August 31st, 2007

I’m not going to give you hard news today, unless there’s another pretzel incident or a bomb goes off somewhere — maybe it’s the in-breath of the Universe, ready to shift our attention [and intention] elsewhere that’s making me a bit giddy; or maybe my brain is just demanding ease from the sheer overload of weighty ponderables.

Anyhow, it makes perfect sense to send you off into a holiday without demonic visions [think: Uncle Dick] or sorrowful statistics [think: Iraq and Afghanistan] to mar your well-deserved time off [if you are a hard news addict and Need To Know, you know how to find the websites.] We don’t get many breaks in this nation, labor-related OR political — so I think we’ll just TAKE one.

Here’s a collection of humor, albeit political — and remember that laughing at ourselves is a sign of good mental health. Let’s review our Molly Ivins signature, in case we’ve forgotten:

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”

That said, there are amusing snippits everywhere I look, today — for instance, it turns out the NRA presented its “Most Distinguished” annual award in 2006 to Larry “I’m Not Gay” Craig … the myopia of Gays, Guns and God produced Larry, in all his polished and prissy Republican glory; terrific that he got an award for it! Kinda like George Tenet and Paul Bremer receiving the Presidential Medals of Freedom and Brownie getting a televised “attaboy!”

And here’s a quote from openly gay Dem. Barney Frank on whether or not Larry Craig should be ousted by the GOP: “It’s one thing to say that someone can’t be trusted to vote without being corrupt, it’s another to say that he can’t be trusted to go to the bathroom by himself.” I don’t think he meant to be funny, but I howled when I read it.

My only semi-serious comment on all of this is that, having heard the audio interview Craig did with the cop who busted him [and if you haven't, just close your eyes and wait for it to come to you -- it's everywhere,] the man is a TRUE politician, gay or not. And for those who think that this was perhaps not enough to identify his actual sexual preferences, the fact that he stared the cop down for LONG moments through the crack in the stall door pretty much wins the argument … those of us who don’t have agenda’s other than taking a leak mind our own business in the john.

Mr. Craig, who will likely resign today [read that: fired by his party,] continues to provide a wealth of [water]closet jokes and parody’s — like this little musical number via Youtube sent in by Stephen; enjoy!

So here’s a short collection of the snide and snippy, satire and snark, to make you chuckle.

Jude

Steve Bradenton ‘toon

That Tingle Means it’s Working
Bill Maher, HuffPo
August 30, 2007

Doesn’t it set a wonderful example for democracy when leaders in this country, both Democrat and Republican, call for the ouster of the elected Maliki government in Iraq?

And now for your first lesson in elected democracy — the coup d’etat.

Oh, and number two — installing a CIA-backed emergency government.

But let’s all see this for what it is: another excuse to buy this shitty war some more time.

The whole idea of the surge was to establish some semblance of security and provide “breathing space” so that the Iraqi leaders could make political progress. And while the military has done a better job creating pockets of security, even while overall violence is up from last summer, the political side of the equation has gone backwards. The Sunnis have left the government entirely, and an emergency summit designed at bringing them back in has failed. Half of the 36 ministries have withdrawn support for the government and don’t even attend meetings. Which raises another question: how do you tell who is showing up when they’re all on vacation?

So what do we do now? Try to install the Allawi government back in. That way, when General Petraeus testifies before Congress that the surge has not created an environment where political reconciliation could take place — i.e. the surge has failed — we’ll then pretend that was because we had the wrong team in charge. But now we have the right team in charge! And you can’t pull the plug now that we have the right team in charge! Just you wait and see! It’s all going to turn out great! Just give us a couple more months!

And by months, I mean years.

Meanwhile, this is the kind of spin you get from the right wing, who likes to think that we’re actually in control of this situation. Here’s a recent National Review editorial:

“The fact is that the surge is President Bush’s policy, and one that he implemented over the vociferous opposition of Democrats who thought the best strategy against al Qaeda in Iraq was to begin to leave. Now the surge has helped turn Sunni tribes against al Qaeda, advancing the goal that nearly everyone in the U.S. notionally shares of routing the terror group from Iraq.”

Then, of course, there’s the reality: it was the Sunnis in Anbar province who decided to create an alliance against the Al Qaeda types, and that happened before the surge even started. So we didn’t do that. They did. We simply armed them, funded them, and helped them. But they’re not on our side. They’re on their side. They were shooting at us and blowing up our convoys just months ago. We didn’t stop and suddenly realize that we’re in love with each other. You’re thinking of a Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan movie.

Plus, Anbar is entirely Sunni. It’s like Utah for Mormons. So they don’t have to deal with the Sunni-Shiite dynamic like the rest of the country. This is regular crazy Sunnis organizing against the extremely crazy Sunnis. With our guns and money. Is that the best we can do for now? Probably. Is it a long-term solution? Shit, no.

