Nice to know that in this time of sequester madness, we have intellectuals like Bill Maher working so hard to find workable solutions to the impasse. This made me laugh out loud, especially the Rube Goldberg part.
You'd think Stephen Moore would know better than to go toe-to-toe with Rachel Maddow over health care reform. Yet that's exactly what he does in this segment, and as Heather noted at the time, he got his ass handed to him.
Stephen Moore, for those who may not know, is the founder of Club for Growth and sits on the Wall Street Journal's editorial board. He's responsible for most of the WSJ editorials that were entitled "Obamacare blah blah blah".
Moore is one of the biggest Koch-heads of them all, and he really doesn't like Obamacare. I'm sure he really doesn't like Rachel Maddow after this segment either.
Still, Maddow's smackdown was so delicious you made it the 39th most viewed video at C&L this year.
It was disappointing to hear Bill Maher refer to Andrew Breitbart as a "journalist" last night. He isn't one, and calling him that is an insult to every journalist everywhere. Journalism requires the kind of integrity Breitbart utterly lacks:
Andrew Breitbart is a known news fabricator. Any material originating through his websites should be considered suspect at best, and subjected to thorough fact-checking before it can be reported on by anyone in any case.
Legitimate bloggers should avoid linking to his websites. Bloggers and other new media content creators who work for Breitbart, or who post to his sites, should be considered fruit of a poisonous tree.
Breitbart himself should be considered unfit for news. If it is absolutely necessary to report on him, Breitbart should be identified primarily as “known fabricator” — not a ‘journalist,’ ‘entertainer,’ ‘website mogul,’ or any other such title.
What Breitbart and his cohort of right-wing "new media" voices do is propaganda. They make nontroversy into outrage, or make crap up when they lack nontroversy. It is media pollution. It is poisonous to democracy.
Maher has diminished himself in elevating Breitbart, who returned the favor by telling his host "you're not libertarian, you're socialist." The fabricator's entire web empire is characterized by this sort of Overton Window-yanking insanity. You cannot find a single mention of Iraq or Afghanistan contracting scandals on his sites, for example, but you can find the latest ginned-up outrage over White House Christmas ornaments or an NEA conference call in between the Victoria Jackson posts.
If Breitbart published such ravings behind a tabloid cover of Batboy or Elvis sightings or world's fattest couple to wed, we would be able to laugh. Instead, Breitbart presents fiction as truth, which isn't funny or thrilling. There is no laughing at how Breitbart, Hannah Giles, and James O'Keefe III smeared ACORN, taking down the largest and most-successful anti-poverty organization in America at the height of a recession even though no one at any ACORN office did anything illegal. Major media swallowed the hoaxers' narrative whole although the hoax videos themselves disprove it.
Those ACORN workers might have been anyone; when Breitbart escaped serious repercussions from the media, he went on to slime Shirley Sherrod. Maher's friendly treatment only encourages him to commit further acts of character assassination from which no one is safe.
Be forewarned, this video is disturbing and NSFW, language-wise. It is a real-time record of a shootout between the California Highway Patrol and an angry, well-armed man. While much of the visual is very dark, there's no question about what's going on. It was posted by Twitter user MannyBlack, who shot the video from his window during the shootout.
The shooter, Byron Williams, was shot by police during the gun battle and is in serious, but stable condition according to local news sources.
What is most disturbing about this is the emergent theme that Williams was angry at government, further stirred up by his unemployment and cable news. Whether this theme plays out as facts emerge, this much is clear: He was well-armed, well-armored, and looking to do harm to someone.
As officers walked toward the pickup, they saw the man pick up a handgun, police said. They said they returned gunfire and radioed for help.
Three CHP vehicles had their windows shot out, but no officers were shot, police said. They said the driver was armed with a rifle and a shotgun as well as the handgun and fired at least two of the weapons during the shootout.
Morgan said the driver was hit numerous times and survived only because he was wearing a bullet-resistant vest.
As more details emerged, it was clear that this man was not simply a guy with a pistol in his truck. He caught the attention of officers for weaving in and out of traffic, cause for a routine stop.
The Tuolumne County man opened fire on two CHP officers who pulled him over on westbound Interstate 580 near Grand Avenue a few minutes before midnight, and continued shooting for several minutes with a high powered rifle before 10 officers returned fire and seriously wounded him, despite body armor he was wearing, CHP Sgt. Trent Cross said.
Cross said Byron Williams, a 45-year-old Groveland resident, was found with a pistol, a shotgun, the rifle, a bullet-resistant vest and a suspicious object that prompted investigators to call a bomb squad to the scene. The object was detonated without mishap in the center divide of the freeway, which cause headache nightmares throughout the East Bay.
