Episode #356 (Originally aired 6/12/15)

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians.

These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds.

Visit progressive.com to see if you could save.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates.

Potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations.

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

Start the clock.

Good afternoon.

Afternoon.

Time will be

real time.

Hey, my buddy!

How you doing?

Thank you very much.

Thank you, that's sit-out.

Oh, thank you.

Okay, all right, all right.

We got a big show.

Please, folks, I bully,

I can stand here.

I can stand here all night and bask in your love.

But there's too much important information we have to get to, starting with this.

I must give you a public service announcement.

Have you heard about this deadly new disease, MERS?

Okay, it's not in our part of the world yet, but one of the ways it spreads is by drinking camel urine.

No, I'm not joking about this.

So the World Health Organization has issued don't drink camel urine.

I know, right with the weekend coming up.

Who hasn't had that feeling?

You're pounding a couple of frosty

camel urines and you're like, oh, I'm going to pay for this tomorrow.

Anyway.

And of course, the other giant threat that if you watch CNN, it's 24-7, the escaped convicts from that prison in upstate New York, oh my gosh, it's amazing we're all still alive.

And now the authorities up there fear that these two could find their way into a large population and blend in as Republican candidates for president.

That's

so many.

Well.

it is getting a little out of hand.

You know, we have 10 declared Republican candidates.

By Tuesday or Wednesday of next week, we're going to have three more.

We're going to have Jeb Bush officially in, Bobby Jindal, and Trump.

Yes.

And then there's still out there, Kasich, Chris Christie, Scott Walker is going to declare.

They say by the time the debates begin, there could be over 20.

And experts are projecting that sometime in early 2016 is when the number of Republican candidates will surpass the number of women who have accused Bill Cosby.

It's a very

convicts.

We got to get these convicts.

You know, they're described, I love this, as extremely cunning.

Why?

Because they put lumps of rags under their blankets in their cots to fool the screws

into thinking they were in the bunks when they were getting out of there.

You know what?

If you fall for the old dummy

made out of rags

routine, you cannot be a prison guard.

But there is a place for you in airport security.

That's

my opinion.

And I love this.

This is reported on the Legitimate News, not CNN, The Legitimate News.

Said one of the missing convicts, get this is handsome and very well-endowed,

which

explains the air of melancholy in the prison.

But

look,

but if you encounter this guy, do not be fooled.

That is a gun in his pocket and he's not happy to see you.

Now, speaking of the well-endowed, how many saw LeBron James' penis last night on the guy?

That's right.

Did you watch the NBA finals?

He was adjusting his junk before the game, and whoo, we got a glimpse.

This is why we love sports in America, isn't it?

I mean, the Super Bowl, we saw Janet Jackson's nipple, and now we've seen LeBron James's junk.

Someone better call the police in McKinney, Texas.

This pool party is getting out of hand.

Oh, you saw that?

You saw, I guess, this week's viral police video, a white cop in Texas goes apeshit on a bunch of peaceable black teenagers at a pool party.

It was shocking.

Black people swimming?

Oh, right, you're Congressman.

I don't care.

But, of course, now we're at the inevitable stage where where Rush Limbaugh and Fox News try to figure out how the victim was really a thug who had it coming.

Megan Kelly was talking sensibly the other day about the 15-year-old girl who had her face pushed out into the lawn when suddenly Megan was overtaken by clueless white girl syndrome.

And she said, the girl is no saint either.

No saint, yeah, because she lingered.

And it reminded me, is that, you know, we think of Megan Kelly as the same one over there at Fox News.

It's just because she's surrounded by Hannity and Bill O'Reilly.

She's like the blonde dragon girl on Game of Thrones.

Everyone else is a zombie or a dwarf or fucking their sister, so she looks normal.

Now,

I hate to tell you this, but Obama, I think, had a very bad week.

First of all, it looks like we're going back into Iraq, which I don't like.

And he lost his big Asian trade deal today.

It's too boring to get into.

But just put it this way, the Democrats stood with the unions, their people.

Obama was so with the Republicans on this that he went into Congress to lobby for it, and House Republicans stood up and cheered for Obama.

Now, they thought he was Dr.

Ben Carson, but still,

that says a lot.

