Episode #374 (Originally aired 1/22/16)

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Month series, Real Time with Bill Maher.

Afternoon, I will be

real time.

Thank you very much.

Oh, please.

Don't even.

Don't even try.

I know why you're happy tonight.

Because you're in California and there is a huge blizzard on the eastern half of the country.

Oh, those poor people.

It is a sea of white.

It's like the whole place is covered in Oscar nominees.

It's just amazing.

Yeah, that's the big controversy out here.

Now, I guess it's national.

Second year in a row, no nominations for African Americans in the big categories.

And now there's a boycott.

A lot of the actors are boycotting.

Chris Rock, scheduled to host.

Some people are asking him to step down.

It is getting so dramatic, they are thinking of turning it into a movie

with a white guy, so it gets nominated.

It's interesting, but

yeah, the Academy now is scrambling to do something about this so it doesn't keep happening.

What should they do?

A quota or

change the way people vote.

Oh, please, this is so easy to fix.

Hire Kanye West to

come to the Oscars, station him near the stage, and snatch the Oscars from the white people when they win.

Now, in a related story, the majority black town of Flint, Michigan has been poisoned when the Republican governor switched the drinking water to save money.

And Jada Pinkett says that's almost as bad as her husband not getting nominated for a third Oscar.

So let's keep things in perspective, shall we?

You know who else is mad at Flint, Michigan?

The police.

They said pumping lead into black people, that's our job.

I kid the police.

Get me a driver to go home tonight.

But hey, I think you're all excited because it's 10 days before the Iowa caucus.

The starting gun for the election, the real voting begins on the Republican side.

It is all-out war between Trump and Cruz.

Today, I love this.

Trump called Cruz too abrasive to be president.

Said the porcupine to the cactus.

I love that.

But it turns out that Trump's secret weapon all along has been Ted Cruz.

For the longest time, it was Trump who was the unthinkable one, but the power of hatred for Ted Cruz.

He's the one guy who makes people go, Tell me more about this Donald Trump.

And

Donald Trump, I tell you, he is in it to win it.

He showed it this week because he brought out Sarah Palin

in Iowa.

You saw that?

Oh,

they make quite a team.

Trump and Gump.

Fat Man and Little Brain.

It was really something.

Did you happen to see any of her speech?

Oh my God.

It was like a crazy drunk bridesmaid grabbed the mic at a wedding reception.

This woman has a thousand stupid clichés in her head.

And when she opens her mouth, it's like they're all escaping a nightclub fire.

You kind of have to see it to believe it.

So show a little bit of this so they know I'm not crazy.

Trump's candidacy, it has exposed not just that tragic, the ramifications of that betrayal of a transformation of our country.

Well, and then funny, ha ha, not funny.

But now what they're doing is wailing, well, Trump and his

trumpeters and he will negotiate deals,

kind of like with the skills of a community organizer maybe organizing a neighborhood tea and we apologize and then we bend over and say thank you, enemy.

You cannot put into words how much she cannot put something into words.

And you could see Trump back there.

He was not happy.

Somewhere in Arizona, John McCain is going, you should have called me, dude.

And you know,

also, the weird thing about it is that Sarah Palin has not had a job

since 2009, 2009, when Lance Armstrong was our most respected athlete.

Michael Jackson was still available for babysitting.

Getting a drink with Bill Cosby was a delightful idea.

I mean,

if America can get over all that, Republicans can't quit Sarah Palin.

And this was not even the worst part of her day.

The truth is, the day before, her son Track, who was a military veteran, was arrested for beating up his girlfriend and Palin blamed it on Obama not respecting the troops.

And that's what makes the Republicans the party of personal responsibility.

And let me tell you,

if Obama would just secure the borders, maybe Bristol would stop getting knocked up all the time.

All right, we got a great show.

John Meacham, Liz Mayer, and Alan Grayson are here.

And a little later, I'll be speaking with my good friend Seth McFarlane is backstage,

hopefully drinking.

But first he is the congressman representing Texas's 10th district, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.

He's the author of a book called Failures of Imagination, Deadliest Threats to Our Homeland and How to Thwart Them.

Please welcome Representative Michael McCall.

Michael.

How you doing, Congressman?

Thank you for being here.

I appreciate you coming by here.

I'll see you.

Okay, so you're...

That's a tough act to follow.

That is a tough act to follow.

We're not going to ask you to be that funny.

Thank you.

But I want to know about your job, head of the Homeland Security Committee, because I think I know what the FBI does to fight terrorism.

I think I know what the CIA does, the NSA.

What does the committee do?

Basically, oversight of the Department of Homeland Security.

My job is very simple but complicated, identifying threats outside the United States and stopping those threats from coming into the United States.

Both people and things.

People, explosive devices, ISIS, al-Qaeda, the threats that face the nation.

So oversight.

You watch the other agencies.

It's oversight, but I get the briefings.

I work with the department and the FBI to make sure.

Do they like working with you or are they like...

Not a good day.

Yeah, they do.

But

it's intense work.

And I will say we've stopped a lot of bad things.

Well, but the TSA last year, I mean, this was widely reported, 95% of the things that should not have gotten through in a test got through.

95%.

Not one bottle of shampoo, I'll give you that.

But

where's the oversight there?

I mean, of course.

