Tag: sausage grinder of snark

Yes, yes that was a boot to the ‘nads.  Now if only his interviews were more like that.

I didn’t mention it last night, but as it develops Jason Jones, the longest serving correspondent at the moment, will also be leaving The Daily Show (Sam Bee, his wife, will be staying with the program).  Jessica Williams has announced she is not a host candidate at this time though I understand Brian Williams is shopping his resume.

I don’t expect he’ll get it, the show would lose credibility.

Over on The Nightly Show side I felt the interveiw with DiBlasio went well enough but it wasn’t particularly funny, about the level you’d get from David Letterman.  The monologue went pretty well-

Tonight we’ll have Joy Reid, Bonnie McFarlane, Megan Powers, and Emma Ianinni talking about sexual assault on college campuses.

If you happen to be assaulted on campus Atrios gives us a warning not to use School Counciling or Medical Services as the records are not protected from the school should you decide to sue them or they you.

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The Turtle and The Carrot

This Week’s Guests-

• Tuesday 3/3: Sigourney Weaver
• Wednesday 3/4: Viacheslav Fetisov
• Thursday 3/5: Gerald Posner

I don’t know what Sigourney Weaver will be on to talk about, but I do know what I want to hear about and that’s her new Aliens project which ditches the last two movies (which were horrible because Ripley dies) and all the vs. Predator crap as non-canon.

Robert Smigel’s web exclusive extended interview and the real news below.

Larry continues to feel his way forward with his format and tonight could actually be a big leap forward if his bookers can keep coming up with high profile guests.

Tonight we’ll spend the whole half hour with Bill DiBlasio and I’ll be interested to see how it works out.

After a month or so now of some hits and some misses (hey, if you put it in play 50% of the time in Baseball you’re generally considered a pretty good bat) I’m kind of hoping that this format kind of works for him.

You see, the problems are first that we are not getting a set up each night.  The opening monologue is where you introduce the players and frame the debate, kind of like putting your leadoff men on base.  Secondly 4 people is too many for the panel, especially when so many of them are lightly known.  They don’t get enough face time with the audience to demonstrate their expertise (if they are serious) or be funny (if they are) and frankly it’s hard to keep them straight.

What I think could actually work is an old fashioned kind of Meet The Press style- 1 to 4 minutes of monologue (why are we watching this, who will we talking to) and then a short segment with just Larry and the guest developing the guest’s point of view.

After that we can bring in the panel (and I’d recommend no more than 2 to allow the audience time to familiarize themselves with them) and put the guest on the grill for about 10 – 12 minutes.

I do think the whole ‘Keeping it 100’ thing works and I would keep that part of it, but Larry and his writers need to be able to step in and pick it up because the questions so far are lame.  I don’t know if that’s just because they aren’t getting many good ones or they’re picking bad ones.

Finally, Lary can’t be allowed to slide off the hook with ‘Weak Tea’ like this-

What the heck is that???  All 4 of the ladies on his panel?  If I was his wife it would have been a long, cold weekend on the couch after that one.  And it may have been gallant but it was a stone cold weasel.

You know, I had another clip in mind (opening panel segment), but frankly last Thursday’s whole show was nothing special and the clip (though the highlight) was no better than the rest of it.

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Well, we’ll see if Jon survived his taping of Monday Night Raw (or maybe not until tomorrow if they did it after The Daily Show.  These Rock and Wrestling mashups rarely work though ever since Cyndi Lauper teamed up with Captain Lou Albano they keep trying it.

The lowly, average, regular rich

This Week’s Guests-

• Monday 3/2: Robert Smigel
• Tuesday 3/3: Sigourney Weaver
• Wednesday 3/4: Viacheslav Fetisov
• Thursday 3/5: Gerald Posner

I do hope Robert Smigel talks about some of his SNL work like ‘The Ambiguously Gay Duo’ but I suspect he’ll be talking about the return of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog in Friday’s The Jack and Triumph Show on Adult Swim.  It’s a funny bit…

For me to poop on.

