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Stephen Colbert Is Replacing Letterman. Here Are His Best—and Worst—Political Moments

by MaxineSolar Posted on April 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, CBS announced that Stephen Colbert will replace the retiring David Letterman as host of Late Show. (Mashable reported last week that Colbert was the network’s top choice to take over for Letterman.) When Colbert leaves for CBS, he’ll be leaving behind The Colbert Report at Comedy Central, where he has played the part of fake conservative cable-TV commentator since 2005.

We’re assuming that once he starts his gig at Late Show he’ll be doing less left-leaning political satire than he’s used to. So here’s a look back at his very best—and very worst—political moments over the past few years. And no, #CancelColbert does not make either list:

THE BEST:

1. Colbert slams the Obama administration’s legal justification for killing American citizens abroad suspected of terrorism: “Trial by jury, trial by fire, rock, paper scissors, who cares? Due process just means that there is a process that you do,” Colbert said in March 2012. “The current process is, apparently, first the president meets with his advisers and decides who he can kill. Then he kills them.”

“Due process just means that there is a process that you do” is pretty dead-on:

The Colbert Report
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2. The Colbert Report‘s incredibly moving, stereotype-smashing segment on the openly gay mayor of Vicco, Kentucky: “To get your point across, sometimes you just gotta laugh,” Mayor Johnny Cummings told Mother Jones, after the segment aired. “That’s how I look at it. So I thought, OK, The Colbert Report would be perfect.”

“If God makes ’em born gay, then why is he against it?” a Vicco resident asks in the clip’s moving final moments. “I can’t understand that. I’ve tried and tried and tried to understand that, and I can’t.”

The Colbert Report
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3. Colbert on The O’Reilly Factor: Bill O’Reilly still seems to think that Colbert, the satirist, is doing great damage to this country.

4. Colbert’s roasting of President George W. Bush at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner: “Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating,” Colbert said. “But guys like us, we don’t pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in ‘reality.’ And reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

For a transcript, click here.

5. Colbert’s surreal congressional testimony: He testified (in character) before a House hearing in 2010 on immigrant farm workers. He offered to submit video of his colonoscopy into the congressional record:

6. Colbert was a two-time presidential candidate who used comedy to highlight the absurdity of the post-Citizens United election landscape. Here’s his recent letter to the IRS, in which he requests the opportunity to testify at a public hearing:

Stephen Colbert Comment to IRS

THE WORST:

1. That time he used Henry Kissinger as a dance partner: The former secretary of state and national security advisor has been accused by human rights groups and journalists of complicity in major human rights violations and war crimes around the globe: In Chile (murder and subversion of democracy), Bangladesh (genocide), East Timor (yet more genocide), Argentina, Vietnam, and Cambodia, to name a few.

So it’s odd that Colbert would feature him in a lighthearted dance-party segment last August. The video (set to Daft Punk’s hit “Get Lucky”) also includes famous people whom no one has ever accused of war crimes, such as Matt Damon, Jeff Bridges, Bryan Cranston, and Hugh Laurie:

The Colbert Report
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2. The other time he made Kissinger seem like a lovable, aging teddy bear: Kissinger was also on The Colbert Report in 2006 during the Colbert guitar “ShredDown.” The following clip also features Eliot Spitzer and guitarist Peter Frampton:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,Video Archive

Colbert’s apparent coziness with Kissinger is even stranger when you consider how Colbert has blasted “the war crimes of Nixon,” and has said that he “despairs that people forget those.” Perhaps he forgot that “the war crimes” he spoke of were as much Kissinger’s as they were President Nixon’s.

Anyway, viewers can hope that when he’s hosting on CBS, there will be fewer musical numbers featuring war criminals.

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Stephen Colbert Is Replacing Letterman. Here Are His Best—and Worst—Political Moments

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Watch Harrison Ford Fight Climate Change In a Fighter Jet

by HartkePoundstone568 Posted on April 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Any film that opens with Harrison Ford buckling into a fighter jet for the sake of science can’t be all bad. Especially when that’s followed by Don Cheadle tromping through Texas cow country, followed by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman strapping on a flak jacket and pushing into the heart of Syria’s civil war. It’s almost enough to make you forget you’re watching a show about climate change.

But in fact, the new Showtime series Years of Living Dangerously is about just that, traversing the warming globe alongside an A-List cast that, as the season progresses, will include Matt Damon, Jessica Alba, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The show premieres Sunday (but the first episode, above, is already online), and counts Hollywood kingmakers Jerry Weintraub and James Cameron as executive producers, and Climate Progress founding editor Joe Romm and Climate Central scientist Heidi Cullen as science advisors.