Dr.

Ben is one of the ten is declared.

Oh, you know who who else has declared?

It made news yesterday, Lindsey Graham.

You know Lindsey Graham, the senator from South Carolina.

He's been dogged by rumors for a long time that he was gay.

He actually came out, did not come out.

He said yesterday, he actually gave an interview and said, quote, I ain't gay, sorry.

And then he said, but that was before I saw LeBron James.

No.

No, no,

take Lindsay at his word.

If he says he's not gay, he's not gay.

It's good enough for me.

Although today they asked him about what to do about the violence in the Middle East, and he said lotions can no longer protect us.

So I.

Not oceans, lotions can.

I just seemed a little gay to me.

Never mind.

Anyway.

So

another declared candidate, Mike Huckabee, had a rough week.

Mac Huckabee last week was defending his friendship with the child molester, Josh Duggar.

Mike's now being asked about the fact that the guy who co-wrote his book, you know, they all have a campaign book, his is called Character Makes a Difference.

The guy who co-wrote it with them, he's facing two lawsuits about being a child molester.

Doesn't anyone in that party just want to have sex with an adult woman?

And

Rick Santorum is not this affiliated with child molesters, and he's Catholic.

I'm just saying.

But it does explain

Mike Huckabee's campaign slogan, which is Huckabee, get in my car and help me look for the dog.

All right.

Thank you very much.

You're a great crowd.

We've got a great show.

We have Ron Christie, Alexis Goldstein, and Mike Puskin.

A little to be speaking with the Roastmaster General himself, Jeff Ross, is backstage.

But first up, he's a film, TV, and stage actor who for 30 years has been the show business community's most respected environmentalist for good reason.

Ed Begley Jr.

Ed?

How are you?

You look great, Ed.

You look great.

Thank you, thank you, you too.

And why wouldn't you?

Because

you treat yourself like the environment, don't you?

Like a temple, I know you do.

Well, I want you to hear today because we want to talk talk about bees, and I've talked about this on the show before.

You have, I know.

I know.

It's called colony collapse disorder, isn't that the syndrome where they're.

Yeah, there's a lot of bees dying, and they were wondering why.

They're still not entirely sure why, but it's the death of a thousand cuts, they think.

There's so many things that are stressing them out, loss of habitat.

And another big one, probably the biggest, is these neonicotinoids, these pesticides that are really hurting the bees.

Now, I once was talking on a cell phone, and a bee flew right to it and then dropped dead.

They thought it was cell towers for a while and now they're thinking it's not that in the scientific community.

It hit the phone and dropped right

dead.

Maybe that's not anecdotal, but it just looked bad.

You know,

maybe they just had some neonicotinoids.

Well, okay.

Also, I see a lot of, this is sad.

I see bees walking.

You know what I mean?

Like when I'm lying out in the backyard, I just see, you never used to see bees bees walking?

You saw a lot of them walking and then falling over in Portland about a year ago at a Target store.

And smoking gun, if you will,

thousands and thousands of bees fell onto the ground and eventually died.

And they just doubted.

Wait, wait, at a Target store?

At a Target store, a parking lot.

There was some trees.

Do they shop at Target?

They were shopping outside Target in the supermarket of

the trees and what have you.

And they had just sprayed the trees with neonicotinoids.

Okay, so that's what they think.

So they think they've narrowed down the culprit to this neonicotinoid.

Yeah, that's one of the biggest.

What is that?

That's a pesticide?

It's a pesticide.

Okay.

Why is that worse than like a thousand other pesticides that must have been horrible for them?

None of them are good for them, but these are very,

they stay a long time.

They're quite persistent.

They last for a long time.

Okay, so

before we get too far into this, I want you to explain why bees are important.

Not that every animal isn't.

I mean, people like you and I who just love animals, we want to save them all just because they're beautiful creatures.

But even if you don't have that in your heart for animals, bees have a special place in the ecosystem, right?

Yeah, if we didn't have bees, we'd be living on, I guess, corn and barley and wheat.

That gets pollinated by wind.

We are living on that.

Yeah, but we'd be living on that and nothing else.

That's all America grows, is fucking corn.

It's a lot of corn syrup.

