The Nightly Show tackles the Bill Cosby rape allegations

The second episode of Larry Wilmore’s new show was entirely about the rape allegations against Bill Cosby, with Wilmore saying right off the top that he thinks Cosby did behave in a manner largely consistent with what his accusers claim. Wilmore is definitely not going to play it safe and this might be the distinctive feature of his show, where people can go to hear frank discussions of major topics, leavened with humor, and by people who are not the usual suspects one sees on such shows. [Read more…]

Huckabee the snake-oil salesman

There was a time back in 2008 when I started becoming aware of Mike Huckabee that I thought that he seemed like a compassionate conservative, someone who was religious but also cared about helping the poor. He would go on shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report and act all affable and avuncular and talk a good game, as if he was a reasonable person.
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Clayton Bigsby – a most unusual white supremacist

In 2003, comedian Dave Chappelle began a sketch comedy show on Comedy Central that was highly acclaimed because it took head-on all the major hot button issues of the day. But after just two seasons he abruptly quit, saying he was fed up with show business and fame. Here is one of the best known sketches from the show, the story of a KKK leader named Clayton Bigsby, told in the style of a Frontline documentary. (Language advisory)
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Jimmy Carter on the attempts to cure major diseases

While I have my criticisms of some aspects of Jimmy Carter’s record while he was president, there is no question that he was one of the better ones in recent times and has been doing some good work since returning to private life. The former president spoke with Jon Stewart about the efforts, in which his own center has participated, that have led to the almost complete eradication of the awful disease caused by the guinea worm.
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A curious case of repetition

Writing a daily comic strip has to be one of the hardest things to do in the creative arts. Having to come up with a good and original joke every single day is something I cannot imagine doing, assuming that I can come up with any jokes at all, which I can’t. Cartoonists often fall back on familiar tropes such as people stuck on a desert island or the Garden of Eden or the fortune teller with a crystal ball and the repetition of such tropes is seen as fair game as long as the joke is slightly different. Some cartoonists have their own particular tropes that they fall back upon.
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On holding everyone responsible for the actions of a few

The odious Rupert Murdoch has weighed in with a series of tweets that all Muslims are essentially responsible for the Charlie Hebdo killers, and author J. K. Rowling and others have responded ridiculing him. Jon Stewart and a panel of The Daily Show correspondents used the Murdoch episode as a springboard to discuss the double standard of those like Murdoch who demand that all Muslims denounce all acts of violence by any Muslim anywhere.
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How many days are there in a week?

Believe it or not, the answer to this question became the subject of a very heated exchange on a site devoted to fans of bodybuilding. Like all great philosophical debates it all stemmed from asking, as Socrates so often did to provoke deep thought among his pupils, a simple question that you might have felt had a straightforward answer. In this case, the question was: If you exercise every other day, how many days a week are you doing it?

The argument raged on and on and is quite hilarious.