Tag Archives: Bill Maher

CPAC2013: Keep F*cking That Chicken

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On Bill Maher’s New Rules segment this week, he talked about a “relatively small group of very shrill people [who are] devoted to — and succeeding at — convincing us that this is a much more conservative and religious nation than it is.”

Maher goes on to explain that CPAC is merely an extension of such devotion:

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Maher discusses his term Shit Kicker Inflation ”the phenomenon of all things conservative being portrayed as way bigger than they really are” with the following examples:

  • ONE MILLION MOMS: the number of followers that One Million Moms has on Twitter: 2,258. 
  • THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE: just as there aren’t a million moms in One Million Moms, there is no “league” in The Catholic League. It’s one guy with a fax machine.
  • OBAMACARE: as an idea, it’s unpopular. But ask voters about the elements in it, they’re all very popular. It’s like saying “I hate pizza! I love tomato sauce and melted cheese on dough, but pizza? I hate that shit.”
  • GUNS: gun ownership is actually DOWN in this country… way down. And yet the NRA, with just 4 million members, has a stranglehold on the gun policies in a nation of 300 million.
  • CPAC2013: Among the featured speakers at CPAC this year include Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Rick Santorum, Wayne LaPierre, Donald Trump, and Sarah Palin… a virtual who’s who of what the fuck.

Here are some highlights from a few of CPAC’s featured who’s who of WTF:

Sarah Palin: ”We’re not here to rebrand a party [but to] put on a fresh coat of rhetorical paint.” Then she said: “More background checks? Dandy idea, Mr. President. Should’ve started with yours.” Fresh birther paint!

Next, she dazzled the audience with a boob joke followed by heroically (according to crowd reaction?) drinking from a Big Gulp. Wolverines!

“Outside the ballroom afterward, CPAC attendees raved about the stunt. “Hilarious.” “I thought that was awesome.” “I loved that.” One woman I spoke to said the moment “just really symbolized American freedom.” A man named Tomas told me that Palin holding up the Big Gulp “gave a new look to the Statue of Liberty.” Whether or not anyone, including Palin, realized that Mayor Bloomberg’s soda restrictions wouldn’t even have affected Big Gulps is not clear.” – Dan Amira




Freedumb!

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Donald Trump: “Behold, the scene at Donald Trump’s CPAC speech this morning in the main ballroom. Empty seats were everywhere, although it’s not entirely Trump’s fault. He was given an 8:45 a.m. speaking slot, the very first of the day. Many CPAC attendees aren’t even out of bed yet. Still, Trump was invited not because of his conservative bona fides (he’s donated more money over the years to Democrats than to Republicans), but because he’s supposedly a crowd-pleasing draw.”

Pre-speech:

Post-speech:

These empty seats are Totally False.

Photos via ‘flunky’ Dan Amira

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Mitt Romney: “‘It’s up to us to make sure that we learn from our mistakes — and my mistakes,’ Romney told the crowd Friday. [...] Romney’s re-emergence at CPAC comes after months spent almost entirely out of public view. People close to him say he consumes large volumes of news every day on his iPad and on Fox News. He stews as he reads the coverage of the various budget showdowns in Congress, frustrated that the president has pursued what he sees as an aggressively liberal agenda that won’t solve the country’s economic problems.”

So to Mitt Romney, “learning from his mistakes” includes continuing to bravely watch Fox and continuing to bravely label the President’s insistence on a balanced approach to deficit reduction (spending cuts alongside closing loopholes and subsidies for the wealthy) an “aggressively liberal agenda.” Sure. Apparently the only mistakes Mitt made with his CPAC speech were omitting some birther jokes and not drinking from a Big Gulp.

Let’s be honest: the theme “America’s Future: The Next Generation of Conservatives” really doesn’t describe CPAC. This annual gathering of wingnuts could be more efficiently labeled “Keep F*cking That Chicken.”

Related: Keep F*cking That Chicken

God Save Us from the next generation of conservatives.

