Real Time with Bill Maher #360 08 14 15 Nun-Sense and Gravitas

Gravitas by Talib Kweli

Nun-sense and Gravitas

by Catherine Giordano


Last week’s show was one of the best ever. I named the review Tsunami of Stupid because Bill Maher coined that phrase to describe the Republican debate. The show was a tsunami of comedy, satire, and fun. Unfortunately, Bill Maher and his guests did not hit that high water mark again on the August 14, 2015 show, episode #360. Nonetheless, the nonsense was skewered and a good time was had by all.

The interview—Sister Helen Prejean
Sister Helen Prejean is a criminal justice activist and death penalty abolitionist, founder of the Ministry Against the Death Penalty, author of The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions and Dead Man Walking: The Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty that Sparked a National Debate. I expected a passionate discussion on the immorality and injustice of capital punishment. What I got was a tepid conversation. 

Bill Maher wasted the first half of the interview reminiscing about his days as a young boy in Catholic school. The sisters smacked you with a ruler, but could we let that go and get on with current events? The new Pope is making some changes with respect to social justice and tolerance. (Bill remarked that Pope Francis said atheists can go to heaven adding, “I don’t care, but it is a nice gesture.” When Sister Prejean said there was less emphasis on sin with the current pope, Maher said, “Wow it really has changed. I got to give it a try again.”)  

Finally, the conversation moved to the death penalty. Sister Prejean said, “It is about us.” I expected her to talk about how executions coarsen society and make us no better than the murders. From a nun, I expected a discussion of morality.  

Instead she let Bill Maher get away with saying, “Let’s kill the right people. Let’s keep the death penalty for the worst of the worst.” She was on the show to talk about one condemned person in particular, someone scheduled to be executed in September. (I didn’t even catch his name because her presentation was that weak.) This man was in all probability innocent and even if he was guilty, his crime was far from being the worst of the worst. He wasn’t even involved in the actual killing, but was accused of hiring the person who did the killing.  

I think sister Prejean was trying to say that as long as we have executions we will have innocent people executed. But she made the case with such a lack of passion that most people probably never even heard it. What a waste of air time.

Here is the case she should have made. Thou Shall Not Kill: The Immorality of the Death Penalty and Why Innocent People are on Death Row. 

Here is a post giving some of Maher’s earlier comments on the subject. Death Row Follies

The Republicans Maher and the panel had a few things to day about the 17 Republicans running for Congress and the nonsense of the ‘100-car pileup that is the Republican field.’

In the monolog, Maher quipped:

“Donald Trump is offering free helicopter rides to kids at the Iowa State fair. Chris Christie countered by offering to be the bouncy house.” 

“Donald Trump said he has a plan for ISIS: I’d laugh, but he defeated Fox News in the period–gate scandal. Fox took a look at the ratings and then said that maybe Megyn was on the rag.” [In 2012, the first Republican debate had 3.2 million viewers; this time it got 26 million viewers.”]

“Worrying about Castro is like worrying about Bobby Jindal’s presidential campaign.” [Neither will have any effect on anything.]

Jeb Bush and War
Jeb Bush can’t seem to get it right on the Iraq War. He’s still defending it. He has to it is his brother’s war. Lawrence Wilkerson, a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William & Mary, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell was not in favor of this war then or now. He’s a military man (31 years in the U.S. Army, retired from active service in 1997 as a colonel) so he knows a little something about war. He said, “U.S. policy always was to stay offshore. Boots on the ground was out of the question. You don’t want to start a ground war in Asia.” Not surprisingly, he is for the deal with Iran. 


Women’s Issues


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Gov. Jennifer Granholm, former Governor of Michigan, Deputy Director of the American Jobs Project at UC Berkeley, Co-chair of Priorities USA Action, a super PAC that is supporting Hillary Clinton for President in 2016 and the author of A Governor's Story: The Fight for Jobs and America's Economic Future was the only woman on the show. She spoke up for women. 

