Some heartfelt advice to Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza, two excellent journalists who now seem to be aspiring satirists: Don’t quit your day jobs. Before you put up a You Tube that makes a comedian with flop sweat look like Chris Rock (and doesn’t enhance your image as journalists) you might want to consider THIS, THIS, THIS, or go to this guy for some coaching (as I did). If you don’t,...

Madonna writes of her spiritual awakening to the teachings of Kabbalah in today’s edition of Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s leading tabloid daily: “I started seeing that being rich and famous isn’t the end of the road, but the beginning of it,” she writes. In the highest tradition of eyewitness reporting, she reveals: “Countless times I’ve travelled the world, performed in...

There is something about Texan Lance Armstrong that tweaks French nerves like nothing else can. The seven-time Tour de France winner, after a three year retirement, returned to the ‘Great Loop’ this year, finishing third. Begrudgingly – and with more than a hint of suspicion that the Tour is somehow soiled by Armstrong – Mustapha Kessous of France’s Le Monde reaches the surprising...

THIS JUST IN! Forget Iran, forget health care — what the world REALLY wants to know about is: how did that “beer summit” called by President Barack Obama featuring himself, a prominent African American Harvard professor and the policeman who arrested the prof (with Vice President Joe Biden at the table) go? So it’s time for (what else?) the analysis. Rather than bore you with ours (we’ll...

There’s been a plethora of coverage, both here and elsewhere, of the “Gates-Gate” affair currently choking the news cycle to death. Of course, most of these people are choosing to focus on “teachable moments” and the “status of black-white relations” and blah, blah, blah, blah. Sadly, what most of these analysts are missing is the good news underlying the affairs of...

Today is the big day — a day that will go down in history: at 6 p.m. EST President Barack Obama will sit down at the White House’s first beer summit with a lreading African-American professor and the policeman who arrested him. Obama’s comments about the arrest added fuel to the polarizing fire — and this is his attempt to defuse it via a low-key session where the three deep six the rhetoric...

As it should have become clear from my recent writings on Dahlia Lithwick, I think she is brilliant in her analyses of the U.S. Supreme Court, its justices, cases and opinions. But her talents don’t stop at the Supreme Court’s magnificent entrance. I came across a set of 18 little poems, written by Lithwick over at Slate. I am told they are written in “haiku form.” Since I am not familiar...

The name “Penn & Teller” conjures up an image of an immensely entertaining comedy/magic team so to the uninitiated, you’d think that any show of theirs would be more of the same. WRONG. In their cable series, Penn Fraser Jillette and Raymond Joseph Teller become the anti-60 Minutes: they present a series of documentaries setting out to examine a common “given” or a politically/environmentally...

If you’re literally a lifelong student of comedy as I am, you have to constantly watch and study the comedy greats. The era is unimportant: you study the work of great film and TV comedians of the 20th and early 21st century. And any student of comedy has to view at least some of the classic Marx Brothers movies, where they’ll be amazed at the antics of all of the brothers — but perhaps most...

On The Tonight Show, William Shatner did a “reading” of the poetry inherent in Sarah Palin’s farewell address as governor of Alaska: I’m speechless… — Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice. — Technorati : Sarah Palin, William Shatner Del.icio.us : Sarah Palin, William Shatner Zooomr : Sarah Palin, William Shatner Flickr : Sarah Palin, William...

I cannot decide which made me laugh harder:  Patrick’s video of the Valley Girl trying to say something about vegetable trees at a Santa Cruz town hall meeting, or this video of Republican congressmen running from Mike Stark, a reporter for The Huffington Post and Firedoglake — and in one case, looking at pens for 20 minutes — in order to avoid having to answer Mike’s question: “Do...

Here at YouTube, over 9 million people have watched this. I watched it. I cried. Not because of the occasion, not because this is how it used to be, in a different form, in my deeply ethnic childhood when I saw my dad do it at every event of this kind… but because tonight, I so wished my dad, had he lived past his 88th year, could have seen this little film tonight too. He would have cried out, Ya! Ya!...

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

It seems that Orly Taitz will be showing up on The Colbert Report this week. She will doubtless have her own certified United States birth certificate on hand. Aside from the delicious entertainment such a meeting promises, we should take this chance to attempt predicting some of the highlights. A lot of this will depend on the rationale of Taitz for accepting the interview. Is she simply unaware of Colbert’s...

How often do you see a review that begins like this? It’s hard to know where — and with whom — to begin when assessing the depraved, worthless piece of filth that is “Orphan,” a high-gloss horror show about a well-meaning couple who bring home a 9-year-old girl to join their family, only to discover, way too late, that she’s a homicidal psychopath. The quote is from Ann Hornaday’s...

America has attracted adventurers in droves in the past two centuries. It’s a country that has challenged human limitations of thoughts and actions. At a time when the mainstream media (MSM), by and large, prostrated itself in front of the altar of profit and greed, several alternatives to provide “real” news to the public appeared on the scene. One fascinating example is The Huffington Post...

Those who have read my prior posts on Mr. Savage are aware that I am far from a fan of his program. I find him highly offensive, homophobic and racist. I think he is a jerk and if his radio show were to vanish from the planet tomorrow morning I would not mourn in the least. However there are some things I like even less than Mr. Savage and one of those things is censorship in the name of political correctness....

We have all heard about the young, Dutch, Jewish girl, Anne Frank. (She was actually born in Germany, but moved with her family to the Netherlands when she was about five because of the escalating anti-Semitism in Hitler’s Germany) And, of course, the diary she kept for two years while hiding out in de “achterhuis“—hidden rooms in her father’s office building in Amsterdam—has...

As the news media gears up for the release sometime over the next two weeks of Michael Jackson’s autopsy results, the Michael Jackson media story narrative is shifting into a new stage: trying to unravel what factors led to his death and if there were signs that it could end the way it did. It’s happening now, amid some other new developments. CNN offers this panel discussion raising the question...

Nate Beeler, The Washington Examiner This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to run on TMV. All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

“Secular” India and “Islamic” Pakistan try to suppress prostitution but ignore the plight of thousands of people involved in this highly risky but widely practised profession. Some NGOs have done commendable work, such as a recent drive in Karachi to promote health awareness among sex workers. Lahore, Karachi, Calcutta, Bombay and Lucknow were among the traditional urban centers in undivided...

My cultural intake the past couple of weeks has provided me with a strong dose of polygamy. Courtesy of Netflix, I am about to finish season two of Big Love, the HBO drama about a forward-thinking polygamist family in Utah. On the literary side of the house, I just finished A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, which recounts the story of two Afghan women who find themselves married to the same brutal...

Forty years ago today, July 20th, 1969 and for a instant in time we were united in celebration. I was still a baby when this happened but I have spoken to family members who talk about how everyone was watching and holding their breath. Children watched their fathers cry as they watched a human being step foot on the surface of the moon. Indeed I don’t know that any of us who were not alive that day can...

And the video below is our lesson for Monday:

The author of Angela’s Ashes was 78. He had skin cancer. I will probably write more at another time. Right now, I am in a state of shock.