Tag: sausage grinder of snark

Aug 06 2015

The Daily/Nightly Show (Conflictions)

Discontinuity

Viacom Bites!

The final guest-

Thursday is of course Jon Stewart’s last episode as host.  It will take up the whole hour.

This is probably not the piece you expect.  You see, for as much time and  pixels I’ve spent writing about The Daily Show, I’ve never had the emotional connection with it that some have had.

On the positive side, and this is really the best and noblest thing I can say about it, it has replaced and supplanted Cable news.  Under Keith MSNBC showed some signs of sanity, but that was short lived and the rest of it is simply a roiling cesspit of D.C. elite conventional wisdom (and I’m looking right at you Rachel and Chris).

Jon is better than that, but for me, except in his interview with Jim Cramer (and maybe a few other times), he never showed the killer instinct of a Carlin except in the correspondent reports and scripted work.  Lewis Black calls Stewart ‘the Cronkite of his generation‘ and that’s true enought I suppose if you remember Uncle Walter was a moderate conservative of whom it was said ‘if you’ve lost Cronkite you’ve lost the nation’.

We’re waaay dow the rabbit hole from there.  Our country routinely commits war crimes that Germans and Japanese were hung for.  We’ve reached a level of corruption that surpasses the Gilded Age.  One writer said that is time for Jon to go because he’s too bitter and strident.  Sorry, he’s not nearly bitter and strident enough.

Jon wants to keep his Rolodex and you need to tear up every card and burn it to ashes if you want to be truthful about what is happening in the United States today.  But he does know his audience and too many people are willing to pretend that weak tea and a ‘D’ make you something less than a fully bought and paid for corporatist toady.  Jon was never willing to go there because he digs the applause.

And so do I, but if there is one thing that being independent has done for me (umm… my blog you know and I don’t care whether you like it or not) is that it has relieved some of the self censorship.

30 bucks a month for freedom is a small price to pay.

It remains to be seen if success spoils Stephen Colbert.

Did I mention Viacom Bites!

Tonighly we’ll be talking about tomorrow’s Republican debate and Planned Parenthood (which we will live blog) and our panel is Jerrod Carmichael, Craig Robinson, and Ricky Valez.

Denis Leary web exclusive extended interview would be below but Viacom Bites! The real news below.

Aug 05 2015

The Daily/Nightly Show (Smokin’)

Discontinuity

Oh, Faux

You are a never ending source of amusement.

This week’s guests-

Thursday is of course Jon Stewart’s last episode as host.

Did you know Jon smokes?  Hope that doesn’t ruin it for you.  It’s one of the things that he and Denis Leary share.  Denis is the guest Jon invites because they are buds on and off camera.  He may pitch something but it’s just an excuse.  This will probably be one of Jon’s worst and most sentimental interviews ever.

Trevor is keeping the production team including the writers, but Jon is leaving the building.

Do you know I was a Boy Scout?

I was horrible.  The Troop that was school based was not so bad, the Troop that was Church based was virulently homophobic and homoerotic at the same time.

I didn’t leave because I was threatened sexually, I just couldn’t stand the constant bullying.  Not me, others.  There are things I will not tolerate.

Tonightly the topic is Toy Guns.  The panel is Mike Yard (who’s wiki warnings have been removed I note.  About damn time, he’s only the head writer for a major Cable network show.), Lennon Parham, and Jessica St. Clair.

Amy Schumer got a web exclusive extended interview! That and the real news below.

Aug 04 2015

Cartnoon

Aug 04 2015

The Daily/Nightly Show (Yes Sensei!)

Discontinuity

We will play in Spades

This week’s guests-

Thursday is of course Jon Stewart’s last episode as host.

I like Amy Schumer.

Yes Sensei!

Oh yeah, therapy and Oprah.  Well, I’m in therapy with a wonderful person who has made me much more positive and less confrontational unlike other bloggers I could name (Armando).

Actually I kind of like him but really, whining about hide rates?  Show a little dignity dude.  I am permanently and definitively banned, not by some auto hide rate system but by the personal action of Meteor Blades who had to break all the rules (rules?  Hah!) to do it.

