Gappy Days Are Here Again

By Bill Maher

Great news: According to the Pew Research Center, the wealth of American households (the sum of all assets and holdings, including car, home, possessions etc., minus household debt) rose by 14% in the period between 2009 and 2011. We're back, baby! We are all a whopping $5 trillion richer. And by "all," I mean not you, but rich people.



The reason America got 14% wealthier on average is because the household wealth of the richest 7% shot up from about $2.5 million to about $3.2 million during that two-year period, while the bottom 93% of households saw their wealth dip from $140,000 to $134,000. So fuck you, takers.

Looking at it another way, in 2009, the average household in the richest 7% had roughly 18 times the wealth of the average household in the lower 93%. Just two years later, they enjoyed 24 times the wealth of those same less affluent households.

Shouldn't we be doing something about wealth inequality?

The Police Spate

By Bill Maher

My usual friends on the right can’t believe that I said that, during the hunt for the Tsarnaev brothers, Massachusetts looked like a “police state,” just because it was a state full of police. But Fortune just did its own review of homeland security spending, and here are some of the highlights:

• Post-9/11 federal spending on homeland security exceeds $790 billion. That’s larger than TARP and, adjusted for inflation, the New Deal.
• Last year, Massachusetts received $4 million in homeland security grants, ranking it 34th in homeland security grant spending per capita.

In short, homeland security is a money pit. And Boston looked like District 9 two weeks ago, when the black tanks and the body armor came out, but it’s actually under-porked, compared to most places in America that got on the homeland security tit and sucked hard.
Two examples from Fortune of homeland security graft in Nowheresville:

• An Indiana county bought a $300,000 “Electronic Emergency Message Boards” system and used it to advertise the volunteer fire department’s fish fry.
• Western Michigan counties bought thirteen $900 Sno-Cone machines.

Since 9/11, “homeland security” has been “open sesame” for federal money. It’s cops (it’s impossible to spend too much on cops) and the military (again, too much ain’t enough). And the result is Grand Rapids gets a sno-cone machine and Watertown, Mass can’t catch an unarmed bleeding teenager without looking like the Battle of the Bulge.
And, because it’s Fortune, there’s always a kernel of investment advice in any article, even one decrying government waste. See if you can pick it up from these clues:

• The video surveillance market was slated to grow from $11.5 billion in 2008 to $37.5 billion in 2015.
• There are 4,000 security cameras in Manhattan.
• Chicago has 10,000 linked public and private security cameras. London has a half-million.

The answer is that we’re under-photographed compared to London. So invest in closed circuit camera companies. You have nothing to lose but your shame.

Background Check, Please!

By Bill Maher

Recent polling suggests that some of the senators who voted against background checks are taking a hit for it, and Joe Manchin, one of the sponsors of the bill, is saying he's going to bring it back up. But here's the problem: it's not a great bill in the first place, and even if it were, it could never pass the House of Representatives.

If the anti-gun people really want to get guns off the streets, they have to start thinking more like the anti-abortion people. Part of that is getting states and localities to restrict guns more -- that's already happening in places like New York and Colorado. But there's something else they could do: go after providers and make it unbearable for them to be in the killing machine business. This is essentially what the anti-abortion movement has done with abortion providers. The results? Today, 48 states have fewer abortion providers than in they did in 1978.

Sticking It to Plan B

By Bill Maher

Last month, a federal judge in Brooklyn ordered the FDA to make the morning-after pill available without a prescription. He basically said that the science was in, and it was safer than Motrin, and the only reason it hadn’t been approved in the first place was Jesus politics. Okay, he didn’t say those things but that’s what it came down to.

That’s not going to stop anti-abortion people from making things up about the morning-after pill killing everything it touches, and then eating through the floor like the blood from an alien.
But it made me think about the horrifying warnings in ads for prescription drugs, the ones that always sound at least as bad as the disease. You know, “You may experience dry mouth, and grow a tail and gills. Ask your exorcist.” Here’s the major side effect of not taking Plan B: A foreign body incubates inside you. Then it takes over your life and ruins it.