I mean, a 95%

report card is abysmal.

Oh.

And so we rained down on them, vetting of their employees.

You know, the downing of the Russian airliner was an employee that was corrupted, compromised.

We don't want to see that kind of thing happen in the inbound flight, as is in one of the chapters of my book into Los Angeles.

I'm sorry.

I mean,

I want to read it.

This stuff can happen.

You know, it's all real stuff.

I admire this.

You imagine things that might happen.

I always say, if you want to know what's going to happen, watch movies from 20 years ago.

Everything that happens in a movie is going to happen.

And you know what's interesting about that is after 9-11, the president, at that time, Bush, his administration talked to producers from Hollywood about what can you imagine.

We failed, right?

I mean, the 9-11 Commission said it was a failure of imagination.

They met with the Hollywood producers to help.

I never knew that.

Do you know which producers?

Well, I don't.

Not you.

No.

I'm not in the product.

But you're not producing.

No, no.

No.

But I like black people.

But I think it's important.

Okay, so.

But here are

some of the attacks you imagine in your book.

ISIS and Al-Qaeda launching a drone attack.

I never thought of that on Washington.

A bioterror in the Magic Kingdom.

smallpox released at Disney World.

A jetliner explodes over LA during the Oscars.

Shooting rampage at the Mall of America on the day after Thanksgiving, the big shopping day.

Hezbollah hires a Mexican drug cartel to get a dirty bomb into the port of Houston.

Have they thought of these?

Because if not, then it's not really good.

It's not the sort of, it's sort of not the bedtime stories you want to read to your kids, but this is everything that keeps me up at night in a book.

But do you think they thought of this?

Oh, absolutely.

And each of the chapters, could it really happen?

What we say is what has already happened in the past, what they have planned to do in the future, and the intelligence that we have about what they're thinking.

Well, let me tell you something I think you might agree with me on, which is I go crazy every time I hear somebody talk about how

The number of people killed by terrorism is less than, and then they can fill in almost anything.

You know, antibiotics not working, or car accidents, certainly gun deaths.

Bicycles, they say, have killed more.

Bicycle, bathtub.

And I always say, yeah, but bathtubs and bicycles are not trying to get a nuclear weapon.

And as soon as they got one, all those figures would be out the window.

So I think that's a very dangerous thing for people to say, and I hear it all the time.

Nothing can compare to Islamic terrorism as a threat, except global terrorism.

Well, in their last publication,

Dabik,

ISIS talked about smuggling a nuclear weapon out of Pakistan through transnational criminal across the Mexican border.

I'm not making this stuff up, but when I read that, it concerns me.

And in my job as chairman of Homeland Security, it's my job to protect the American people.

And that's what we do day in and day out.

You know, the number of foreign fighters disturbs me.

It's gone up to 35,000 from 120 different countries, all converging into Iraq and Syria to train.

They conducted the Paris attacks.

You know, we had San Bernardino in the United States, and where's the next one?

When going to happen?

What is your position on immigration?

Trump says we shouldn't allow any Muslims in this country.

Some countries say we just shouldn't allow the Syrian refugees in.

What is your position on that?

I don't think you can condemn an entire population and say you can't come into the United States.

What we do is we vet and we stop the bad Muslims, you know, the radical terrorist Muslims.

Muslims.

See, this is bullshit right there, excuse me.

I heard Chris Christie say to the debate, we just stopped the bad ones.

Every time a terrorist, you just mentioned San Bernardino, what did everybody who knew him say?

Can't believe it.

We never saw a child.

They don't come into the country with a button that says bad guy.

Well, he was actually born in the country.

It was his wife that came in from Pakistan.

But you can't do, that's a terrible way to do it.

Well, let me tell you what I did.

I think you stopped.

What I did do that I think is responsible is a Syrian refugees coming from the most dangerous part of the world at Iraq, Assyria, the capital of ISIS, we put a pause on the program until we can properly vet them and bring them in under certification at the highest levels.

They're not a threat to national security.

I think that's responsible to take a pause.

We've had Iraqis come in through the refugee program that have become terrorists in the United States.

And the FBI director told me and testified before my committee, as well as the Secretary of Homeland Security, that this poses a threat to our national security.

And ISIS, in their own words, said we want to infiltrate the program to infiltrate the West and bring them into the United States.

Okay.

You've been very critical, though, of the President when he uses terms like strategic patience with ISIS.

But when you think about it, for the last 15 years, we've been at war militarily.

We went to Afghanistan to make sure that

terrorists didn't have a place where they could plot from.

Well, there are more terrorists there now than ever.

Iraq, we went in, there weren't any terrorists there, and just in case they got there.

Well, now, of course, there's more than ever there.

Yemen, same thing.

Libya.

The people who want more war and more bombing, just please point to one place where American military intervention ever stopped that from happening.

Well, you know, I would say I've been over there a while.

And

there's no doubt our presence provokes it.

Bin Laden talked about our presence

as the infidel in holy territory.

I think the key is American leadership, the coalition forces, special operators, but also the Sunni Arab standing up against the Sunni extremists, which is ISIS.

You know, the Arab nations need to create a lot of the same.

Do you agree with Bernie Sanders?

Well, I don't always agree with them,

but honestly, they need to carry, you know, we carry their water.

Yes.