Various and sundry reasons why we can’t have nice things

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Feds spend $7 on THE ELDERLY for every $1 on KIDS: Funny how the blame is always on the (nonexistent) welfare moms who keep pumping out kids for more government cheese. (via) »»»»»» SENIORS TAKE NOTE: it’s impossible for the GOP to draft a budget that balances in 10 years without eating into entitlement benefits for people older than 55. »»»»»»  House GOP leaders want Obama to own the automatic cuts — the sequester (the OBAMAQUESTER) — but their budget chief, PAUL RYAN, is expected to count those cuts toward his 10 year plan.   

Kerry: Budget cuts may force reduction in aid to ISRAEL: Some $3 billion goes to Israel annually in US military aid, 74 percent of which must be spent in the US. »»»»»»  Incomes rose more than 11 percent for the TOP 1 PERCENT of earners during the economic recovery and declined by 0.4 percent for everyone else.

After a METEOR struck RUSSIA, the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology announced Friday that it will hold a hearing over asteroids – that committee is chaired by THIS GUY, so maybe they’ll try to pray them away.   »»»»»»  ”The REPUBLICAN PARTY was always an uneasy marriage between the Jesus freaks and the plutocrats.”  »»»»»»  Why a $9.00 MINIMUM WAGE would NOT lead employers to shed jobs or increase prices and pass the costs onto consumers. 

The NRA says regular Americans can’t protect themselves without high-capacity magazines.  »»»»»»  We’re at war, but… why did Senator JOHN MCCAIN claim he wouldn’t filibuster CHUCK HAGEL, then go ahead and do so anyway? Because Hagel hurt his feelings over five years ago.  »»»»»» SEAN HANNITY: “It’s the first time a filibuster of a cabinet nominee has been used. And needless to say, this marks a major win for the GOP, and pretty embarrassing defeat for the president.”  »»»»»»  FreedomWorks produced a video of a fake GIANT PANDA having sex with a fake HILLARY CLINTON. Seriously.  

Bill Maher explains Donald Trump’s $5 million lawsuit against him (and #Apers)

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Huffington Post: Donald Trump is suing Bill Maher for $5 million in charity donations after “proving” his biological father is not, as Maher joked on “The Tonight Show,” an orange-haired orangutan.

Politico: Trump’s attorney Scott S. Balber released a letter following Maher’s comments and attached a copy of Trump’s birth certificate. “Attached hereto is a copy of Mr. Trump’s birth certificate, demonstrating that he is the son of Fred Trump, not an orangutan,” Balber wrote in the letter.

Seriously! And the best part? Trump released a short-form birth certificate!

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Maher explains,

“Let me catch you up on how all this got started. During the last week of the presidential campaign last year, Donald Trump – who previously had been a one-issue candidate obsessed with Obama’s birth certificate – announced that he would give $5 million to charity if Obama produced his college records. Because a black guy getting into college? Something fishy there.

So playing on the fact that the only other thing in nature with the same color hair as Trump’s is the orange-haired orangutan, I joked that Donald Trump needed to show HIS papers to prove HE wasn’t hiding a bad secret about HIS birth. This is known as parody. And it’s a form of something we in the comedy business call a joke.

Naturally I also aped, if you will, Trump’s offer of a charity of HIS choosing… which I identified as The Hair Club for Men. Really? We’re going to court about this? Well, this upset The Donald so much that they could barely get him to stop flinging his feces…

[...] You know, I’ll tell you something: the legal system in this country, it’s not a joke. It’s not a toy for rich idiots to play with. And, frankly, Mr. Balber, what you released raises more questions than it answers. At least it does to a growing chorus of patriotic Americans who call ourselves ‘Apers’ …”

Watch the whole thing. Hilarious.

The Donald flinging his feces:

Feb. 4:
1

Yesterday (Feb. 9):
2

Bill Maher explains why Sarah Palin is about to make a lot of money

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“Survival seeds. Also known as… seeds.”

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Bill Maher explains why Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh do so well financially – and why it’s that conservative business model which Palin will undoubtedly cash in on as well:

“They don’t care about winning elections; they care about separating rubes from their money. They discovered that there’s a fortune to be made by keeping a small portion of America under the illusion that they are always under attack, from Mexicans or ACORN or Planned Parenthood or gays or takers, global warming hoaxers — it doesn’t matter. They don’t want a majority; they want a mailing list, a list of the kind of gullible ‘Honey Boo Boos’ out there who think that there’s a ‘War on Christmas’ and the Socialist policies of our Kenyan President have been so disastrous that the end of the world is coming.