The real news below.

Black women?  What do women want?  I always assume it’s that same thing that I, as a human, want; but maybe it’s totally different.

Red Shirts

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Sarcasm, Insults, and Dishonest Editing

Olivia Wilde will be on to promote her latest, The Lazarus Effect.

Next Week’s Guests-

• Mo 3/2: Robert Smigel
• Tu 3/3: Sigourney Weaver
• We 3/4: Viacheslav Fetisov
• Th 3/5: Gerald Posner

The real news below.

What?  Lil’ Wayne is only the second most offensive Rapper on the Internet.  Ask the 7 white guys if they’re racist.

So tonight’s topic (just keeping it 100) is whether you would take a one way trip to Mars.  Hands?  Well, you’re all going to die.

Of course so will the rest of us and maybe you’ll get a brass plaque somewhere that aliens can come and look at and say- “what the hell is that?  Is it some kind of alien language or something?”

I guess whether you find that funny or not depends on your perspective.

I knew Or and Wil and Curt and in honestly (oh, you can look at that as a contra-action but then you’d be missing what makes it punny) when I saw those bags of sticks and strings I contemplated not whether I longed for the sweet release of Death, but how quickly I wanted it to happen.

I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my Grandfather, not screaming in terror like his passengers.

Ahhh! Woooh! What’s happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What’s my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I? Okay okay, calm down calm down get a grip now. Ooh, this is an interesting sensation. What is it? Its a sort of tingling in my… well I suppose I better start finding names for things. Lets call it a… tail! Yeah! Tail! And hey, what’s this roaring sound, whooshing past what I’m suddenly gonna call my head? Wind! Is that a good name? It’ll do. Yeah, this is really exciting. I’m dizzy with anticipation! Or is it the wind? There’s an awful lot of that now isn’t there? And what’s this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like ‘Ow’, ‘Ownge’, ‘Round’, ‘Ground’! That’s it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it’ll be friends with me? Hello, Ground!

Curiously, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias, as it fell, was, “Oh no, not again!” Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.

There was a time I wanted to go leading my troops in a hopeless battle against impossible odds just as the tide turned to victory.  Now I just want a nap, and in my sleep I would dream of napping.

A cat with restless sleep is a sad thing indeed.  At least Larry is funny when ‘Black Ice’ is around.

Look, as a stone cold atheist I think all religion is fundamentally ridiculous and faith of any sort mostly superstition and certainly no substitute for reason, logic, and science.

That said, I don’t find Islam any more reprehensible than Mormonism, indeed they share several characteristics that make them simply Christian heresies like Arianism and Rastafarianism (two totally different things mon).

For instance, both believe in prophets after Jesus who were divinely inspired by God to write ‘corrected’ testaments of His Word to substitute and extend the generally accepted texts of Abrahamaic revelation.

Interestingly enough Americanism (“A group of related heresies which were defined as the endorsement of freedom of the press, liberalism, individualism, and separation of church and state, and as an insistence upon individual initiative, which could be incompatible with the principle of Catholicism of obedience to authority.”) was condemned by Pope Leo XIII on his letter Testem benevolentiae nostrae in 1899.

So if you’re even reading this I can virtually guarantee you’re going to Hell just like me if I believed in that sort of thing.

I think what pisses off Christians so much about Islam is that faithful practitioners are genuinely holier than thou (pray 5 times a day, no booze, no pork) and that they so kicked butt as a military force and an enlightened civilization that didn’t barbarically destroy every bit of ‘pagan’ knowledge as witchcraft out of sheer ignorance they in short order created an Empire (Caliphate) larger than Rome, a fact you won’t often hear admitted because they were (gasp) interracial and not usually covered in filth.

