Spacial Delivery

By Bill Maher

Republicans don't want anything to do with progressive thinking in any area of American life -- except in the case of military hardware. Then and only then are they willing to embrace the future. That's how we got that weird, mechanical over-land death mule and it's how we got the unmanned drone. We can now visit death upon our enemies without having to show up in person, look them in the eye and have an actual fight. It just feels wrong -- like breaking up with a girl via text message. If you're going to vanquish your enemy, shouldn't you have to confront them? How does a warrior willing to die for his cause in the Takhar Province fight a guy operating a joystick in Tallahassee?

Which brings me to this: Earlier this month we were flying one of our unmanned drones near Iranian airspace -- you know, the ones we use for surveillance and to provide the "something blew" to Muslim weddings -- and the Iranians took some shots at it. The incident was described as "unprecedented" and, as such, we really didn't know how to respond. I mean, it was an unmanned drone, not a plane with an American pilot in it, and they didn't shoot it down; they just shot at it. It's like catching the neighbor you hate throwing a beer bottle at your parked car and missing. We had no idea what level of outrage to feign.

I didn't go to West Point or anything but I’m guessing if one of our planes came upon an unmanned Iranian death-copter off the coast of Jersey the order wouldn’t be to "get a nice picture of it."

We utilize the best means at our disposal to go into foreign lands and blow up the people we consider the bad guys even if that means collateral damage in the form of civilian casualties. When someone does that exact same thing to us, don’t we call it "terrorism"?

Paul Ryan Is Not An Economist

By Bill Maher

Paul Ryan couldn't explain his tax plan to Chris Wallace because "It would take me too long to go through all of the math." It's not the first time Ryan has had trouble trying to explain his plans and it raises an important question: is Paul Ryan a policy wonk, or does he just play one on TV?

The record suggests he just plays one on TV. He has a bachelor's degree in political science and economics. That's all. He's not a trained economist and wouldn't be qualified to teach a graduate level economics course. Most economists take him about as seriously as they do his idol, Ayn Rand.

The only people who have tagged him as a brilliant economist are journalists who aren't economists themselves and other Republicans. Why does everyone take it as a given that he's a wonk? How would they even know? He lies about everything else; doesn't it make sense that he’s lying about that, too?

I notice any time Ryan gets into trouble explaining economic issues, he starts using the word "baseline" a lot. It's not really that complicated of a word, but I think it's meant to scare people off, like, "Don’t mess with me, I'll start talking about baselines." To me, it just smacks of a guy who's trying too hard. And it's meant to end the conversation before someone who does know what they're talking about discovers he has no idea.

Ryan once told The Weekly Standard that meeting with budget actuaries was "the highlight of my day." Again, trying too hard. The reporter bought that. I don't. And is someone who enjoys talking to actuaries that much really qualified to be vice president?

Romney's awfulness as a candidate is obscuring how awful Ryan is. Look at that footage of him being booed at the AARP -- seniors don't just dislike his plan, they think he's a condescending little prick. If you thought Al Gore talked down to people, listen to Paul Ryan for five minutes. The difference is, Gore wasn't pretending -- he really did know shit.

The polls also suggest that the real disaster on the Romney/Ryan ticket might be Ryan. Around the time Ryan was picked for VP, Romney was up among seniors in Florida and Ohio; now Obama has the edge. Along with Democrats solidifying their support, the improvement with seniors is the biggest reason Obama has risen. Don't you think Ryan has something to do with that?

Rasmussen Closes the Hole

By Bill Maher

When we talk about the conservative bubble, we’re generally talking about the Fox-Rush-Drudge information bubble, and the people who reside in it. This is the information loop that allows any willing right-winger to live in a world where the opinions they already are the only ones that get recited back to them, and the opinions they will one day have get fed to them so they can later recite them and hear them being recited back again, and around and around we go, all without any having to hear any opposing viewpoints expressed beyond – possibly – those of tokens like Kirsten Powers and that old school Irish Dem who periodically loses it and tells Sean Hannity to go fuck himself. I think his name is Bob Beckel or something. And I’d like his job some day.