They need some skin in the game.

Step up on the plate.

They're Middle Eastern countries who don't want to get involved in the Middle East.

It's their backyard, and it's their religion.

Right.

And they need to fix it too.

That's a part of the solution.

All right, high five on that.

Thank you for coming by.

It's keep us safe.

This we surely need it.

Thank you, Congressman.

All right, let's meet our panel.

Okay.

Hey.

Here they are.

He's the congressman representing Florida's 9th district and now a candidate for the Senate.

Representative Alan Grayson is back with us.

I love him.

She's a Republican political consultant who heads the anti-Trump super PAC Make America Awesome.

Liz Mayer.

Hey Liz, how you doing?

Make it awesome.

Thank you.

He's executive editor and VP of Random House and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose latest book, wow, a real egghead on our show,

is Destiny and Power, the American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush.

Our friend John Meacham is over here.

All right, remember to send us your questions for tonight's overtime so we can answer them after the show on YouTube.

All right, well, I never thought I'd see a week where the question was Trump or Cruz.

So I'm going to ask this panel a very basic question.

Let us say you know the Democrat is going to lose.

So the Republican nominee is going to win.

It's got to be either Trump or Cruz.

We know where you stand because you don't like Trump.

I would vote for probably a dried dog turd running as a Republican over Trump.

A dry dog

It would be for smaller government like Donald Trump.

I mean, that's for sure.

Okay.

So we know where you stand.

Yes.

What are the positions of the other members of the panel if you had to pick?

I look at Cruz and I see Senator McCarthy.

They look alike, they sound alike.

The same lines.

So that's a vote for Trump.

Yeah, unfortunately.

John?

By default.

Oh, Lord.

Isn't there something else?

No, there's nothing.

There's nothing else.

You have to play my game.

There's the dried dog turd, yeah.

That was the Whig.

It's a great option.

In the 19th century, the Whigs ran a lot of those.

How about revolution instead?

Let's answer this question first.

I guess I accept the

emerging conventional wisdom that Trump would probably be slightly more manageable.

I agree.

I heard him yesterday say something that you don't hear Republicans say, and that happens fairly frequently, which is Ronald Reagan made deals.

I'll make deals.

Now, they've been getting by for the longest time, as Ted Cruz does, saying, I don't work with the Democrats.

That's why I'm great.

And they all applaud.

And Trump has this ability to come out there and tell them that they're fucking idiots.

And no, Ronald Reagan, when he invokes, you know, peace and blessings be upon him, he made deals.

And I'm the deal maker.

Deals are great.

I make great deals.

I'm America's personal shopper.

I'm going to make it.

And

the Republicans in Congress just made a huge deal with the spending package that was passed.

And the issue that a lot of conservatives have is that it sucks.

I mean, and Donald Trump isn't somebody who's going to make it suck less.

He wants to spend more money, not less.

So I think for conservatives, that's a pretty tenuous proposition.

Yeah, but who are the conservatives?

I mean, the National Review, which is read by less people probably than in our studio audience.

In terms of the hard copy, I have no idea.

But the website's still extremely well.

Okay, but they put out this cover yesterday, yesterday.

They're imploring people who read it.

22 conservatives wrote essays against Trump.

Who are they?

Exactly.

This is not who votes.

The people

who vote are reading internet chat rooms

and emails from their uncle Cletus.

That's actually not, well, that's not actually the issue.

I agree that what National Review did, I read it, I found it a very cathartic experience.

I found myself nodding a lot.

But the problem is, I was never going to vote for Donald Trump anyway.

You're also the dog-turd person.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

I am actually the cruise person.

I am the cruise person between those two.

I'm just saying dog turd might be a better choice from your standpoint.

But the real issue is Donald Trump's voters aren't actually very conservative.

You look at all the data,

they're economic liberals who just have a problem with Mexicans, China, and Muslims.

So

it's true.

And so candidly,

National Review can say, well, William F.

Buckley, whatever, and they're going to go, screw you, William F.

Buckley.

Like, I want the hard ass.

But isn't that why Trump is effective?

He has what I think Reagan and Obama had.

People look at him and see what they want.

The conservatives see a conservative.

The people who aren't see something else.

And the words don't matter.

Well, I don't think the conservatives really do see a conservative.

I think that that's why he's got, he does have a ceiling.

It's a higher ceiling, admittedly, than I would like.

But conservatives don't like him.

But the problem is we have a lot of people out there.

I think that this would be conceded across the board.

There are a lot of people out there who are very angry, they feel that they've been let down, they are not in an economically good position.

The question is just who do they think is to blame for that?

And people who are rallying around Bernie Sanders have one answer, and people who are rallying around Donald Trump have another, which is basically Mexicans, China, and Muslims.

I see it a little differently.

I think that his appeal...

One day you'll be a Democrat.

What I think Trump's appeal is, is that people believe that he actually is going to get stuff done.

And the Republicans in particular see a complete failure of the political class, if you will, the puppets.

And what's happened now is that one of the puppeteers has stepped in, one of the billionaires has stepped in and said, I'm going to do it myself.

You know, we talk a lot about the possibility of oligarchy.

We'll make sure that there's an oligarchy.

We'll make sure it's a plutocracy.

But what people find appealing on the other side about Trump is they believe he's going to actually do what he says.

