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Nov. 5, 2010 - Jimmy Dore Show
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20101105_The_Jimmy_Dore_Show_-_November_4_2010
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It's the Jimmy Door Show.
The show for...
The kind of people that are...
It's the show that makes Anderson Cooper say.
It's hard to talk to you, T-Doggy.
So sit back or sit up or keep driving.
Because it's the Jimmy Dore Show.
And now, here's a guy who sounds a lot like me.
It's Jimmy Dore!
Hi, everybody, and welcome to the Jimmy Door Show.
I'm in studio, joined by Ben Zalavansky, sitting across from me, and to my right, Robert Yasimura.
And we're waiting on David Feldman.
He doesn't come in that much since he's got his own show now at KPFK.
Okay, here we go.
You know what?
I'm going to let you know what's coming up on today's show.
And why do I do that?
Because people love to know what's coming up.
We're going to talk about the election.
That's right.
We're going to talk about the election.
And finally, the Democrats know what it's like to be a regular American because they just got their house repossessed too.
That's right.
The Republicans swept the house, which is weird because they usually hire illegal immigrants to do that.
People say they blame it on Barack Obama being detached from his base.
There are reports that he thought Huffington Post was an NFL wide receiver route.
We're going to talk about all that coming up.
Aboron's going to call in.
Jim Hightower talks to us.
We're going to go over the California's crazy ballot proposition game with a lot lot, and we're going to talk about Jon Stewart's false equivalency between the left and the right.
But right now, let's go ahead and take a listen to what I thought about the elections.
I have a message.
A message from the Tea Party.
A message that is loud and clear and does not mince words.
We've come to take our government back.
That's Teabagger Rand Paul, who was victorious in his run for Senate in Kentucky.
He's pledging to take our government back.
How far back, Rand Paul?
I think Rand Paul would like to take it back to before the Civil Rights Act.
Let's move on to teabagger Christine O'Donnell.
Christine O'Donnell lost big, but she's not going to let a minor detail like losing spoil a perfectly good victory party.
We worked hard.
We had an incredible victory.
Be encouraged.
We have won.
No, Christine, I double-checked it, and you lost.
So, but wait a minute.
I know what she's trying to do.
She's trying to cast a spell.
Hey, Christine, is that a cauldron full of bats in your pocket?
Are you just happy to see me?
Don't look now, but it's crazy man Carl Palladino.
I have a message for Andrew Cuomo, the next governor of New York.
I've always said my baseball bat is a metaphor for the people who want to take their government back.
As our next governor, you can grab this handle and bring the people with you to Albany.
Or you can leave it untouched and run the risk of having it wielded against you.
Because make no mistake, you have not heard the last of Carl Palladino.
Ooh, that's some tough talk by Carl Palladino, threatening Governor-elect Cuomo that if he doesn't do what Palladino wants, he's going to come back in four years and lose again.
Now, the conventional wisdom is that the Tea Partiers really cleaned up last night.
Then they swept and took control of the entire Congress.
But just how well did they actually do?
I need some numbers.
140 candidates backed by local or national Tea Party groups ran for Congress yesterday.
45 of them won.
When a handful of remaining races are tallied, as many as 95 of those Tea Partiers will have lost.
Wow.
So out of 140 Teabaggers, only 45 of them won.
Huh.
That's interesting.
Because it goes against everything I've heard on every news show since.
Okay, so contrary to conventional wisdom, the Tea Partiers didn't really do as well as everyone said, but they didn't actually hurt the Republican Party, did they?
And even some Republicans are saying that if Tea Partiers like Christine O'Donnell had not pulled victory from the GOP's grasp in states like Delaware and Colorado, Republicans would now control the Senate as well.
Now, why the Teabaggers didn't particularly do that well?
The Republicans did very well.
So well that they're going to get a new speaker.
It's John Boehner, whose skin color doesn't rhyme with anything.
Hey, John, what are your plans now that you're in control of the House?
We recognize this is a time for us to roll up our sleeves and go to work on the people's priorities.
That's great.
After 19 years in Congress, John Boehner says it's time he rolls up his sleeves and get down to working on the people's priorities.
And what are those priorities, John?
Creating jobs, cutting spending, and reforming the way Congress does its business.
Oh, you mean, so basically the opposite of everything you guys did two years ago when you were in power.
Okay, I got you.
And now that John Boehner and the Republicans have a majority in the Congress, everybody's talking it's time for bipartisanship.
They have to work together.
That's what the American people want.
That's what everybody says.
But let's remember how this new brand of Republicans sees bipartisanship.
Just what is bipartisanship to the modern-day Republican?
To us, bipartisanship is them being forced to agree with us after we have politically cleaned their clocks and beaten them.
And that has to be what we're focused on.
Okay, so that's just Rush Limbaugh, and that's just him giving some hyperbole, I'm sure.
I'm sure the Republicans are going to compromise.
I mean, they're grown-ups.
They want to get their policies through, and now they have a little power.
I'm sure they're going to compromise.
That's what everybody says has to be done.
So who's going to compromise first?
Is it going to be the new Speaker of the House, John Boehner?
This is not a time for compromise.
Okay, that's new Speaker of the House, John Boehner, down as a no on compromise.
How about the chairman of the House Republican Conference, Mike Pence?
Are you going to compromise?
If I haven't been clear enough yet, let me say again, no compromise.
Wow, okay.
So what about the Senate Republican majority leader, Mitch McConnell?
Is he going to compromise?
What does Mitch say?
Over the next two years, he says, quote, the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.
I mean, come on, you guys.
There's got to be some room for compromise.
You guys only have one house of Congress.
I mean, come on, we're all Americans, aren't we?
We can come together and work together.
There's got to be room for that.
Where is there room for any compromise with Marxism or socialism or liberalism.
Where is the compromise with evil?
Okay, so if the Republicans in Congress, the Republicans in the Senate, and even the professional right doesn't want to compromise, what's going to happen?
