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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Doug TenNapel to discuss Ratfist, his new socioeconomic satire of the modern world, what it’s like to be a conservative in liberal Hollywood, and his upcoming book, Bad Island.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Wide World of Webcomics: Doug TenNapel Has a RATFIST
Ratfist
Ghostopolis
Doug TenNael’s Website
Pre-order Bad Island on Amazon
Doug’s work at Big Hollywood

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M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film production, The Last Airbender, was recently awarded over $35 million in film tax credits from Pennsylvania over two years.  The award is the largest in the history of Pennsylvania’s Film Tax Credit (FTC), breaking the record held by his previous project, The Happening, which received $12 million in tax credits.  His film Lady in the Water also received a film production grant. The only good news is that taxpayers are only forced to subsidize these movies, not to watch them.

Pennsylvania first created a film tax credit in 2004, replaced it with a film grant program in 2006, then enacted its current $75 tax credit program in 2007, in which films can receive up to 25 percent of production costs in the form of tax credit. The state’s FTC was temporarily reduced, as the 2009 state budget agreement reduced all tax credits by 33% for three years.

Forty-four states offer tax incentivizes or grants to filmmakers for in-state production, according to a recent report on film tax credits by the Tax Foundation.  Pennsylvania is among the 26 states that offer transferable (or in some states refundable) tax credits to film producers.  This means that tax credit awarded is more than the actual state taxes the recipient owes, they can sell the remaining credit to another business.

But movie incentives by-and-large have failed as economic policy.  As the Tax Foundation notes:

Movie production incentives are costly and fail to live up to their promises. … Among these failures, the two most important are their failure to encourage economic growth overall and their failure to raise tax revenue.

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Tonight, Hollywood holds its Prom, aka The Academy Awards. We’re curious how smug they will be this year. Politically, things are…well…different. Be sure to stay tuned to our sister site, Big Hollywood, who will be live-blogging the awards.

It permeates the public’s consciousness and Big Media obsessively promotes the perception to our detriment.  Yet, like a canker on a suitor, polite Republicans won’t discuss it.  No longer, however, can we pretend the issue doesn’t exist.  It does and, though painful to admit, we must confront the truth.

Republicans have a “hip gap.”

This is not to say Democrats are hip.  People who squander their precious breaths of life poring over Das Kapital, practicing rhythmic chanting with Kindergarten lyrics, chaining themselves to national monuments and/or writing memoirs prior to accomplishing anything are utter stiffs.  They can only pass themselves off as cool in comparison to…well, us.

Oh sure, we’d like to think this is just another slanderous Leftist attack on Republicans.  But, let’s be honest:  a large gaggle of GOPers have yet to put a toenail into the Twenty-First Century’s cultural crosscurrents – or, for that matter, the Nineteenth’s.

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From Mediaite:

14. Andrew Breitbart, Breitbart.com

Though he’s not exactly a household name, Andrew Breitbart has long been a power player in the sphere of Internet influence and opinion. The former editor of The Drudge Report, and lead researcher and developer for The Huffington Post, Breitbart has since set out on his own, creating a number of sites that both aggregate and report from what he describes as a center right point-of-view. When Breitbart provided an exclusive interview with Mediate this year, he revealed big plans to grow his “Big” network of sites beyond Big Hollywood and Big Government (which he launched this Fall.) Big Journalism is set to launch next January, with more to follow in the coming year.

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I host a late night Internet Radio Show on Blog Talk Radio called “The Stage Right Show”.  I focus on many of the stories written here at Big Government and on our sister site, Big Hollywood.

When the infamous NEA Conference call story broke, I spent much time discussing it and the various players involved.  One of my very talented listeners, Gary Eaton wrote a song about the central figure in the saga, Yosi Sergant.

Andrew Breitbart liked that song so much that he had us post it over at Big Hollywood for all to enjoy.

Recently, Andrew “Volun-told” Gary to write a song for our favorite ACORN personality, Alvivon “Bon Bon” Hurd.  You remember Bon Bon.  She was that charming and talkitive ACORN protestor who admitted on tape that ACORN had worked nefariously to get Obama elected even though they were supposed to be bi-partisan.

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When the AARP began its full-throated support for the President’s Health Care Scheme many wondered why this venerable organization would support a plan which would  cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare, mostly by putting strict price controls on the very popular Medicare Advantage program.

By putting enormous price controls (cuts) in the Medicare Advantage program, many seniors will be forced to look to the other Medicare supplemental offer, MediGap.   It just so happens that AARP sells MediGap coverage to its members.  The income generated from those sales accounts for 60.3% of AARP’s revenues, ten years ago, this income only accounted for 10% of their budget.

So, in short, the Obama Health Care Scheme puts hundreds of millions of dollars in AARP’s coffers by forcing seniors off of Medicare Advantage and into MediGap programs.  You would think that this was enough of a payback to the AARP for their support.  But Big Government now reveals another little prize that has been awarded to AARP in time for their recent official endorsement of the Senate Bill.