If you already follow climate change, many of the stories here won’t be new—deforestation in Indonesia, drought in Texas, conflict in Syria. But Years is a rare, big-budget effort to put the issue squarely in front of an audience more accustomed to Dexter and Homeland, and it does so with spectacular cinematography and compelling, interwoven plot lines that help to propel you through the basics of climate science to arrive at… aw, don’t listen to me, just watch the thing.

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Watch Harrison Ford Fight Climate Change In a Fighter Jet

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El Niño Could Grow Into a Monster, New Data Show

by Myrna Posted on April 7, 2014

A powerful El Niño could worsen droughts, intensify heat waves, and contribute to dangerous flooding. alika1712/Thinkstock The odds are increasing that an El Niño is in the works for 2014—and recent forecasts show it might be a big one. As we learned from Chris Farley, El Niños can boost the odds of extreme weather (droughts, typhoons, heat waves) across much of the planet. But the most important thing about El Niño is that it is predictable, sometimes six months to a year in advance. That’s an incredibly powerful tool, especially if you are one of the billions who live where El Niño tends to hit hardest—Asia and the Americas. If current forecasts stay on track, El Niño might end up being the biggest global weather story of 2014. Read the rest at Slate. Taken from:  El Niño Could Grow Into a Monster, New Data Show ; ;Related ArticlesFrame Climate Change as a Food Issue, Experts SayWATCH: Is This Man the Greenest Governor in America?To Fight Climate Change, the Entire World Will Have to Eat Less Meat ;

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El Niño Could Grow Into a Monster, New Data Show

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Here Is a Wonderful Video of a 40-Year-Old Deaf Woman Hearing for the First Time

by JosefWOOZigzhlu Posted on March 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Joanne Milne was born deaf and began to go blind in her twenties thanks to a rare genetic disorder called Usher Syndrome. Last month, at the age of 40 she underwent surgery to have cochlear implants installed. This video of her hearing for the first time in her entire life is the reason I can’t get any work done this morning.

“It might be a bit overwhelming at first,” the doctor warns before turning them on. That’s an understatement.

“Hearing things for the first time is so emotional from the ping of a light switch to running water. I can’t stop crying and I can already foresee how it’s going to be life changing,” Joanne says.

Her friends made her a playlist with one song for every year of her life. The first one she heard was John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

Anyway, this is beautiful and amazing and, to be honest, I don’t even like that stupid John Lennon song but I want to listen to it right now on repeat for an hour.

Happy Friday.

(via Gawker )

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Here Is a Wonderful Video of a 40-Year-Old Deaf Woman Hearing for the First Time

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Watch the US Drop 2.5 Million Tons of Bombs on Laos

by Leon69Eyzqm Posted on March 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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Between 1964 and 1973, the United States dropped around 2.5 million tons of bombs on Laos. While the American public was focused on the war in neighboring Vietnam, the US military was waging a devastating covert campaign to cut off North Vietnamese supply lines through the small Southeast Asian country.

The nearly 600,000 bombing runs delivered a staggering amount of explosives: The equivalent of a planeload of bombs every eight minutes for nine years, or a ton of bombs for every person in the country—more than what American planes unloaded on Germany and Japan combined during World War II. Laos remains, per capita, the most heavily bombed country on earth.

The map above, created by photographer Jerry Redfern, provides another view of the massive scale of the bombing. Each point on the map corresponds to one US bombing mission starting in October 1965; multiple planes often flew on missions.

The unfinished aftermath of the air campaign is the subject of Redfern and Karen Coates’ new book, Eternal Harvest: The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos. This stunning book, seven years in the making, documents how the secret air war is still claiming lives more than four decades after it ended.

More than 100 Laotians fall victim to unexploded cluster bombs annually, delayed casualties of Operation Barrel Roll and Operation Steel Tiger, which dropped 270 million cluster bomblets. Packed by the dozens or hundreds in canisters, cluster bombs are designed to open in midair, scattering small explosives across a wide radius. Yet not all of them detonated, and today, 80 million live bomblets lurk under Laos’ soil.

Cleaning up the unexploded ordnance (UXO) has been agonizingly slow. In January, Congress approved $12 million for UXO clearance and related aid in Laos. In comparison, the bombing cost the United States spent $17 million a day in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Below, a selection of Redfern’s photographs from Eternal Harvest. Learn more about his and Coates’ work at their website.