Gridlock?
What about the people?
What about the tea-bagging people?
Let's go to Mark Meckler, the founder of the Tea Party Patriots.
Are the Tea Party Patriots people ready to compromise?
The American people have spoken loud and clear, and they're not in a flexible mood.
They are not in a mood for compromise.
Holy crap.
So you're telling me the Republicans in the Senate aren't going to compromise.
The Republicans in the House aren't going to compromise.
You're telling me that the professional right isn't going to compromise.
And the Republican people aren't going to compromise either.
Well, who is going to compromise?
I'm willing to compromise in the past, and I'm going to be willing to compromise going forward.
We have politically cleaned their clocks and beaten them.
Okay, well, thank God somebody's going to go ahead and compromise.
But you know what scares me the most?
I just get this eerie feeling that the teabaggers, they're just so 120,000% owned by corporations that they don't even really care about what's happening to the working people of America.
And not only do they don't care, they don't even know.
They don't even know to care.
In fact, I have a feeling they don't even know that there are poor people or even a middle class in America.
The thing is, is we're all interconnected.
There are no rich.
There are no middle class.
There are no poor.
We all are interconnected in the economy.
Really, Rand Paul?
There are no poor people?
There are no middle class in America?
There are no rich?
Well, if you don't think that there's poor people or middle class people in America, then how are you going to push policies that are in their interest if you don't even know they're there?
I mean, of course there's a middle class in America.
Rand, if you haven't noticed, that's what makes America great, or that's what I was told.
That's what separates us from the rest of the world.
Our thriving middle class.
The ability for anybody who was willing to work 40 hours a week could have a decent life in America, which is why everybody wants to come to America.
That's what I thought that made us different than the rest of the world, our middle class.
You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples.
There are nations.
There are no peoples.
There are no Russians.
There are no Arabs.
There are no third worlds.
There is no West.
There is only one holistic system of systems.
One vast and humane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars.
Petro dollars, electro dollars, multi-dollars, Reichmarks, RIMS, rubles, pounds, and seconds.
There is no America.
There is no democracy.
There is only IBM and ITT and AT ⁇ T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon.
Those are the nations of the world today.
And that is how I saw the election, ladies and gentlemen.
The Tea Party, their influence, overstated, understated.
What do you think they did?
I'll throw it to you, Ben.
Well, I think it couldn't possibly be more overstated.
Nobody's talking about anything except that.
The Tea Party, they sent a message and the people have spoken.
And it's all the same people that spoke exactly the opposite way two years ago.
And yet now there's some great revolution that has happened.
And even though most of them lost, that's not really that important.
They just have, they're just so darn angry.
Yeah, I mean, when the economy's in the tank, people want to change.
And every president, you know, loses Congress and their first midterm.
Like it always happened.
Like this may have been a little worse than some, but it's just nothing unexpected.
And these were the people that were poised.
The reason why this was worse than before, I think, oh, David Feldman is here, ladies and gentlemen, walking in, a three-time Emmy Award winner, 18-time Emmy Award loser.
21 times.
21 times.
David Feldman is here, and we're talking about the election.
Robert, what do you think about the Teabaggers' influence on this election?
I don't.
They're claiming that they won something they didn't.
The Republican Party won those seats.
The Teabaggers didn't win those seats.
The people who were Teabag Tea Party candidates only won 32% of the races that they were in.
Of course, they would have won them.
So anyway, the Republican Party would have won those anyway.
They won the Republican nominations in those districts, but that's not that big a deal.
And by the way, Congress is full of lunatics anyway.
Like, winning a congressional seat doesn't require sanity or good policy.
That is true.
Like, I mean, go and look at some of the congresspeople that we've elected over the years.
They're lunatics.
The observation that I had made about the Tea Partiers was that they did hurt them.
I think they hurt them more.
And now they're going to just make them more strident.
They're going to make the Republicans dig their heels in.
I mean, John Boehner's not going to be able to compromise.
They're not going to allow him to come.
So now we're going to have gridlock.
But they want gridlock.
Like, that's the goal.
The goal is right.
The goal is to say we're going to try something and they're going to stop us.
And we're going to campaign and say that the Democrats are obstructionists.
Right.
Which is complete nonsense.
And it starts with Obamacare.
they're gonna say, "Okay, we're gonna repeal Obamacare," which they legally cannot do.
But what they'll do is...
They might defund it, but they might not.
They might just leave it in place.
But either way, they're going to win that argument if the Democrats do what they always do, which is puss out.
Yeah, not get some talking points, not get boots on the ground, get talking points out there, get the truth out there.
So Palin 2012.
Palin 2012.
But don't you think the truth was out there this time?
Like, it's out there if you want to find it.
And it's out there.
Like, the truth is the truth.
No, truth enough.
People really aren't voting.
They're voting emotionally, not intellectually.
And the people that vote that way will always vote that way.
And you can put a whole list of accomplishments in front of them and a whole list of terrible things from the other side in front of them.
And it doesn't make a difference.
And that's that.
It's pure cognitive dissonance.
But you just explained exactly what's wrong with the Democratic Party.
They are trying to win logically.
Yeah.
They're not going to win logically.
Yeah, they're not going to win using common sense.
They're not going to win.
They're going to start playing the Republican.
Yeah, but they're not going to think about it.
Let's bring David in.
Let's bring David in.
David, they said it's the biggest sweep in history for the Republicans.
And my point was, well, the reason why it's such a big sweep is because the Democrats took what was normally a Republican seat two years ago, like a bunch of them.
So that's why they lost so many.
And here we are.
So what's your opinion on the election, David?
Well, I'm the eternal optimist until they come knocking on my door and putting me in a camp.
But I think we're at the beginning of a major progressive wave that's going to last 30 years.
I do.
I do.
And I think that this was a really house.
