through a rocky patch until Nemo is kidnapped by a Ukrainian sex cartel and Marlin and Dory swim up the Dnieper River and gun down every pimp in Kiev.

Alas, outside Hollywood, foreigners are somewhat less pliable than the body count of Liam Neeson’s and Bruce Willis’s obliging extras would suggest. The funniest line in Taken 2 was Neeson’s advice to his daughter in an emergency: “Go to the U.S. embassy. You’ll be safe there.” It opened a couple of weeks after Benghazi.

There are drones, of course, which offer the consolations of technological badassery, as if Liam Neeson could take out all the Albanians from the X-Box in his basement. But don’t worry. According to Politico, at a recent meeting with Senate Democrats, President Obama assured them that they had no need to worry about his awesome power to rain down death from the skies because, as he put it, he’s not Dick Cheney.

Meanwhile, back at the GOP, Senator Rand Paul is no Dick Cheney either: At CPAC this week, the narrow bounds of his smash-hit filibuster — questioning drone assassinations on Americans in America — broadened somewhat, not just to questioning drone assassinations on Americans anywhere, nor to questioning drone assassinations on anyone, nor even to questioning the “war on terror” or war in general, but to questioning the very assumptions of American global order, starting with our bankrolling of Mohamed Morsi in Cairo. The Egyptians send mobs to torch the U.S. embassy, the Saudis wage ideological warfare against Western civilization, the Turks call Israel a “crime against humanity” and threaten a cultural and demographic takeover of Europe, the Pakistanis are ramping up nuke production to sell to any loon in town — and those are just our “allies.” With friends like these, who needs foreign policy? There are fewer and fewer takers for the burdens of global superpower, and whoever wins the nomination in 2016 will be considerably less Cheney and more Randy.

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FLOTUS Interruptus: Obamas Hijack The Oscars

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Photo Credit: BreitbartConservative movie lovers didn’t suffer any serious Red State taunts during the just-wrapped Academy Awards telecast. Michael Moore wasn’t on hand to bash the GOP, and show host Seth MacFarlane trained his immature wit on George Clooney, breast-baring actresses and the show’s ridiculous length.

And then it came time to announce the Best Picture winner, and Jack Nicholson stepped on stage to do the honors. Only Nicholson, and the show’s organizers, had something else in mind. Enter Michelle Obama.

The First Lady appeared via satellite to not only announce the night’s biggest prize but gave a speech extolling the virtues of the films in play. It was an unprecedented cultural power grab by the Obamas, almost daring conservative viewers to adore her as much as progressives already do.

“These nine movies took us back in time and all around the world. They made us laugh, they made us weep, and they made us grip our armrests just a little tighter. They taught us that love can endure against all odds and transform our lives in the most surprising ways. They reminded us that we can overcome any obstacle if we dig deep enough and fight hard enough and find the courage to believe in ourselves. These lessons apply to all of us no matter who we are, or what we look like, or where we come from, or who we love, but they are especially important for our young people…”

President Barack Obama is no longer running for office, yet the permanent campaign shows little sign of slowing. With this media appearance, the First Couple crossed the line into propaganda, their Cult of Personality act taking an ugly turn.

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2013 Oscars: Inside the Top-Secret Show (+video)

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Photo Credit: Video ScreenshotSecurity is airtight at the Dolby Theater in the days leading up to Oscar Sunday, but ET has your ticket inside the heavily guarded streets of Hollywood as the Academy preps for the big day!

Watch video here:

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