Humor

It's time for Tuesday's all-new episode of NewsBusted. As usual, make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel or embed your own 'Busted widget for all of Jodi's latest comedic stylings. Enjoy!

At the MRC’s “DisHonors Awards” last month I got a pretty good reaction to a compilation of those humorous clips Bret Baier plays at the end of his FNC show, usually drawn from funny takes and edited news video produced by the late night comedy shows. (For that “funny clips” compilation, scroll down on this page.)

So, I thought I’d bring the concept to NewsBusters with occasional weekend postings of the “best” of Baier’s choices. For this inaugural edition, I went back to Baier’s June 15 program for Jimmy Kimmel’s mash-up of a certain term used over and over during CNN’s June 13 Republican presidential debate, a mash-up which ends with a different phrase from Herman Cain. Watch below the jump. It’s short and funny.

CNN is finally vindicated, sort of. Nearly nine years ago, the network emphatically declared of Osama bin Laden: "Experts Agree: Al Qaeda Leader Is Dead or Alive."

Which would pretty much cover all of the available possibilities. Now we know -- he was alive back then, and he's dead today.

Here's the item from the September 4, 2002 CyberAlert (as written at the time by MRC's Brent Baker) referring to the story from the previous day's "Live From..." newscast:

Jon Stewart's latest anti-conservative screed included a satirical defense of top income earners and a tongue-in-cheek plea for teachers to pay their fair share, in the wake of the Wisconsin protests. On Monday's "Daily Show," the Comedy Central host offered a shallow assessment of the entire Wisconsin situation with not a single critical look at the state's public sector unions.

Stewart's simplistic take on events is that teachers are being unduly bullied by Republicans and the wealthy to help solve the budget crisis in this country. What could help, he opined, would be boosting taxes on the "top two percent" of income earners.

"Hey you know, one thing we could do – not extend the Bush tax cuts to the top two percent of the country. That would earn us $700 billion over the next ten years," Stewart remarked to applause. "Oh, oh, and maybe also we could close some corporate tax loopholes."
 

Via Drudge, it's the end of an era, so give us a fitting caption for this photo. Keep it clean, people.

Funny:

In honor of Harry Smith leaving the CBS Early Show at the end of the month, along with weatherman Dave Price and already departed co-host Maggie Rodriguez, actor Mark Wahlberg concluded an interview with the morning show host by literally getting on the floor and kissing Smith's feet, declaring "You're the best, ever."  

On November 30, it was announced that Smith, Rodriguez, and Price would be replaced by Chris Wragge, Erica Hill, Jeff Glor and Marysol Castro starting January 3. Walhberg's send-off included not only feet-kissing, but he embraced Smith twice as the show moved on to the next segment.

View video below

On Friday's CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith got into the Halloween spirit by dressing up as Sue Sylvester, the cheerleading coach from the show 'Glee,' and on NBC's Today, correspondent Tamron Hall showed up as President Obama. For Smith, it was the second consecutive Halloween he chose a female persona, going as celebrity chef Julia Child in 2009.

[Video below]

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation isn't backing down when it comes to bullying its way into protected-class status. The gay advocacy group has rejected actor Vince Vaughn’s defense of using the term “gay” to describe electric cars in his yet-to-be released movie, “The Dilemma.” According to the Hollywood Reporter, a post on the official GLAAD website rebutted, “Vince is right. Comedy does bring us together, unless one of us is the punchline. Then it pushes us apart.”

Last week the Culture and Media Institute reported that Vaughn defended his character’s use of the term “gay” by saying, “Comedy and joking about our differences breaks tension and brings us together.”

The frequently-maudlin Ann Curry outdid herself on Wednesday's Today show. Narrating a short video item about Russia unveiling a new set of inflatable weapons designed to fool spy satellites, Curry chirped: "Wish all weapons were like that." (Video below the fold.)

Her flower-child moment brought to mind how another morning show anchor, ABC's Charles Gibson, confided to Larry King shortly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq how he and his wife had “a little framed sign hanging in our bedroom, my wife and I, that said, ‘War is not good for children and other living things,’ and I believe that. So I don’t like covering war and I hate to see them occur.”

Earlier this week an essay appeared on the Huffington Post which accused Heritage Action of plagiarism with regards to some Internet spots they are currently running starring Clint Howard. As the writer for the Heritage Action ads in question, let me address the charge of plagiarism directly. First of all, I can give you my word of honor as a gentleman* that until yesterday morning I had never seen or even heard of the SEIU ads I am accused of plagiarizing. I have heard of Lee Camp, as I peruse the Huffington Post regularly for joke premises, and I have even sampled a couple of Mr. Camp’s alleged comedy offerings. Not being a fan of his work, however, there would be no reason for me to seek out additional examples of it. I would be more than happy to undergo a polygraph examination to corroborate my claims of innocence on the condition that Mr. Camp undergo a polygraph test to corroborate his claims of being a comedy writer which I have been unable to document elsewhere.