So don’t let them fool you with all the talk of “progress.” They’ve simply, and for the 37th time, re-defined what “progress” means. And when we get to #65 - that more Iraqis have access to NFL Network than ever before — I’ll say, “Okay, okay. That is progress. …Can we come home now?”

Bill Maher is the host of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” which airs every Friday at 11PM.

Comic Will Durst on the All-American Sport of Bipartisan Bashing
Katie Halper, AlterNet
August 31, 2007

Will Durst is a San Francisco-based comic, satirist and pundit. He and I first met when we performed at a Laughing Liberally show in L.A. (I’m a comic too.)

A year later, we got a chance to reconnect in New York, where Will is making everybody laugh with his new one-man show Will Durst: The All-American Sport of Bipartisan Bashing. From left to right and everywhere in between, from the New York Times to the New York Post, the critics are raving.

When we met on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Durst was reading the sports section over a cup of black coffee. No doubt he had finished reading the latest issue of the Nation magazine and drunk his chai-organic-double-vegan-latte before I got there. But he wasn’t fooling me. And soon we were talking about getting flipped off by Olympia Dukakis, helping the terrorists win, necrophilia and other things liberals enjoy.

Katie Halper: Why do you hate America?

Will Durst: I’m not an America-hater, I’m an America-lover. Dissent is the ultimate patriotic act. Just like every liberal commie pinko weenie says.

Halper: When did you start hating America?

Durst: I started loving America right away. Free water. Water fountains everywhere. Refrigerated, cold, refreshing water. You try getting that anywhere else. Try getting that in France, not gonna happen. Go head, I dare you. It’s $5.

Halper: Funny, I was going ask you why you don’t move to France. But I guess it’s the whole water thing. Anyway, you have moments of redemption when you praise Bush, calling him a father figure.

Durst: He has been like a father to me. Just in terms of providing.

Halper: So he’s a good provider?

Durst: Yes, not just a decider and a commuter; he’s also a provider. Not just for me, but for editorial cartoonists, columnists, anyone with a speck of consciousness. He is very fecund and fertile.

Halper: He is very virile.

Durst: He’s like a rising tide. The rising tide of Bush lifts all boats. It’s a wonderful rain, it’s a hard rain.

Halper: I saw Olympia Dukakis sitting right in front of me in the theater [at your show] and I knew I was in a scary place: a theater in New York, a woman who represents the unholy alliance between the Hollywood elite and liberals. But I was impressed when you got into a hissing match with her. Because anyone who hisses at a Dukakis is a friend of mine.

Durst: Yeah, I told a tough joke about Hilary, which I thought was fair, and then she hissed at me. I got her back on my side by doing the second part of the joke. I didn’t know it was Olympia Dukakis at the time. But then when she came backstage, I recognized her. “Oh, my living god. I got heckled by an Oscar winner.”

Halper: I think you got flipped the bird too.

Durst: Oh really? She flipped me off?

Halper: Yeah. How does it feel being flipped off by a Democrat?

Durst: Well somebody’s gotta do it. I feel like Dennis Miller.

Halper: You make fun of Arnold Schwarzenegger for signing a law outlawing having sex with corpses. Why do you want to legalize necrophilia?

Durst: It’s a freedom issue. Like the sanctity of life. It fits into the whole pro-life thing. It’s actually part of the pro-life movement.

Halper: Right, the right-to-lifers for necrophilia. And then you’re not wasting the seed either.

Durst: Right. Although I’m not sure exactly how that fits in, so to speak.

Halper: In your show you provide immigrants and terrorists with a plan for getting across the border. Why do you help the terrorists win?

Durst: I am of two minds about putting that portion in the show. I understand it could be considered aiding and abetting the enemy to let them know they could go around the 700-mile-long, 16-foot-high wall that covers a 1,952 mile-long border. Or they could bring a ladder. But since they have already started building tunnels, they probably already thought of it. But I really hope that you don’t make a big deal of it. Maybe you shouldn’t even print this.

Halper: What do you think that political comics can achieve?

Durst: I think we can distill what seem to be incredibly complex questions into something any audience member can understand. They don’t have to be a poly-sci major. You can empower them to know that their opinion is important. There’s no way that people are going to become enlightened. You’re usually preaching to the choir. But it’s nice to get the choir to sing. Especially after we’ve been used as human dart boards for the last six and a half years.

It’s funny because there was a time when you couldn’t do jokes about Bush. Even though we were, starting on Jan. 21st, 2001. Then Sept. 11th happened, and you couldn’t touch him. It was seen as unpatriotic; we were involved in a war. Then Katrina happened. And taking on Bush became fashionable, and now it’s considered old hat. We had a window of 18 months for Christ’s sake when it was OK. And then it was, “Oh no, Bush is low-hanging fruit,” or, “Everybody bashes Bush.” Fuck you! We haven’t hit him hard enough, and we’re gonna hit him until … until he dies, OK, until he dies, and we’ll keep hitting, and then that still won’t be enough.