[...] Glenn Beck has only 300,000 subscribers, so they’ll never be a majority. But it doesn’t matter. Maybe they can only vote once every two years, but they can buy the same book every three weeks… the exact same book, over and over and over again.

I don’t know why being a Republican means needing to have your faith recharged five times a day like Dick Cheney’s heart. Because there’s no comparable industry on the left devoted to separating liberals from their cash. I mean, unless you count Whole Foods.”

Bill Maher on the difference between the debt ceiling and “the fiscal cliff”

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I think most people have “the fiscal cliff” confused with the debt ceiling crisis. Really, they’re opposites. Not raising the debt ceiling means not paying our debts. Going off the fiscal cliff means paying off our debt by raising taxes and cutting government spending. Well-advertised is the CBO saying going off the cliff could lead to a recession next year. Less advertised is that it also says it could get us into a more sound fiscal position in the long-term.

All this fiscal cliff panic is just proof that we are all Keynesians. Everybody knows that more government spending — whether it’s in the form of tax expenditures or social services, helps the economy grow. But you have to balance that with not letting your budget get out of hand.

Since we’re looking for new revenue streams that aren’t income taxes, Obama should use this budget crisis — if you can call it that — to do something about global warming with a carbon tax. This may be his last and only chance to do something big since cap and trade didn’t work. And it would be just desserts for the oil and coal industries that went all in for Mitt Romney, a nice little personal fuck you to the Koch brothers.

— Bill Maher

Simple truths: people who LIKE government run it better

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via: randomactsofchaos

VOTE OUT those very confused politicians who are running for a government job but who don’t like government. Simple math. They need a new career where they might perform their jobs better.

Related: People who don’t believe in government don’t run it well

Bill Maher: with four days left, there’s only time for five more reincarnations of Mitt Romney

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via Politicususa:

So with only four more days left in this campaign, it means there’s only time for five more reincarnations of Mitt Romney. By Tuesday, he’ll be insisting he’s always been a staunchly pro-gay Unitarian who hates corporations, is proud of his Latino heritage, and doesn’t want old white men telling him what he can’t do with his vagina. [...]

2012 may also be remembered as the election where one candidate was suspected of not being born in America, and the other was suspected of not being born on Earth. But when future historians ask, Mitt Romney? How did we get this shameless weathervane from the planet Kolab? The answer will be because the other choices were Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, the mom from Carrie, and the black guy from Ghostbusters.

But at the end of the day the tea party had spoken. They were against health care mandates, against Wall Street fatcats, and against establishment insiders, so they nominated Mitt Romney. [...]

In this and the subsequent debates, the Mitt of the primary season. The man who had promised teabaggers and bible thumpers that he could bag and thump with the best of them was replaced by a new Mitt Romney who suddenly liked regulation, and protecting women’s rights, and who was for taxing the rich, and offering foreign aid to the terrorists. Can you imagine if he had said those things during the primary debates? The crowd and the crazies on the stage would have devoured him. There would have been nothing left behind his podium but a clump of magic underwear and black hair dye.

So, that’s it. That’s the election. It is your choice, America. Because for me, it is a win-win. If Obama wins, America wins. If Romney wins, comedy wins.

Bill Maher: some things to consider if you are thinking about voting for Mitt Romney

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Bill Maher warns against voting for “moderate” Mitt Romney.


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“A new Republican administration would be an open for business sign to all the bizarre Bible-thumping bullshit that the Obama administration has given us a break from.”

Bill Maher on John Sununu on President Obama

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The Hill: A surrogate for Mitt Romney on Thursday said President Obama’s performance at the first presidential debate, held in Denver, revealed how “lazy and detached he is.” The surrogate, former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu (R), made the remarks in an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, a day after the crucial debate. [...] ”What people saw last night, I think, was a president that revealed his incompetence, how lazy and detached he is, how he has absolutely no idea how serious the economic problems of the country are, and how he has failed to even begin to address them,” Sununu said.