If you’re a conservative, wherever you turn, the bubble is there. If you want to get your news on TV, you have Fox. If you’re the type who frequents talk radio, there’s Rush, along with a dozen other Rush clones. If you want to get your news online, you get all the links you want to read assembled for you by Matt Drudge, complete with misleading headlines, bad pictures of Hillary Clinton and Michele Obama, and a smattering of racism. Anywhere a Republican wants to turn for news, there’s a friendly face. And by “friendly” I mean the “smiling veneer over the contemptible inner core.”

But there was always one hole in the bubble that continued to let in the air of reality: polling information. As in, surveys that measure what Americans actually believe, or who they plan on voting for, or what they think of ideas like privatizing Social Security, etc. Because wingnuts can go for months and not talk to anyone who doesn’t think Obama is a bigger threat to America than Al Qaeda with airborne AIDS, but that’s because they live in rural Tennessee, and inside the information bubble.

Polling information, on the other hand, when done correctly, comes from a representative sample of everyone. What’s more, polls are often widely reported, mostly because it’s an easy article to write. Even if you do your best to live only in the Fox-Rush-Drudge information world, you’re still going to get information about what people outside the bubble think through polling data. And it can be very disconcerting for Republicans, finding out that millions of other Americans exist in the “not real America” and think they’re completely batshit.

Thankfully, Republicans now seem to have solved this problem. Enter Scott Rasmussen. He’s a Republican and a pollster. And a few years ago, it seemed Scott ran his polling outfit the way everyone else did. But somewhere along the line – and I’m guessing here – Scott saw which way the media winds were blowing and realized there was a new way to distinguish yourself in the world of political news: by taking a side.

You see, polls, when done accurately, have a way of creating a narrative about what people actually want or think, or what may eventually happen. And this narrative is largely immune from the partisans on either side because, well, it just is. Because polls are the temperature of reality. If your candidate is down 8 points in a poll a few weeks out before the election, the story starts becoming about how you’re going to lose, and how everyone knows it, and how you might as well stay home on election day because it’s hopeless. Which is effective, or harmful, depending on which side you’re on. Because lots of people are looking for an excuse not to vote anyway and “My Candidate is down 9 points as of yesterday” is a pretty good one.

These narratives are particularly dangerous for Republicans. And that’s where Rasmussen polling comes in. By designing his to polls to lean Republican, he allows Republicans inside the bubble to continue breathing the air inside the bubble. Ex: When other polls show Obama pulling away from Romney, release a poll that says he isn’t:

Mission accomplished.

You see, now when people inside the bubble get confronted with what people think outside they bubble you can say, “No, according to a poll out today, they don’t think that!” Narrative averted! Thanks, Scott Rasmussen!

There’s only one problem with this, of course. And that’s that the bubble has now plugged its leak. Remaining contact with the outside world is even more limited. Republicans now not only have their own information loop, but their own polling company to deny what everyone outside the bubble thinks, too.

Weekend at Gurneys

By Bill Maher

A couple of weeks ago on Real Time, Jack Kingston told us about all the people who come into the United States seeking medical treatment from "the best healthcare system in the world." Not only is this oft-parroted argument out of touch, it's actually out of date: For several years, the number of people leaving the United States for medical care has outnumbered people coming in, and that gap is growing.

According to a study by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, it breaks down like this: Inbound medical tourism is growing, but slowly. Somewhere between 60,000 and 85,000 came here to seek treatment in 2008, and the number is projected to grow to slightly over half a million by 2017. But outbound medical tourism, Americans going abroad, was 750,000 in 2007, a big uptick from the year before. And the number ballooned to 1.3 million Americans in 2008.

It's still going up, by all reports, but the trend line was clear long before Obamacare or even President Obama: Our healthcare system wasn't working, and it was getting worse. Just as they like to ignore the financial shitstorm Obama inherited, Republicans choose to forget that our medical system was also in crisis when we elected Obama.

One reason for Americans getting treated overseas, obviously, is cost. Services abroad are 80 percent cheaper, on average. But they're not just looking for healthcare on the cheap. According to a McKinsey Company report, 40% of medical tourists are seeking better technology, and 32% are looking for better care. Also, despite the dire warnings about future waiting lists and rationing, it's already here. 15% of outgoing medical tourists are doing it because of shorter waiting periods for procedures.

Don't try telling this to Republicans, though -- they still need to believe in the America that draws people to its awesome healthcare, just like they can't let go of the idea that Mexicans are still pouring over the border. Because once they start admitting that the world is just not that into us anymore, they'll have to start examining what we actually have.