I think it was a bump in the road.
Look, we have our first African-American president.
We have two wars.
We have a horrible economy.
And the fact that the Democrats were able to keep the Senate, we still have a president for the next two years.
There's nobody who's going to be able to defeat him in 2012, which means either we turn into a fascist state before that, or Obama wins in a landslide, which means that wave will give the Democrats back the House.
And it's going to be the beginning of a progressive movement that, you know, Reagan started in 1980 and it collapsed in 2008 when the banks disappeared.
We're at the beginning now of an alterable liberal wave that will continue for a very long time.
Why, in what way is Obama liberal?
But he's well, he is.
I hear what you're saying, Robert, 100%.
But yes, he is not liberal in lots of ways.
In fact, more ways than not, he's to the right of center.
But he is to the left of center on certain things.
All right.
They did finally take, you know, that what the hell has Obama done thing that people have been passing around on Facebook and Twitter.
And I went to it and I was impressed with some of the stuff they've, but overall, he's losing.
I mean, David, this is the first time I've heard someone with that kind of attitude.
I mean, that's kind of refreshed.
I feel by wild.
Well, I think that I'm not trying to take this the wrong way.
I understand the rage you have.
It's a little, it's a little infantile.
And you're much smarter than I am, but there's realities to taking a government over, and it doesn't happen overnight.
And yes, people are suffering.
And we have one-third of our children suffer from food insecurity in this country.
It's disgraceful.
We have two wars that are disgraceful.
But you can't expect President Obama to take a sick and diseased, cancer-riddled nation, a disgusting country for the past eight years, you know, who almost deserves what's happening to it because of what we've done to Iraq and Afghanistan.
You can't in two years turn this nation around, suddenly make us moral.
We sat back.
That was not what I'm saying.
I'm saying it takes time.
I don't think anybody thought that Obama was going to flip a switch and everything was going to go back to normal again.
I think, speaking for myself at least, my problem is that I felt like he should have been pulling a little harder in this tug of war.
Like, he started off right in the middle and continues to.
He's the only guy, you know, in the clip that you played that still in the compromise.
Like, if we were exactly where we were, but I felt like he had tried for things and missed, I'd be a lot happier with his performance.
I see most legislation passed since Lyndon Johnson.
Yeah, but he could.
Well, he did have both.
He did have a supermajority, and he did have both houses of Congress.
So, I mean, that's he should have.
So, I mean, you're right.
And it's one of those Jimmy Carters.
Blue Dog Democrats.
I mean, come on, we have a diseased Democratic Party.
He did the best he could with what he had to work with.
We're a nation of idiots.
And by the way, anybody who's listened to this show knows I agree more or less with what you're saying.
Yes.
I give that guy a lot of slack, but when he came out yesterday and said it is time for compromise, I lost my mind.
I couldn't, like, you could not.
But what do you think?
But here's the beauty of it.
Here's why I'm optimistic.
He got more done in 18 months than any Democratic president has gotten done since Lyndon Johnson.
Hang on, let me finish for one second.
Now you're going to have this crook, Darrell Issa, on the Republican side, holding hearings, locking up legislation.
That's okay, because for the next two years, Obama can focus on foreign policy and all the agencies under his purview.
He's got a lot of power.
There's a lot of stuff he can do as president.
Let Congress fight it out.
Let them hold their hearings.
He can do more as president signing executive orders right now.
Forget the legislative branch.
He can appoint maybe another Supreme Court justice.
He can appoint more circuit judges.
But is he going to do that the way Bush used the executive Bush did?
You know what?
We're up against the clock.
We're going to continue this on the other side of the break.
But right now, we're going to take an examination of the crazy California ballot proposition system.
Those of you who don't live in California, maybe you don't know this.
But the Golden State has this totally awesome system of direct democracy.
It's called the proposition system.
It's great.
It allows every registered voter in the state to vote on all kinds of public policies, which will have the force of state law.
See, everybody gets to make law.
Everybody.
No matter how illiterate or credulous you might be, you get to have your say.
It's kind of like American Idol, but with more primitive vote counting technology.
Now, there's a few ways you can get a proposition on the ballot in California.
One, the state legislature proposes a constitutional amendment and it gets put on the ballot.
Two, a proposal is put on the ballot to veto an existing law by a popular petition of no less than 5% of those who voted in the last gubernatorial election.
Gubernatorial.
Or three, a petition can be made to the Attorney General of the state to change the Constitution if 8% of the voting public sign the petition, or a statute can be put on the ballot with 5% signatures.
Or four, you could strangle a flightless bird by the light of a full moon, then draw three backward sixes in the dirt with a pointed stick no shorter than 12 inches and no longer than 24 inches while sitting on a glossy 8x10 publicity photo of Ronald Reagan from bedtime for Bonzo.
Now, one of those methods is something I just made up.
And if you can guess which one, you're smart enough to vote in the proposition system.
Basically, besides the actual legislature, if you want something put on the ballot, all you need is the money and time to put boots on the ground collecting signatures.
And why not?
What on earth could go wrong?
Everybody knows that the most noble public servants are the ones with limitless time and money and an axe to grind.
Just look at Mel Gibson.
So once a measure is on the ballot, all it needs is a simple majority.
That's better than 50% to be enacted.
Let me restate that.
A simple majority vote amends the state constitution.
By comparison, to even propose to amend the federal Constitution, you need a two-thirds majority of Congress.
And to ratify an amendment requires a three-fourths majority of all the state legislatures.
Californians get, let's say, a dozen or so ballot measures to consider every election cycle.
Fortunately, voters have plenty of time on their hands to study the ballot measures and Track down who's really behind them.
And thanks in large part to a great public school system, California voters each possess the skills to analyze what the long-term costs of each proposition may be.
Yeah, that's right.