An aerial view of the countryside around Phonsavanh, Laos, shows craters from the US bombing campaign.

Workers found this unexploded bomb shell in a quarry. It awaits a clearance team, which will attempt to defuse it safely.

Left: Bo Ya, 35, lost his hands and most of his vision 10 years ago when he picked up some unexploded ordnance (UXO). Right: A pile of bomb scrap, shrapnel, and cluster bombs lies next to a new home along the old Ho Chi Minh Trail.

A Vietnamese trader and his family eat dinner by a heap of shrapnel and cluster bombs and an artillery shell. Scrap-metal traders buy bomb debris from Laotians who collect it in the fields and forests.

A technician with an unexploded ordnance disposal team scans for bombs along the new road built atop the old Ho Chi Minh Trail. People began building new homes in this spot before the area had been cleared.

Left: A 750-pound bomb is detonated by a clearance team. Right: A woman and her children paddle down the Banghiang River in a canoe fashioned from fuel tanks dropped by American bombers.

A guesthouse with decorations fashioned from war detritus caters to foreigners in the town of Phonsavanh.

Ethnic Lave kids count the money they earned from selling bomb scrap.

The lobby of the Vinh Thong Guesthouse in Phonsavan displays an amazing array of defused UXO as well as a mural depicting the 1968 bombing of the Plain of Jars.

Children study by a UXO warning poster in a one-room schoolhouse in Ban Pakeo.

A dud rocket found in a clump of bamboo. It was later detonated by a bomb disposal team.

Left: A planter made from the tail fins of an American bomb in Vieng Xay, a former stronghold of the Pathet Lao communist guerillas. Right: Sou Lin Phan poses next to a large dud bomb in the middle of his village in Xieng Khouang Province.

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Watch the US Drop 2.5 Million Tons of Bombs on Laos

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WATCH: The Religious Right has Spread the "Good News of Homophobia" Around the World Fiore Cartoon

by FrancescaGresha Posted on March 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

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WATCH: The Religious Right has Spread the "Good News of Homophobia" Around the World Fiore Cartoon

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Dirty Money: From Rockefeller to Koch

by Myrna Posted on March 11, 2014

Catholic University’s decision to accept $1 million from the Charles Koch Foundation to support the study of “principled entrepreneurship” is like a modern-day reenactment of 1905′s “tainted money affair.” Catholic University of America. NCinDC/flickr Last November, the Catholic University of America announced a pledge of $1 million from the Charles Koch Foundation to support the study of “principled entrepreneurship” at the university’s new business school. As the billionaire funder of various libertarian causes and much of the Tea Party movement, Koch (along with his brother David) is not exactly a stranger to controversy. But his foundation has made gifts to many educational institutions in the past—its website lists 270 colleges and universities it supports, including more than two dozen Catholic schools—with only the occasional stir of opposition. And so he might have assumed that his gift would be met with a press release and that mild mix of gratitude and entitlement with which the public now greets most seven-figure gifts to educational and cultural institutions. After all: Who doesn’t like principled entrepreneurship? Yet, this time, the gift to Catholic (CUA) caused more than a stir. In fact, from a significant swath of the broader Catholic community it provoked something close to outrage. As things stand today, the outcry hasn’t managed to scuttle the donation. But it has the chance to do something even more important: to renew a vital and century-long debate about the terms of philanthropy itself. There are two reasons why Koch’s gift did not slide tranquilly into Catholic’s coffers. One is that CUA holds a unique status among American institutions of Catholic higher education; both because of CUA’s national profile and because U.S. bishops founded it and sit on its board, American Catholics tend to be especially defensive about its reputation. The other is that Koch’s gift coincided with a moment of mounting confidence among Catholic progressives, who have found an ally in Pope Francis. In fact, just a little more than a week after CUA announced Koch’s donation, the Pope issued his first major public pronouncement, denouncing the “deified market,” the folly of supply-side economics, and the “new tyranny” of unfettered capitalism. Here, it seemed, was a call for principled entrepreneurship that placed Koch’s libertarianism directly in its sights. Read the rest at The Atlantic. Continue reading: Dirty Money: From Rockefeller to Koch Related ArticlesDemocrat Senators to Stage All-Night Session of Climate Change SpeechesWhat the Ukraine Crisis Means for the Energy IndustryPublic Transit Usage Is at Its Highest Level in More than Fifty Years

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Ugh: Cheney and Palin Call For Military Involvement in Ukraine

by turystycznypbs700 Posted on March 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Washington bureau chief David Corn joined Chris Matthews and Huffington Post‘s Howard Fineman on Hardball to discuss the push by far-right conservatives like Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, and Ted Cruz for US military involvement in Ukraine.