Denise, you’re still a rapist apologist and Blade- you’re a disappointing sellout, a whore to corporatists and Plutocrats.

Yes, I feel MUCH better now.

Amy is in fact the cousin of Chuck who is probably as embarrassed as can be about the fact she’s perceived as the bluest female comic performing today.  Among the things she will be talking about is tighter gun control in the wake of the tragic shootings at her new film Trainwreck.

Oh, it’s not her best work.  In the end the damsel gets saved by a guy, rent Frozen instead.

Man Bites Dog

You stop being racist and I’ll stop talking about it.

Oh, and Dirk Benedict is a neighbor and he likes to be remembered for his role as ‘Face’.

Our panelists tonightly will be Julie Klausner, Rory Albanese, and Deon Cole.

The real news below.

Jul 31 2015

The Daily/Nightly Show (The Force Awakens)

Discontinuity

Reagan’s Eyesocket

Gay Eureka Springs

Next week’s guests-

Thursday is of course Jon Stewart’s last episode as host.

There is a near certain probability J.J. Abrams will be on to talk about Mission Impossible which if I haven’t mentioned it before I find entirely derivative and uninspired, the acting terrible and wooden, and the action sequences cliched and boring; only some of which was true about the original TV version.

Now I’d be just as happy if J.J. would talk about his uncredited writing for the Avatar: The Last Airbender episode, The Drill, but I suspect most of you would find the topic a little arcane.  What I would like to find out about (and I suspect most of you also) is the Disney reboot of Star Wars due for ek’smas, The Force Awakens.

Thinning the Herd

Tonightly we will be talking about Sam DuBose and Plantation Weddings with our panel Robin Thede, Ed Helms, and BIG K.R.I.T..

You stop being racist and I’ll stop talking about it.

The real news below.

Jul 30 2015

The Daily/Nightly Show (Credible History)

Discontinuity

Arby’s Enema

This week’s guests-

Doris Kearns Goodwin is my least favorite credible historian.

Let’s get least favorite part out of the way first.  She’s my least favorite because she’s a constantly sycophantic toady to power who has never met a Beltway trope or a piece of Villiager conventional wisdom that she was not willing to parrot or at least let pass unprotested.

Doris is a conservative historian, thoroughly unchallenging and well conected and thus trotted out frequently by talk shows (including Jon unfortunately) as a veneer of respectability.

Is she respectable?  Well, more than those idealogues and cretins you see trotted out by the racist and fascist right wing.  She might come to decide Barack Obama was a bad President (and he was) but she would never compare him with Hitler where I, a less credible historian, might.

Oh you want to get into it?  Torture, assassination by association, Gestapo-like Security State, undeclared wars of aggression.  Q.E.D., and don’t bother telling me he had no agency, he and his ‘Just Us’ department actively worked to thwart every effort at accountability.  That’s what we call accessory after the fact.

But she’s not totally unhinged from reality and as an example of historical reality and how it plays out over time I give you the underlying causes of the War for Slavery.

There was a time in the mid ’60s when the Civil Rights Movement was peaking and the centenials of this and that were being celebrated.  In secondary schools and some colleges the prevailing narrative is that it was the growing economic might of the North and a fear for diminishing political influence that were the prevailing causes of the War of Southern Rebellion.

Some far out historians (probably pot smoking dirty hippies) suggested that the two precipitating forces were the economic value of Black Human Beings as property and flat out racism.  Now they had plenty of contemporaneous primary sources that said just that in unmistakable black and white but no said the historical establishment, the North was as fully implicated in the Institution of Slavery as the South and it couldn’t possibly be.

Well, the elite North was (which it would do not to forget) and the average person was just as racist as those in the South, but what they also saw was an economic system that, even if they couldn’t articulate it as directly as we do today, Slave Labor would drive Free Labor out of the marketplace.  The resentment against the Fugitive Slave Act wasn’t driven entirely by altruistic sympathy for the poor downtrodden Black.