And they're very frustrated that nobody else seems to do what they say to them.

And if Bush or Ruby or anybody else had gone to the border and said, I'm going to build the wall, they would say, well, why didn't you build it already?

You know, you've been in office.

Why didn't you build it already?

When Trump says it, they believe it.

If Trump says, my space policy is I'm going to build a bridge from the Earth to the moon and have the extraterrestrials pay for it,

they believe it.

They believe it.

This is the...

This is.

Let's hear it from the egghead moment.

This is the oldest American argument, right?

So right now, in January of 2016, we have people on the left who believe the country's been taken away by the money classes, that Senator Clinton is a bought and paid-for commodity, that the Sanders energy there is on that side.

On the other side, conservatives, who aren't really that conservative, actually, in the classic sense,

believe that the country has been taken away by someone else.

Starting at the time of the Revolution, in the hours before the ratification of the Constitution, we had Americans who believed that the revolution had been taken away by other people.

And so there had to be this huge fight.

The Constitution was damn near not ratified.

It was a very close thing.

And the rhetoric is not all that different.

There's apocalyptic rhetoric.

And I think that what's happened, we've survived from age to age.

Forgive me, I know this isn't wildly popular, perhaps at this table, but there is a kind of center.

There is a kind of common sense that takes over.

And the danger right now is that the center just is not going to hold for the first time, I think.

Okay.

Well, let's talk about Flint, Michigan.

Because I don't know if you know what happened there, folks, but as I mentioned in the monologue, the Republican governor switched how they got their water.

It was fine.

And then they thought they could save money.

And somebody said, but Mr.

Money,

that would poison the people.

Yeah, but it would save money.

So people are a little pissed about it.

And I could not help but think of John Kasich, who was one of these sensible conservatives, they always say, at the last Republican debate, opening matters by saying, let's have a year-long moratorium on regulations.

And many Republicans want to abolish the EPA.

This, to me, is the argument we should be having in America.

Certainly government sometimes oversteps its bounds.

But when you think of the number of times we have been poisoned or something has exploded or derailed.

Let me put a little montage together for you.

These are less regulation.

This is

eventually, look at this, UCLA water main burst, remember when this happened here?

Durango mine waste leak, the Chipotle

coli outbreak, Minnesota Bridge collapse, the ice cream listeria outbreak, the Mayflower oil spill, the Texas fertilizer explosion.

Remember that one took out a whole block?

Santa Barbara oil spill, the West Virginia mine disaster, peanut butter salmonella outbreak, Amtrak derailment, BP oil spill, and now Flint.

And right here,

half hour away, Porter Ranch, California, methane gas leak, probably poisoning us right now.

And I just feel like this is sort of like

gun shootings in America.

We know what happens.

We accept it.

It's probably not going to be me, but it might be.

I might get killed, but it probably isn't me, so fuck it.

Well, look, what's happened is that big, powerful forces like the oil and gas industry, whatever you want to call it, big schmutz, whatever, and other

Wall Street, other powerful economic forces have decided that deregulation will increase their profits.

There is no money to be made in safety.

There is no money to be made

in health.

In fact, there's money to be made against safety and against health, because no one is ever held accountable for these things.

I can guarantee you that no one has been held accountable for that, what is it, 50 tons that are released every day in methane from that gas leak.

No one's been held accountable.

Who's gone to prison?

Nobody.

Who's had to pay a fine?

Nobody.

Okay, so they recognize that this is a good winning strategy for them.

That's how they make their money.

That's the problem.

Ironically, long term, we we actually do save money.

I mean, we took lead out of the paint and crime went down.

You know, there's a link there.

You've always got people who blame lead and piping for the fall of the Roman Empire, right?

I mean, lead is obviously not a good thing.

We don't particularly want to be eating it.

But I would just hasten to point out at least one of the examples that you threw up there, the Orange River, that, as I understand it, was in fact caused by government.

More regulation.

Actually, yes.

More regulation.

EPA definitely fucked up, but the reason EPA was there was because industry had fucked up and because there wasn't enough regulation to begin with.

Yes, the EPA sometimes fucks up.

That's what I'm saying.

And I think it's interesting.

But that was like one out of 20, I read.

But I think it's...

Well, sure, but you can find other examples.

I think that it's interesting, though, at the beginning that you're talking about.

But mostly it's interesting.

When you were interviewing the congressman, I thought it was interesting that you point out that government is really, really bad at stopping bad stuff from making it through TSA.

They stop our shampoo extremely effectively, but they're bad at that.

Yet the argument is that government would be doing an awesome job if we just had more regulations.

Now, I grant you,

I'm not saying get rid of all regulations, but I do think

there are two different things, aren't they?

No, they're both security threats, aren't they?

They're both things.

fight a war on coal, they won't admit it, and made us safer there.

They got rid of DDTs, they got lead in the paint we mentioned, the ozone layer they closed by banning fluorocarbons.

Other things they can't.

Right.

Well, this is one they can.

Flint,

we let them.

No, I agree on Flint.

I agree on Flint.

I'm just saying it's a general concept.

That's not 100%.

You're not a conservative global warming denier, right?

No, I'm a libertarian who believes in climate change but thinks that what Obama is trying to do about it is not going to achieve anything and is basically pointless.