Jeb Bush is proud to say that he defunded Planned Parenthood in Florida. Granholm pointed out that he did more than that. He improperly intervened in court cases that concerned abortion. He advocated for the “scarlet letter bill” that would have forced women who continued their pregnancies, but wanted to place the baby up for adoption, to publish their sexual histories in the newspaper. It was about public shaming.

Here is where panelist Doug Heye jumped in, loudly and obnoxiously. Heye was the Deputy Chief of Staff to former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (VA R) and was the RNC Communications Director. On the pretense of defending women he told us how he thought that the term “women’s issues” was insulting to women because women care about all issues, especially the economy and jobs.

So Granholm took him to school over how Republicans voted against the violence against women act, voted against equal pay for women, and are now threatening to shut down the government over Planned Parenthood. She pointed out that the Republicans had little to nothing to say about the middle class during the debate while having plenty to say about abortion.

[P.S. Women who care about the economy and jobs should definitely vote Democratic. Compare the economy and jobs situation now to when GWB was president.]

Mike Huckabee has been on the campaign trail saying that Jay Z treats his wife Beyonce as if he was her pimp. What nonsense! Maher scoffed saying that Beyonce runs her own career. [Talk about being insulting to women he compared Beyonce to a whore and said she had no mind of her own when it came to her career choices!]

The Mysterious People Who Aren’t Men
The talk about women was a great segue into the mid-show comedy bit. Maher read from a spoof children’s book with the above title.

The book taught children that there are “Voters out there who don’t have a penis,” “Women live in houses, not Mitt Romney’s binders,” and “Women exist even when we are not horny.”

Talib Kweli
Talib Kweli is a musician (his latest albums are Fuck the Money and Gravitas) and founder of The Action Support Committee. Some of his songs made it onto Obama’s play list.

Kweli recently did two concerts on the anniversary of the death of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson. The first concert was to raise money for the protestors and the second was for the family of Michael Brown.

Maher brought up the “Black Lives Matter” protestors who interrupted Bernie Sanders’ speech. He said that Sanders is not a racist. Kweli explained. “Activists are not about being polite. They changed the agenda. They forced the candidates to come up with a platform.”

Donald Trump
Donald Trump is still at the top of the polls, even in Iowa. Everyone said he would never 

 

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play in Iowa. He’s on his third wife and the evangelicals in Iowa won’t like his lack of piety about God and his New York bluster in general. Heye lamented that “the press is ignoring the serious candidates.” What Heye is missing is that Trump is transforming himself into a serious candidate. I watched Trump give his press conference in Iowa and he was good. He looked like a clown in the debate, but he is evidently a quick study.

He’s telling people what they want to hear. “I will make America great again.” Whatever problem America has, he has a “terrific” plan to fix it. . (He never says how he will fix it—just that it will be terrific.)

Personally, I think America is pretty great right now (compared to the GWB years) and the best way to see that America gets to be even more great is to elect a Democratic president with a Democratic Congress. The rest of the world does not think that “America is a joke” as Trump is fond of saying. (That was during the GWB years—now America is admired again.) 

But despite his lack of polish, Trump has modulated his tone and is starting to look like a serious candidate. He still talks nonsense, but he seems to have gained a bit of gravitas. (But will he tweet Putin 26 times at 3am if Putin says something that makes him angry?)

Hillary Clinton


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The final New Rules was about Hillary Clinton. Maher reminded us that he gave one million dollars to Obama and said now I have one million dollars …of advice for Hillary. It boiled down to lighten up. Be more like Trump. “Say I’ll be the best.”

I agree that the advice is worth a million dollars. I groan every time I see Hillary give a speech. She is so over-rehearsed. I know she wants to play it safe and not make a gaffe, and maybe she is right. But even her jokes sound so scripted. (I wonder how she will manage at the Correspondent’s Dinner.”)

Maher told her to laugh more, but to lose the cackle that makes her sound like "the wicked witch of the West Wing.”

