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It's the best joke from a film almost springloaded with them, but what is the origin of Airplane!'s famous "Don't call me Shirley" gag? Airplane! was written and directed by Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker, with the comedy being heavily inspired by the 1957 b-movie Zero Hour!, which featured Sterling Hayden (The Godfather). The plot of Zero Hour! featured a World War 2 pilot forced to land an airplane after the pilots become ill with food poisoning.Zero Hour!'s combination of unintentionally hilarious dialogue and taking the silly events of the plot deathly serious made an impression on Zucker,...

The treatment of Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., by her fellow House Republican leaders and colleagues "simply for having a contrary opinion" on former President Donald Trump is appalling, and late President Ronald Reagan would never have approved, presidential historian Craig Shirley wrote in a new opinion piece. "Cheney's only crime of course is her belief that the GOP needs to wash its hands of Donald Trump," Shirley, a biographer for late President Ronald Reagan, wrote for Townhall. "Otherwise, she's a tried and true conservative. And our movement is big enough to accommodate personal opinions.

Elizabeth Jo Shirley, of Hedgesville, West Virginia, has admitted to unlawfully retaining a document containing national defense information and committing international parental kidnapping, the Department of Justice announced.Shirley, 47, pled guilty to one count of “Willful Retention of National Defense Information” and one count of “International Parental Kidnapping.”  Shirley admitted to unlawfully retaining a National Security Agency (NSA) document containing information classified at the TOP SECRET/SENSITIVE COMPARTMENTED INFORMATION (TS/SCI) level relating to the national defense that outlines intelligence information regarding a foreign government’s military and political issues.  Shirley also admitted to removing her child, of whom she was the...

Shirley Skipper-Scott, the warden of the federal jail in New York City where wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein killed himself was reassigned out of that post by Attorney General William Barr, the Justice Department said. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons also placed two staffers at the Metropolitan Correctional Center who had been assigned to Epstein’s cell unit on administrative leave pending ongoing investigations into Epstein’s death. Epstein, a former friend of Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, was being held without bail on child sex trafficking charges at the times of his death.

“Green Book” is the worst best picture Oscar winner since “Crash,” and I don’t make the comparison lightly. Like that 2005 movie, Peter Farrelly’s interracial buddy dramedy is insultingly glib and hucksterish, a self-satisfied crock masquerading as an olive branch. It reduces the long, barbaric and ongoing history of American racism to a problem, a formula, a dramatic equation that can be balanced and solved. “Green Book” is an embarrassment; the film industry’s unquestioning embrace of it is another.

Set aside some time for this. There were a LOT of jokes.

SNIPPET: "Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg is among four people who have been arrested on suspicion of Syria-related terrorism offences, police have said. Mr Begg, 45, who was held by the US authorities for almost three years, was arrested earlier with two other men and a woman in the West Midlands. He was detained on suspicion of attending a terrorist training camp and facilitating terrorism overseas." SNIPPET: "Mr Begg was arrested in Hall Green in Birmingham. The other people arrested - a 36-year-old man from Shirley, a 44-year-old woman and her son, 20, both from Sparkhill - are being...

Seventy years ago this month, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and brought America into a war that had begun in Europe in 1939. In his masterful new book "December 1941: 31 Days That Changed America and Saved the World," Craig Shirley takes readers back to a very different America. Through hundreds of stories and advertisements culled from newspapers, Shirley not only transports us back to that tumultuous time, but reminds this generation that denial about an enemy's intentions can have grave consequences. Each chapter in the book deals with a single day of December 1941. We go to the movies...

(Credit: CBS) Shirley Sherrod, who was forced to resign from the Department of Agriculture after an out-of-context video of remarks she made were published on a conservative website, is still considering the formal job offer she received from the USDA, she tells CBS News Producer Daniel Steinberger. The department has offered Sherrod a position titled Deputy Director of the office of advocacy and outreach at the USDA, she says. The offer was delivered in a draft that puts into writing what Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack offered her on the phone last week. Sherrod said she sat down to read...

On Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011, Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart, the impresario of the ACORN scandal and a growing investigative force in the conservative media, held a press conference at the Conservative Political Action Conference. At that press conference, he laid out evidence of a concerted effort by government officials, race-baiting lawyers and certain black non-farmers to defraud the federal government of millions of dollars by exploiting a legal settlement called Pigford. On Saturday, Feb. 12, 2011, Shirley Sherrod, the single largest recipient of cash from the Pigford settlement, filed a lawsuit against Breitbart for defamation. Sherrod, you may remember, was...

Shirley Sherrod, ousted from her position with the U.S. Department of Agriculture after an internet video produced by conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart surfaced, has filed suit in District of Columbia Superior Court alleging defamation, false light and infliction of emotional distress. Breitbart confirmed that his company, breitbart.com, LLC,had been served with a copy of the suit over the weekend. In addition to Breitbart, producer Larry O’Conner and an unknown ‘John Doe’ are also named in the suit. Sherrod resigned as Georgia’s Director of Rural Development after the video clip appeared last July. The edited clip showed a speech she gave...

WASHINGTON- Shirley Sherrod has filed a defamation suit against Andrew Breitbart, the conservative gadfly she alleges triggered her firing by the Obama administration and ignited a national debate on race and reverse discrimination.Sherrod was the Georgia director for rural development for the U.S. Department of Agriculture until last June, when Breitbart posted online a heavily edited video excerpt of her speaking to a Georgia civil-rights group in which Sherrod, an African American woman, suggested that she once discriminated against a white farmer seeking help.The resulting tumult led the USDA to ask for Sherrod's resignation.

Readers who read my original Washington Examiner post about Shirley Sherrod know that she and husband Charles received $150,000 each for "pain and suffering” as part of "a thirteen million dollar settlement in the minority farmers law suit Pigford vs Vilsack." Based on history presented by Ron Wilkins yesterday at Counterpunch, it's appropriate to ask: "Whose pain and suffering?" It now seems that Mr. and Mrs. Sherrod inflicted quite a bit of pain and suffering on their own -- and on some of the very people Mr. Sherrod described as "our own"

Shirley Jean Rickert, a former child actress who was the cute little blond with the spit curls in "Our Gang" comedies in the early 1930s and later became a long-haired burlesque stripper known as Gilda and Her Crowning Glory, has died. She was 82. Rickert, who in recent decades went by her married name of Measures, died Friday after a long illness in a nursing home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., said her daughter, Melody Kennedy.

Washington (CNSNews.com) – Oscar award-winning actress Shirley MacLaine, who wrote several New Age books, told reporters at AARP’s 50th anniversary convention on Thursday it was “ridiculous” to think that women who voted for Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) would vote for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), now that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is on the GOP ticket as vice president. “I think the idea of nominating her to commandeer some of the disenfranchised Hillary voters just because she wears a skirt is ridiculous,” MacLaine said, adding that critics who say she should stay at home with her infant son, who has Down...

Army commander Commander Voreqe has taken over as head of state Bainimarama announced a short while ago that he was doing this to end the impasse. Dr Jona Senilagakali will be caretaker Prime Minister until an interim administration is appointed. Bainimarama said he had no intention of arresting the Prime Minister or other ministers. He said the 1997 Constitution was intact except for parts relating to the emergency powers.

GETTING AHEAD You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas. Shirley Chisholm (1924-2005) Politician Dear Abby: My husband is a liar and a cheat. He has cheated on me from the very beginning, and when I confront him, he denies everything. What's worse, every one knows he cheats on me. It is so humiliating. Also, he's been out of work for the past four years and has not even looked for a new job since. All he does is smoke cigars, and cruise around with his pals, while I have...

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA spy in the Middle East, argues that the only way to douse the fires of Islamic radicalism is through stunning, overwhelming, military force ..... In "The Counterterrorist Myth" (July/August Atlantic), Reuel Marc Gerecht, who worked for the Central Intelligence Agency for nine years on Middle Eastern matters, argued that despite its claims that it was "'picking apart' bin Ladin's organization 'limb by limb,'" the CIA's chances of infiltrating and gaining good intelligence on bin Laden's al Qaeda network were pathetically negligible. Gerecht described a CIA operation which had few operatives of Middle Eastern background, ...