As opposed opposed to the other argument, which is it snowed today in Washington, so the whole thing is.

Oh, yeah, that's ridiculous, too.

Of course, it's ridiculous, and that's not doing anything about it.

My argument is that we're going to adapt to this, and we're going to come up with better technology, and we're going to do more energy saving so that we can't.

That's simply not the case.

Look, it is the case.

No, it's not the case.

No, anybody is free to pollute.

There's no tax on carbon.

There's no cap and trade.

There's nothing.

That's absolutely true.

You can put out as much carbon, as much methane as we're seeing in L.A.

right now

as you want.

It's improving all the time.

Technology is improving all the time.

But there's no incentive to apply it unless the government regulates it.

That's absolutely not true.

Of course it is.

No, it's not.

I drive a car that gets 55 miles to the gallon.

I didn't buy it because government incentivized it.

It's because I'm cheap.

What does that have to do with the battery?

But now

gas is cheap.

It has to do with environmental.

But now gas is cheap again.

Gas is cheap again, so people are going to go back to Hummers.

This was in the paper yesterday.

This is the hottest.

I'm the hottest because I'm still cheap.

I still want to pay less and less and less.

You're paying for the gas.

We've already established you're not typical.

The gas is what causes it.

When you run the motor, that's how you get the pollution out of the car.

I get that.

Do you?

I don't know if you do.

But I mean, a major source of emissions is cars.

If you get cars that are more fuel efficient, you get the idea

that people who pollute don't now have to pay for it, and they should.

Do you get that?

If we're talking about power plants and carbon emissions specifically, yes, I do.

Yes, that's a good idea.

And just so we know, this this is the hottest year.

That's not the entirety of environmental regulation, and that's not the entirety of pollution.

That's my point.

2015

was the hottest year.

Before that, it was 2014.

They say next year will be the hottest year again.

That's never happened three years in a row.

Something is happening.

I don't know what we have to tell Republicans to make them agree, but...

I mean, some of us do.

Some of us do.

And if you actually look at some of the votes in the Senate, when you're looking at some of the votes on the Senate on EPA regulation, you do see that there are Republicans who do vote with Democrats on that.

And you see that there's the occasional Democrat who votes more like a Republican, like Joe Manchin from West Virginia.

I think the question, though, there are a lot of people in the Republican Party.

I'm not saying it's all of us, I'm not saying it's even a majority, but there are a lot of people in the Republican Party who accept that it's happening.

The question is, what do we do about it?

And is what he's proposing going to do anything to rein this in, or is it already basically out of our control?

And do we just need to adapt and thrive?

Adapt.

You mean like wear masks like they do in China?

Well, I think that's a different.

That's not.

I think that's a different sort of pollution to the one we're dealing with here.

You have the Pentagon saying this is a national security threat.

Well, you have the Maldives basically buying property elsewhere because they're going to have to move.

But it's also about,

I think we're mixing up a lot of different things.

There's

a safety regulation, which has not been a part of American life for more than 50 years, basically.

I mean, that's the important thing.

Well, Tony Roosevelt does some on the books.

Some.

But if you're talking about bridges collapsing and that's what I'm saying.

That's true.

If you're talking about like poultry.

Let him finish at EPA.

Jesus, where was him?

And

if you don't have a family, I've never had to say this on the show, but let the man speak.

There might be an Oscar nomination in this.

No, the.

It's about institutions, it seems to me.

The idea, and this has been going on really since 1981 when President Reagan said the government's not the solution, it's the problem.

There's been this cultural shift that the private sector,

you stipulate that they do things better.

It's just not true.

It's not true that the public sector does things better.

It's just institutions have to be run by smart people who are dedicated to a larger good, whether it's a profit or keeping a bridge up.

Those are called Democrats.

Okay, let's move on

to the, I mentioned the Oscars in the monologue and look, this is a problem.

I'm not gonna whitewash it.

And it's such a problem, I tell you this, we got a hold of some of the movies that are coming out next year.

We got the posters for them.

And even movies that should be black movies are pretty white.

Let me show you what I mean.

New Line has coming out straight out of Burlington.

Paramount has no better mileage.

Look at that.

It's

Bull Run in a priest.

Sony has the helped.

Okay, now that's

not the helped.

Warner Brothers.

Did you hiss?

Get out.

That's what I hate.

We'll be talking about Seth in a bit.

Warner Brothers has Malcolm Forbes.

Instead of Malcolm X.

Castle Rock has guess who's coming to the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza.

Fox Searchlight, How Stella Got Her Deposit Back.

DreamWorks has the autobiography of Miss Jane Pauley.

And Universal, of course, has Waiting to Eat Kale.

All right.

He has a new show called Bordertown.

It's very fun.

Well,

this guy has new shows like I go to the weed store.

But his true love is a singer.

His album, No One Ever Tells You.

Now, number one on the jazz charts, nominated for a Grammy.

Seth McFarlane is on the home.

Seth McFarlane is always.

Thank you for dressing up.

My pleasure.

My pleasure.

All right.

They love you.

Now, what do you got in Matt Cup there?

Whatever your guys put in it.

I don't know.

I don't have any control over it.

Okay.

So before we get to you.

Well, they know me, that's for sure.

Before we get to you and what we're playing.