@BillMaher via: mediate

SNL and Bill Maher on The Undecided Voter

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We’re all pretty tired of it…

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“There’s still a lot we don’t know. And we want answers.”

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Bill Maher also tackled undecided voters on Friday night — AND the media who celebrates them:

Huffington Post: With less than two months until the election, Maher advises those who still don’t know who they’re voting for to “stay home” on Nov. 6, because they probably won’t be able to find their polling places. He doesn’t understand why undecideds such as “Octomom” Nadya Suleman are being celebrated or painted as more discerning than the rest of us when Barack Obama and Mitt Romney couldn’t be more different.

“And that, in a nutshell, is America’s celebrated, undecided voter: put on a pedestal by the media as if they were Hamlet in a think-tank, searching out every last bit of information, high-minded arbiters pouring over policy positions and matching them against their own philosophies. Please, they mostly fall into a category political scientists call ‘low information voters,’ otherwise known as ‘dipsh*ts.’”


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Bill Maher: “I think this is the week Mitt Romney lost the election.”

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Raw Story reports on an exchange between John Feehery and Chris Hayes that I thought was significant regarding reality and Republican talking points:

“Obama just looked cool and smart,” Maher recalled. “And, again, Obama just looks cooler and smarter, ’cause he is.”

One of Maher’s panelists, Republican strategist John Feehery, suggested that “things are just getting started” in this election cycle, since there haven’t been any debates between Romney and President Barack Obama yet, and Obama has yet to poll above 40 percent with voters in “key states,” though he did not mention which ones.

But when Feehery described this week’s outbreak of violence in the Middle East, including the killing of the U.S. envoy to Libya as “all hell breaking loose,” MSNBC host Chris Hayes interjected.

“All hell breaking loose in the Middle East are 4,800 dead Americans in Iraq, and 500,000 Iraqi civilians dead,” Hayes responded. “That is what all hell in the Middle East breaking loose is.”

Watch video

7 states that could decide the election: CO, FL, IA, OH, NV, NH, VA

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That is, if the Voter ID laws in other states don’t turn things around for Romney…

While Obama has a clear advantage given his incumbency, Romney does have a path to victory — though it’s a steep climb. He must win most of the seven most competitive states — Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Nevada, New Hampshire and Virginia — in order to reach the magic number. For instance, he can lose Ohio’s 18 electoral votes and still become president if he wins the other six and hangs onto those already in his grasp. It’s difficult to see a scenario where Romney wins without a victory in Florida, which offers 29 electoral votes. — Obama-Romney race is focused on 7 states – SFGat

THE GOO-GOO SYNDROME: Paul Weyrich, father of the right-wing movement and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, Moral Majority and various other groups tells his flock that he doesn’t want people to vote. Here’s the problem with fundies in politics:


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Which of the 7 states above have Voter ID laws?


via: NCSL

Mike Turzai: “Voter ID, which is gonna allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, DONE.” Watch:


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Here is how the Justice Department explains Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965: “…a nationwide prohibition against voting practices and procedures, including redistricting plans and at-large election systems, poll worker hiring, and voter registration procedures, that discriminate on the basis of race, color or membership in a language minority group. It prohibits not only election-related practices and procedures that are intended to be racially discriminatory, but also those that are shown to have a racially discriminatory impact.”

RNC Platform Formally Backs Voter ID Laws — The GOP platform committee adopted language on Tuesday supporting states that have passed voter ID and proof of citizenship laws. The citizenship amendment, proposed by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), would support laws that make voters prove their citizenship before they are allowed on the voter rolls.

Voter ID laws: Why do minorities lack ID to show at the polls? – Slate Magazine — Because a lot of minorities don’t have much use for them. The most common voter ID is a driver’s license, and minorities are less likely to drive… Minorities are less likely to have driver’s licenses because they are more likely to be poor and to live in urban areas. If you can’t afford a car, or if you don’t need one because you take the bus or subway, you are less likely to have a driver’s license. Students are less likely to have driver’s licenses for the same reasons (plus the fact that they can sometimes rely on student IDs, and may just have not gotten around to getting a driver’s license yet). [...] Of course, minority voters aren’t the only group likely to be disenfranchised. Seniors, for example, are also less likely to drive. Academic studies suggest that voter ID laws do probably reduce turnout, both among Democrats and Republicans, but not by more than about 2 percent.