"There is no doubt in our mind, given the body armor and the extensive amount of ammunition he had, that he was on his way to do a very serious crime against either someone or a group of people," Cross said. [read more...]
Williams is a convicted felon with two strikes. He was on parole and if stopped, would have been charged with a third-strike felony. However, police believe he was motivated by anti-government sentiments.
His background, coupled with the presence of possible explosives, was enough to prompt the FBI to get involved in the investigation, Cross said.
"Right now, this is not being looked at as a domestic terrorism case," Cross said Sunday afternoon. "But there's more evidence to go through, and that could change."
Among that evidence was a white three-ring binder recovered from the truck by a bomb squad robot. Scrawled by hand on the cover of the binder was the word, "California." Officials would not describe the contents of the binder.
His mother says that he was upset by the "left-wing Congress":
Williams' mother, Janice Williams of Groveland, said her son had been living next door and taking care of her father's house and land. She said he had been released from prison about 2 1/2 years ago after a felony conviction, which she declined to describe, and had almost completed his parole.
"He hasn't been able to get a job because he's an ex-felon and nobody will hire him," she said.
She said her son, who had been a carpenter and a cabinetmaker before his imprisonment, was angry about his unemployment and about "what's happening to our country."
Williams watched the news on television and was upset by "the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items," his mother said. [Read more]
Bill Maher has new rules for political "soulmates", gay French ambassadors, Amy Winehouse and any American who is considering voting for a candidate who seeks healing from witch doctors.
And finally, new rule: You can’t be President if you practice a violent, Middle Eastern religion and worship a genocidal desert god. Which is why Sarah Palin can’t be President. Now all the churches that Sarah Palin has attended, and she’s been to almost as many churches as she has colleges, have one thing in common: a belief that the Bible is literally true. She’s not “Country First”, she’s “Bible First”. And not just the New Testament. That’s the happy half of the book: the baby in the manger, Jesus doing magic tricks, long romantic walks on the water that turn into fishing trips with the guys and a generally positive message. Jesus, after all, preached love and forgiveness, not shooting wolves from an airplane.
The problem is Gov. Avon Lady, she takes the Old Testament literally too, and in that one, God is an insecure, rage-filled hybrid of Bobby Knight and Suge Knight. He’s been alive forever and He has anger issues. He’s like John McCain if John McCain could fart hail. He’s pro-slavery, pro-polygamy and homophobic and he’ll kill you for masturbating. More people get stoned in the Old Testament than in my Jacuzzi. That’s what I have to tell you guys… If there was a video of Barack Obama standing in front of his congregation being healed by a black witch doctor, this election would be over.
On Real Time with Bill Maher's New Rules segment, host Bill Maher exhorts viewers not to assume the worst about John McCain just because of the color of his skin.
Now, take a look at these pictures. Here are the CEOs of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG and the Lehman Brothers. I know the first thing that jumps out about these faces is that they all happen to be white, and they all happen to be responsible for stealing. But what you have to understand is that these whites are a product of a society that made them that way. It was the neighborhoods and the schools they went to: Harvard, Yale, the Wharton School of Business. They never learned the value of doing real, actual work and the first step to fixing that is better role models, so kids growing up white today don't think the only way out of Westchester is corporate crime. Or a government handout or sailing. So I get it, the temptation is to look at McCain and vote against him because you don't see an individual, you just see another typical welfare whitey.
And it's true, he's spent his entire life shuffling from one low-paying government job to another. Well, except those years he spent in prison. Typical! And between you and me, he's not very articulate. Oh, he may have some street smarts, but he's not what you call an educated man. He freely admits he's ignorant about the economy. And apparently the only thing his white running mate knows how to do is crank out one baby after another. And now of course, her teenage daughter is pregnant out of wedlock. Because she learns it at home! But that doesn't mean we should assume all white people are like that, just because so many of them are.
It's so chic of conservatives like Sullivan to blame the American people for the economic crisis, because as Sullivan stated on Real Time, millions and millions of people took out loans on homes that they couldn't afford. Yes, the Kudlow Thesis of the market housing crisis. Don't blame the lenders and grifters that came upon us like a biblical plague of locusts, blame the people.
Naomi Klein, God love her, told him that it was the Wall Street profiteers that preyed upon society. His ideal conservative world is completely fictional. And as she says, what comes next is the real disaster. Today was Christmas morning to the fat cats on The Street, but what happens next to all the debt we the people have just incurred? Whoever is elected president will have a major role in deciding our fate. Sorry, I can't write the whole transcript, so watch the entire clip.