So somewhere in the middle of working two or three jobs, raising their kids, and sitting in traffic on highways clogged with more cars than Jay Leno's garage, you're basically asking a California voter to get the equivalent of a poli-sci degree just so they can vote on the propositions.
And yet, still, sometimes we manage to get lucky and defeat ballot measures like Proposition 23, an attempt by major energy companies to roll back major environmental legislation.
Of course, it goes the other way too, like Proposition 24, where we decided to give a $2.1 billion tax break to corporations in the middle of a recession.
Money which likely will come out of the state education budget.
Or take Prop 20 and 27.
They kind of cancel each other out.
Prop 20 passed and Prop 27 failed.
And depending how you read it, one of the propositions will make it easier to gerrymander voting districts while the other one won't.
Or not.
Or something.
I mean, you know, who the hell knows?
And sometimes these propositions have the side benefit of screwing over the state legislature by requiring that they allocate money in a specific way, as in the recently passed Prop 22.
Prop 22 prevents the state government from allocating local funds to stop a statewide crisis.
You know, a statewide crisis, like to keep the schools open or something stupid like that.
Well, Prop 22 is going to prevent the state from doing something like that again.
I mean, why entrust our elected leaders to make those decisions on an emergency basis when you can hand the power over to the minority of people who even bother to come out to vote in the first place?
The failed Prop 21 would have levied an $18 annual car tax in order to save the state park system.
Hard to believe that one tanked.
People love to raise their own taxes.
You know, I wouldn't have thought you could put a price on our precious and dwindling natural resources, but I guess you can, and it's 18 bucks a year.
And Californians said no.
Prop 26, which makes it virtually impossible to levy fees on corporations without a two-thirds majority.
And by the way, a two-thirds majority is totally easy to get when you need it.
Just try figuring out where to eat with your family, and you'll see.
But that doesn't matter.
Getting a two-thirds majority is vitally important, except when it comes to Proposition 25, which makes state budget passage possible with a simple 51% majority, instead of the previous impossible-to-get two-thirds majority, because, you know, until yesterday, it took 67% of the legislature to pass an annual budget.
But it only took a simple majority of the population to amend the state constitution.
You know, to say, prevent gay people from visiting one another in the hospital.
So there's your crass course in California's cuckoo nutty system of ballot measures.
Now, some of you might be saying, why doesn't the whole country have this totally cool way of making laws?
Because the rest of the country is totally hung up on this ridiculous notion that the founders designed the country as a republic.
Yeah, that we're supposed to elect smart people whose only job is to understand the complexities of public policy and then make decisions for us based on that information.
What a crock, huh?
Stuff like that is best left to the masses.
You know, the people who brought you slavery and Jim Crow laws and more recently, Jeff Dunham and Dancing with the Stars.
And as we all know, the will of the people is the only will that really matters.
Except when it comes to legalizing pot.
I wanted my legalized pot people.
I wanted safe, totally taxed and regulated pot.
And I wanted it at my local 7-Eleven and I wanted it to be awesome.
But now, most people are going to continue to get their pot completely tax-free and unregulated through a gray-to-black market of potentially nefarious characters who, at least in California, make the purchasing of marijuana easier than buying a beer.
And yeah, I guess I'll have to continue ruining society through all those pot-fueled violent crimes you're always hearing about.
But otherwise, I gotta love California.
I do.
I love you just the way you are.
Which I'd better, since it's virtually impossible to remove the balloting process from the Constitution.
I mean, you can do it, but not without capturing a virgin in a canvas bag and sinking her into the La Brea tar pits on the day of the winter solstice.
Then it's possible.
The Jimmy Door show is available as a podcast for free.
Just go to iTunes or go to JimmyDoorComedy.com.
And why not help make the Jimmy Door show possible by clicking on Donate and becoming a recurring donor?
And I'll send you a CD as a thank you.
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This is the Jimmy Dore Show on Pacifica.
This is the Jimmy Dore Show.
so Okay, we're back on the Jimmy Door show, and thanks everybody who came out in Ventura last weekend, Venture Harbor Harbor Comedy Club.
It was a fantastic time.
Two out of the three shows were great.
At 66, two out of three.
You're going to make it into the Hall of Fame with those kind of numbers.
I mean, two of those shows were two of my favorite shows of my life.
Those are pretty fun shows.
Then the third show had a couple of drunk cops at the show.
That always works out great.
I'm a drunk cop and I can do it.
Oh, yeah.
Who are you going to call?
Oh, you.
How do you respond to a drunk cop?
Do I go to where you work and shoot autistic black guys who don't have a gun?
Oh, I'm writing that one down for the next time.
Oh, yeah, I would definitely say that.
Anyway, I want to let people know about my shows that are coming up in Claremont.
There's a Flappers Comedy Club.
There's one here in Burbank, and there's one out in Claremont, which I will be at next weekend, the 12th and 13th of November.
The Jimmy Doer show comes out to the Flappers in Claremont.
If you call right now, 818-985-5735.
That's 818-985-5735.
I were going to set you up with a pair of tickets, right?
We're going to take five callers, going to set you up with a pair of tickets to see Jimmy Door and Friends out at the Claremont.
And don't forget, on the 18th, November 18th, for the people living closer to L.A., we're going to have Jimmy Door and Friends' subversive comedy at Flappers in Burbank.
That's at 105 East Magnolia.
So if you want to see me Friday, November 12th and November 13th, Friday and Saturday in Claremont Flappers call 818-985-5735 and I'll set you up with a pair of tickets.
Hey, now it's time to check in with our good friend Jim Hightower and see what's on his mind this week.
With the media's preoccupation with Tea Party politicking and with a full force of raw corporate power suffocating our democracy, you probably haven't heard that many beacons of progressive hope are shining brightly from America's grassroots.
These efforts show that well-organized alley cats can defeat the big money of the fat cats.
Check out New Jersey, where the state AFL-CIO is not merely getting its rank-and-file members to support good candidates, but to become candidates.