Here’s Slate putting it in gentler terms:

The reality is that oral contraceptives help prevent a much more serious condition: pregnancy, which brings with it huge medical, emotional, financial, and legal risk. More specifically, the main health concern with oral contraceptives is an increased risk of blood clots, but as the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists points out, that risk is “extremely low.” It’s also “significantly lower than the risk of blood clots during pregnancy and the postpartum period.”

The morning-after pill is better for you than pregnancy. So we can debate abortion, but we can’t pretend it’s about some global-warming type mystery about women’s health.

Haters Gonna Hate

By Bill Maher

There's a new push by the right to paint the Obamas as President Nero and his wife Marie Antoinette. It cropped up most recently after the White House Correspondent's Dinner: How could they, especially now, when we're overtaxed and the government is supposed to be cutting back, be having dinner! Don't they know we're in the middle of a series of (politically manufactured) economic crises?!

This particular "outrage" doesn't even make sense, really, because there's nothing especially opulent about renting a ballroom in the Hilton and having your trade association's annual banquet. But the criticism has to be leveled, because the formula is now always "How could Obama be doing x while the country is in such dire straits?" Where x equals every single thing Obama does -- eating, traveling, seeing shows or sporting events, entertaining dignitaries -- really anything that doesn't involve sitting behind his desk in the oval office and signing documents by candlelight.

Capitalism Fails the News

By Bill Maher

At the White House Correspondents' Dinner, just about every media outlet was taking shit from the presenters about how often they got it wrong in these last few weeks. CNN, for its ridiculous and inaccurate coverage of the Boston bombings; Buzzfeed, for getting it all wrong too; MSNBC for being in the pocket of the White House; Fox News for being in the pocket of evil. The verdict was in, and it was that, other than Pete Williams and The Boston Globe, every traditional media outlet -- especially those on TV -- is running a sad rumor mill factory, obsessed with sensationalism, when they're not being partisan hacks shilling for their home team. And hey, enjoy the filet.

But here's what you didn't hear at the White House Correspondents' Dinner: "Something, something, Gwen Ifill. [Laughter] Something, something, Ray Suarez. [Hollering]" Because what everyone seems to be forgetting is that there's a great news outlet on TV that always gets it right: the PBS Newshour. And why? Because they're allowed to be a news organization. Because they're not chasing ratings with giant BREAKING NEWS graphics and Megyn Kelly's legs and segments about the day's funny web videos.

Back in the day, the network news broadcasts weren't designed to make money. They were a loss leader. Because people understood the difference between news and entertainment: one was something you needed to eat, and the other was dessert.

But then capitalism took over the news business. And since then, the news has gone down a downward slope of suckitude.

Hey, don't get me wrong -- capitalism is a great thing. When it comes to designing America a new ketchup bottle that sits upside down so all the ketchupy goodness has already moved right to the opening so that you can then squeeze it on to your fries and avoid all of that needless pounding on the bottom of the old glass ketchup bottles, capitalism is the way you want to go. Because capitalism gets you what you want, and at the lowest price.

But in a democracy, there's a difference between what you want -- my ketchup to come out of the bottle on cue -- and what you need, which is an informed citizenry.

Our problem isn't that we have capitalism and that we have democracy. It's that we think they're the same thing.

Threat Assessment

By Bill Maher

What do we do when there's no evidence that someone is actually planning to do something dangerous, but there are clearly warning signs? For example, the FBI confirmed it investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaev a couple of years ago due to a request from Russia, but didn't find "derogatory" information that would require proceeding.

And then there's the Benton County, Arkansas Republican Party. Here's an excerpt from one of their recent newsletters, which, of course, I receive every month because I'm one of their biggest donors:

"We need to let those who will come in the future to represent us [know] that we are serious. The 2nd amendment means nothing unless those in power believe you would have no problem simply walking up and shooting them if they got too far out of line and stopped responding as representatives. It seems that we are unable to muster that belief in any of our representatives on a state or federal level, but we have to have something, something costly, something that they will fear that we will use if they step out of line."

Do we have to wait for them to do "something costly," or is there anything we can do right now? Because this goes right up to the line on the First Amendment, and when you're this paranoid and openly violent about the government taking away your guns, maybe the government needs to take away your guns.