Comedy Central

Joe Scarborough made a big mistake.

More: The Immoral Minority: If Anybody Wondered Whether Stephen Colbert Would Help His Sister in Her Campaign for the South Carolina Congressional Seat, That Is No Longer a Mystery. He Is All In!

Public Policy Polling’s new survey shows that Stephen Colbert tops the South Carolina voters’ Senate wish list:

Haley has pretty solid numbers within her own party. 70% of Republicans approve of the job she’s doing to 22% who disapprove. But with Democrats (15/78 approval) and independents (28/57) her numbers are pretty woeful.

There is a path back to popularity for Haley though: appointing Stephen Colbert to replace Jim DeMint in the Senate. Colbert tops the wish list of who South Carolina voters would like to see join that body at 20%, followed by Tim Scott at 15%, Trey Gowdy at 14%, Jenny Sanford at 11%, Henry McMaster and Mark Sanford at 8%, Jeff Duncan and Joe Wilson at 5%, and Mick Mulvaney at 4%.

It’s Democrats and independents- those voters Haley most needs to improve her standing with- who are pining for a Colbert appointment. Among Democrats 32% say they’d like Colbert to be picked with Jenny Sanford at 19% and no one else in double digits. With crucial independent voters Colbert has a 15 point lead for the appointment, getting 28% to 13% for Tim Scott, 12% for Jenny Sanford, and 10% for Trey Gowdy with no one else in double digits.

Stephen Colbert’s Atone Phone

Tevye the Milkman is not the only one to believe in tradition. Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central’s Colbert Report does, too. As has become his High Holiday custom, Colbert is happily prepared to accept apologies from Jews who have wronged him. To make that easier, he has set up a toll-free Atone Phone. Here’s how he explained it earlier this week:

“To quote your Jewish pope, Moses, revenge is a dish best served Kosher. That’s why I am once again offering my Atone Phone hot line. If you’re Jewish and you gave me tsuris during the year 5772 just pick up the phone before Yom Kippur and dial [no phone numbers allowed].”

That will likely be easier to remember if you think: 1-888-OOPS-JEW. Unfortunately, the cost of a toll-free line — even one with so noble a purpose — is prohibitive. So to help defray the cost, he’s had to share the number with several other companies.

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nytimes.com

The comedian Stephen Colbert and Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York bantered onstage Friday night before 3,000 cheering, stomping, chanting students at Fordham University, in what might have been the most successful Roman Catholic youth evangelization event since Pope John Paul II last appeared at World Youth Day.

The evening was billed as an opportunity to hear two Catholic celebrities discuss how joy and humor infuse their spiritual lives. They both delivered, with surprises and zingers that began the moment the two walked onstage. Mr. Colbert went to shake Cardinal Dolan’s hand, but the cardinal took Mr. Colbert’s hand and kissed it — a disarming role reversal for a big prelate with a big job and a big ring.

Cardinal Dolan was introduced as a man who might one day be elected pope, to which he said, “If I am elected pope, which is probably the greatest gag all evening, I’ll be Stephen III.

The event would not have happened without its moderator, the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and prolific author who has made it his mission to remind Catholics that there is no contradiction between faithful and funny. His latest book is ‘Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor and Laughter Are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life.’

theatlantic.com

And the major paused for about a minute, and he said, troopers advance. And you saw these men putting on their gas masks. They came toward us, beating us with nightsticks, bullwhips, tramping us with horses, releasing the teargas. I was hit in the head by a state trooper with a nightstick. My legs went from under me. I thought I was going to die. I thought I saw death.

I had a concussion there at the bridge, and I don’t recall 45 years later how we made it back across the bridge, crossing the Alabama River back to this little church that we left from. And when we returned to the church, the church was full to capacity. More than 2,000 people outside trying to get in to protect what had happened. And someone asked me to say something to the audience.

And I stood up and said, I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it, how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam and cannot send troops to Selma, Alabama, to protect people whose only desire is to register to vote. And the next thing I realized, I had been admitted to the Good Samaritan Hospital, a short distance away. There were 17 other people who had been hurt.

