Sarah Palin, a professional politician with a 17 year career, who recently dissed professional politicians, a creature who was largely created by the right-wing media, but likes to blame everything on the media, has resigned. Of course, even though she saw nothing wrong with spending lots of campaign money on clothes, and raising political money to cover her legal bills (which is an ethics violation), she delivered her resignation speech — blaming government spending for our nation’s problems.
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert discuss Universal Health Care calmly and rationally (not). Jon doesn’t remember how much a full anal probe costs on Alpha Centauri because his memory was erased.
“President Obama throws out the first pitch at the All-Star Game. And people are criticizing him because he had the big baggy jeans on, but Obama says Americans have it all wrong if they want a president who looks great in tight jeans. I think that was Al Gore’s campaign slogan, wasn’t it?” – David Letterman
“I want to tell you something. In all honesty, if we had wanted a president who looked good in pants, we’d have elected Hillary. You know what I mean?” – David Letterman
“Yesterday, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, the three astronauts from Apollo 11 visited the White House. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were allowed to set foot inside the White House, while Michael Collins was forced to drive around in circles outside.” – Conan O’Brien
“Yesterday, Obama extended Dick Cheney – you remember Dick Cheney, Vice President Dick ‘Ka-Boom’ Cheney, you remember him? He extended his Secret Service protection for another six months. Hey, I’ll tell you who needs protection, Cheney’s hunting buddies.” – David Letterman
“Cheney needs protection. Yeah, protection from bacon.” – David Letterman
“A new book reveals that George Bush’s twin daughters Jenna and Barbara were a nightmare for Secret Service to keep tabs on. The girls responded, ‘That’s not true. We had tabs at every bar we went to.'” – Jimmy Fallon
“You remember before the election, in October and September, and the big convention, all people could talk about was Sarah Palin and John McCain? And now, this is Sarah Palin’s last week in office as governor of Alaska. Isn’t that crazy? Going back to her old job as IHOP hostess.” – David Letterman
“But Sunday will be a big day for Sarah Palin. That’s the day she plans to go on her porch and wave goodbye to Russia. Then she’ll run back in the House and jiggle the handle.” – David Letterman
“On Monday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, announced that the U.S. will send an additional 22,000 troops to Iraq to speed up the withdrawal effort. It’s all part of the Administration’s new exit strategy, ‘Reverse Psychology.'” – Jimmy Fallon
“Here’s how bad the economy is. Now people can’t afford to be buried in a cemetery so they’re being buried in their backyard. Well, I mean, you think about it. You sink all your money into real estate. Why not go with it?” – David Letterman
“Good News for California. This just came out. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has apparently found a way to close the state’s $26 billion budget shortfall. Schwarzenegger says it won’t be pretty, but times like this call for a sequel to ‘Jingle All The Way.'” – Conan O’Brien
“Seriously, though, this is very good news. You should be happy. Schwarzenegger has found a way to close the state’s $26 billion budget deficit. It’s giant. Now I can’t get into all the details, but in short, Fresno is now part of China.” – Conan O’Brien
Special Extra: even more Late Night Political Humor on video.
Former porn star Nora Baumberger (nee “Dolly Buster”) is upset because her name is on the ballot as a candidate for city council in the German city of Wesel. Baumberger is worried that this could ruin her reputation. “I’ve been nominated by a group whose name I’ve never even heard of. I’m really irritated.”
Her husband Dino, who produces porn films, also appears on the ballot as a candidate.
But what is really ironic is that the pair actually signed forms to become candidates. They claim they thought they were signing up to be members of the party, not candidates. But it makes you wonder how she can claim to not ever have heard of the group’s name. Not only that, but Nora Baumberger ran for a seat in the European Union parliament in 2004.
Despite protesting “I wouldn’t vote for me. … The people should just not vote for me!” — I’ll bet she wins.