At the time (the 1960s not the 1860s) most historians denied that Slaves had any economic value at all and argued the South was trapped in a dying system.  Modern historians almost universally accept that the South was wealthier than the North and was poised to add to that disparity on the Cotton Trade and expansion of Slavery.  The South was not all picking and grinning, many Plantations sported Factories and Ironworks, all staffed by Slaves.

Doris Kearns Goodwin blows with the breeze, neither the best or worst, just another hack but at least a credible one.

Senior Black Correspondent

Tonightly we will be talking about Cecil The Lion with our panel Rory Albanese, Baratunde Thurston, and Bobcat Goldwait.

The real news below.

Jul 29 2015

The Daily/Nightly Show (Xenu)

Discontinuity

Calvinball

This week’s guests-

Tom will be on to whore Mission Impossible Whatever which is fine I guess.

The Church of Scientology says that a human is an immortal, spiritual being (thetan) that is resident in a physical body. The thetan has had innumerable past lives and it is observed in advanced Scientology texts that lives preceding the thetan’s arrival on Earth were lived in extraterrestrial cultures.

At least Tom doesn’t believe in any wierd culty things like, oh, say, Mormonism.

Word Blerd

Tonightly the topic is Trump, another fellow with very strange ideas about what does and does not constitute ‘consent’.  The panel is Penn Jillette, Brina Milikowsky, and Ricky Velez.

The real news below.

Jul 28 2015

Cartnoon

Jul 28 2015

The Daily/Nightly Show (Penultimate)

Discontinuity

A Giant Barbecue

I like the brisket with Carolina sauce, but what do I know?

It’s cruise week.

This week’s guests-

Who knows what madness Ted will spout but he desparately needs to pump up his polls before next week’s Republican debate and The Donald has no monopoly on crazy.

The Church of Scientology says that a human is an immortal, spiritual being (thetan) that is resident in a physical body. The thetan has had innumerable past lives and it is observed in advanced Scientology texts that lives preceding the thetan’s arrival on Earth were lived in extraterrestrial cultures.

See?

But there are no Black people in Maine

You just don’t hang with the right people.

Maine is the Arkansas of the northeast and basically everyone who doesn’t live in the touristy areas is dirt poor and doesn’t have all the teeth they were born with.  The rest steal everything they can from the ‘aways’ who stare and take pictures of rocks, water, and trees WHICH WE HAVE MORE OF THAN YOU, YOU NEW HAMPSHIRE BASTARDS!

Yeah, come February and I’ll tell you what upstate New York, New Hampshire and Maine are all about.  Cold and dark, on the positive side there aren’t as many bugs.

Me, I live in the armpit of New England where we hide the stinky and smelly by products of the Industrial Revolution with a thin screen of trees because we have class.

Tonightly the topic is more Cosby.  The panel is Colin Quinn, Sally Kohn, and Gina Yashere.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2 part web exclusive extended interview and the real news below.

Jul 24 2015

The Daily/Nightly Show (‘Burbs)

Discontinuity

Why do Greeks make the best Pizza?

Next week’s guests-

Ta-Nehisi Coates will be on to talk about Between the World and Me.

“Between the World and Me” (which takes its title from a Richard Wright poem) offers an abbreviated portrait of the author’s life at home, focusing mainly on the fear he felt growing up. Fear of the police, who he tells his son “have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body,” and who also possess a dominion of prerogatives that include “friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations.” And fear of the streets where members of crews – “young men who’d transmuted their fear into rage” – might “break your jaw, stomp your face, and shoot you down to feel that power, to revel in the might of their own bodies,” where death might “billow up like fog” on an ordinary afternoon.

The “need to be always on guard” was exhausting, “the slow siphoning of essence,” Mr. Coates writes. He “feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to address the block, and contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues, and contort again so as not to give police a reason.”