For the past dozen years, Jersey's Federation of Working Families has been recruiting, training, supporting, and electing its own members to state and local offices.
In a state where campaigns routinely cost millions of dollars, the AFL-CIO spends a modest $250,000 a year to run a political boot camp that schools ordinary folks to be successful candidates.
More than 160 of New Jersey's current office holders, including the state Senate president, are union members elected through this grassroots program.
They learn the how-tos of speaking, media outreach, fundraising, and other basic democratic skills, all focused not merely on winning, but on enacting public policies to advance the middle class.
The AFL-CIO president says, we started with zoning boards, school boards, councils, then mayor, freeholder, and then senators and assemblymen.
We take our members and apprentice them in the field of politics, just as we apprentice them in their own crafts, he says.
The result is that labor no longer is a hapless outside group trying to persuade corporate-backed office holders to do the right thing for workaday people, but is now an inside player with real power to help set the state's policy agenda.
This is Jim Haitar saying, why not do this in your state?
For information, go to njaflcio.org and click on C-O-P-E.
All right, well, if you're like me, you are interested in the Jon Stewart restores or rally to restore sanity?
Yes.
Yes, and he wanted to restore sanity because things have gotten pretty insane.
And some people have been upset about some of the stuff.
When I say some people, I mean me, people like me, because they said Jon Stewart made some false equivalencies.
They said, I said he made some false equivalencies.
And I just want to play a little bit of, he gave a closing speech, which I like that he had a couple of costume changes.
Did you notice that?
It's a big show.
It's like I was going to see.
Is this Jon Stewart's comedy show or is this Celine Deion?
Whoa.
Is Cher going to hear?
He changed outfits.
Really?
You changed outfits?
I mean, it wasn't like Stephen Colbert put out a costume.
Anyway, anyway.
But you know what?
Good for him.
I'm going to start.
We should all start changing.
I'm going to start changing outfits.
People maybe don't know this, but I have costume changes every week on this show.
People do not know this.
You have to look.
You have to look.
Go to my blog.
He starts off the show in a blue t-shirt, and then we come back.
Sometimes he's in a tankini.
That's if the show is really hot.
Ooh, hot.
It's really rolling.
So let's play what Jon Stewart had to say.
At least a little bit of it.
Here's a minute of his kind of soliloquy he did at the end of the rally.
The country's 24-hour politico-pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems.
But its existence makes solving them that much harder.
Why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our Constitution or racists and homophobes who see no one's humanity but their own?
We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is on the brink of catastrophe, torn by polarizing hate, and how it's a shame that we can't work together to get things done.
The truth is, we do.
We work together to get things done every damn day.
The only place we don't is here or on cable TV.
Okay, so that was Jon Stewart giving it to everybody about what should be happening and how uncivil our discourse has gotten.
And, you know, he seems to paint with a broad brush.
You know, I have a feeling if he showed a video montage, and in the video montage, he showed a bunch of talking heads from cable news, and all of them saying very hyperbolic things.
And one of the, he showed a couple of clips.
One clip was Keith Olbermann calling someone an un-American bastard, as if that was representative of how horrible things have gotten.
But if you know anything about that clip, the guy who was he was referring to Keith Oberman when he was calling someone an un-American bastard, he was referring to Brian Kilmead, who had said that not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.
And he said it several times on a news channel.
In fact, the leading news channel in America that was said.
So when Keith Oberman was responding to the dumb bully, he had a little emotion behind himself and he called him an un-American bastard, which is accurate.
That's the weird thing.
So there's people are getting on him about this false equivalency.
It's tough because you can't disagree with his general point about what their colossal failure like the political media is.
Simply political media.
Yes.
But you also, it's crazy to say, well, both sides do it, and it's equal.
It's just not the same.
It's just, and it really undermines almost, I think, all the good work that Jon Stewart does.
And let's just do, in fact, let's take a trip down if a pretend meeting of the MSNBC guy and the guy from the John Daly Stewart show.
Okay, ready?
I'll be the MSNBC guy, Ben, and you'll be the John Daly Stewart Show guy.
Okay, got it.
I just want to thank you again for taking the time to meet with me, Jon Stewart, Daily Show guy.
All of us at NBC are such big fans of the Daily Show.
I feel like we're pretty much kindred spirits.
I mean, I also think at MSNBC, we have a lot to learn from how you guys do the daily show.
Yeah, I agree, you do.
All right, right.
Well, congratulations on the big rally, too.
Oh, yeah, thanks.
We really felt like it was time that someone restored sanity to our national discourse.
I'm with you on that.
Some of the stuff they say over at Fox News is, it's downright insane.
What do you mean, over at Fox News?
Well, like Glenn Beck, when he said that Obama was in lockstep with Hamas and that he's a racist who hates white culture, that's plain nuts.
Yeah, that is nuts.
That's almost as nuts as when Keith Oberman said that George W. Bush should be tried for war crimes.
You see, both sides are just way over the top with this name-calling.
You know, that's not the same thing, right?
Oh, yeah, it is.
Both sides are insane.
Actually, George W. Bush admitted to ordering waterboarding of colleague Sheikh Mohammed.
He even said that he'd do it again.
And the War Crimes Act of 1996, that makes it a federal crime to breach the Geneva Conventions by using torture, even including humiliating and degrading treatment.
So there's a case to be made that Bush should at least be put on trial.
There's no case whatsoever to be made that Barack Obama hates white people.
You sound so insane right now.
The sane thing to do is to just ignore everything Bush said and did.
That's all in the past.
So ignoring war crimes is the sane thing to do?
That's what Obama did.
He could have prosecuted the people who subverted our Constitution and ordered torture, but he didn't.
And you know why he didn't?
Because he's a grown-up who understands how important it is that we all get along.
Oh, I thought that was just a political calculation.
Yes, a completely sane and rational political calculation.