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THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

– Thomas Paine, The Crisis, December 23, 1776

For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?”

– Esther 4:14

These are interesting times. Under President Obama and the most liberal Congress since 1965, the United States government is expected to borrow a trillion dollars per year for the next decade while the size and power of our federal government will grow at the expense of our liberties. 

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To which I respond to my unofficial biographer Conor Friedersdorf’s Daily Beast criticism of your’s truly and bigger fish Andrew Sullivan’s two-thumbs-up to it:                             

Andrew Sullivan (left) and Conor Friedersdorf

In the piece you link to and affirm in the Daily Beast, “The Right’s Lesser Press,” Conor Friedersdorf refuses to interview me as he continues to be my unofficial biographer. (I’m VERY reachable, Conor.) He writes opinion pieces on me purporting to be journalism. He doesn’t quote or cite me, he simply assumes and pushes the point of view he thinks I have and makes an argument based on these alleged positions. It’s sloppy and you, of all people, should know better.

Breitbart.com is MOSTLY a news aggregator. It carries the Associated Press, Reuters, even, Agence France Presse, from those dreaded croissant eaters!!!

It even carries the New York Times on its front page — a benefit that even Big Government and Big Hollywood don’t receive.

Big Hollywood is what it is: a counter-voice to the virtually monolithic Hollywood left. How dare I grant a platform, and a means for the defense of those in Hollywood who would dare go against the strident and intolerant Hollywood left.

Big Government, too, is providing an outlet for voices and ideas that are not proportionally represented in the traditional and mostly biased mainstream media.

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If you’ve ever wondered–and worried–about where government support of the arts leads, look no further than the full transcript of an August 10 telecon  between an official at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and a group of “independent artists from around the country.” The short version: It leads to the use of taxpayer-funded culture as a means of propagandizing for specific, partisan political aims. Which corrupts not just art but artists.

As Patrick Courrelieche, an L.A.-based arts organizer who participated in the call, reported at Big Hollywood, the people running the call, including the NEA’s director of communications Yosi Sergant  and members of the White House Office of Public Engagement and United We Serve, told the assembled crew of “thought leaders” that “we’re going to come at you with some specific asks here” (that’s a direct quote from Buffy Wicks of the Office of Public Engagement). 

Chief among the requests from Sergant (who was either “reassigned” from the agency or “reportedly resigned” after denying the full extent of his role in organizing the call) was “to pick something whether it’s health care, education, the environment, you know… [and] apply artistic, you know, your artistic creative communities’ utilities and bring them to the table.” Beyond the specific policy issues above, the call organizers stressed the ideologically loaded concept of “service” as the animating principle of the Obama administration and wanted the artists to do whatever they could to promote that. As Wicks put it, “We really view [our efforts] as an onramp to a lifetime of service. We really want service to be incorporated into people’s daily lives.”

Given that the NEA prides itself on being the single largest funding source for the arts in the country, such arm-twisting by agency officials, however masked in fulsome compliments to creators’ genius, is disturbing on its face. It clearly sets a political agenda for the very people who are likely to be applying for, well, NEA and other government grants. Does anyone think that the organizers were fishing around for projects that might complicate the public option for health care?

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From the transcript of today’s “Rush Limbaugh Show” show:

RUSH: Now, this is incredible.  Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood, started a new website recently, BigGovernment.com.  And filmmaker James O’Keefe, 25-year-old independent filmmaker, has his own theory about how to expose people on the left and he’s using Alinsky rules.  One of the Saul Alinsky rules in dealing with your enemies is making your enemies live by their own rules will destroy them.  So O’Keefe’s theory is, hey, just calling attention to their corruption and disagreeing with it and demanding that it stop isn’t going to accomplish anything.  We’ve got to go encourage the corruption and illustrate how it happens.  So what happened was, James O’Keefe posed as a pimp with a 20-year-old woman named Kenya who posed as a prostitute while visiting ACORN’s office in Baltimore.  The couple told ACORN staffers that they wanted to secure housing where the woman could continue to maintain a prostitution business.

Now, ACORN advised the woman on two things:  how to avoid being caught paying taxis, how to avoid paying taxes on her business, how to cheat the IRS, and how to get away with running a prostitution business in Baltimore.  We have couple sound bites that illustrate this.  There’s video of this.  The whole video runs about an hour.  They got two long segments of it on O’Keefe’s site at BigGovernment.com.  This is your tax dollars at work, by the way.  ACORN employees, ACORN, four to five billion dollars in the stimulus package directly to them.  Remember, ACORN is Barack Obama’s training ground.  When he got to Chicago he became a community organizer with ACORN.  He taught them how to do things; they taught him how to do things.  We now have an ACORN-type community agitator as president of the United States.  So in this bite, this is the videotape, James O Keefe is posing as the pimp, his woman, Kenya, posing as the prostitute at the ACORN Baltimore office, and in this bite the ACORN employee advises the cameraman on how to hide a prostitution business.

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