Videos below the page break

Reporting that an elderly woman fainted at a West Virginia campaign appearance by former President Clinton, MSNBC ran the provocative headline "He's Still Got It," on its 10 a.m. EDT news hour. We'll leave it to the reader to guess what exactly MSNBC was getting at.

President Clinton was giving a stump speech Monday for West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin, the state's Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate.

"One audience member was just a little overwhelmed,"  MSNBC anchor Chris Jansing remarked, as a video clip then showed Clinton pausing his speech to recognize an elderly woman in the front who had fainted. "Maybe if you're a Democrat, you'll think this is awesome," Jansing commented.

The woman had received medical attention and was being escorted away by a doctor and two security guards. "And I'm going to save her reputation. It was the sun and not me that made her faint," Clinton joked as she was escorted from the premises.

Fired CNN anchor Rick Sanchez was granted an online Q&A Monday on The Washington Post website. Sanchez still finds it unfair that he would be knocked for noting knowing how many feet are in a meter. Hasn't someone pulled him aside and told him that audiences expect an anchor to at least fake that they've taken the time to figure out feet to meters? When he was asked about why Jon Stewart mocked him so often, Sanchez replied:

I have taken to heart some of Jon Stewart's criticisms and I asked Jon about that last week. He said, "Rick, I'm a comedian and the only reason I focused on you was because I like you."

Maybe I just never saw it that way. Maybe I was too thin-skinned. I blamed it on Jon's prejudice and that was wrong. But here is my point: Oftentimes the ridiculing was simply baseless. I was ridiculed for not knowing how many inches or feet in ten meters. I didn't think that was fair, because it happened during a breaking news story and frankly I'm not good with the metric system.

A young liberal group recently stripped down naked to show their, uh, support for ObamaCare. Well, now a young conservative group has produced a response video. Judge for yourself which one makes the better argument.

For more thoughts on both videos make sure you check out this post on the Eyeblast Blog.

Monday brings the debut of CNN’s new “Parker Spitzer,” an 8pm ET political discussion program hosted by columnist Kathleen Parker and the ex-Democratic Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer, who resigned two years ago in the midst of a prostitution scandal.

The new show was championed by then-CNN President Jonathan Klein, who was fired by the network on Friday. “Eliot Spitzer still has a lot of ideas to contribute and a lot of things to say. And I think our viewers are going to find him a very interesting person to tune into every night,” Klein enthused back on June 27 on CNN’s Reliable Sources.

As a reality check on CNN’s effort to rehabilitate this scandal-scarred liberal, MRC intern Alex Fitzsimmons and I pulled together quotes from CNN’s coverage of Spitzer’s scandal back in March 2008. MRC video editor Bob Parks turned the clips we found into a polished video presentation documenting how the infamous “Client #9” was mocked and derided by the anchors and correspondents who are now his colleagues. (Video after the jump)

Lauding Jon Stewart's biting humor and criticism of today's politicized media, NY Magazine columnist Chris Smith called him "Cronkite, the most trusted man in America" in his piece featured on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" Friday. The show's panel largely agreed with him and emphasized that Stewart is bi-partisan in his comedy.

"The right provides better raw material, but Stewart's complaints are bi-partisan," Smith writes in his column "America is a Joke." On MSNBC, Smith described Stewart as a "comedy opportunist, you know, where people do mockable things – left, right, in-between."

The show's co-host Joe Scarborough joined Smith in diffusing the myth that Stewart is a raging liberal. "Over the past year, he's been every bit as tough on the Obama administration as Republicans on Capitol Hill," he asserted.

If it wasn't for the smell, this situation would actually be amusing.

 

At a media summit in London on Wednesday, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger predicted the Times will eventually go out of print (and become a wholly online/digital publication). But Times Home section contributor Anne Raver has uncovered a possible alternative use for the dead tree version of the paper: Compost.

Under the hopeful headline "Read First, Then Use to Kill Weeds," Raver made the case for using the Times, with compost, to kill garden weeds, as demonstrated in the above photo by the Times's Rob Cardillo.

"I knew I was saving those newspapers for a reason," I said to Rock, as he rolled a cartful from the barn. (We have enough newspapers stacked in there to blanket the turf at the Augusta National Golf Club.)

I started laying down the newspaper, four sheets thick, as Rock went off to dig some compost -- rotted leaves from one pile, aged manure from another -- and mixed it together in a wheelbarrow.

I used the garden hose to wet the newspapers, to keep them from blowing away. But also because wet newspapers will decay faster, and roots from young plants will be able to grow right through to the soil below.