You know, that's interesting because abandoning the Constitution to try and curry favor with political opponents who are guaranteed to stab you in the back no matter what you do, that doesn't sound at all that sane to me.
Well, what would you know about sanity?
Aren't you the same cable news network that accuses Fox News and the right wing of race baiting?
I mean, that's just so insane.
Well, it is.
These are the people who want you to believe that Obama is a secret Muslim born in Kenya.
They push fake stories about Acorn and Shirley Sharad.
They even tell frightened white people that the Black Panther Party is going to harass them at the polls.
I mean, there are fewer Black Panther Party members in this country than there are actual Black Panthers in this country.
Wow, you need to get back on your meds, my friend.
Fox News stoking the racial biases and fears of white people in order to keep government in the hands of wealthy white power brokers?
Never in my life have I heard such unbridled insanity.
I mean, we are talking cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs here.
But you guys at the Daily Show point out right-wing extremism and racism all the time.
Why is it different when we do it?
Because we are comedians.
When we do it, it's funny.
When you do it, it courses the dialogue.
But don't you think you've crossed the line from comedy to punditry anyway?
I mean, you held a rally on the mall.
You interviewed the top lawmakers in the land, including the president of the United States himself.
I don't know a lot of comedians who get to do that stuff.
If you're just comedians, then why should anyone pay attention to your media critiques?
And if you're legitimate media critics, then why are you still hiding behind the excuse that you're just comedians?
All right, you're starting to sound insane again.
This rampant hyperbole has got to stop.
Until it does, all cable news shows will continue to be equally evil.
Isn't what you just said rampant hyperbole?
No.
In fact, what you just said is literally the most insane thing I've ever heard.
Again, I would have to classify that statement.
I got to go.
We're putting together a piece for tonight where Olivia Munn interviews Rand Paul's hairpiece.
Okay, so that was our sketch pointing out the ridiculousness of the false equivalency that the Daily Show and Jon Stewart have been making about the left and the right and Fox News and MSNBC.
And, you know, I've had this, I've had three arguments with friends over this.
One acquaintance, daughter of my hero, George Carlin, and I mixed it up over this shoe.
And, you know, you appreciate, hey, Jon Stewart's my hero, too, you know?
And that's why it's so frustrating.
That's why it is.
Because he's like, you know, he's like, most of what they do is so on target and really legitimately brilliant.
And then it's just weird.
But I ask, like, what choice do they have?
Like, can they really come out and say, you know, like, I feel like people already have this feeling, ah, the Daily Show is all left-wing.
Yeah, I think that they are.
Why don't they just.
Well, I don't think.
Well, we'll talk about that because when people say that Jon Stewart is a liberal comedian, I always say right away that he's just doing comedy.
There aren't two sides to the truth.
And what makes his comedy funny is that he's pointing out the truth that no one else is pointing out.
And yes, he might be what's considered a liberal because you're only getting two choices in America for some reason.
You know, if we were in England, we get a lot more choices.
But only in America, you only get one choice, or two choices.
And so he asked, so they go, oh, he's a liberal.
He's just a comedian.
You know, George Carlin was a comedian.
Lenny Bruce was a comedian, right?
Bill Hicks is a comedian.
Same thing with Jon Stewart.
They're just doing comedy.
That's what I think.
David, I see you kind of making a sour face.
No, no, no.
I thought what you wrote, Ben, was just fantastic.
I thought it summed everything up.
Personally, I don't watch the Daily Show.
I'm of the minority.
I get my news from the New York Times.
La D-Da.
Or I read The Washington Post or The Huffington Post.
I don't get my news from a comedy show.
Not even this one?
No, I think it's a little more important.
World affairs are so important that you should maybe pick up a newspaper every now and then.
I guess.
But I'll tell you something Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, wrote, and this is why I think Mr. Stewart is wrong.
Henry Kissinger wrote his senior thesis on how Europe did not grasp how craven Napoleon was.
And they kept thinking we can negotiate with Napoleon, we can negotiate with Napoleon.
Next thing you know, he's all the way into Russia.
And Kissinger talked about how Europe didn't grasp how evil Adolf Hitler was.
That when during the time of appeasement, people were saying, this is according to Krugman, and he's right, that people were saying, well, you know, Hitler's only asking for the moon because he's willing to compromise.
And when people like Jon Stewart or Barack Obama speak of bipartisan relationship with the Republicans, they don't realize that these people on the other side of the aisle will not settle for anything less than the moon.
You cannot compromise with these people.
They really do want to take the government and strangle it in the bathwater.
I mean, you know, they would have let Senator Bunning hold up people's unemployment compensation in the middle of the worst depression since the 30s over an ideology point.
What do you have to say, Robert?
That's going to happen again anyway.
I mean, that's going to be like one of the few things they can immediately get done is cut unemployment and wait for it, January 1.
What do you think about Jon Stewart's false equivalency and my problem with it?
No, I agree with you.
We don't want to talk about it.
I mean, there was a time maybe a couple of months ago where I would have said, well, I understand he's trying to split the difference.
I'm done.
I'm done.
Yeah.
Because it's so clear, like, MSNBC doesn't bold-face lie.
Right.
I think they do make a mistake when they have, like, when Ed Schultz goes on and he's obviously in the tank for the Democrats.
That is such a dumb Thing, I think, for them to do at MSNBC.
It's like you can be straight news.
Straight news doesn't have to, you don't have to go that way.
You don't have to be a partisan.
It's like what Stephen, because the straight news is good enough.
As long as people are informed, you know, if you just inform people, that's what you need to do.
Liberal, the reality has a liberal bias.
All you have to do is give full disclosed information.
And you're a left-wing station.
Well, that's the thing.
Informing people has to go beyond informing what both sides say.
Like when there's a demonstrable truth to something, you have to, like, it's not a bias to say, well, one side says this, the other side says that, but the first side is wrong for these reasons.
Especially, yes.