It's not a problem.

It's not a problem if you can still function.

That's what I say.

That's my story.

I'm sticking with it.

Let's talk about the Oscars because you were the host of the Oscars.

I don't get to.

I don't remember that year.

Was that one of I do vividly.

It was very funny.

But I don't get the fact that Hollywood is so liberal that someone was just hissing there at a joke that was supportive of black people.

Just because we mentioned black.

See, it's not about.

Yeah.

It's just about you mention race.

It used to be like you had to actually make a racist joke.

Now you do something to do with race, and some people hiss.

Yeah, that's the way things are.

I mean, Was it Ricky Gervais's Caitlin Jenner joke?

Was it transphobic or?

What was the joke?

It was something about the car accident.

Oh yeah.

Was it not right?

Yes, right.

And there was a lot of flap about it.

Like this is a transphobic.

When the content was, you know,

I'm not weighing in on whether the joke was funny or not, but

there are certain buzzwords that are

are instantaneous.

They give you a knee-jerk reaction these days.

And you're so lucky that you do cartoons because

the things you get away with cartoons.

I'm so jealous of.

You're the first person ever to tell me that.

Oh, please.

I was wondering.

You're so lucky you do cartoons.

I saw your show.

It was a repeat, I know, but it was.

That's what Jack Nicholson says to me, too.

What?

You're so lucky you do cartoons.

Why is he saying that?

The joke being, most of us in cartoons like to be.

Anyway,

anyway,

but Jesus was fucking Peter's wife.

And not only was Jesus fucking Peter's wife, but it was a scam.

He was fucking a lot of people's wives.

And this was your Christmas show.

Right.

This was the holiday show.

So I was.

But anyway, so my

meandering here.

The Oscars,

the biggest liberals in the world live in this town and are picking the Oscars.

People who said, Academy members who said they did not see 12 Years a Slave still voted for it because they just knew it was the best picture or should be.

Why is there this problem?

You would have to conduct an in-depth investigation.

Is it a problem with the Academy?

Is it a problem that people aren't seeing the movies and they're saying, oh, I know this person, I know that film.

Oh, this guy's white too.

You know,

is it that?

Is it conscious?

Is it subconscious?

Is it a problem with the industry at large that there's just not enough diversity, which is a criticism that's often leveled against Hollywood?

Everything is speculation.

I don't know.

What will have to be a part of it is, and this is the dirty little secret, is that most movies are made now with an eye to the foreign market.

Well, that's true.

And Asians really are racist.

Unlike you, for instance, right?

You just said they're racist.

That makes you racist.

What else?

You're going to stoke a ton of outrage now.

No, no, I'm just honest.

But they are.

I mean, they are.

They don't want to see black people generally in their movies.

And, you know, the Hollywood executives are like, we're not racist.

We just have to pretend we're racist because we're capitalist.

We want to sell our movie in China.

So they don't like Kevin Hart.

It's tricky because it's a liberal town, but it's still a business.

So again, I don't know.

I mean,

there would have to be a real breakdown of what the factors are.

Otherwise, we're just going to do that.

So your album, number one on the gist, very impressive.

And you know, you do.

And show the picture there.

I love this picture because this is you.

It's so Sinatra.

You're smoking a cigarette on a gritty New York street.

Oh, no.

Oh, look at that.

The old pizza rat came by.

It's ruining the whole thing.

Wow.

How much did that cost?

Whatever it was, it was totally worth it.

Some poor fucking animator sitting at a computer going, I got to get this goddamn pizza across the screen in time for the show.

I dialed that in about two in the morning.

I was like, I want a pizza rat on his.

Help me, Don Bluth.

Yeah.

But

I mean,

it's a terrific album in

that vein of that era when Frank Sinatra was pining over Ava Gardner.

Yeah, and all the songs are very blue.

Why are you blue?

You have everything.

I got my reasons.

Listen,

we all have our heartaches.

We're all crazy.

We've discussed this in private.

I know.

But it's such a great album.

And, you know, I was there at your house when you were celebrating Frank Sinatra's 100th birthday.

We had a little gay night and sang a song together.

And you hosted a wonderful show to give tribute to Frank Sinatra's 100th birth on another network, as they say.

And I noticed that some of the people who sang the Sinatra songs, man, they were nervous.

You know, you own it.

Some of them were like, geez, is Frank going to come back and whack me if I sing this song?

What is it about him that he did that like nobody else can?

Well, you know, I think if I tried to sing like an Eminem song, you would have the same result.

I think it kind of works both ways.

No, I mean,

he was the one vocalist who was acting the songs.

He was inhabiting the songs.

And most importantly, I think he understood that the arrangement, the orchestration, was as important as the vocal, that you should be able to take the vocal out, and the instrumentation should be as moving as the vocal interpretation.

And you had guys like Nelson Riddle and Billy May who got him there.

And you travel everywhere with that 65-piece orchestra.

They're in the back.

You don't go to the bathroom without it.

All right, so let's talk a little politics.

I know you feel the same way I do, that Donald Trump is largely a result of a backlash to political correctness.

I do.

Yeah.

I mean, my friend Andrean, who wrote Cosmos.

Sure, we had her here.

Yeah, one of the most brilliant people I know.

Carlo Agensworth.

Yes.