My New Rule for Todd Akin and the Republican Party

by Bill Maher

New Rule: If your entire party tries to get rid of you, and you stay in, you can't talk about how easy it is for a woman to push a stupid prick out of her body.

I don't want to waste another second thinking about Todd Akin, and his theory that you can't get pregnant unless your eggs are asking for it. Here's the only thing you need to know about Todd Akin and human anatomy: he's an asshole. What I want to talk about is how it's not a coincidence that the party of fundamentalism is also the party of fantasy. When I say religion is a mental illness, this is what I mean: it corrodes your mental faculties to the point where you can believe in tiny ninja warriors who hide in vaginas and lie in wait for bad people's sperm.

Evangelicals might like to pretend that the magical thinking that they indulge in at home doesn't affect what they do at the office, but it absolutely does. The brain that believes in angels and miracles and Jesus riding a dinosaur is trained to see the world not as it is, but as you want it to be.

Republicans would like to pretend like Congressman Akin's substitution of superstition for science is a lone problem but it's not: they're all magical thinkers, on nearly every issue. They don't get their answers on climate change from climatologists, they get them from the Book of Genesis. Hence Sharia Law in America is a dire threat, and global warming a hoax.

Or take the issue that consumes the right these days, our sea of red ink: Republicans are united in their fervent desire to reduce the deficit, but they want to do it in some magical fashion that doesn't involve raising taxes or cutting any spending. When given a choice in polls between these two options, a majority of Republicans check "none of the above" as a way to reduce the deficit. That's like deciding to pay off your student loans by daydreaming.

Or as it's known on Capitol Hill, supply-side economics. Remember that magic beans theory? That you actually bring in more revenue by bringing in less? Ronald Reagan believed it. But at least back in the '80s it was new. The thing is, we tried it, and it doesn't work. Yet, Paul Ryan, who every shit-for-brains pundit in America keeps telling us is a "serious" guy, still believes in the supply-side theory. All the Republicans do. They all believe in something that both science and history have shown to be pure fantasy. The symbol for their party shouldn't be an elephant -- it should be a unicorn.

Paul Ryan is their tough guy on spending but he doesn't want to touch defense -- that's right, a budget hawk who doesn't think there's anything bloated about the Defense Department's budget. It's like being a health inspector and finding nothing wrong with the Asian place that has the chicken hanging in the window. This is how low we've put the bar for political courage -- that you can just write, "I want a pony" in a binder and call it the "Plan For Restoring Vision For the Future of America's Greatness" or some shit, and then everyone has to refer to you as the serious one in Congress. It reminds me of health care. Republicans are for all the popular things, like covering people with pre-existing conditions, but they're not for the part where you pay for it, like the mandate. Just like they were for our recent wars, but not for paying for them. For the prescription drug bill, but not for paying for it.

How do they get away with it? They know that, because we're already such a religious country, our minds are primed for magical, fantasy thinking. The gullibility comes factory-installed. They've learned that you appeal not to an American's head, but to his gut -- it's a much bigger target. But here's the problem: life is complicated. I mean, I know we know some things for sure, like why Jesus put us here on Earth: to watch Here Comes Honey Boo Boo on a 50-inch TV screen. But what about the Chinese slaves who made the TV? What about carbon from the coal that generated the electricity? What about the Walmart where we bought it, where the workers don't have health insurance? What about racism, or the oceans turning into nail polish remover? The grown-up answer is: identify problems scientifically, prioritize and solve. The Republican answer is: there isn't a problem. And anyone who tells you different is a liar who hates America. We don't have to make hard choices. We just have to ignore the science and the math -- that's why God gave us values.

If rape babies throw a monkey wrench into the whole right-to-life pitch, just make believe rape babies don't exist. If you want to cut down on teen pregnancy, just tell curious kids with raging hormones to practice abstinence. Until they get married. Because everyone knows, that's when the fucking never stops. Health care? Not a problem if you just keep repeating, "We have the greatest health care in the world." Even though the U.N. ranks it 37th.

What's the solution to global warming? It's that it isn't real, and even if it is, big whoop, just buy an air conditioner, you pussy. Republicans also believe that putting the word "clean" next to the word "coal" creates something called clean coal. Even though there's the exact same amount of evidence for clean coal as there is for Todd Akin's mistaken baby makin' theory.