And that's what journalism is supposed to do.
It's supposed to find out what the facts and the truth are.
That's hard work, and they don't do that anymore.
You know, you can't be a jury.
What they do like a lot today is they'll go, okay, we're going to talk about global warming.
Here's a guy who's going to tell you that global warming exists and what the problems are.
And here's a guy who thinks it's a hoax.
Okay, but that's not a true debate because in order for that to be the representative of the real debate that's happening in the world, you would have to interview 99 guys who believe in global warming and then interview the one guy who doesn't.
And that would be an equal and even-handed debate.
But that is not how it works on Cable D or any news.
And we all know that.
Or they interview, you know, an economist like Paul Krugman, then, you know, Joe the Plumber.
Those are not the same people.
But wait, wait, are they talking about plumbing?
Because in that case, I got to say, like, yeah, I would go with Joe the Plumber on the plumbing question.
Oh, my God.
Hang on, you guys.
I got to take this.
Hold on.
Hey, it's Jimmy.
Who's this?
Hey, Jimmy, how you doing?
It's Moron.
Hey, Moron.
How's it going, buddy?
Ah, Jimmy, you know me.
I'm a great American.
I'm easily manipulated to vote against my own economic interest.
And I have lots of legitimate anger at the government, but it's often misplaced at the wrong people.
But I do find comfort in the fact that my Lord Jesus Christ hates exactly the same people that I hate.
So what's up?
What's on your mind today, buddy?
Wow, Jim.
I think those teabaggers really gave the Democrats an ass kicking.
Huh?
Yeah, ass kicking.
Yeah, they lost a lot of seats, buddy, in the House.
That's for sure.
Total rejection of Obama's.
Well, I wouldn't say it's a total rejection.
Total rejection of Obama's, Jim.
Total.
Well, I mean, I wouldn't say that, Moron.
I know, Jim.
That's why I'm saying it.
Total rejection of Obama's.
Moron, come on.
They just threw out the Republicans two years ago because people wanted a change.
And I guess they feel like Barack Obama didn't bring enough change, like a lot of us feel.
That he's doing things the same way.
So throw the bums out.
But you know what?
They threw in right back in the same guys that they threw out two years ago.
So what do you make of that?
Total rejection of Obama's, Jim.
Really?
You don't have anything to say about what I just said.
Jim, I heard you guys in California voted down pot.
Yeah.
How the hell did you guys do that, for Christ's sake?
Because I guess sometimes we're just as dumb as...
Charlie Sheen's naked with a whore every other day in a restaurant.
I know.
He doesn't have to mix a day of work, but if he had a joint in his pocket, he'd be in the slam of six months.
Moron, I'm with you 100% on this one.
I have no idea what's going on.
It's just weird to see my generation of people lie to their kids about marijuana the same way our parents lied to us.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
I forgot you're the big pothead, right?
I use medical marijuana medicinally.
Come on, Jim, medical marijuana.
You and I both know that's a scam.
I know a guy who got a medical marijuana license just by saying he's got headaches.
Headaches, Jim.
Huh?
Yeah, moron.
You know why they give medical marijuana to people with headaches?
Why?
Because marijuana cures headaches.
Oh, you're a real riot, Jim.
Well, it does.
It does.
You know you do it for fun.
Yes, I also endorse it for non-medical purposes.
Yes, that's true.
Well, it's a good thing that didn't pass.
Why?
I heard that if it would have, that if you went and had surgery, that your nurse could be totally high.
Wow, that's some pretty good fear-mongering, moron.
No, that Teresa's cousin said she heard it on the radio out there right on the news station.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, yeah, I know.
They were running commercials like that.
I believe you're Terese.
You know what I don't get is I thought you guys were bankrupt in Californias and that this Proposition 19 was a good step in the direction of taxing pot and a lot of the money like a billion billion dollars was supposed to go towards the deficit and what have you.
I mean, it's pot, Jim.
Even me, a moron knows it's not a gateway drug.
No, it's not a gateway drug.
I'll tell you what is a gateway drug.
Those Plinstone vitamins.
Oh my God, those are tiny.
And I get so jacked up on them.
I need a couple of frescas just to come down, you know?
No, I never heard of it.
Have you ever OD'd on vitamins?
Oh, my Christ.
Your pee comes out like a rainbow.
No, I never.
OD'd on it.
I can't, but I thought California, with all you liberals, your big hippies, and your stinky, smelly hair.
I thought that even the poll workers took a puff at a sweet Mary Jane before, during, and after the election.
Well, you know, everybody I know out here.
Jim, tell me something.
Why do we always have to vote on a Tuesday?
It's not so convenient.
Yeah, I've often wondered that myself.
Like, why don't they have the elections on a weekend?
Or even better, like a holiday when nobody's got a worker, mostly nobody, just people at the restaurants and cops and firemen and nurses and doctors and all the people who do those kind of works and stuff.
Yeah, well, all the people who work at the airports and the bus stations and the train stations.
Well, why do you think that we vote on pizza delivery guys too?
Yeah, I got it.
Why do you think we vote on a workday?
To make it harder for people with jobs to go vote.
That's what I think.
Well, Moron, I think you're exactly correct.
Huh?
I think they want to make it harder for working people to vote.
Oh, Jim, you're blowing my mind over here.
Hey, Moron, I forgot to wish you guys a happy anniversary.
What'd you get, Therese?
Oh, my God.
I got her the great new thing that's called the neck genie.
You got her something called the neck genie?
What is that?
They got her a neck genie.
Yeah, I know.
What is a neck?
A neck genie.
Yeah, I know what it is.
It slims your neck.
You know, it takes years off your appearance, Jim.
Gently.
Every day it firms the underlying muscles of the neck, and it tightens the skin around there, and it gives you a dramatic lift, dramatic lift, in just two minutes a day.
Well, that's good, because I don't have a lot of...
