The Daily Show turns its attention to how the US Congress can act fast when it wants to benefit itself. In this series of three short clips, the show looks at how quickly it moved to exempt the Federal Aviation Administration from the rules of the sequester so that they could recall air traffic controllers from their furloughs so that flight delays were eliminated just in time to let members of Congress go on their vacations. Meanwhile, much worthier programs where sequester cuts had harmed many people were left unchanged. [Read more…]

As regular readers of this blog know, I am a huge fan of Orly Taitz, that devoted seeker of truth who has made it her life’s work to expose the fact that Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the US because he was born in Kenya and his father was not a US citizen. The former is disputed but Orly says that that is not necessary since the latter fact alone is sufficient to make him ineligible to be president. Constitutional lawyers dispute this but whom are you going to trust as a better judge of the constitution, some smarty-pants scholars or someone who is a triple threat, not merely a lawyer but also a dentist and a real estate agent? [Read more…]

His ‘Getting to know your district’ series, where he interviews the elected members of various districts in the House of Representatives, is pretty funny. Here Colbert talks to a Democratic member from Pennsylvania. [Read more…]

Jon Oliver has had a spectacularly good three-part series comparing gun control efforts in Australia and the US, putting the lie to the claims in the US that gun control does not work to curb gun-related violence and that implementing it is hard and takes a long time. [Read more…]

It looks like I was premature in giving the Justice Department credit for reading Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights. It appears that they questioned him for a long time before a judge insisted on reading him his rights on Monday. So once again, we are dependent on the judiciary to intervene to make sure the government does not violate the rights of people. (In a separate case, a federal judge is challenging the government’s claim to broad secrecy powers.) [Read more…]

The Daily Show has yet more fun at the expense of CNN for its coverage of the Boston bombings, showing how they seemed to have thrown editorial judgment out the window in their effort to portray a sense of immediacy and urgency, even when they had no idea what was going on and were simply making wild guesses based on the flimsiest of evidence. [Read more…]

Before law enforcement officials released photographs of the two suspects in the Boston bombing, some media outlets went overboard in their attempt to finger ‘dark-skinned’ people as culprits for the Boston bombing. [Read more…]

The debate over gun control is a complicated one. A case can be made that people should have the right to own guns of their own. But there is no question that opponents of any form of gun control invest in the Second Amendment an almost mystical quality that suggests that any regulation of any kind is a horrendous violation, and this is taking them over the cliff leading to a kind of extremism that can backfire. [Read more…]