Said,

you know, since time began, since humanity began, we've always hungered for a buffoon to lead us,

which

I kind of love.

But now it's particularly bad.

And I do, you know, I think the rise of social media and the power that it has has something to do with it.

I think that

the good part of social media is it gives voice to the voiceless.

I think somebody like Caitlin Jenner would not have been as accepted had it not been for social media.

So I think that's the good part of it.

Right.

But you know, when when we get when we get on the bandwagon to take down Kim Davis, that is politically correct.

That's a good thing to do because she's actively curtailing somebody.

Or brew a joke about race before you even hear what the joke is.

The flip side of that is Justine Sacco, who was the woman who was on the plane, and John Ronson writes about her in his book extensively, who tweeted the joke about AIDS in South Africa.

Yeah, I remember that.

Maybe not your cup of tea, maybe not my cup of tea, but she was descended upon by progressive social media and they ruined her life.

She lost her job.

She had to move.

And we lose a little bit of credibility when we go after the Kim Davises.

Right.

When that happens, and we say to

the conservatives, these people are kind of half-baked.

So if we have to sort of get smart about picking our battles,

the guy who owns the cake shop must be compelled to sell the cake to the gay wedding.

He has to be, because otherwise it's a short hop to, I don't want such and such in my diner.

But we are trying to get him to like it, and that's

you know, you go after your racist uncle, and the harder you go after him, the more he retreats.

And I think that's what's some of that in play.

You were on the show once, and you said we've tried center politics in America, and we've tried right-wing politics, and we've never tried left-wing politics.

Absolutely.

So that brings me to Bernie Sanders and

I want to turn this back over to everybody here.

I think it's becoming clear the difference between Bernie and Hillary because there really is quite a difference.

We didn't maybe think so at first, but on the last debate she was really running for Obama's third term.

On almost every issue she clung right to what he has already put forth.

Okay, guns, super PACs, health care, foreign policy.

Bernie,

not even really a Democrat, Democrat socialist, he says.

And everything he says is way to the left of what she says.

She wants to regulate the banks, he wants to break them up.

She says, keep going with Obamacare.

He says, single-payer.

She says, you know, make college more affordable.

He says, make it free.

This is left wing.

Does it have a chance?

Might in Iowa and New Hampshire, which complicates the path, obviously.

But Iowa is not a liberal state.

New Clinton.

No, but the enthusiasm is there for him.

They've rejected her before, too.

Don't forget.

They have rejected her soundly before.

And the Clintons have never had to...

One of the things, remember, when Clinton ran in 92, Harkin was running.

So that took it off the table.

Clinton himself never had to go in and wire the state either.

Yeah, I'd probably see it in slightly different different terms, but I will say I do think the biggest area where I see huge differences between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders is with regard to national security, foreign policy, and most importantly, civil liberties.

Hillary Clinton has a terrible record on civil liberties, and I say that as a civil libertarian.

Bernie Sanders has a very strong record on civil liberties.

And that is

a huge intervention.

What did Hillary do bad about civil liberties?

Just go through the whole record.

I mean, she's...

Well, you just go through one.

Well, okay, what I'm saying is is

she voted in a way.

Okay, if you take a look at where she was with regard to wiretapping and surveillance, she was basically in line with Bush Cheney on all of that until the final vote

that was taken.

The final vote that was taken in 2008 where she flip-flopped and where Obama, who had actually had a very pro-civil liberties record, flip-flopped the other way so he'd look more like centrist.

To me, I think it's kind of odd to say right-left on these things because to me it's libertarian-authoritarian when you're talking about civil liberties.

But the fact is, she is not in a good place on civil liberties.

And I believe that there are a lot of Democrats that care about that.

There are a lot of liberals that care about it.

There are some Republicans who do too.

Not as many, apparently, given Trump's rise.

But

it's a little bit more difficult.

When you're talking about the issues, the way that you just did, we're not talking about experience, we're not talking about persona, we're not talking about who you'd like to have a beer with, none of that.

We're talking about the issues.

What Bernie has done is quite simple.

Bernie has staked out the progressive position.

The heart of the Democratic Party is progressivism.

The heart of

progressivism is progress.

Progress.

So Bernie's telling people, this is what I will do after January 20th next year if I'm president of the United States.

I don't think that you can win the hearts of progressives if you're saying, I'm just going to keep everything the same.

That's a very interesting point.

I think there may be.

There may be truth to that.

Let me ask a moral question.

Sarah Palin in Iowa was talking about

some stuff?

Well, she was talking about her son coming back from Iraq, and she said, like my son, like so many others, they came back a bit different.

And then just glossed over that.

Like, we accept that now.

We send our sons off to stupid wars, and they come back a bit different because he beat up his girlfriend, was talking suicide, and she blamed that on Obama.

And that's, I'm sure, why his girlfriend was carrying under the bed because of Obama.

Her other, her daughter has had two out-of-wedlock children.

I mean does it ever occur to anybody that the Obamas are just so much better parents?

Well

one thing I'll say

this is probably

this is probably the area

This is probably the area where I'll give Obama the most credit.

I think he's an amazing father.

I think he's an amazing father.

Well, some would think he's an amazing president.

No, well, I don't agree with that, but I do think he's an amazing father, and I think that he presents a very good example for parenthood for many people.