It gets rid of the double chin and the neck folds, which I don't like the neck folds.
So that's it'll be great for Jeff for Terese.
Wow, well, I hope it picks up your marriage, man.
It takes years off your appearance, and it's just two minutes a day.
Does it hurt?
Because it sounds like a problem.
No pain, no expensive surgery.
And it helps reduce the double chin and the neck folds, like I said.
I hate the neck folds.
Yeah, really, I'm starting to understand.
Well, you take care, and I know it hurts because the tea bodies totally kicked Obama's ass.
Okay, Moron.
I'll talk to you, buddy.
All right, bye, buddy.
Okay, that was another Tuesdays with Moron.
Thanks to Moron for calling in.
Well, even Moron is on to how ridiculous the Proposition 19 going down is and all the Prop 19.
Like, it doesn't matter.
Like, if you want pot in L.A., you can get pot.
It's not, it's just easier than getting alcohol.
Like, anytime we can get rid of pointless, outdated Puritanism, I'm all for it.
I agree, but there's a guy in prison right now from up in San Jose County who was selling medical marijuana.
He had a license to do business from the city.
The mayor had everybody signed off on this.
The sheriff went and busted him because he said he sold marijuana to an underage kid, which he did.
The kid had cancer, and so they gave him some medical marijuana.
And they wouldn't let him bring that.
He couldn't present that in court, that he was giving it to medical.
For whatever reason, the judge didn't allow that.
That guy's in jail.
So that's why, even though we have medical marijuana and it's really easy to get, you forget about stuff like that.
Like, oh, there's a guy right now doing time for selling medicine to a kid with cancer because there's a sheriff who's got a bug up his ass.
And he gets to do that because we have these draconian, ridiculous views of drugs in America.
People go, well, I don't know.
You know, I did pot when I was a kid, but I wouldn't want my kids doing it.
Well, guess what?
Your kids are going to do pot.
So now what you've just done is ensured that they're also going to break a law when they're doing it.
They're also going to become criminals.
That's what you've just ensured.
Okay.
Well, how do those same people say, you know, I'm fine with my kids drinking?
Yes.
What could go wrong?
What could possibly?
Nobody ever gets hurt.
When I was a kid, there was always those people in the neighborhood who are like, yeah, I let my kids drink, but I've got to be there with them.
Oh, that's fantastic.
You sound so responsible.
Your regular father's knows best over here, aren't you?
When they say things like, your bus driver might be high.
Your nurse might be high.
I'm like, they could be drunk right now, legally.
Also, they could be high right now.
Also, they could still be.
They might still be high.
And being legal doesn't change that at all.
Well, you know, people, Moron did bring that up in the moron segment, but I didn't make that explicit.
That was a real commercial I heard.
I was driving to vote in California.
I was driving to vote, and I heard in my car, a commercial came on against Prop 19, against the legalization of marijuana.
And there was a woman on there and said, did you know if Prop 19 passes, when you come out of surgery, your nurse could be high, and there's nothing you could do about it.
And your co-workers could come to work high, and your employer couldn't do anything about it until after they had an accident.
It's like, yeah, the same thing that's right now today.
Right now, today, you mean someone could come to work on prescription drugs, have an accident.
Yeah, someone could come today on heroin.
Yes.
It's the same thing.
You can't stop people.
My head almost blew off when I heard that.
I couldn't.
It was like, how is that not illegal?
How is that?
To make arguments like that?
Like, oh, like the, oh, God, this is my favorite one, the Prop 8.
They couldn't find a logical argument.
So what they said was, they'll teach your kids about homosexuality in school.
And I'm like, they don't teach our kids about heterosexuality in school.
What the hell are you talking about?
Robert, you think that, first of all, that is a crazy thing for them, but that worked.
I had a total court.
I had a friend, I won't say which one, who used to write for this show.
I was talking about one day I'm at his house and I go, hey, how are you voting on the Prop 8?
He goes, oh, you know, I don't want him teaching it in schools.
And I go to the title.
He teaches what in schools?
He's, you know, I don't want him teaching.
Second graders are going to teach him about gays.
Well, what if they made it an elective?
But what does that even mean?
Teach them about.
What does that mean?
First of all, second graders are calling each other queer anyway.
Right.
That's how it works.
Well, and Prop 8 wasn't, let's teach homosexuality in schools.
That had nothing to do with anything.
That's basic human civil rights.
And my favorite argument, and this goes back to the pot thing, is that it's so similar.
Is they say, well, your nurse could be high.
And it's the same as the gays in the military argument where they're like, you know, if they're gays in the military, they're going to come on to people.
You do get that sexual behavior at all in the military is inappropriate.
Like, it's an incredibly dangerous thing to do.
You can get drummed out of the service for like sleeping with somebody you're working with.
And most, and most, I think something like 70% of the women in the military report sexual harassment, and 30% report rape.
Right.
So there you go.
But that's not even my favorite part of the heterosexuality.
So the heterosexuals are working out super.
But my favorite argument about it.
Tune in next week to hear my favorite argument about something.
We're going to hear Ben's favorite argument.
I want to thank everybody who helped make this show possible.
And before I do that, if you'd like to stop by JimmyDoorComedy.com, sign my email list, click on donate, help make this show possible.
I appreciate all your help.
And I have another show called Comedy and Everything Else that I do with Steph Zamarano.
And we interview all the big shot comedians of the day.
Brian Regan, Jim Gaffigan, Janine Garofilo, Bill Burr, Doug Benson, every Paula Tompkins, Patton Oswald.
Everybody who's funny has been on our show, so check that out.
And right now, it's time for me to thank everybody who makes this show possible.
I want to thank my producer, Ali Lexa, my guest, Robert Yasimura, Ben Zalibansky, David Feldman, the loser, and Stan Stankos and Steph Samurano for helping write the show too.
And thanks for listening.
I'm going to be here next week at the same time.
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