Jon Oliver of Last Week Tonight thinks that the arrests of top FIFA officials for widespread corruption does not go nearly far enough and has launched one of his campaigns, this time calling for the removal of its long time head Sepp Blatter, which he says could be facilitated by major sponsors withdrawing their support for FIFA.
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Jon Stewart brings us up to date on the latest entrants on the Republican side, from the crazy to the racist. It is quite incredible to me that people like Carly Fiorina and Lindsey Graham can be so casual about being condescending and bigoted towards entire nations of large populations.
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Whatever happens to the lead actresses in action films, whatever turmoil they go through, they somehow manage to emerge looking good. The secret about how they achieve that is now revealed by these outtakes from such films. It is because these films are written by men.
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I am way out of touch with popular culture and so I had never heard of John Legend before the Oscars this year when the news reported that he and Common (another performer whom I had never heard of until recently) had given a boffo live performance of the song Glory from the film Selma during the Academy Awards show, where it won an award and where the two gave great acceptance speeches.
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On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver exposes how the chicken industry is dominated by four major companies (Pilgrim’s, Tyson, Perdue, and Sanderson Farms) that use their monopoly power to create hellish conditions, not just for chickens of which we are all aware, but also for the chicken farmers who work for them on contracts that are incredibly exploitative. And Congress protects these abusive companies.
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Somehow I missed the sad news that British comedian John Fortune had died on December 31, 2013. Michael Coveney provides a retrospective of his life. I came across Fortune only about a decade or so ago, when the brilliant improvisational sketches that he did with John Bird appeared online. These took the form of an interview in which one of them would question the other on the issues of the day. I love this kind of deadpan comedy, where the conversation takes an absurd turn but the speakers discuss it quite seriously.
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Jessica Williams of The Daily Show got all teary-eyed as she went to mingle with the opponents of same-sex marriage who gathered outside the US Supreme Court on the day they heard the case, because she thinks that the court will approve of such marriages and she may never get to see this bunch of losers together like this again.
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Fox News is all of a doodah because president Obama said something that is blazingly obvious by saying that they demonize the poor. They have gone on a weeklong whine fest about being so unfairly maligned. The Daily Show poses the question of whether this shows that Fox News in merely lacking in self-awareness or is cynical or stupid or just downright evil.
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Last weekend saw yet another parade of Republican presidential hopefuls auditioning before a group of people in Iowa. Senator Lindsay Graham was one of them and during his 10-minute speech he said the following:
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US elections are absurdly long and ridiculously expensive. People in other countries cannot believe what an absurd system we have in which one has to be either a multimillionaire or beholden to multimillionaires merely in order to be even considered as a serious candidate. Not only that, it is the GRAGGS issues (guns, race, abortion, gays, god, sex) that generate the most attention.
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