I have a kid who's

the worst, the most morally scared.

Well, I'm not even

getting into that.

I'm not

a snappy person going to Iowa to convince the evangelicals, the supposedly moral people

to vote.

That's why faith sucks so bad.

Because when you have the same faith as me, then whatever you do is off the table.

Right?

You watch her and you're like,

what is she on?

And then you realize, the problem is she's not on anything.

There's nothing worse.

There's nothing worse.

I don't know about that.

It's a lot.

There's nothing worse.

She looked like she's been a sober person talking like that.

Well, she does.

And she was reading.

Did you notice that she was actually reading it?

Who actually wrote that for her?

A bunch of drunk monkeys sitting at typewriters?

Who wrote that?

I will say, Sarah Palin is known to consume just like the hugest quantities of caffeinated drinks on the planet.

That's a lot to blame on Red Bull.

I don't know.

Well, I don't know.

A friend of mine used to be a little bit more of a drink.

That looked a lot more like

he has to drink it out of that.

All right, thank you, panel.

I have to go to New Rules now.

It's time for New Rules.

All right, New Rule.

Those who hate the idea of Donald Trump becoming president must admit it would be fun watching that thing on his head turn gray

New Rule restaurants have to stop claiming, we sell happy.

No, the Thai place that does massage down the street sells happy.

You sell Cobb salad.

New Rule the Super Bowl needs to remember when it's booking the halftime show, we're watching football.

This year's Super Bowl act is cold play, because nothing screams football like drippy piano noodling and a good cry.

Come on, we're celebrating a bunch of violent meatheads with brain damage.

Get kid rocked!

Neural Walmart can go ahead and close 154 stores in the U.S., but then they have to tell me where I'm supposed to go now to see an obese woman wearing an eye patch beat her children.

New rule, now that we're coming up on three years since it's

coming up on three years since it's been implanted, Chris Christie's lap band must admit it has given up.

There's no shame in it, Lap Band.

You fought the slaw and the slaw won.

And finally, new rules.

Someone needs to tell those wackadoodle militiamen who took over a federal building in the middle of nowhere in Oregon that to be a hero, you need something to be heroic about.

These guys keep promising to occupy that building until,

well, we're not sure.

And they're not sure.

Something about redneck lives matter.

just listen here to one of them, Patriot John Ritzheimer, explaining to his kids in a video he posted from his truck why he had to leave.

It's gonna be one of the tougher videos I've had to make.

Your daddy swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution.

And that's why he couldn't be with you on Christmas.

Wow, seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to get out of spending time with your family over the holidays.

Why not just drink like the rest of them?

Now, of course, I'm probably being too cynical about this whole thing.

After all, you can't doubt the passion in that video when he tells his kids, Daddy swore an oath, and that's why I can't be home.

Except, John, you can be home.

How?

Get out of your truck and go back inside.

And not to be cruel, but how tough can you rugged individualists be when the first thing you did after storming the rest stop was to post an appeal online for supplies, a shopping list really, that included such items as throw rugs, shampoo, foot warmers, and French vanilla coffee creamer.

What, no scrunchie so you can braid each other's hair?

And I don't know if you know this, but if you're such ready-to-die ready-to-die patriots, America has actual wars available.

Yeah.

You can go fight ISIS because what you're doing isn't saving the Republic.

It's more like when you're a kid and you run away from home by hiding in the backyard.

However, I must tell you that the right wing by no means possesses a monopoly on infantile drama queens.

Does anybody remember the video last fall when a Yale college student confronted a professor?

Because the professor's wife had written an email suggesting that maybe Yale should chill out a little bit on being the Halloween costume police.

Well, here's that student's calm reaction.

You should step down.

If that is what you think about being a fast, you should step down.

It is not about creating an intellectual space.

It is not.

Do you understand that?

It's about creating a home here.

Again, you can't deny the passion.

She is adamant that untouchables must be allowed to vote.

Oh, wait, that's Gandhi.

Right, this insufferable brat can't sleep at night because there's no school policy against the white girl dressing up as Pocahontas.

To which they agree.

Which is what these days they call a microaggression.

Which begs the question, if it is a microaggression, shouldn't it just make you micro-angry?

Do we have to go to DEF CON 1 for everything in this country?

Where's the perspective anymore?

Hey, kid, you want to protest outfits that oppress people?

Why don't you start with these?

Because saying Yale doesn't have enough cultural sensitivity is like saying Pier 1 doesn't have enough wicker.

And

it's interesting that this Yale student and this hammerhead in the woods think they're political opposites, but really they're the same person.

Martyrs without a cause, whipping themselves up into a lather over issues that would better be addressed with Xanax.

Because if you don't feel coddled enough at Yale or free enough in Oregon, there's nothing political we can do for you.

It's the government's job to protect a lot of things, but your feelings ain't one of them.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the Cobb Center in Atlanta February 19th.

Thomas Wolfe in Asheville, North Carolina, February 20th.

Oh, the Mirage in Vegas.

I start there, March 12th and 13th.

Hey, I want to thank Alan Grayson, Liz Mair, John Meachin, Seth McFarland, and Michael McCall.

Join us now for overtime on YouTube.

Thank you, folks.

Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Ma every Friday night at 10, or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand.

For more information, log on to HBO.com.