Republicans also believe if they kick all the Mexicans out of the country, the strawberries will pick themselves, and that if they cut the safety net all the poor blacks are "resting" in, they will fall gently to the ground, stand up, dust themselves off, and get good-paying jobs as Olympic gymnasts.
Next week in Tampa the Republicans must admit that the difference between a GOP convention and Comic-Con is that the people at Comic-Con have a much firmer grasp of reality.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/todd-akin-republicans_b_1826617.html

Stimu-late Than Never

by Bill Maher

Question: How come preventing chaos and civil war in Iraq was enough to say, “Bush’s surge worked,” but averting a complete financial meltdown and a second Great Depression isn’t enough to say, “Obama’s stimulus worked”? No, we haven’t achieved full employment, but neither was Iraq transformed to a model of peace and democracy. Have we been conditioned to think of economic success only in terms of immediate prosperity? Don’t you get any points for halting decline? Stopping a free fall? Turning the tide?

Conservatives say “Obama’s policies have failed” but the fact is we need a second stimulus, and Obama has served one up in the form of his jobs bill, which is being cock-blocked in Congress by Republicans. It’s as if the doctor has said to a dying patient, “You need two shots. The first will arrest your illness and save your life and the second will get you healthy and back on your feet.” And Republicans voted against the first injection to stave off death and now they’re refusing the second to stave off an Obama second term. Isn’t it clear Republicans are purposely delaying recovery so they can blame Obama for keeping us bedridden?

What Will Happen if the Republicans Take Over: Nothing

By Bill Maher

I stole this chart from Slate, which got it from a Dartmouth survey:

It’s pretty comical, really. Republicans say they want to reduce the deficit, but they want to do it in some magical fashion that doesn’t involve raising taxes or cutting any spending. Fifty-three percent tick “none of the above” as a way to reduce the deficit. That’s like deciding to pay off your student loans by daydreaming.  

Also interesting is the Independent category -- these people seem to be more like Republicans than Democrats, except they don’t mind raising taxes and they want to cut the hell out of the military.

In fact I’d say the military spending category is the most telling category of all. It separates the Republicans from everyone else in a way that backs up my contention that what the Republicans really stand for isn’t conservatism, but authoritarianism.

Those Blazy Days of Summer

By Bill Maher

It's summer, when a young man's fancy turns to wildfires. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, we currently have 52 large fires burning in 14 states. Colorado, in particular, is on fire. Hundreds of thousands of acres have been consumed, thousands of firefighters have been deployed and hundreds of homes have been burnt to the ground.  

Likewise, things are predicted to heat up here in Southern California. A new study of the effects of climate change on global fire patterns finds Southern California is "headed into a more fire-prone future" and West Hollywood can expect to become even more flaming than it is now. 

The study, led by UC Berkeley scientists, says that by the end of the century, the world will see more frequent and more severe wildfires than we see now, including fires in the tundra and the forests of the Far North. "Tundra fires": shouldn't that phrase alone make you say, "Hmm, maybe there is something to this global warming"? I'm not saying we're in for even more extreme weather, but they say Adele really will be able to "set fire to the rain." 

Of course Republicans will dismiss this as bunk because, after all, these are "Berkeley" scientists and they used "16 different global climate models" to gather "global wildfire and climate data for roughly the last decade and examined climate variables that affect fuel availability." And, if that doesn't spell "liberal hoax," I don't know what does. 


By not effectively regulating polluters or funding green technology now, Republicans are ensuring a future of more expense, and possibly even our ultimate demise. Isn't that some serious stuff to be politically toying with -- the survival of Man? 


It's time we realized "the adults in the room" aren't the ones living for the immediate gratification of "right now," with no regard for long-term consequences.

New Rule: The Republican Leadership in America Must Produce Their Birth Certificates

New Rule: The Republican leadership in America must produce their birth certificates! Not because I doubt they're Americans, I just want to make sure they're not eight-years-old. I mention this because a major talking point on Fox News and hate radio these days is that, after a year and a half of Obama, it's time to bring the "adults" back into power, so they can rein in our deficit, defeat terrorism, and focus on America's real enemy: cleaning ladies in Arizona. But I must protest the premise, because conservatives are the ones who tend to believe in magical ideas, like: America is never wrong; you can defeat terrorism militarily; and lower taxes will somehow fix the deficit. And I'm not even mentioning the stuff about how Jesus used to fly around on a pterodactyl and just hated it when homos ate wedding cake.