David Corn is Mother Jones’ Washington bureau chief. For more of his stories, click here. He’s also on Twitter.

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Ugh: Cheney and Palin Call For Military Involvement in Ukraine

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Le1f’s Latest Is a Panty Dropper, No Matter Your Gender

by Guadalupe Scharff Posted on March 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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“I’m being really ratchet right now,” the up-and-coming rapper Le1f tells me over the phone. He’s on a train, and I’ve asked him what his wildest music video fantasy would look like. He laughs, but he doesn’t demur. “I don’t think I’m being like Marina Abramovic, but that’s totally where I want to take it: pulling strands of pearls through wounds in my body while rapping. That sounds really crackin’ to be honest.”

If you don’t know Le1f, aka Khalif Diouf, you will. He’s been making waves in the New York rap scene among queer and straight listeners alike. And for all his subversive ideas, he’s got the potential for broad appeal. (Referring to him as a “gay rapper,” while accurate, is a misdirection, he points out; “female rap” isn’t a genre either.)

Hey, Le1f’s new EP dropping tomorrow, includes the single “Boom.” (“How many batty boys can you fit in a jeep?”) It’s his first project since signing with Terrible Records, a move that establishes his position in the indie scene with labelmates like Grizzly Bear and Dev Hynes. The deal is part of a joint venture with XL recordings, which carries blockbuster names such as Thom Yorke and Vampire Weekend. “I don’t necessarily need it to be a fucking Lady Gaga, Janet Jackson production,” he says. “But I definitely have ideas that require screens and projection and hired dancers.”

At Wesleyan University, where he majored in dance, Le1f, 24, wrote beats for Das Racist, including the track “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” which made them internet famous. But Le1f was destined to make his own mark on the widening hip-hop landscape. He has released three mixtapes, most recently Tree House, whose track “Damn Son” Pitchfork called an “unqualified banger.”

When I ask Le1f for a tour of his musical influences, he narrates his version of Genesis in a matter-of-fact tone. “Music history starts in 1994 with Aaliyah. And then you put on Missy Elliott and Timbaland and that’s the second day, and on the third day there was Lil’ Kim and Junior Mafia. After that it’s like Bjork and weird shit.”

Perhaps the most unique thing about Le1f’s music is it’s deep sensuality in a genre that tends toward phallus comparisons, the objectification of women, and the trivialization of sex. He is at times theatrical or ironic, but the defining characteristic of his music is potency. His lush, clubby beats and agile lyrical delivery thrust him toward a trajectory of pop-rap radio play.

That’s not to say his lyrics lack depth or timely social commentary. “It’s my place to talk about issues within the gay community as well as gay rights,” he says. “Taxi,” one of the songs on his forthcoming full-length album, is about “racist gay dudes in the club” who ignore him precisely the way taxi cab drivers ignore him on the street.

“The Gaystream doesn’t care about diversity,” Le1f says. “I’m not going to shy away from what it feels like to be unaccepted as a gay person.”

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Le1f’s Latest Is a Panty Dropper, No Matter Your Gender

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Meet the American Pastor Behind Uganda’s Anti-Gay Crackdown

by HubertN55u Posted on March 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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In late February, when Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed the nation’s harsh new anti-gay bill into law, he claimed the measure had been “provoked by arrogant and careless western groups that are fond of coming into our schools and recruiting young children into homosexuality.” What he failed to mention is that the legislation—which makes homosexuality a crime punishable by life in prison in some cases—was itself largely due to Western interlopers, chief among them a radical American pastor named Scott Lively.

Lively, a 56-year-old Massachusetts native, specializes in stirring up anti-gay feeling around the globe. In Uganda, which he first visited in 2002, he has cultivated ties to influential politicians and religious leaders at the forefront of the nation’s anti-gay crusade. Just before the first draft of Uganda’s anti-gay bill began circulating in April 2009, Lively traveled to Kampala and gave lengthy presentations to members of Uganda’s parliament and cabinet, which laid out the argument that the nation’s president and lawmakers would later use to justify Uganda’s draconian anti-gay crackdown—namely that Western agitators were trying to unravel Uganda’s social fabric by spreading “the disease” of homosexuality to children. “They’re looking for other people to be able to prey upon,” Lively said, according to video footage. “When they see a child that’s from a broken home it’s like they have a flashing neon sign over their head.”

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Meet the American Pastor Behind Uganda’s Anti-Gay Crackdown

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