Klein: The disaster is far from over. They've actually just relocated. The disaster was on Wall Street and they have moved the disaster to Main Street by accepting those debts and you said they didn't have to bomb, the bomb has yet to detonate. The bomb is the debt that has now been transferred to the taxpayers so it detonates when, if John McCain becomes president in the midst of an economic crisis and says look we're in trouble, we have a disaster on our hands, we have to privatize social security, we can't afford health care, we can't afford food stamps, we need more deregulation, more privatization. The thesis of the Shock Doctrine is you need a disaster to rationalize these very unpopular policies so the real disaster has yet to come.The real disaster is the debt that is going to explode on the American taxpayers. And then they do economic shock therapy.
They had to step in, but I don't think they had to step in in the way they did. The reason why the stock market went up on Wall Street today is because it's Christmas morning. Imagine waking up and being told your credit card debits have been wiped out, your mortgage has been erased. There's a fairy godmother that has taken care of you. A guardian angel. But actually that's the tax payers.
With a smirk, Andrew gets pissed and chimes in
Sullivan: You're favoring nationalizing the other companies.and most industries?
Klein: No, I'm just saying. This is socialism for the rich.
Maher: Why are you so hostile towards this?
Sullivan: Because I think the fundamental thesis that she is proposing is wrong. I think the reason why we're in this situation is not demonizing a few individual companies, it's systemic. And part of the reason we have this is the American People. The American people since the 70's have had stagnating income, so they decided to get something for nothing. And the government never told them they couldn't. So we have the stock bubble of the 90's and now we have the real estate bubble in the 2000's.
Klein: That's not why we have this.
Sullivan: And the government never told them they couldn't. Wall Street is to blame for giving these people these loans, but no one is ever forced to take out a bad load they cannot pay.
Klein: The reason why this bubble was allowed to inflate was not that the American people demanded it, it was spectacularly profitable for Wall Street. Just in bonuses last year, they handed out 33 billion dollars in bonuses... The problem is we have crybaby capitalism where when the times are good they are preaching deregulation and when the times are bad they want the bail-outs. The problem I have with your argument is where is this ideal capitalism of which you speak?
Andrew, the lenders told them they could get the houses for nothing and then lied about how they would pay for it and what they would pay, then bundled the cash and passed it on... And it's not the government's role to tell people what they cannot do. That's why we used to have regulations and background checks and down payments and mortgage lenders to oversee the system. It weeds out the people that can and cannot afford a home. He tried to deconstruct her argument because apparently he wasn't getting enough air time at that point (he filibustered the entire show after that) with nonsensical rationalizations on the current state of affairs. I lived through it and saw it up close and personal. Yea, he supports Obama, great, but his conservative ideology is a sham.
Andrew Sullivan has been conned by a fictitious notion of what conservatism really is. He states his Utopian vision of conservatism, but leaves out the part where conservatives want to deregulate everything and get rid of oversight and government so they can reap a magical harvest of cash like they have been doing during the entire Bush administration. Now we are seeing the results of conservatism. It's a failure. Does Sully really believe that conservatism exists without the fat cats expanding their pie of wealth in America to 1920's or pre-New Deal proportions? They've been trying to undo the New Deal ever since it was instituted and by the way which brought the country back from the brink of destruction.
Do you want Barack Obama or John McCain to make these decisions? I think the choice is easy. Conservative rule rains Armageddon down upon our heads---whether it happens in two years or twenty. It's inevitable.
Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and The New Yorker joins Bill via satellite to talk about the conventions, John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin, and her attacks on "the media."
"New Rule: You can't put a windmill in your ad if you've voted against every single bill that might lead someone to actually build one. As long as you're sending a camera crew to a farm, why not take a picture of actual bullsh*t."
Heather also took the liberty of uploading the Overtime segment and writes this:
This is the portion of the Overtime segment where they're talking about cable news pundits talking about nothing instead of actually covering the speeches during the convention and just how bad all "news" coverage is right now and the use of advocates as reporters and mixing commentary and reporters and Corzine takes a good shot at the papers for advocating for war and saying there were WMD's on their front pages and that there is opinion buried in almost all reporting now so that people don't know what to trust.
Bill Maher goes off on chick vs. slasher flicks, postage on tax returns, airline customer service, papal dress, corporate takeovers and how Barack Obama's "bitter" comments are not as elitist as John McCain would like you to believe.
Referring to voters who America has left behind economically as “bitter” isn’t an insult.In fact, it’s a compliment, acknowledging that they’re smart enough to understand what’s happening to them. The hopeful, now those are some idiots.So let’s separate the bitter – my people – from the idiots.If you think the Democrats are going to take away your Bible, you’re an idiot.If you think they’re going to take away your gun, you’re an armed idiot.And if you think they’re going to take away your gun and give it to a Mexican to kill your God, you’re Bill O’Reilly.
Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and The New Yorker joins Bill via satellite to talk about the conventions, John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin, and her attacks on "the media."
Bill Maher returned to HBO last night with a great show and a hilarious "New Rules" segment.