Maher’s last bit of advice was what he called her “ace in the hole.” “Your husband Bill Clinton has to have an affair. You can get the magic back, but Bill has to humiliate you.” 

  

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Bill Maher’s Guests: Episode 360,  August 14, 2015

 

Interview

 

Sister Helen Prejean: Criminal justice activist and death penalty abolitionist, founder of the Ministry Against the Death Penalty, author of The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions and Dead Man Walking: The Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty that Sparked a National Debate

 

Mid-Show guest

Talib Kweli: Activist, musician, founder of The Action Support Committee. His latest albums are Fuck the Money (available on August 17) and Gravitas

 

Panel

Gov. Jennifer Granholm : Former Governor of Michigan, Deputy Director of the American Jobs Project at UC Berkeley, Co-chair of Priorities USA Action, a super PAC that is supporting Hillary Clinton for President in 2016. She is the author of A Governor's Story: The Fight for Jobs and America's Economic Future

Doug Heye: Deputy Chief of Staff to former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (VA R), former RNC Communications Director. He was recently selected as a Fall 2015 fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William & Mary, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. He served 31 years in the U.S. Army and retired from active service in 1997 as a colonel.

Real Time with Bill Maher #327 August 1, 2014 Frat Party

This magazine cover is from 1969,
but seems perfectly relevant today.

by Catherine Giordano

You know the last day of school or the last day at work just before a big four-day weekend. Everyone is there physically, but there is a giddy feeling in the air and, mentally, everyone is already on vacation. That was the feeling on Real Time with Bill Maher, episode 327, which aired on August 1, 2014.  

The “vacation” feeling, together with the fact that there were only men on the show, is why I named this review and recap of the show “Frat Party.” (Representative Barbara Lee (D, CA), author of Renegade for Peace and Justice: A Memoir of Political and Personal Courage, was supposed to be on the show, but the House of Representatives had to delay their own five-week vacation in order to take some votes that they should have taken earlier in the week, so Ms. Lee had to cancel her appearance.)

Douglas Brinkley, professor of history at Rice University, fellow at the non-partisan think tank, The James Baker Institute for Public Policy,  and author of several books including his latest book The Nixon Tapes: 1971-1972 was also supposed to be on the show.  I can't find out why he wasn't on the show--maybe he went on vacation.)

 

New Rules: Slack Like Me

 

Even the Final New Rules segment was about vacation.  Maher began by reporting that the United States scores 17^th on the world happiness index. “Why?” Maher asks. Because we work too much and too hard. Or, as Maher put it, “Our balance of working to living is off.”

  

For example, “Half the country is fighting to keep a job working in a coal mine, a job so bad that when we want to describe a job that is bad we say, "It is like working in a coal mine.’”

  

[I know working in a coal mine and dying from black lung disease or a cave-in is a tradition for some families in some parts of the country, but give it up already. I like those commercials for Siemans on TV that show these happy people in Iowa working to make wind turbines. They look so happy and so proud…and so clean. Those are the jobs of the future. Coal miners, listen up: The sooner the coal industry is gone, the better it will be for you.] 

 

He blamed our workaholic ways on religion. "The Catholic Church says God loves poverty. That is why he made so much of it. Then the Protestants came along and said God wants everyone to be rich …or die trying.”

  

Next Maher went on a rant about the Cadillac commercial from a couple of years ago where a man berates the people of other countries for taking it easy, but here in America we work hard, so we can buy Cadillacs. Bill said that Americans are working hard so they can die from a heart attack at 50, while Europeans take a siesta in the afternoon. You know what that means. They are having sex in the afternoon and we are not.

 

Maher berated lottery winners who collect their winnings and then say they are going back to their job. "What a waste of good luck”, he said. He said that Aussies are always the life of the party—why—because they don’t have jobs.

