I love the Sesame Street parodies.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Today is election day in the US and in his latest investigative report John Oliver points out that while all attention is focused on elections to Congress and the governors races, the real action takes place below the radar in elections for state legislatures where much of the legislation that impacts our daily lives is enacted.
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Al Madrigal of The Daily Show goes deep undercover to discover the threats they pose to America and find out what they are really up to.
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For some reason, the businesses run by the Koch brothers started advertising on The Daily Show and this gave Jon Stewart the opportunity to launch an attack on them and the way they are using their money to buy politicians. That is an interesting thing to see. Usually broadcasters tend to give the sponsors of their show kid glove treatment, something that businesses know and take advantage of to buy the silence of news organizations, as media watcher Jeff Cohen noted some time ago.
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I am neither knowledgeable nor a big fan of comic books, largely because in my youth, the impressionable years, I was in Sri Lanka where comics were expensive and hard to get. So while I had read the odd issue of Superman and Batman, all the others were unknown to me, although I had heard the names.
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Stephen Colbert gave his take on the Gamergate controversy and also interviewed Anita Sarkeesian, the woman who had to cancel her talk at Utah State University because of the death threats she received for speaking out against the objectification of women in video games.
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Stephen Colbert makes the case for congressman Louie Gohmert who wins it even in the face of stiff competition from the likes of Michele Bachmann. I sometimes wonder whether he could be as stupid as he really seems to be and whether he is really quite savvy and has figured out that by saying deliberately stupid things, he gets a lot of media attention. But that would require him to be a really good actor, worthy of an award.
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Jon Stewart looks at how easily Americans are made fearful about everything and asks wonderingly, “What’s wrong with us? I thought we were the home of the brave.” While that sentiment may provide a rousing end to the national anthem, it is just another case of pandering to the self-image of people that they and their nation are possessed of some virtue not held by others. Such self-aggrandizing conceits are hard to erase. The hardest thing for people to accept is that they (as individuals and collectively as nations or ethnic groups) are pretty much just like everyone else in their basic human qualities.
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I despise the entire concept of patriotism. I agree with Leo Tolstoy who wrote the following:
Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most indubitable signification is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, and conscience, and a slavish enthrallment to those in power. And as such it is recommended wherever it is preached. Patriotism is slavery.”
Nowadays I watch almost all the episodes of The Daily Show but that was not always true. The show has been going on for a long time and Jon Stewart took over the role of host from Craig Kilborn on January 11, 1999 and steered it in a more political direction. I am not sure when I started following it regularly.
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