-Rep. John Lewis (D- Ga.), on NPR in 2010, marking the 45th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” the 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery.

If there is an American alive today who is well suited to evaluate the partisan push for new restrictive voting laws this election cycle, it is Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights icon who put his skull where his heart and mind were on the Edmund Pettus Bridge all those years ago. But to merely read the words above doesn’t do justice to what happened that day. Here’s an interview the congressman did earlier this year with Stephen Colbert. In it you can hear, you can see, you can feel the profound impact the event had upon Rep. Lewis’ life and, indeed, upon the life of the nation.

washingtonpost.com

Nation, our so-called universities are in big trouble, and not just because attending one of them leaves you with more debt than the Greek government. No, we’re talking about something even more unsettling: the academic world’s obsession with Stephen Colbert.

Last we checked, Colbert was a mere TV comedian, or a satirist if you want to get fancy about it. (And, of course, being college professors, they do.) He’s a TV star, like Donald Trump, only less of a caricature.

Yet ever since Colbert’s show, “The Colbert Report,” began airing on Comedy Central in 2005, these ivory-tower eggheads have been devoting themselves to studying all things Colbertian. They’ve sliced and diced his comic stylings more ways than a Ginsu knife. Every academic discipline — well, among the liberal arts, at least — seems to want a piece of him. Political science. Journalism. Philosophy. Race relations. Communications studies. Theology. Linguistics. Rhetoric.

There are dozens of scholarly articles, monographs, treatises and essays about Colbert, as well as books of scholarly articles, monographs and essays. A University of Oklahoma student even earned her doctorate last year by examining him and his “Daily Show” running mate Jon Stewart. It was called “Political Humor and Third-Person Perception.”

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pitch.com

his year, the Missouri Legislature has been great fodder for late-night comedians such as Stephen Colbert, who riffed on the “Don’t Say Gay” bill on his Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report.

“Folks, finding out that homosexuality exists is a slippery slope to tolerating it,” Colbert said.

The Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi followed up that report, butting heads with state Rep. Wanda Brown over House Bill 1621, which prevents employers from firing employees for owning guns — instances of which no one had heard before Brown’s bill.

“How many examples of gun-owner discrimination do you know of?” Mandvi asked Brown.

“Well, you know, I’d rather not get into examples,” she stumbled.

“Right, you must have thousands of them. But can you give me a few?”

“This is preventative,” she said. “I’d just like to protect the Second Amendment [rights] of everyone in the future.”

An awkward roasting ensued.

There’s a certain brand of national reporting that exists solely as political rubbernecking for eye-grabbing conservative legislation. State Sen. Brian Nieves caught The Atlantic’s attention with SJR 45, a secession-lite bill that “prohibits the Missouri legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government from recognizing, enforcing, or acting in furtherance of any federal action that exceeds the powers delegated to the federal government.”

“Whoa,” wrote The Atlantic’s Andrew Cohen. “Is Missouri going to declare war on the United States? Are its citizens going to refuse to enforce laws they don’t agree with?”

Cohen followed up with a distraught update on HB 1534, sponsored by state Rep. Kurt Bahr, which criminalizes the implementation of Obamacare, punishing any federal official who attempts to enforce the Affordable Care Act with up to a year in prison.

Stephen Colbert’s political action committee has enough cash to play jokes and pull pranks through the presidential campaign, but for now the comedian is mum on how he plans to spend that money.

Colbert’s Super PAC, Americans for A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow has $794,000 cash-on-hand sitting untouched in its coffers, according to March documents filed with the Federal Election Commission, making it wealthier than some PAC’s intended to back (legitimate!) presidential candidates.

The PAC raised just $44,000 in March, but spent only $28,000, mostly on Internet bills and legal fees. Though the March haul is paltry, the committee is sitting on a significant sum.

By contrast, as Politico first reported, Endorse Liberty, a PAC dedicated to supporting Ron Paul’s candidacy has just $54,000 in the bank.

Endorse Liberty, initially bankrolled with a $1.7 million donation from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, raised just $13,000 in March.

ABCNews.com