  

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Then Maher triumphantly announced that he was taking August off.  And part of September too. He won’t be back until September 12. I felt like this whole new rule was just about Maher feeling guilty about going on vacation. (Fess up, Bill, if you won the lottery you'd still do this show and your personal appearances, too.)

 

Here I am on Saturday morning, typing away at my computer instead of enjoying the beautiful Florida sunshine.  But I like writing, and if I went outside, I’d probably be weeding the yard. So staying inside and writing is a vacation. By the way, Florida is a wonderful place for a vacation. Pick up a travel guide, and come on down. 

  

Chris Hardwick, mid-show guest

 

Spend an hour with the mid show guest, Chris Hardwick, a comedian, actor, screenwriter, musician, podcaster, television host for @Midnight on Comedy Central (and Talking Bad and Taking Dead), author of The Nerdist Way: How to Reach the Next Level (In Real Life) and you might feel like you need a vacation. He has a lot of manic energy, but he’s so funny, so delightful, so affable, that you won’t want to leave.

 

Maher said that Chris was the head of the nerd empire. Hardwick instantly refused the title. “Nerd power will take me down. Nerds understand something down to the molecular level, and then they use that information against people. I am just a servant of the nerd army.” Talented, good-looking, and modest too. If Hardwick is a nerd, he will change the image of nerds everywhere.

 

Hardwick spoke about social media. “You are interfacing with a machine, with text; you are not looking in people’s eyes. The problem with social media is, one, you can be anonymous and therefore not have to take responsibility and, two, it is an emotion in the moment. A minute later, you don’t feel that way anymore and you don’t even know why you said it.”

 

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Maher brought up “FakeBook” and “OK Stupid” who were doing Dr.Mengele-like experiments. Facebook decided to put only negative posts into the news feed of some people and OK Cupid sent people random matches. Why? Evidently, just because they could. Gee, if you can’t trust social media, who can you trust?

 

Hardwick explained that the internet is used as a ‘vessel of anger.”  He warned that since you can’t read emotion, you should try to understand before you respond with anger. Maybe that innocent-sounding remark actually is actually just an innocent remark and not meant to be sarcastic. So Chris Hardwick is a nice guy too.

 

He’d be a great asset at a frat party.

 

Ralph Nader, interview guest

 

You probably won’t find Ralph Nader, political activist, former candidate (and spoiler) in the presidential election of 2000, and author of several books including his latest book (with Luke Nichter) Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. Maher began the interview by mentioning the time on is show that Maher, along with Michael Moore, were down on their knees, begging Nader to get out of the 2000 race. 

 

Nader didn’t get out and he still refuses to take responsibility for having inflicted George W. Bush upon the nation. He still maintains that it doesn’t make any difference who is elected because Republicans and Democrats are the same. My response is: Yes, they are the same, in the same way that an ant and a tiger are the same. They will both bite you, but would you rather be bitten by an ant or a tiger? Democrats are far from perfect-they are pawns of Wall Street too, but they avoid the worse excesses and they do some good.

 

Bill Maher made the point too. “What if we had Mitt-McCain for president, a president who thinks he will inherit his own planet with Lindsey Graham?”  Maher went on, “We’d have Ted Nugent on the Supreme Court, we’d be at war with nine countries, the auto industry would have been allowed to die, and tax rates for the rich would be 3%.”

 

Maher and Nader spoke about President Obama calling out “corporate deserters”—companies that take everything that America offers (subsidies, research, protection) to succeed and then want to take the money and run. They buy a small company in another country where taxes are low, and then claim that their major business here in the United States is a subsidiary of the small company in order to avoid paying taxes in the United States. A Republican president would be trying to make it easier for corporations to do this, unlike President Obama, who wants to stop this practice.

  

And that, Mr. Nader, is the difference between Democrats and Republicans.  And that, Mr. Nader, is why I will never forgive you for your ego-trip/publicity stunt in 2000. (I keep typing “nadir” instead of “Nader.” A Freudian slip?)

