Dirty Hippies » Comedy

Ya Got Trouble — A fresh look at an old con

Tom Sullivan — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 15:58:25 +0000

The Music Man "Ya Got Trouble"

Trouble with a capital “T”
And that rhymes with “P” and that stands for pool!

Friday, a friend put me on to a musical bit that I know by heart, but he gave me a fresh perspective on it. I had never seen it in a modern political context, in a cable news/talk radio context.

In one, short speech — building intensity as he goes — Professor Harold Hill gathers a crowd of onlookers and rattles off a litany of big city sins “the right kinda parents” worry about corrupting their children and their small town: sloth, drinking, gambling, being “stuck-up,” smoking, loose morals, and indecent pop culture. In a fevered crescendo, Hill warns parents of “shameless music • That’ll grab your son, your daughter • With the arms of a jungle animal instink!”

Mass-staria!

Harold is selling something. And in four minutes he creates a market for it out of thin air — among people he calls “as green as the money.” Moments earlier…

HAROLD HILL: Now, Marce, I need some ideas if I’m gonna get your town out of the serious trouble it’s in.

MARCELLUS: River City ain’t in any trouble.

HILL: We’re going to have to create some.

Hill presses every button the people of River City, Iowa have to press, plus appeals to patriotism and God to create a city-wide moral crisis that four minutes earlier the townspeople didn’t know they had. Sound familiar?

Now strike pool . Insert contraception , voter fraud , death panels , or a half dozen other right-wing bogey men and the grifter’s pitch works the same. Today, Harold Hill would be working for Fox News or Americans for Prosperity. He’d be running American Crossroads, and making a lot more money.

Eat your heart out, Karl Rove. Watch the video here. Lyrics here.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

Colbert Super PAC: Exposing How It’s Done

Tom Sullivan — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 03:13:16 +0000

When comedian Stephen Colbert petitioned the Federal Election Commission for permission to form Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow (a.k.a., the Colbert Super PAC), people laughed to see Colbert use the campaign finance system to lampoon that very system. “This is 100 percent legal and at least 10 percent ethical,” he said upon receiving FEC approval.

The Citizens United decision by the U.S. Supreme Court now allows “independent-expenditure only committees” like Colbert’s to spend unlimited amounts of money to support or attack candidates. But with the debut of Colbert’s first television ads ahead of Iowa’s Ames straw poll, it is clear that Colbert’s target list is broader than candidates and campaign finance.

Another YouTube video points to one aspect of the Colbert super PAC’s targets that deserves more attention from progressives. In it, Teller, of the magic duo Penn & Teller, describes how magicians use human pattern seeking to trick both the eye and mind.

Teller begins, “One thing that magicians do is take advantage of our natural inclination to study something that we see done over and over again and think that we’re learning something … If you do that with a magician, it’s sometimes a big mistake.” With Fox News as well. Especially if you think you’re learning something.

To make their illusions work, magicians use that pattern reflex to manage audience attention and lead them to false assumptions about reality. Penn & Teller do more. Their magic/comedy shows bring audiences into the act by exposing how the tricks are done.

What the Iowa ads from Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow do is something similar. By calling out grifter super PACs by name, by revealing to the audience in satirical fashion how political ads attempt to manipulate them, Colbert lets the audience “in on the trick.” He’s telling them what to watch for when “out of state groups” like Grow PAC and Jobs for Iowa PAC “flood the airwaves” with their ads.

Faced with the massive amounts of money that flowed into conservative political ads in the wake of Citizens United, progressives face the daunting prospect of finding ways to fight back. Lacking comparable funding, there seem to be few ways for grassroots groups to mount an effective messaging counteroffensive. But few doesn’t mean none.

The Agenda Project’s “America the Beautiful” ad targeted Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform plan and – buying no air time – garnered tons of earned media after it went viral on YouTube. But that “earned media” strategy probably is not workable for mounting a sustained campaign against millions of dollars in corporate-funded ad buys.

Yet in spite of that, and unlike most progressive organizations, Colbert has positioned himself to fight back in the mainstream media against the Citizens United money flood – just what the progressive community wants, if not in the high-minded way it might imagine for itself. But even Colbert’s modest effort in Iowa is better than the mainstream messaging vehicle progressives don’t have. As much as they might value Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” progressives have not yet embraced Colbert’s super PAC as much more than Onion-like satire.

That could be a missed opportunity. Because Colbert has the national presence and media platform progressive groups lack for raising money and mainstreaming the kind of smackdown most political advertising deserves. Besides, attempting “serious” in this political environment might be a riskier maneuver than the progressive movement can successfully pull off. “Maybe the whole system has become such a joke,” writes the New York Times‘ David Carr, “that only jokes will serve as a corrective.”

Joining Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow’s efforts to spotlight other super PACs’ manipulation just might be progressives’ best bet for gaining ground in an otherwise asymmetrical fight. (As a bonus, Colbert adds donors’ names to the HEROE$ crawl that runs during his show.) Expect Karl Rove’s American Crossroads PAC to get extra special attention from Colbert’s super PAC. That alone should merit progressive financial support.

As the Fox News Channel’s short-lived “1/2 Hour News Hour” graphically demonstrated, humor is one of the few areas of political warfare where liberals wield superior firepower. In a battle in which they are otherwise outgunned, it would be a mistake for progressives to dismiss Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow’s effort as a mere comedic stunt rather than help Colbert deploy it to maximum effect. Of all people, progressive “dirty hippies” should be able to appreciate what it is like to be treated as unserious.

