One of the things I hate about professional sports in the US is the way that wealthy team owners extort public money for fancy stadiums that not only do not benefit the public but actually siphon money away from much needed and better services that many more people would benefit from. It is one more of the many ways that money is diverted from the poor to the rich.
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Jerry Seinfeld has a comedy series where he invites a fellow comedian to have coffee with him and they drive to a coffee shop, have breakfast, and drive back, just talking all the while. The series is called Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (naturally) and is a nice chance to see comedians have an unscripted conversation, though the footage is edited.
His latest guest was Stephen Colbert.
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I tend to favor the underdog. And there is no question that the oligarchy, the one-percenters who control so much of the nation’s wealth and seek even more as their just due, have been taking a beating in parts of the media. It is just not fair. Thankfully, someone has recognized this imbalance and started a news channel called “One Percent News so that they can get their side of the story out to combat all the negative propaganda being waged against this fine group of people.
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There is no chance that Donald Trump will ever become the nominee of the Republican party for president, despite the fact that he has surged to #2 in some polls. Even within the Republican party there is a limit (the crazification factor of 27%) to the number of people who will support an out-and-out buffoon and he has to share that vote with the likes of Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee, and Rick Santorum. At the very worst, the party establishment will deliberately torpedo his candidacy if he becomes a real threat.
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Ohio, the state I live in, can claim to be the birthplace of many presidents but none of them covered themselves with great glory. That does not mean that the people of Ohio are not capable of jealously guarding the right to name random national landmarks after them, as Jordan Klepper discusses with reference to an Alaskan mountain that the native Athabascan population has always referred to as Denali though officially it is called Mount McKinley.
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There is this weird idea among some people, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, that women are not as funny as men. Christopher Hitchens put his foot in it in 2007 in an essay titled Why Women Aren’t Funny and though he got some well-deserved flak for what seemed like deliberate obtuseness, perhaps in order to buff up his self-image of being a contrarian provocateur, it did not seem to change his mind.
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As the number of presidential candidates keeps rising (14 Republicans and 5 Democrats so far), their attempts to distinguish themselves from the others are getting more and more desperate and pathetic, especially on the Republican side. Meanwhile the merchandising and marketing tactics range from just simply crass to ridiculous.
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After celebrating the good decisions by the US Supreme Court on Obamacare and same-sex marriage, the next day Jon Stewart and The Daily Show team looked at two other decisions that conservatives are hailing as good news, that will either allow companies to more easily pollute the air or will kill death row inmates more painfully.
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Both The Daily Show and The Nightly Show celebrated the decisions on Obamacare and same-sex marriage made fun of the dire warnings of the opponents that these developments heralded the coming of the Apocalypse.
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