So that sentiment drives the vast majority of Islamophobic racists.  Now sophisticated pretenders like Bill Maher claim that Islam is inherently political and dedicated to conquest and it is, but so is Christianity and Judaism (you can make a case that Christianity is pacifistic but those who do are generally martyred in ways much more gruesome than mere beheading).  In reality it is the same egocentric exceptional racism that leads them to this conclusion and if they were true atheists (rarer than true Scotsmen) they’d spend just as much time or more condemning our own cultural biases instead of buying into them out of piss-pants fear some evil Ay-rab is going to boogeyman out from under their bed and slit their throat while they sleep.

Fear something real, like the next asshole who runs a Stop Sign and T-Bones your body to a bloody pulp.

Last night only the panel had to keep it 100, but the monologue was funny.

Continuity

He ruined my adulterous ‘Love Shack’

Yes, it is in fact true that the driving motivation for establishing the NYC Emergency Command Center at the World Trade Center (literally the largest target in New York City) is that it was only a block away from the apartment Rudy was using to bang Judy Nathan so his wife didn’t know.

This week’s guests-

• Tuesday 2/24: Lynsey Addario
• Wednesday 2/25: Conan O’Brien
• Thursday 2/26: Olivia Wilde

What I like about Lynsey Addario is she’s a homey, born in Norwalk which while part of the Fairfield County Gold Coast is not as tony as you think.  She’ll be on to plug It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War.

Christine Lagarde’s two part web exclusive extended interview and the real news below.

I thought we were pals after all that riding we did together. All of a sudden he’s worried about some mutt. Well, we did like he asked. We left him, and he went to jail for a dog. You want to hear the funny part? Paden didn’t even like that damn dog.

It evened out in the end. They locked me up; the dog sprung me.

So, what does it mean to love America?  I for one think it means recognizing the United States is not the only damn country on two continents and a land bridge and never confusing one with the other, but then again I have a lot of “crazy” ideas about ‘Liberty and Justice for All’ and ‘We, The People’ that are just so Enlightenment as to make me quaint and cuddly like a Mennonite kneecapper at an Amish Field Party.

Anyway, tonight we get to hear Martin Short (Canadian), Big Sean, Frank Rich and former senior media adviser to Mitt Romney Tara Setmayer (nee Wall) pontificate on the subject which will be a relief for you since you generally get me spouting off about it 3 or 4 times a day.

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James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine was seriously ill two or three weeks ago in London, but is well now.  The report of my illness grew out of the report of his illness, the report of my death was an exaggeration.

Mark Twain, May 1897

To the death, serious wounding, or ‘Uncle’ saying Arby’s.

Horny Las Vegas Teens

This week’s guests-

• Monday 2/23: Christine Lagarde
• Tuesday 2/24: Lynsey Addario
• Wednesday 2/25: Conan O’Brien
• Thursday 2/26: Olivia Wilde

Christine Lagarde is the head of the IMF.  Do you think we will hear anything about SYRIZA and Greece?

Hmm…

You know, in case you’ve forgotten how to sing.

Sigh.  It’s just too hard to process at the moment and as TMC says the reaction is still pouring in.  There are the tributes and arguments over what The Daily Show really means in the context of contemporary news and politics, there are the justified criticisms of Jon’s failure to really hold people to account and slipping off into the safe buffoonery of Faux Noise and penis jokes, and of course speculation about the future direction of the show and who will host it.

I’ll try to organize some of that material tomorrow or better yet Friday as a companion piece to what TMC has already written.  Tonight I’m still trying to integrate The Nightly Show into what I produce as is Larry Wilmore trying to find out what has worked and what hasn’t in his three weeks at the helm.

Now last night was actually pretty funny I thought-

The discussion I liked best was this one from the first episode-

The best comedy bit was from Mike Yard-

Larry sometimes seems like he’s going to go yard (hit a Home Run for you non-Baseball types) in his own ‘Keeping it 100’ but most often ends up ‘Weak Tea’ in part because of the lameness of the submissions (at least the ones the writers select).