The Dirty Hippies Crystal Ball Saves You the Trouble of Watching A Presidential Debate Among Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, and Herman Cain

Cynthia — Sun, 08 May 2011 23:08:03 +0000

Supposedly Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain (and third generation military veteran) will announce he’ll run for president. Of the United States, yes.

A three-way debate among GOP POTUS contenders Trump, Palin, and Cain would be Teabagger Comedy Hour. Let’s look into the special Dirty Hippies crystal ball, and see what would transpire. It would be broadcast on FOX and co-moderated by David Brooks (in a show of bipartisanship) and for gravitas, Andrew Breitbart.

The night gets off to an energetic start as Palin demands Trump and Cain’s foreign policy credentials. She wilts a little when she realizes (belatedly) Cain has actually served overseas. Oopsie! (No, it was actually Alan West who served overseas, not Cain.) It just doesn’t hold up to some closed-door speech she gave to a trade group in Hong Kong. That’s what happens when the only newspapers you read are your own press clips.

Trump goes on the attack by challenging first Cain’s citizenship and then Palin’s college grades. Cain boasts about his business expertise and tells The Donald, “You’re fired!”

There’s a lengthy interlude where Trump and Cain compete to see who loves capitalism more, but when a moderator pipes up and reminds them that Presidents must make public their tax returns, The Donald balks and Palin blanches a little.

The two reality tv stars ridicule the radio guy. (Breitbart gets some licks in too, as he has a dog in this fight.) Trump offers his beauty pageant and many (ex-)wives as proof he loves women; Palin offers herself as proof she loves women. “See? I love them so much I am one.”

Cain says he embodies the American dream of hard work and pizza sales. Crickets from Palin and Trump.

Results from real-time polling show it’s a three-way split: people who like bumpits say Palin won, bald people say Trump won, and people who like pizza say McCain won.

(Eh, what’s that you say? That’s not John McCain? OHHHH. *blink* *blink*)

Post-debate, Trump sends angry photocopies of magazine articles marked up in Sharpie to his opponents, while Palin’s ghost-Tweeter snarks in unintelligible sentence fragments and then longer, equally unintelligible sentence fragments on Facebook.

Cain issues a press release reminding his opponents that his name is Herman, not Barack. And it’s Cain, not McCain.

You betcha.

OK, whatever you say, Herbert McCain.

There’s a kerfuffle over whether Palin trademarked the term “You betcha” or no, and whether anyone else can use it besides her.

FOX, CBS, CNN, ABC, and NBC devote THREE days of news coverage over the tag line “You betcha.”

There, I think I just saved you from paying attention to three months of GOP presidential campaigning plus a “debate”. You may safely ignore them now.

Half a century of work and pay in an hour’s time

Aaron Krager — Mon, 02 May 2011 23:33:04 +0000

Originally posted at my own site.

Very few things are certain in life other than life and death. In the middle we work roughly 50 years of our life and pay taxes. That much we know for sure. For the most part we are a tough working people -- dedicated to the task and sweating the day away.

It might be nice to cut to the chase and just hoard together all the money we will make in our lifetime at the beginning -- sort of like a down payment if you will. If you want to do that -- join Wall Street and work for a hedge fund. They make as much money in an hour as John and Jane Doe down the street do in a lifetime of blood, sweat and tears.

Paul Krugman conducted some analysis of IRS data (boring stuff but important nonetheless)

But I was struck by something else: in several years during the last decade the top 400 accounted for more than 10 percent of all capital gains income in America. Just 400 people!

Conservatives often try to sell the notion that reducing the capital gains tax is about helping small business people. But you really want to think of the fact that a significant chunk of that tax break is going to just 400 people.

These are the same people who are hoarding the money and making it hand over fist in a matter of hours -- not days, months or even years -- hours!

All the while they are paying a capital gains tax of 15% instead of income taxes like the rest of us, like John and Jane Doe down the street. Instead of trying to realize we need job programs and better policies for the middle class -- conservative politicians and pundits try to sell us on tax cuts but as Krugman notes above, a large chunk of it will benefit just 400 people in a country of more than 300 million.

We are sold the idea of an American Dream as well as policies that simultaneously benefit those who already live on cloud nine.

Rewarding evil instead of good – the perils of Wall Street

Aaron Krager — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 12:39:18 +0000

Comedic gold from Lee Camp!

In my mind the art of good comedy is satirizing the truth in a way that highlights the ridiculousness of the situation. Lee Camp has an uncanny ability to do just that. When the Yes Men punked General Electric the stock price actually dropped causing investing to lose money. The total looks like it was somewhere around a couple billion dollars.

It took 30 minutes for General Electric to come out and say they were not in fact giving back the $3.2 billion it received as a tax benefit. Their stock recovered.

The bottom line of profit is all that matters and nothing being done out of the common good is rewarded. If we could do it all over again – is this the system we would create?

Originally posted at my site.

New York Slimes

Mike Sheehan — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 20:27:42 +0000

So Frank Rich has departed the Grey Lady for smaller pastures, leaving one wondering who is to replace him on the hallowed—and increasingly right-leaning—op-ed pages of the Times. Hm…

X-posted from Jazz from Hell