“According to a new poll, 42% of Americans say they would vote for Sarah Palin for president in 2012. They also said they’d support her decision to step down in 2013.” – Conan O’Brien
“The governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, is stepping down from office. Will no longer be the governor of Alaska on Sunday. So right about now, Sarah Palin should be taking her grizzly bear head off the wall and packing it in bubble wrap.” – David Letterman
“She’s leaving office because she wants to spend more time riding in a helicopter shooting wildlife.” – David Letterman
“Several weeks ago, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford disappeared without explanation for five days. Now of course, as it turns out, he didn’t really disappear. It turns out he was hiking on the Appalachian Trail. Which is a trail that starts in Maine and ends in an Argentine woman’s vagina.” – Jon Stewart
“Gov. Sanford is still trying to recover from his sex scandal. This is the latest. This weekend, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford wrote an editorial apologizing for his behavior. I’m not sure he’s sincere, though, because it starts out, ‘Dear Penthouse.'” – Conan O’Brien
“Since then, the governor has apologized many times, most recently in an open letter to the people of South Carolina in which he promised to ‘trust god in his larger work of changing me.’ I thought Reform Judaism was lax! This Christianity thing sounds amazing! See, you’re not banging a hot Argentinean woman. You’re ‘undergoing a religious metamorphosis.’ And, you get to do that and eat bacon. I’m in!” – Jon Stewart
“Happy birthday to former Senator Larry Craig from Idaho. Sixty-four years old. And if you are wondering where the celebration is, well, it’s in the stall with the yellow balloons.” – David Letterman
“Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the United States will build two nuclear plants in India. And here’s the weird part about those power plants. They’re going to outsource all the jobs to Americans.” – Jimmy Fallon
“And just this morning, Hillary Clinton said that the US will not comment on North Korea’s nuclear tests to avoid giving them attention. And then she said, ‘Oh, wait, damn, I just — I kind of just mentioned it.” – Jimmy Fallon
“Looks like Paula Abdul may not be going back to ‘American Idol.’ And that means President Obama has to nominate another new judge.” – David Letterman
“It was that fateful day in July that we planted the Stars and Stripes in the lunar surface, officially claiming the moon as America’s space Puerto Rico. It was all ours. It was the culmination of a dream. … It took us ten years, astronauts’ lives, billions of dollars, and all we did is hit a f*cking golf ball? … I can’t help but think, if only there’d been Moon Indians. By now, we’d probably have hourly shuttles to the moon casinos that we had to give them as an apology for the terrible Earthpox epidemic of 1973.” – Jon Stewart
“Walter Cronkite’s influence on the news is still felt today, in that news anchors still wear ties. Other parts of his legacy have become obsolete. For instance, dispassionate reporting is fine for covering the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, but not for an issue as complex as Octomom. Sadly, Cronkite’s passing is not getting the kind of cable news attention I believe it deserves. I watched the coverage this weekend and I didn’t see one helicopter shot of his home. I don’t even think his family has booked the Staples Center yet.” – Stephen Colbert
If we can’t have real health care reform in this country, I would rather that we stick with the current system. I know that sounds crazy. And it isn’t that I like the current system — I hate it — but I don’t want to see some half-assed reform that would (at best) be only marginally better than what we currently have and would delay real reform. There are powerful forces opposing health care reform in this country, and I’m sure that if they are unable to kill health care reform, they will do their best to make the new system worse than what we have now. After all, if the Democrats manage to pass health care reform that people like (at least as much as they like Medicare), then the Republican party will be in even worse trouble than they are now.
Consider the “reform” that added prescription drug benefits to Medicare. It was primarily a huge giveaway to the drug companies — who are now using that money to lobby Congress to oppose health care reform. And the drug benefit is so unbelievably complicated that hardly anyone really understands it. What are the chances that we will be able to fix prescription drug benefits in the future? Don’t hold your breath.
What is clear to me is that our current system is horribly broken. So even if we don’t get reform now, we will get it eventually. And I’d rather have real reform.
So this is what I think should happen. If we don’t get a bill through Congress with a real public option and which does not control costs properly, I think we should kill the bill. At that point, we can ask the Republicans — who all claim to be in favor of health care reform (just not the reform that Obama wants) — to come up with their reform bill. Of course, most likely they won’t be able to come up with anything, but even if they do, I’m sure that a cost analysis will show (just like their Medicare Drug Benefit) that it will cost lots of money for little or no benefit. At which point, we can show that for the same (or less) money, we can have a system like they have in every other freaking industrialized nation in the world that will work much better.
How about it? Are you willing to say no to compromise? After all, lack of health coverage is killing tens of thousands of Americans every year. How can we compromise on any solution that doesn’t solve that problem? And yet, most of the bills currently working their way though Congress — even some that claim to provide a “public option” — do not solve this problem.
Congress is saying that they can’t finish up health care reform before they go on vacation in August.
To put this in perspective, what will happen while Congress is on vacation for three weeks?
Seriously, over 22,000 people a year die because they don’t have health insurance. That’s seven times worse than 9/11, and it happens every single year. And we can prevent it.
Fixing our broken health care system is not all that hard. Every single other industrialized nation has already done it. The only hard part in this country is due to politicians trying so very hard to please their rich overlords in the insurance and pharma industries.
I’d say this makes me sick, but I don’t dare get sick in this country.
UPDATE: Jim Moss over at FireDogLake has the solution to this problem:
UPDATE 2: Presidential historian Doris Goodwin, who worked in the White House during the time president Johnson got a balking Congress to pass Medicare, talks about how Obama can get his Johnson working. Johnson once said that razor-thin votes were fine, even with big majorities in the Congress, for that meant he had secured the maximum provisions he wanted, rather than compromising too early and too much.
UPDATE 3: Business Week reports on a new study that links rising health care costs to lost jobs and a worsening economy.
UPDATE 4: How do you lie and get away with it? You buy a company that does health care studies, and then get Republicans to quote their studies. The Lewin Group, whose research has been quoted by Eric Cantor, Orrin Hatch, and Republicans on the House Ways and Means committee to try to discredit a public health option, is owned by UnitedHealth, one of the nation’s largest health insurers. Can you guess if any of those Republicans bothered to mention that fact?