‘Keeping it 100’ with the panel is rarely completely successful because he’s still including weasels on them, it works better with unique questions for each member than it does without because then it just seems like the writers are lazy or out of ideas.

Keeping it 100?

Umm… this is eventually going to get funnier, right?

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I can’t not play this-

Sigh.  I’m not going anywhere tomorrow.  For one thing it’s supposed to snow.

This week’s guests-

The Daily Show

• Wednesday 2/11: Colin Firth
• Thursday 2/12: TBA

Colin Firth will be on to promote Kingsmen which looks like a rolicking good yarn if you’re not the type who snooted The Avengers remake, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or The Lone Ranger.  You know, movies don’t always have to have a message, sometimes they can be just for fun.

Fortunately David Axelrod didn’t get extended beyond his two show segments so I don’t have to pimp him again.  The real news below.

Today we get the news that Jon will be leaving The Daily Show at the end of the year.  His contract is up which is why the speculation about his taking over Meet the Press had a certain amount of reasonance.

What will he do?  It won’t be The Daily Show.

Will The Daily Show continue?  There are some indicators that it will, they’ve changed hosts before, in the beginning as often as they changed socks; but it might be replaced by something else.

What would that be?  Some people think that Larry Wilmore deserves an hour which his format probably needs though I think it’s just too soon to tell after 3 weeks.  I also hear that it strikes some people as Meet the Press with more minorities which is also true and what troubles me most.  If he’s just going to be peddling the same Beltway BS instead of Keeping it 100 (which he already shows unfortunate signs of) I might as well be watching Hayes or Maddow (which I don’t, they’re better than most but not that good in the bigger picture because they’re too tied to the Institutional Democratic Party).

What I can tell you is that it’s not funny.  So far.  Larry is way too earnest.

Now I think the topics are interesting (some people disagree) but I don’t exactly see the value of other’s opinions of them (unless of course they agree with mine) and short of throwing a brick at my TV (which is much less satisfying without that big CRT implosion) I can’t get them to shut up and listen to ME!

I won’t try to encapsulate tonight the importance of “fake” news in the current culture where everything is a blatant lie relying on your ignorance and faulty short term memory to skate by.  In this environment Jon Stewart is Walter Cronkite.

Tangentially, Brian Williams is done.  Suspended for 6 months without pay which will cost him $5 Million but don’t delude yourself, he will never anchor again.  Instead the job is Lester Holt’s to lose.

Sigh.  Culture is important.  Our perceptions of what is news and what is propaganda are important.  That’s what made The Daily Show and The Colbert Report pivotal touchstones of reality during a time when objective or even subjective truth is under constant assault.

I may be pleasantly surprised by change, but I rarely am.

You, dear readers, may rest assured that I will keep doing what I do (what is that exactly anyway?) until I can’t do it any more.  Quality is a crapshoot and a bonus when it happens, the threshold of dignity is slightly better than absolutely horrible.

The U.S. Relationship with War

Men, all this stuff you’ve heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dung. Americans traditionally love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, big league ball players, the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost, and will never lose a war… because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.

Tonight’s topic?  You’ve got me.  The site is all focused on Wednesday’s Ask Me Anything.

Continuity

Maybe this guy is available.

This week’s guests-

The Daily Show

• Tuesday 2/10: David Axelrod
• Wednesday 2/11: Colin Firth
• Thursday 2/12: TBA

Ok, everything about David Axelrod is evil.  He’s a soulless ghoul feasting on the decaying flesh of the Democratic Party.  He’s whoring his book Believer: My Forty Years in Politics.  Make no mistake, David Axelrod doesn’t believe in anything except winning (oh, and cushy jobs for David Axelrod).

We don’t want to go back to the same policies and the same practices that drove our economy into a ditch, that punished the middle class, and that led us to this catastrophe. We have to keep moving forward.

How’s that working out for you?

The real news below.