Halper: And then you’ll have sex with him?

Durst: Exactly, goes back to the Schwarzenegger law.

Halper: We’ve really come full circle. Speaking of dead people and perverts, let’s go back to the Democrats. My favorite part of the show, obviously, is when you focus on your Clintons, your Kerries, your Dukaki? More of your thoughts on them?

Durst: The Democrats seem more interested in getting re-elected than they are in changing anything for the better. When Gore ducked the Kansas Board of Education teaching intelligent design along with evolution and said, “Children should be exposed to varying theories,” I just wanted to dick-slap him, I really did. And he would have had to have been very close, and I understand that. Not that I don’t believe in Giselle the Mountain Sprite. She’s from where all things flow. She’s my goddess.

Halper: Do you renew the show every day with new news stories and headlines?

Durst: I try to. There was a quote from yesterday about dog fighting, and I’m chomping at the bit, so to speak, to put it in the show tonight.

Halper: And how do you actually get your news?

Durst: First I wake up at noon. Then I have to clear all the potato chip bags and beer cans that are covering the floor.

Halper: And the copies of the Nation?

Durst: Of course. Then I find a phrase that I love, and I try to come up with a punch line. I’m all one-liners. They’re strung on top of each other so that hopefully the previous punch line is a set up for the next joke. It’s piggybacking, which is a timing that I learned works because if you wanna do political comedy in Stockton, Calif., at Uncle Chuckles Fun Hut, then you have to learn how to get them to shut up.

There are about four places where we can work and people really know what we’re talking about. N.Y., San Francisco, D.C., Boston. And I don’t blame people because it’s such a morass, it’s so ugly, it’s hard to keep up. The names are constantly changing. The circus remains the same, but the clowns are different. So I don’t blame people if they don’t know what I’m talking about. They have families, jobs, they have a life. It’s our job to keep up on this shit and try to put it in terms they understand.

Halper: Was your comedy always political?

Durst: When I started doing standup in 1974, there was the Vietnam War and everything was, “We’re gonna fight the man, man.” Now, we are the man, man. But everything was political then. High school arithmetic was political. Of course in Wisconsin we didn’t get the ’60s until about 1974 anyway.

Halper: Was there one thing in particular that politicized you?

Durst: There were some riots in Milwaukee. I actually got run over by a horse. I was there for the chicks. That’s what everyone went to rallies for no matter what they say. That was about as political as I got. I was never a big Weatherman kinda guy. I thought blowing shit up to protest blowing shit up was kinda oxymoronic.

Halper: Why a show and not just standup?

Durst: Bigger canvas, more paint, and with writing you can plant a seed in the first paragraph and follow it until it blooms in the last paragraph. That’s something I can do with the show. I can take my time between laughs. I always thought I was more literary than most comics. Which doesn’t mean they’re not smart. Comics are smart. They have a lot going on in their minds. Most are ADHD.

Halper: Are you?

Durst: I dunno. When I was a kid, I was hyper. They started feeding me coffee at the age of 10. That was a popular therapy at the time, over-amping the kid to short-circuit him.

Halper: What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you at a show?

Durst: A guy threw his prosthetic leg at me. He was trying to be funny. I held it up. Then I had a glass ash tray shatter behind me on the wall. The woman said she threw it because she was laughing so hard. Then I had a guy taken out on a stretcher because he had a heart attack right before I went on stage. I had a corporate gig the week after 9/11 for a law firm in Palo Alto, and they had an office in the World Trade Center and had just lost 16 people. So they had a moment of silence, and then they brought me on stage. I swear to fucking god.

Another time, this guy started yelling at me, and I couldn’t hear him. And someone was taping the show, so he rushed at the camera and tried to grab it and had to be escorted out. It turns out he was an out-of-work right-wing talk show host. So he’s calling all the radio stations in Sacramento and saying he was molested by the club staff, saying his freedom of speech was violated. Nobody would return his calls. Another time someone was going to beat me up in a club, but he got into a fight with someone who liked me, and they beat each other up. Good times.

Halper: Are you going to be sad at the end of Bush’s term?

Durst: No. Because we’re gonna get to know so much about the next person. Some people predicted the demise of political humor after Bill Clinton. Everything was below the belt. Every two-bit hack in America took his dick jokes and made them presidential dick jokes. Corporate gigs loved it when I would take on Clinton. I lost a lot of corporate gigs after Clinton. It’s not so funny when you take on the boy king.

Halper: Who was your biggest influence?