Now, am I saying there are no adults in today's Republican Party? Absolutely not, there are -- but like a lot of parents today, the adults let their kids cow them. And silence them. And rule over them. Rush Limbaugh is a child, a primal scream of a man, but he gets his way because he's the fat bully on the playground; and Glenn Beck is the weepy kid who's always crying because he's insane and you don't know what he's going to do and who he's going to take with him.

For example: to solve our debt crisis, a bunch of Republican senators suggested a bipartisan debt commission, which is the adult thing to do. But when Obama agreed to it, immediately seven of them said no -- now they're against it. Because Obama has cooties. Democrats have cooties, so you can't vote with them, or work with them, and compromise is treason. Compare this to England, where they just had an election two weeks ago and, power changed hands -- but the party that lost is working WITH the part that won -- they are not accusing them of being Bolshevik Zulus out to destroy the Magna Carta. Because the English are grown ups, including their conservatives who enjoy a wonderful luxury that conservatives on this side of the pond do not. They're allowed to be sane. They don't have to pander to creationists and anti-intellectuals. Only in this dumb country do liberals and conservatives argue over things like "evolution" and "climate change" and whether "sick people should be left to die in the street."

The conservative who won in England, David Cameron, was asked if he's religious, and he said, "I don't feel I have a direct line." That's right, he distanced himself from God. If Obama did that we wouldn't see him again until neighbors called the cops about the smell. Conservatives in England don't care about the 3 Gs -- God, guns and gays -- that tilt so many elections in America. And they don't get their policy ideas from TV shows, like 24. You never hear a Brit say, "I'm for torture because it worked on The Avengers."

The Washington Post said David Cameron won by running as a sort of "anti-Sarah Palin." Let those words settle in: "anti-Sarah Palin." They feel so good coming out of my mouth it's like I bit into a refreshing burst of civilization.

Finally, one hallmark of not being adult is a tendency to exaggerate. Like this week when Newt Gingrich said "the Obama administration represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did." Which is basically saying Obama is a billion times worse than any president ever! No, he's infinity times worse!

And it made me think: were we this deranged when Bush was in office? I don't think so -- and Bush merited it: We once did a sketch on this show where we sold George Bush fuck-up collector plates, which included: starting and mismanaging the Iraq War, not catching Bin Laden, Katrina, Abu Ghraib, transforming a budgetary surplus into a giant debt, not doing anything about global warming, sitting on his ass on 9/11, outing Valerie Plame, firing federal prosecutors for political reasons, nominating Harriet Miers, Terri Schiavo, trying to sell the ports to the Arabs...I mean, giant, tangible horrific fuckups that Obama could never equal.

Although with the way he's solving this oil spill, he's off to a good start.

To Pass Health Care, Democrats Should Be Against It

President Obama made a point the other day in speaking at the Republican retreat to say he wasn't an ideologue, and while there was skepticism in his audience about whether that was true, there was agreement in both parties that not being an ideologue is a good thing.

Is it? Maybe the problem is that neither party has any ideology anymore -- its just all about getting the money you need to run commercials at election time, and being against whatever the other party is for. For example, why is the decision to have the trial of Khalid "Shake Shake Shake" Mohammed in New York a Democratic position, and not having it in New York a Republican position? Republicans are usually the 24 loving macho warriors. Isn't it the more macho position to be saying, "Damn right we're going to try them at the scene of the crime! We're going to make that bastard look at Ground Zero right out the window of the courtroom every day -- we're going to stick his nose in it like a dog who's made a mess on the rug: 'Look what you did! Bad dog! Bad!!'"? I can much more easily imagine Bill O'Reilly making that case than Obama.

And yet, because its the Democrats who suggested it, the Republicans automatically piss all over it and find themselves backing the opposite approach, then make up a bunch of stupid reasons why: it'll fuck up traffic in Manhattan; it'll be a platform for Mohammed to "mock" us.

Really? The big tough guys are afraid of this loser mocking us?

Blue team says X, Red team says Y. You know how the Democrats can get health care passed? Say they're against it.