Hurray.  Well, in a meta sense, we know 3 of the 4 panel members today Michael McKean, Wes Moore, and Kimberly Dozier.  I predict that the question will not be whether the U.S. should be a global bully, but where with all of those tempting targets like Ukraine, Syria, Iran, Nigeria, and Korea just waiting for a little “suck on this.”

We needed to go over there, basically, and take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble…. What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad and basically saying “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think we care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, we’re just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this!” That, Charlie, is what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia! It was part of that bubble. We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

Who says our elite media is full of genocidal maniacs?

Keeping it 100 Larry?  Suck on this-

Continuity

HIHOL

What?  Hebrew International House Of Latkas.  This is a Billion dollar franchise opportunity I’m telling you.

This week’s guests-

The Daily Show

• Monday 2/9: Patricia Arquette
• Tuesday 2/10: David Axelrod
• Wednesday 2/11: Colin Firth
• Thursday 2/12: TBA

I dunno.  Is Thursday something besides Abraham Lincoln’s birthday?  Still no guest.

Patricia Arquette will be on promoting… Boyhood?  That’s getting a little old though Oscar season is right around the corner.  CSI: Cyber is slated to debut March 4th so there is that I suppose (oh, and if you want a hack toolkit let me recommend DEFT, Digital Evidence & Forensics Toolkit, currently in version 8.2.  Your target computer will have to support a DVD though).

Other than that the question is how will Jon handle the Brian Williams scandal.

Jon Stewart’s Brian Williams dilemma: How will “Daily Show” handle a friend becoming a punchline?

by Sophia A. McClennen, Salon

Monday, Feb 9, 2015 08:30 AM EST

Of all TV news icons to fall, though, Williams is in a unique spot. Williams, perhaps more than any other TV news anchor working today, has been particularly visible in popular culture. Williams has consistently attempted to court a younger audience and cultivate a “hip” vibe by making regular appearances on late night comedy. He has been on David Letterman’s show numerous times, he appeared on “Weekend Update” on “Saturday Night Live,” and he has made appearances on Conan O’Brien’s show as well as on “30 Rock.” In each of these cases he has traded his gravitas as a news anchor for laughs and for a chance to reach a wider audience.

But now as we reflect on what the revelations of his exaggerated experiences in Iraq (and possibly elsewhere) mean for his career, it is worth wondering what we can learn about Williams’s special connection to comedy. Certainly in hindsight these stunts reveal a degree of parody and performance that are much less funny in light of his diminished integrity.

One of the best examples of this heightened parody is his repeated appearances on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.” A few months after Fallon stepped in as host in 2014, his staff created a mash-up of Williams where he appeared to rap to hip-hop. The show made a few of these mash up videos and they repeatedly went viral. But even funnier- and even weirder in light of recent events – are the “slow jams” Williams did with Fallon, where he read news to music and Fallon sang and made puns. The slow jam with Fallon was funny because it was a parody of Williams as a serious reporter. Now that we know the truth – that Williams was less serious and more egotistical – the slow jams seem more like examples of shameless self-promotion.

It is important to point out, though, that this story is about more than the inflated ego of one nightly news anchor. Instead, the decline of Williams needs to be read as part of the ongoing blurring of entertainment and news. TV news has long been in decline as a trusted source of information to the public. Numerous studies show that network news is decreasing as a source of information for the U.S. public, especially among younger viewers. Williams, who won a Peabody for his reporting on Katrina (reporting that is now also being called into question) may have been one of the most visible TV news journalists, but his presence as a public figure was nothing in comparison to TV anchor predecessors like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather.

The real news below.

Tonight’s topic is three parent babies and there’s a lot of confusion about just what those are.

Cells are not just undifferentiated masses of goo, they have microscopic structures similar to the organs of multicellular organisms and one of those is the Mitochondria.  Now the principal function of  Mitochondria is to convert Glucose and Fatty Acids (cell food) into Adenosine triphosphate which can be used either for energy or to construct cell structures.  It also, to a lesser extent, produces a similar chemical, Cyclic adenosine monophosphate, which carries intracellular signals and regulates the conversion of ATP into energy or structural elements.