UPDATE 5: In the last 3 months, pharmaceutical companies spent $40 million lobbying Congress. That’s just big pharma; it doesn’t include the insurance industry. If you want to know what they are buying with this $40 million, notice that in none of the current bills being worked on is there any mention of legalizing drug reimportation from Canada, nor of giving the government the ability to negotiate drug prices. Expect drug prices to keep skyrocketing.
It was bad enough when Goldman Sachs decided to pay out huge bonuses to its top employees, when it wasn’t so long ago that we were bailing them out. But banks are generally now doing well. The exception to this is Morgan Stanley, who just announced their third quarterly loss, and even admitted that it was disappointed with key departments. So what do they do? Morgan Stanley announces that they are allocating $3.9 billion for bonuses. That is a stunning 72% of net revenues.
I thought the purpose of a bonus was to reward key employees when they did well. But in the topsy-turvy world of US banks, you get rewarded handsomely even when you do poorly. When the economy falls apart (and it is partly your fault), you still get your huge bonus. When other banks are doing well, but you aren’t, you still get your bonus, even though it is almost certainly your fault the bank is not doing well. Just what do you have to do to not get a bonus?
Last week, Harvard professor Henry ‘Skip’ Gates (who is black) was arrested after he broke into his own home in Cambridge Mass., even after he had shown ID that this was his home. Last night at his press conference Obama was asked about the incident, and joked that if he had tried to jimmy his way into his current home (the White House) “Here, I’d get shot.”
But this incident raises multiple issues: Apparently, Gates was angry that he was accused of breaking into his own home. The police officer says that Gates accused him of being a racist, of racial profiling, and that Gates was “speaking about my mother.”
The police officer arrested Gates for “disorderly conduct” (the charges were later dropped). How would this situation have played out if Gates had not been black? Did Gates, who is known as a fairly vocal person, overreact? Could this be used as a teachable moment?
Unfortunately, as usual the media is trying to gin up this incident, trying to goad the police officer into saying that Obama owes him an apology for saying that the police “acted stupidly”. They are also trying to prove that the officer is not a racist. However, other black professors at Harvard have complained about racist treatment by the Cambridge police, and the governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, said he was “troubled” by the situation.
So what’s it going to be? Will this be an opportunity for us to calmly discuss issues around race? Or will this just lead to more polarization and politics?
UPDATE: There are some discrepancies in the police report filed by Sergeant Crowley that bring into question his version of what happened.
UPDATE 2: Gates was arrested for “disorderly conduct” but Massachusetts law is very clear that yelling at a police officer is not grounds for disorderly conduct. Therefore, when Gates was arrested (as Obama said) the police “acted stupidly”. They may even be guilty of making a false arrest.
UPDATE 3: Colin Powell on the arrest of Gates and racial profiling. Very interesting.
“The tag Republicans kept throwing to hang around Sonia Sotomayor’s neck was ‘reverse racist.’ They said, you know, it’s reverse racists like her that give regular racists like them a bad name.” – Bill Maher
“Yesterday, Sonia Sotomayor’s questioning finally came to an end. Sotomayor said that she had received a ‘gracious and fair’ hearing. Her exact quote was, ‘Thanks a lot, you old honkies. I’m outta here. You can kiss my ass.'” – Conan O’Brien
“It looks like healthcare reform really is gaining momentum and is going to happen. Now of course Republicans say the plan is too confusing, too convoluted, but you know, these are the same people who say they can make sense out of a Sarah Palin speech.” – Bill Maher
“President Obama recently said that the best way to pay for his health care plan is to raise taxes on people like him. As a result, the government is raising taxes on all half-Kenyan, half-Kansan presidents who were born in Hawaii.” – Conan O’Brien
“I know where I’m going to go on my next break. I’m going to the C Street House in Washington, D.C. You know what this is? It’s kind of a frat house for Christian congressman, where they live and pray together and counsel each other on how to adhere to the nine commandments.” – Bill Maher
“I say the nine commandments because Gov. Sanford hung out there, John Ensign, the Senator from Nevada who was banging his chief of staff’s wife, he lives there. And now a third alumnus, a former Republican congressman named Chip Pickering, has also been exposed for cheating on his wife, apparently actually in the house. It kind of makes you miss those innocent days when Republicans just tried to blow a stranger in an airport bathroom.” – Bill Maher
“Experts say the video game industry has been dramatically hurt by the economic downturn. Which explains the popularity of the new Nintendo game, ‘Wii Job Interview.'” – Conan O’Brien
“Forty years ago, Apollo 11 left for the moon. … The whole thing was delayed. Do you remember the delay? They had to go through Newark.” – David Letterman
“This weekend, it’s very cool. It’s the fortieth anniversary of the moon landing, considered by some to be mankind’s greatest achievement. … Unless, of course, you count the time we put the cheese inside the pizza crust.” – Conan O’Brien
“President Obama, he’s the kind of guy with a lot of foresight, a lot of vision. He says that he would like to put another man on the moon. He’s thinking about maybe Joe Biden.” – David Letterman
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