“… What makes the voter ID law special is that they propose to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. We have empirical data proving that essentially no one is showing up to the polls and impersonating a legally registered voter. Runaway slave laws were racist and wrong, but at least there occasionally was a runaway slave!” — Bill Maher, from his Friday night monologue, via: Daily Kos 

The Real Cost of Voter Id Laws — In 2011, Republicans have advanced photo ID legislation in at least 35 states. The report concluded that if these 35 states enact a photo ID law, they collectively will spend at least $276 million, and possibly as much as $828 million, in the first four years alone. At a time when states are experiencing huge budget shortfalls, it would be an enormous waste to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to disenfranchise voters.

“Cockblock the vote”/ “Paid for by people who want Romney to win”

‘There’s a conspiracy among those who want to steal the election,’ says Jennifer Granholm — In Texas, a gun permit is a valid voter ID, but a university ID is not. Wait, what? Jennifer Granholm says the system of catch-22s and unconstitutional fees being enacted by Republicans who claim to be fighting voter fraud is having a very real effect on real people whose votes are being suppressed. “By using this pretense of voter fraud and the weapon of voter ID laws, the Republicans are systematically snatching away people’s rights,” Granholm says.

The Startling Urban Dynamic in Pennsylvania’s Voter ID Law

Something big is happening in Philadelphia ahead of this fall’s presidential election – the first in the state since a stringent new Voter ID law was passed earlier this year – although people there concerned about it are having a maddeningly hard time putting their finger on the precise size of the problem. The city has just over 1 million registered voters. About 800,000 of them are considered “active.” […]

The Pennsylvania Department of State recently released two lists of the Pennsylvania residents whose state IDs have expired since last November (and thus can’t be used to verify their identity at the polls this fall), as well as a list of the active voters whose names don’t match up with the PennDOT database as currently having an ID. This second list is terribly sloppy (one database spells names like McCormack as “Mc Cormack,” and there’s all kinds of chaos with hyphens and apostrophes). But nonetheless, the best official data available suggests that as many as 280,000 voters in Philadelphia may need to get an ID between now and November to have their votes counted.

“Nearly 500,000 eligible voters in 10 states with restrictive voter ID laws live in households without vehicles and reside at least 10 miles from an ID-issuing office open more than two days a week, a new Brennan Center for Justice study found. Because many of these voters may not have driver’s licenses — and nearly all live in rural areas with dwindling public transportation options — it could be significantly harder for them to get an ID and cast a ballot. The Brennan Center’s study undercuts the claim by many politicians in restrictive ID states that eligible voters can easily obtain a free ID to vote. A federal court considered this issue last week during a trial over Texas’s voter ID law, and Pennsylvania’s ID law will go before a state judge next Wednesday…. The Center’s research shows 1 in 10 eligible voters lack the necessary government-issued photo ID required by new restrictive voter ID laws, including 25 percent of African-Americans and 18 percent of Americans over 65.” — Study: 500,000 Americans Could Face Significant Challenges to Obtain Photo ID to Vote | Brennan Center for Justice

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Not racist though

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via: early-onset-of-night

Related: Bill Maher: the problem with racism is Matt Drudge

On a related note, this was overheard at a Tea Party rally this weekend: Ozark Tea Party board member Inge Marler considers this joke an “ice breaker:”

A black kid asks his mom, ‘Mama, what’s a democracy?’
‘Well, son, that be when white folks work every day so us po’ folks can get all our benefits.’
‘But mama, don’t the white folk get mad about that?’
‘They sho do, son. They sho do. And that’s called racism.’

After her joke was reported, Marler told the Baxter Bulletin she’d stop using it. Audio of the speech can be heard here.

Just for the record: More white people are on welfare than black people.