John Cleese on The Other Palin: "A Nice-Looking Parrot"

He concludes: "And she's running as the partner of a 72-year-old cancer survivor! I mean, Monty Python could have written this. [laughs] And I'm sorry, Michael Palin, to say you're not the funniest Palin any more, but you're not."

Ode to Sean Hannity

HannityIsAMoron.com

By John Cleese, the Minister of Silly Walks:

Ode to Sean Hannity

by John Cleese

Aping urbanity
Oozing with vanity
Plump as a manatee
Faking humanity
Journalistic calamity
Intellectual inanity
Fox Noise insanity
You’re a profanity
Hannity

Michael Palin for President

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! More qualified than Sarah, for sure. She may eat mooseburgers, but he eats Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, baked beans and Spam!

We Love Lists

#1: "Dead Parrot", Monty Python, 1969

nerve.com: The 50 Greatest Comedy Sketches of All Time

hat tip to BoingBoing

#12: "The Racial Draft" Chappelle's Show

If Woody Allen's monologue qualified as a sketch, I'd add "The Moose" (1965) to the list. The Berkowitzes! The moose is furious!

Classic SPAM

hat tip to Shakesville

Just For Laughs

Monty Python - Philosophers' World Cup

Another gift from Who Ate All The Pies?

And Now for Something Completely Different

The Sound of Young America: Unearthed Monty Python Footage From 1975

All but John Cleese. Note: the audience could be my high school class. The hair, the hair.

I saw this on BoingBoing

Good Article on the Politics of Abortion

From commondreams:

Every Sperm is Sacred

The general joke about pro-lifers is that for them, "Life begins at conception and ends at birth." That's when the poor, the disenfranchised, the overworked, the overloaded and the undersupported women without access to good health insurance have to start raising these unwanted children.

In 2001, an article in Harvard's Quarterly Journal of Economics, John H, Donahue III and Steven D. Levitt concluded that: "Crime began to fall roughly 18 years after abortion legalization... Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime."

While this theory was immediately attacked, its ramifications are interesting. More studies could have been done on the positive effects of abortion - if the climate had not been made so emotionally charged that even suggesting there were positive benefits was seen as something akin to supporting child rape.

There's something self-righteous about pro-lifers, something sneering as well as controlling. They have the same kind of credibility with me as racist senators who are later found to have fathered illegitimate children with their African-American servants. There's a whiff of hypocrisy in the air. I would bet that some of the most fervent abortion foes have had abortions - or their wives and/or mistresses have had them. And if abortion is criminalized in this country, they will still have them. Anyone with money for an airline ticket will have access to abortions, because some states will permit them and many other countries provide them.

[]

We're back to the domination of women, aren't we? About getting us back into the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, so men are not challenged by our talent, our wit, our abilities and our gumption.

The Monty Python comedy troupe was making fun of this belief in their song, "Every Sperm is Sacred": "Every sperm is sacred/Every sperm is great/If a sperm is wasted/God gets quite irate."

United States of Shame

United States of Shame
By MAUREEN DOWD

Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.

Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle - Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine - lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.

When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.

When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.

Who are we if we can't take care of our own?

Why Didn't the Camera Show the Shoes?

Condoleeza Rice just gave a State Department briefing. No one asked her about her shoe shopping while Americans died.

Picture of Condi hitting a Monty Python Broadway show this past Wednesday while people were dying in New Orleans

Where's Dick Cheney?

Just wondering. Americablog is wondering, too: Is Cheney ill?

We know Condi has been called back to Washington from New York City, where she was booed at the Broadway show Spamalot, and yelled at by a sane American while shoe shopping during a national catastrophe.

Bush is on TV now, biting his lip, listening to the thanks of the Republican governors of Alabama & Mississippi. "Making progress every day", Haley Barbour just said. Channelling his inner George W. Bush, I guess. Now Barbour is talking about people who didn't leave. Check, second GOP talking point.

They all look high school kids on the stage giving a report.

This is pathetic. They should have used Air Force One to drop water & food.