- Props to Bill Maher for showing more tact and restraint in removing a disruptive protestor from his show than security at the University of Florida showed last month in dealing with the student who became only slightly belligerent in asking questions during a John Kerry speech. While UF security came with six or seven guards and used a Taser (“Don’t tase me bro, don’t tase me!”) to subdue a single knucklehead that one guard could have restrained sans Taser, Maher and security guards from his show showed much better strategy in dealing with a rowdy protestor who held up a smuggled-in sign proclaiming “9/11 is a cover-up fraud” and shouted out similar comments during a panel discussion about science. Maher helped security escort the man from the studio, with the incident shown live on the East Coast and unedited in its taped version on the West Coast. There was minor resistance from this tool, but no Tasers were broken out and there were no yelps of pain and hundreds of volts of electricity shot through the body of a man who was already on the ground and in the custody of multiple security officers. Classy show you run there on Real Time with Bill Maher, Bill Maher, classy show indeed.
- Happy days are here for Comedy Central, home of the best fake news shows in the world. Last week, satirist and host of The Colbert Report Stephen Colbert announced that he’ll run in the presidential primary in his home state of South Carolina. The announcement was the capper on a running joke on the show about the coyness and beat-around-the-bush nature of many candidates in this current race when it comes to announcing whether or not they plan to run for president. Now comes news that Jon Stewart host of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the show where Colbert got his start as a fake news correspondent, has signed a two-year contract extension that will keep him on the air until at least 2010. Also, Comedy Central has created a stand-alone website for the show that will feature video clips from every episode Stewart has hosted dating back to his debut in 1999. You can visit www.thedailyshow.com and see for yourself how the fake news business has changed over the past eight years or so, it’s truly amazing to see………..
- Do you want the good news or the bad news for the world’s environmental system? Heck, who am I kidding, it’s pretty much all bad news for the environment nowadays, it’s just a matter of what degree of bad-ness. This would fall under the heading of lower on the bad-ness scale, as the Antarctic ozone hole has shrunk back to its average size, reaching a maximum size of 9.7 million square miles in September, down from its peak size of 11.5 million square miles last year. This news should fly well in the White House….well, that is if W. and his stool pigeons even admit that a hole in the ozone layer exists at all. It’s a slippery slope when you refuse to admit that global warming exists, because then you get into the habit of denying all sorts of clearly existing environmental phenomena that everyone else in the world believe in.
- London Calling….and the NFL should have let it go to voice mail and then deleted the message. That brief homage to legendary punk rockers The Clash notwithstanding, the NFL’s decision to hold a regular season game in jolly old England is questionable at best and a dumb decision no matter what. The game is next Sunday, with the New York Giants facing the team surging toward my dream of a reverse perfect season (0-16). I know that the NFL wants to mimic the NBA in expanding its game globally and in gaining fans around the world, but has anyone been paying attention to that whole NFL Europa folding deal? The league tried to ram American football down the throats of Euros for nearly two decades and earlier this year was finally forced to admit that the experiment wasn’t working. I realize that NFL Europe, as it was also called, was the lower echelon of American football, a developmental league with B-list talent, but I don’t think that’s the main reason Euros rejected it. The sport simply does not have a base in Europe like it does in America because it’s not played from youth on up there and it’s the same dynamic that soccer has here in America, only in reverse. Soccer will never catch on here as a major sport, just as American football will never be huge in Europe. But you have the Giants and Dolphins in Week 8, smack dab in the middle of the season, hopping on a plane to fly halfway across the world to play a game in London. The Giants are 5-2 and a playoff contender, while the Dolphins are chasing that reverse perfecto that is my dream season. Can’t the NFL see that the ‘Fins have found a comfort zone at home, where they have developed a routine that allows them to show up, lose games and not even break a sweat (which is saying something in Miami)? One game in London isn’t going to create millions of new NFL fans in Europe, and if the league is hoping this is a prelude to eventually having a team in Europe, they need to sack that idea immediately, because as bad of an idea as this game is, having a Euro team is a worse one. No, the time differential isn’t an issue because with London five hours ahead, the game can begin at 6 p.m. local time and still be a 1 p.m. kickoff here in the States, but that’s about the only part of this whole mess that isn’t a terrible idea. But hey, it won’t be the worst idea for an international game that the NFL has had for too long, because within the next 2-3 years, a game will be played in China. Great thinking NFL, just make sure to not bring any lead-paint laden toys back with you when you send two teams to the world’s largest Communist nation in 2009 or 2010, and keep up the stellar planning and scheduling, idiots…..
- Never a good sign when your government decides that it needs to borrow ideas and governing strategies from its Communist days. Yet that’s what Russian citizens are facing with the prices of food product and other important items skyrocketing and parliamentary and presidential elections looming. With the prices of items like diary products (up 9.4 percent) and cooking oil (up 13 percent) going up in disturbingly quick fashion, the Russian government has hearkened back to the 1970s and 1980s be slamming price control on staple items and targeting what it says is widespread corruption in the business world due to sleazy middlemen who are driving up the prices of these products. There is no shortage of food, as there was mid-20th century when store shelves were nearly bare and organized crime controlled much of the flow of good and services, but with the sky-high prices on basic necessities, many Russians are finding it difficult to survive. With parliamentary elections set for Dec. 2 and the vote for the country’s next president three months later, the government faces the challenge of solving this problem or seeing the voters make their voice heard by ushering in new leadership, preferably one that won't continue steering them back in the direction of Communism.
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