In addition to supplying cellular energy, mitochondria are involved in other tasks such as signaling, cellular differentiation, cell death, as well as maintaining the control of the cell cycle and cell growth.

To assist in these tasks Mitochondria have their own DNA which both disassembles the incoming Glucose and Fatty Acids and assembles the ATP and AMP designating whether the ATP is to be converted to energy or used by Nucleic DNA for further processing into more complex proteins.

Mitochondrial DNA is unique and distinct from Nucleic DNA, is passed only from mother to offspring, and has no bearing whatever on the unique characteristics of the multicellular organism (what we would normally think of as genetics like hair, eye, and skin color).  If damaged or defective though it can produce several diseases related to Cellular respiration (it’s been implicated in Juvenile Diabetes for instance).

The British Parliament has recently approved a procedure that in cases of In Vitro Fertilisation will allow for Doctors in cases where damage to the Mitochondrial DNA is detected to replace that DNA with DNA from a donor, creating a “three parent baby”.

Of course Conservatives are up in arms as they are about anything regarding sex, but a surprising number of supposedly intelligent people are also buying into the concept that this minor procedure opens the door to eugenics and “designer babies”.

We’ll see tonight if Larry is fooled.

Do you know what Mitochondrial DNA is?

Just keeping it 100.

Continuity

E. Coli Nation

Next week’s guests-

The Daily Show

• Monday 2/9: Patricia Arquette
• Tuesday 2/10: David Axelrod
• Wednesday 2/11: Colin Firth
• Thursday 2/12: TBA

Bob Odenkirk will be on to pitch his new series Better Call Saul which premieres February 8, 2015.  I was never into Breaking Bad, the original series that spawned this spin off, so I can’t say from personal knowledge, but critics I’ve read say it’s not nearly as dark as the original and the advertising and preview clips seem to bear this out.

The 2 part web exclusive extended interview with Wes Moore (ugh) and the real news below.

For years now I’ve been kinda pissed off at Bill Cosby, not because of the rapes (I simply didn’t know about them, celebrity gossip is of very little interest to me even if true) but because I felt he was unduly critical of, and set unrealistic expectations for, black fathers.

If you listen to his early work you’ll realized that his relationship with Big Russell (his dad) was dysfunctional and violent and even the warm and fuzzy stories he told about his interactions with his wife and children were abusive power struggles, at least in the mental and emotional sense.

And then he spent 8 years as TVs favorite Dad, a loveable curmudgeon straight out of the 50s, tough but fair.  Not just that, but rich too.  He a Doctor, his wife an Attorney, they owned their own Brownstone in Brooklyn Heights.

1%ers.

Needless to say this is not the life experience of most U.S. citizens, let alone African-American ones.

The pont of the show in Cosby’s mind was to show how to raise successful children with the measure of that success being college graduation.  After that you were on your own as he frequently proclaimed and demonstrated in his later treatment of Sondra and Elvin.  When Denise started becoming independent she pretty much got exiled and finally disappeared altogether.

So that’s your TV view of the epitome of black fatherhood.

What I will call the myth of black fathers being irresponsible arises I think partly from the abuse of slavery where slave owners considered their property cattle and bred and sold them as such.  Before the Civil War there was an entire vein of Abolitionist literature about loving families broken by evil masters and fathers escaping and struggling to reunite with their loved ones and liberate them, most often ending in Romantic Tragedy as all perished.  Afterwards there arose the fiction of the nobility of ‘The Lost Cause’ and the excuse making for the horrific practices of slavery and propoganda of the happy, inferior African-American, content with field work and incapable of anything else- first because we are ‘Exceptional’ and nothing we do is ever wrong, and second because it helped justify continued and pervasive Jim Crow discrimination both North and South.

