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Articles by Daniel Wattenberg

** FILE ** Paul McCartney performs at the 12-12-12 The Concert for Sandy Relief at Madison Square Garden in New York on Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2012. (AP Photo/Starpix, Dave Allocca)

Hello, goodbye: Late relief help from Paul McCartney can’t save gun background checks in Senate

Hard to believe, but Jay Mohr's tweet rescinding the Second Amendment wasn't enough to clinch victory for gun control advocates in Wednesday's Senate vote on a measure to expand background checks on gun buyers. So Paul McCartney on Wednesday became a late addition to an anti-gun campaign spearheaded by crooner Tony Bennett. That wasn't enough either: Faster than you can say "Hello, Goodbye" the Senate rejected the new background checks late Wednesday afternoon.

April 17, 2013
Tax Day is cause for celebration in the Nation's Capital.

Merry Tax Day! From the Palm

Normal people don’t think of Tax Day as cause for celebration. But things are different here in the Nation’s Capital. For one thing, we have a better baseball team than you do. For another, here in Washington, where the Palm’s walls are crowded with fond caricatures of politicos and the eatery’s coffers are propped up by lobbyists on expense accounts, Tax Day is indeed occasion to celebrate.

April 15, 2013
Quentin Tarantino

(UPDATE) Tarantino’s ‘Django Unchained’: China spiking, none speaking (and we called it here)

Baffled industry observers are at a loss to explain why the Chinese authorities would rescind approval for a film that had already met the exacting demands of state censors. In the absence of a better explanation, I can’t help wondering if — don’t laugh — my own speculations about “Django’s” potential cultural impact in China — posted here on the eve of “Django’s” Chinese release — somehow tripped an alarm, triggering last minute jitters somewhere in the upper echelons of the state film bureaucracy.

April 11, 2013
Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in "The Iron Lady," the 2011 biopic about the late British prime minister. (Pathe Productions Ltd.)

Roger Ebert on ‘The Iron Lady’: Margaret Thatcher lacked feelings

By many accounts, "The Iron Lady" credits Mrs. Thatcher as a kind of objective feminist who overcame long odds through force of will and personality in rising to the top of a male-dominated political arena. That wasn't enough for Mr. Ebert. "Was she a monster? A heroine?" he demanded. "The movie has no opinion." Guess which one she was in the critic's opinion.

April 8, 2013
Gerard Butler attends a screening of FilmDistrict's "Olympus Has Fallen" on Monday, March 11, 2013 in New York. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

‘Olympus Has Fallen’ box office: Hollywood fooled again

Biblical drama isn’t the only entertainment genre with a stealth market invisible to Hollywood. Here’e another: patriotic action thriller. “Olympus Has Fallen,” an unapologetically flag-waving action spectacle centered around a North Korean plot to seize the White House and take the president hostage, took in $30.5 million at the box office over the weekend, beating consensus prerelease expectations in Hollywood by about 50 percent.

March 25, 2013
In this file photo, the Rev. Al Sharpton, now the host of MSNBC's "PoliticsNation" rallies with hundreds of demonstrators outside the New York Post headquarters in New York. (Getty Images)

This just in: MSNBC is a liberal opinion network

At the prime-time home of Al Sharpton, Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Kirk O’Donnell and outgoing Ed Schultz/incoming Chris Hayes, “Opinion dominates reporting,” the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism has learned.

March 18, 2013
** FILE ** Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis star in "The Expendables 2." (Twentieth Century Fox/dapd via Associated Press)

Gun control at the box office, part 2: Willis blows away Stallone and Schwarzenegger

Perhaps there is a Lover’s Day lesson to be gleaned from Bruce Willis’ weekend box office triumph: Love your base, and your base will love you. Opening on Valentine’s Day, “A Good Day to Die Hard,” the fifth installment in the star’s signature action movie franchise, finished number one at the box office for President’s Day weekend, with a three-day gross of $25 million.

February 18, 2013
In this Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2013 photo, Swati Dlamini, left, and Zaziwe Dlamini-Manaway, granddaughters of Nelson and Winnie Mandela, speak during an interview in New York. The sisters are stars of the new reality show "Being Mandela," produced by COZI TV for NBC. The 30-minute weekly show premieres on Sunday, Feb. 10 at 9 PM and will follow the next generation of Mandela family through the experiences of sisters Zaziwe and Swati and their families. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

Winnie Mandela takes star turn in granddaughters’ new reality series for U.S. TV

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the controversial ex-wife of anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela, is featured as a doting and beloved grandmother and materfamilias in “Being Mandela,” a new reality series chronicling the fashion-forward lives of sisters Zaziwe Dlamini-Manaway and Swati Dlamini, the granddaughters of Mr. Mandela, 94, and Madikizela-Mandela, 76.

February 8, 2013
**FILE** Chris Brown looks on alongside his attorney Mark Geragos at Los Angeles County Superior Court in Los Angeles on Aug. 25, 2009, during his sentencing for assaulting his girlfriend Rihanna. (Associated Press)

After prosecutors slam ‘sloppy’ Richmond PD, judge orders new records in Chris Brown case

A Los Angeles judge on Wednesday ordered additional records to prove that Chris Brown actually completed a community service sentence imposed after he pleaded guilty in the 2009 beating of then-girlfriend Rihanna. The order comes after Los Angeles County prosecutors slammed the Richmond Police Department for “at best sloppy documentation and at worst fraudulent reporting” in monitoring and substantiating Brown’s compliance.

February 6, 2013
"The Second Amendment comes from the right to protect — for settlers to protect themselves from slave revolts, and from uprisings by Native Americans," actor Danny Glover told students at Texas A&M University. Captured on video, his bold reinterpretation of the Second Amendment quickly went viral. (Associated Press)

Roots of Glover’s 2nd Amendment interpretation lie in eccentric historical claims of 9/11 truther

Speaking to students Thursday at Texas A&M, Danny Glover left his young Aggie hosts little reason to suspect that his confident dissent from mainstream scholarly understanding of the "genesis" of the Second Amendment might be founded on nothing more than an article by a talk radio host and 9/11 "truther" posted within the previous two days at a left-wing website proudly specializing in provocation. But such now appears to be the case.

January 22, 2013