Mr. Coates – a national correspondent for The Atlantic – contrasts this world of the streets with the “other world” of suburbia, “organized around pot roasts, blueberry pies, fireworks, ice cream sundaes, immaculate bathrooms, and small toy trucks that were loosed in wooded backyards with streams and glens.” He associates this clichéd suburban idyll with what he calls “the Dream” – not the American dream of opportunity and a better life for one’s children; not Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of freedom and equality (which the Reverend King observed was “a dream deeply rooted in the American dream”), but instead, in Mr. Coates’s somewhat confusing use of the term, an exclusionary white dream rooted in a history of subjugation and privilege.

Those Dreamers, he contends, “have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world.”

Yeah Ta, I was raised in the world and it ain’t all “pot roasts, blueberry pies, fireworks, ice cream sundaes, immaculate bathrooms, and small toy trucks that were loosed in wooded backyards with streams and glens.”.  It’s different, not better.  Bullies will be and we all “live down here with us, down here in the world.”  Freedom and equality mean strife and struggle.  Revolution has no color except blood.

Nipsey Russell

Tonightly the topic is Sandra Bland.  The panel is Christina Greer, Jordan Carlos, and Mark deMayo.

The real news below.

Jul 23 2015

The Daily/Nightly Show (Sinister)

The whole show. You can watch it if you can stand it.  Here are the standard links (1, 2, 3) and the web exclusive extended (1, 2).  At least it’s out of the way and we can concentrate on what makes Jon good and not on what makes him suck.

This week’s guests-

Jake Gyllenhaal will be on to talk about Southpaw, a kind of grittier Rocky (Adrian dies).

The Whitely Show

Tonightly our special guest is Felonious Munk talking about #BlackLives vs. #AllLives.  The panel is Lavell Crawford, Gary Owen (not the one you are thinking of), and Uzo Aduba.

The real news below.

Jul 22 2015

The Daily/Nightly Show (The Big Get)

You can watch it if you can stand it.  My position is that at least it’s out of the way and we can concentrate on what makes Jon good and not on what makes him suck.  My activist brother was worried that it will be just another one of these love fests where Jon decides not to burn his Rolodex by asking only softball questions, big and fat and right over the heart of the plate (oh, and he’s bi-partisany about it too, anyone remember John McCain?).

My brother was exactly right.

Obama on The Daily Show: ‘Executive order: Jon Stewart cannot leave’

by Rory Carroll, The Guardian

Tuesday 21 July 2015 19.54 EDT

With Obama approaching his final year in the White House and Stewart nearing the end of his 16-year-run as host of the Comedy Central flagship, the encounter had a valedictory air.

The Iran nuclear deal, as expected, featured prominently. Obama joked that critics of the deal seemed to think that “if you had brought Dick Cheney to the negotiations everything would be fine”.

Stewart noted his guest’s recent run of victories: “It appears that you’re feeling it a little bit right now. Do you feel like seven years in ≥”

“I know what I’m doing,” Obama interrupted. “A lot of the work that we did early starts bearing fruit late. The way I’m feeling right now is, I’ve got 18 months.” He vowed to tackle climate change and fuel-efficiency standards before leaving power.

…

Obama said he felt strongly that “stuff gets better if we work at it and we stay focused on where we are going”. He said the “Hope” posters from his 2008 election run gave some the impression that everything would be fixed right away.

“We didn’t make those. You made those,” Stewart noted.

The president conceded many goals will remain unmet when he leaves office in 2017. “You’re always going to fall short, because if you’re hitting your marks, that means you didn’t set them high enough. We don’t score a touchdown every time, but we move the ball forward.”

Hmm… what would Dr. King have to say about that?

As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained.

As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community.

…

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides–and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history.

…

I feel impelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping “order” and “preventing violence.” I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department.

In a democratic system our representatives are not without agency and power, to pretend otherwise is a lie.

And the Party Platform?  A broken promise.

It’s not about the morality of the victim, it’s about the motivation of the rapist and consent

Tonightly we’ll be talking about the Ashley Madison hack and, of course, the Cos.  Our panel will be 50 Cent, Judd Apatow, and Rachel Feinstein.

Discontinuity

Not just a step, a giant leap for ass kind

This week’s guests-

Paul Rudd’s web exclusive extended interview and the real news below.

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