 

The panel

 

The three men on the panel were:

 

Andrew Ross Sorkin, journalist, financial columnist for The New York Times, co-anchor of CNBC's Squawk Box, and author of Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System--and Themselves

 

Reza Aslan: scholar of religion, associate professor of creative writing at the University of California, and author of several books including Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth 

 

Doug Heye, Eric Cantor’s deputy chief of staff for communications. (Since Eric Cantor lost his primary and announced that he was quitting instead of serving his full term, maybe Doug Heye considers his appearance on the show to be a job interview. He doesn’t have a book to promote.)

 

Everyone got along well and pretty much agreed on the issues. (That’s the frat party aspect again—they sounded like guys sitting around the frat house discussing things over a few beers.)  

Economy

 

Conservative Doug Heye had to admit that we have seen some good job growth, and then added,  “But it is not good enough.” We have all heard that ‘but” so many times, so Maher’s replied “Blah Blah Blah.” (Later Maher told Heye he was just looking for a reason to hate Obama. Heye denied this and then denied his denial by saying, "I don't have to look far." I need to think that part about everyone getting along well. Maybe they didn't get along all that well.)

 

Israel-Hamas

 

The panel was pretty much in agreement that maybe the United States should stop giving money to other counties (including Israel) so that they can use that money to buy weapons from the United States. They did disagree though about blaming Israel for the fighting with Hamas.

 

Aslan thought that since Israel is a democracy, it must be held to a higher standard.  But he also noted that even Arab states headed by tyrants and dictators don’t like Hamas. Maher pointed out that when Arab countries get to vote for their leaders, we get the Muslim Brotherhood and not democracy. 

 

Marijuana, Drugs, Redeem Act

 

They were all back in agreement when the topic turned to drug laws and incarceration rates—they agreed that they were stupid. Sorkin said that it was ridiculous that marijuana was a “schedule A” drug with heroin, while meth and coke were “schedule B.”  Maher talked about Senators Cory Booker (D, NJ) and Rand Paul (R, KY) teaming up for the “Redeem Act”—an act that, if passed, would give young people convicted of drug offenses a chance to wipe their record clean.

 

In Florida, where I live, we will be voting on medical marijuana in November.  Some polls show 90% approval. So perhaps, the Redeem Act stands a chance of becoming law.

 

Mid-show Comedy Segment

For the last show before the August vacation, it’s traditional to do a segment about the headlines we might see while the show is on hiatus. Here are a few.

Maylasian Airlines Lands One 

Supreme Court Rules Female Orgasm Unconstitutional

GM Recalls Three Remaining Cars

See the details and a video clip at Headline Predictions.

Sharknado

Maher did a New Rules segment about Sharknado 2. He said that will have to try harder to be stupid because, "Have you ever seen Heaven is for Real?"

 

I’ll do a full recap of this bit later on my other blog, Bill Maher Rules (for real)   

Real Time on Hiatus

 

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This is the last new ‘Real Time” until September 12.
  

What will I do with my Saturday mornings without a new review to write? What will I do with my Friday nights? Does anyone know of a frat party I could go to?  Maybe I should just watch the movie.

Thank you for liking, sharing, and tweeting this post.
Also, thanks for using my amazon links to buy stuff.

 

Read what Bill Maher said about the border crisis: Border Crossings


 Bill Maher’s Guests #327 August 1, 2014

Ralph Nader: political activist, former candidate (and spoiler) in the presidential election of 2000, author of several books including his latest book (with Luke Nichter) Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State 

Reza Aslan: scholar of religion, associate professor of creative writing at the University of California, author of several books including Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

Andrew Ross Sorkin: journalist, financial columnist for The New York Times, co-anchor of CNBC's Squawk Box, author of Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System--and Themselves

 

Doug Heye: Eric Cantor’s deputy chief of staff for communications

Chris Hardwick: Comedian, actor, screenwriter, musician, podcaster, television host for @Midnight on Comedy Central, author of The Nerdist Way: How to Reach the Next Level (In Real Life)