And narratives of the irresponsible underclass, whatever race or ethnicity, were always popular with the elites who used them to validate and rationalize their continued oppression.

Another expression of this in modern times is 1965’s The Negro Family: The Case For National Action by every racist conservative’s favorite “Liberal”, Daniel Patrick Moynihan.  While there are many flaws and entirely valid criticisms I propose two for your consideration- the first is that the Report focuses only on ‘out of wedlock’ births as a symptom of family dysfunction and doesn’t properly correct for class bias (including all poor families as a group) or recognize other symptoms of dysfunction which vary by culture (inbreeding and domestic violence and child abuse for example).

The second is simply- who gives a rat’s ass about getting married now anyway?  Certainly not 1%er White folk.

Oh, gays.

So my question for Larry is-

Why are you buying into this?

Continuity

Every Day Is Exactly The Same

This week’s guests-

The Daily Show

• Wednesday 2/4: Wes Moore
• Thursday 2/5: Bob Odenkirk

Wes Moore is the next Colin Powell.  He was a Captain in the 82nd Airborne, served as assistant to Condoleezza Rice, and worked at Citigroup.  He currently hosts his own show on the Oprah Winfrey Network.  If he’s not pitching the show he’ll be whoring his newest book, The Work: My Search for a Life That Matters.

Bonus video and the real news below.

So tonight’s topic is Gay Marriage and all I’ve really got to say is we’re talking about it why?

Oh, Mike Huckabee said something stupid and bigoted about it and he’s thinking about running for president (again).  Well, he’s a stupid bigot so of course he says stupid and bigoted things and he’s not really running for president, he just wants to scam some more money from the stupid and bigoted people he represents and also those deep pocketed Billionaires who think the stupid and bigoted vote is an important part of the Republican coalition and want to keep the rubes in line by throwing them a bone.

You see it’s all about the ick factor and if any of these Bozos had the least scrap of religious integrity they wouldn’t be picking and choosing which parts of Leviticus to honor.  Thank goodness as an Atheist I think it’s all superstitious non-sense and don’t have to do any thelogical contortions to justify my regard for blended fabrics, cheeseburgers, and any number of delicious things made from pork and non scaly water life either singly or in combination.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not militant about it.  I’m perfectly content to let you fester in ignorance, salving life’s numerous disappointments and injustices with the laugable belief that there’s some sugar daddy in the sky with a big rock candy mountain and you’ll get you piece of the pie bye and bye, bye and bye.  That’s why Marx called it the opiate of the masses.  Why worry about how much your life here sucks and who’s to blame for it if by your slavish worship and utter conformity you’ll live in eternal bliss.

After you’re just a little too dead to enjoy it of course, but we don’t make the rules.  Oh wait, we do!

Were I really keeping it 100 I’d ask Larry why so many of the poor and minorities buy into fundamentalism, but I think for the most part I’ve just answered that question.

Personally I don’t think there’s a lot of grist in this mill for Larry to work with and I wish they’d get him better topics but maybe we could stand to loose the weight.

That’s called portion control.

Continuity

The Magic Gap

This week’s guests-

The Daily Show

• Tuesday 2/3: Bill Browder
• Wednesday 2/4: Wes Moore
• Thursday 2/5: Bob Odenkirk

Tonight’s guest, Bill Browder, has a very sad tale to tell of how his friend and attorney was arrested, tortured, and killed by Putin at the behest of Putin’s oligarch friends and how he, as a true patriot, stood up to evil D.C. State Department bureaucrats and with the help of a few brave Senators, forced the administration to accept truly effective sanctions on those nasty Russ.  It’s the subject of his new book, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice.  Don’t judge this one by it’s cover.  Bill Browder is a hedge fund manager who got booted by Putin in 2005 for corruption so he has his own agenda working and I’d take this with enough salt to show up in my bloodwork (and that’s quite a bit, my Sodium levels are rock steady).

Martin Short’s 2 part web exclusive extended interview and the real news below.