Durst: Lenny Bruce. I used to listen to him before I went on stage. I read his autobiography, How to Talk Dirty. And there are great political comics out there. You were hysterical the other night. And there’s Lee Camp, Costaki, David Feldman, Johnny Steel, Barry Weintraub. Marga Gomez is my hero. I worked with Mort Sahl a few months ago. He’s great. He’s 80 years old and his opening line was, “If Paris Hilton goes to jail, will that rob her life of meaning?”

Halper: What are you hoping your show will accomplish?

Durst: Driving a nail through capitalism.

NBC Launches To Catch a Senator
Andy Borowitz, HuffPo
August 30, 2007

Dateline, the NBC newsmagazine which has scored big ratings for its To Catch a Predator investigations, announced today that it would introduce a new investigative series this fall, entitled To Catch a Senator.

At a press conference in New York, NBC News president Steve Capus said that To Catch a Senator would focus the Dateline investigation team’s energies on “the number one menace in America today: pervy Republican senators.”

While he indicated that plans for the program are still being developed, Mr. Capus said that To Catch a Senator would use an airport bathroom as the nerve center for its sting operation.

Specifically, he said that the program would deploy Predator host Chris Hansen as a decoy to lure depraved senators into lewd contact.

“Chris will be waiting in one of the bathroom stalls, and when the senator taps on the wall, Chris will kind of pop out of the stall and start grilling him,” Mr. Capus said. “We’ll nail that bastard faster than he can say ‘I’m not gay.’”

But even as NBC trumpeted its latest Dateline spin-off, industry insiders wondered whether there would be an adequate supply of sex-crazed senators to keep the program going for more than a few episodes.

For his part, Mr. Capus brushed off such concerns, telling reporters, “As long as there are Republican senators out there who oppose gay marriage, there will always be plenty of pervs.”

Elsewhere, President Bush praised Pakistan’s General Pervez Musharraf for agreeing to stand for election, saying, “If free and fair elections work in Pakistan, we may eventually try them here.”

We’re the Republicans. And We’re Looking for a Few Good Men.
Ellis Weiner, HuffPo
August 30, 2007

Maybe you’ve heard the news lately: The Republican Party — the party of Lincoln, of Ike, of the Gipper, yes, that Republican Party — has gone homo.

The party of God, guts, and guns has become a soiree of poufs, pansies, and pederasts.

Well, it ends here. It ends now.

It ends with you — if you’ve got what it takes.

Think you do? Think you can cut taxes for billionaires by day and by night have regulation, procreative sexual intercourse with an actual woman — in the missionary position; no unguents; no “oral;” no diapers — and not fantasize about some Panamanian pool boy from that in-room video last week?

Think you can undergo the demanding, life-changing rite-of-passage we call “marriage” (to a woman), and not secretly yearn for the understanding touch of that sweet, crew-cut Congressional aide from Liberty U. on the Ways and Means staff? And then get up the next day and work to gut environmental rules and regs?

Think you can manage to get through a single lifetime without wearing women’s clothing? In public, at least?

If you can, then we’d like to speak with you.

If thinking about women gets you physically aroused, however sporadically, and thinking about men doesn’t, or doesn’t all that much, there’s a place for you in today’s Republican Party. If you’re a man, that is.

Because we want you on our team. We want you to be part of a new tradition — a tradition of Republican men who are proud to stand up and say, when asked by anyone, from a newspaper reporter to a vice cop to a Senate Ethics inquiry, “That’s right — I’m married. To a woman. What do you think of that?”

Join our team, and you’ll learn what “discipline” means. Not the discipline of ordinary conservative men — the recreational kind, the kind they refer to when the cloak room chatter turns to talk of state-of-the-art gear, and weapons, and “equipment.”

We mean real discipline. The kind that trains the whole mind, the whole body, and the whole system of genitalia and so forth. The kind of discipline that separates ordinary men from Republican men, and Republican men from each other, God willing.

Join our team, and you’ll learn what “courage” means. Because courage doesn’t mean, not being afraid of a naked woman. Real courage means being afraid of a naked woman but doing what you have to do — what you’ve been trained to do, or paid to do, or maybe hypnotized to do — anyway.

Succeed, and you’ll find resources you never knew you had. Institutes. Slush funds.

“Consultancy positions.” Lobbyist jobs that ask only that you eat lunch. And foundations with fellowships that can last a lifetime.

See your RNC recruiter and hear what he has to offer. Be straight with him and he’ll be straight with you. We can all but guarantee it. Usually.

Join our team and, if you’ve got what it takes, you’ll learn what the Republican motto means, and has meant for generations, or, rather, will have meant for generations, generations from now:

Semper Hetero. Forever Straight.
The Few.
The Straight.
No, really.
The Republican Party.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. gay length movie free fullfree full movies xxxscript free movie readhentai sample moviemovies huge titinternal of female orgasm movielive fuck with samples movieswomen being whipped of movie Map

Entry Filed under: Political Waves