I have been on a Rowan Atkinson kick recently and I couldn’t resist linking to this sketch from the 1980s BBC comedy show Not the Nine O’Clock News that may be where Donald Trump got the ideas for his campaign. The similarities are uncanny.
There was a lot to cover.
But do they also get a special line and a little carpet to walk over that reassures them that they are much more important than the rest of us?
He asks the important question that we all want answered but no one seems to ask the singer.
Theologians like to keep discussions of god’s existence on a high abstract plane because that enables all manner of wooly statements to pass unchallenged. It is down-to-Earth practical questions that tend to stump them. In this clip from the 1980s BBC comedy show Not the Nine O’Clock News, an audience member poses just such a question to a theologian.
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Newspapers are laying off beat reporters because their work does not generate enough revenue. The subscriber base is decreasing while the online ad revenue is not rising fast enough to compensate. But newspaper beat reporters covering actual events are the foundation of the news food chain, providing the essential nourishment that sustains all the other things such as TV, commentary, blogs, and other online services. If they go, the rest collapses.
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Donald Trump’s sons apparently like to indulge in ‘big game hunting’, a disgusting activity where people kill large land mammals just for the hell of it, even though those animals are losing their habitats and their numbers are running low.
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During every presidential election season, people look eagerly to see the effects of each party’s convention on the polls. Since the conventions are highly choreographed to show the candidate in the best light, that party candidate’s poll numbers usually rise in the immediate wake of the convention by about 3-4%.
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At a time when the Donald Trump camp should be telling all its surrogates to just stop talking about the Khans so that media attention shifts away from this damaging issue, his supporter Ben Carson emerges from hibernation to suggest that all this spectacle could be ended if both Trump and the Khans apologized to each other, though he admitted that this was unlikely to happen. When asked what exactly the Khans should apologize for, Carson was typically vague saying that they had said things about Trump that were not true.
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Much has been made of the fact that Hillary Clinton is the first woman to be the presidential nominee of a major political party in the US and if elected would be the first woman US president. This is undoubtedly an important step and I can see why so many Americans are savoring the moment. For me personally, my reaction is “What took America so long?” since Sri Lanka elected the first woman head of state back in 1960 and many, many other nations have done so since.
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