I know.

High-fructose corn syrup.

Right.

And a lot of food.

But we wouldn't have avocados, we wouldn't have citrus, we wouldn't have lots of plants.

Some say 60%, the lowest, is 30%.

Einstein said if we wipe out the bees, we would have four years left before we would all die.

I think there's probably some truth to that, and 90% of the plants.

Some truth, Einstein, Ed.

I know, you're right.

Who might argue with Einstein?

I'm not a scientist, but I think he's right.

Yeah, and 90% of the plants in the natural world are pollinated by these bees and other plants.

I mean, they're our tiniest farm workers.

It's like what we're doing in this area.

They are our tiniest farm workers.

You're exactly exactly right.

It's like we're...

And they're paid about as much.

Thank God

there's a big victory for the United Farm Workers.

Now, Artie Rodriguez is a dear friend of mine.

Steso Chavez was a friend of mine.

They have a bill that's going to help them in the heat a great deal.

And so si se puede to the United Farm Workers.

So

If you were doubting that these neoniconoids are bad and evil, because when I first read about it, I was was like, well, Monsanto isn't involved.

Yesterday I read, Monsanto's trying to buy the company that makes it.

So there's your final proof that it must be totally evil.

Because it works so well.

Yeah.

So what can people do to help the bees?

More natural habitat.

Don't use those kinds of chemicals.

More natural habitat.

Just preserve little strips of, if you can, don't have all kinds of lawns and monoculture.

If you have any influence on your surroundings as far as plantings, make sure there's lots of native plants.

I let my grass die my good for you my yeah

we're saying that in 2015 no I did I mean I was like I cannot water a lawn anymore I just can't do it out here yeah 1988 I took mine out and put it dry you know what it looks like shit and it doesn't change my life at all no I gotta get I gotta tell you something

I don't know how we got it into our heads that we needed a lawn to be happy, but my happiness level, exactly, right here, does not even this much because I don't have a lawn.

I never liked picnics.

How about croquet?

Are you a fan of croquet?

Exactly.

Well, you're going to miss that.

I played no croquet in my life.

It's literally a leftover of some feudal lord saying, I don't need to plant any crop on this area.

This is a lawn.

It's a leftover from some sort of richness of a different era.

I mean,

and you are the, I mean, you are really the guy.

You are the early adapter out here or anywhere.

You did, no, it's so true, Ed.

You have done things that have become commonplace.

I mean, I remember when you bought an electric car.

We used to do jokes about you on politically in your neighborhood jokes.

Yeah I remember once Ed Begley is supposed to be on the show tonight unless it's cloudy.

I had a car

1970 I bought my first electric car 70.

1970.

What?

Yeah.

There was electric cars in 1970?

Henry Ford's wife preferred her Baker Electric to his car.

I couldn't afford one of those cars, but I had a Taylor Dunn electric car.

When I say car, I'm being quite grand.

We're talking about a golf cart with a windshield wipe and a horn.

Right, exactly.

I took Cindy Williams on a date with us, and there was not a second date.

A kid on Hot Wheels was passing us by giving us a finger.

Well,

you may have dodged a bullet with that one.

I know.

Come on, Cindy.

I know.

Shirley, Laverne and Shirley.

It's a dear friend for many of you.

Like I say,

go back and get her, Ed.

She's waiting for you.

But your house, tell us about your house.

Your house, you wouldn't like use wood, right?

I built a house out of steel, which is highly recycled, 65% post-consumer recycled.

But I want to back up to 1970, before I did all this fancy pants stuff, I did all the cheap and easy stuff I could afford.

And when I moved into my house of 26 years, I did a retrofit to make it highly energy efficient.

So it's not just the fancy stuff that I'm doing now.

I'm doing a very grand LEED platinum home that not everybody can afford.

But all that stuff.

Your home is made of platinum?

It's going to achieve a platinum status, I'm sorry.

There's silver, gold, and platinum, and I'll hit the highest rating, which is platinum, which is a very low carbon footprint, very low energy use.

Like living in an American express car.

That's amazing.

But not everybody can do that, but people can buy energy-saving thermostats, weather stripping, energy-efficient light bulbs.

Don't you have a thing to catch rainwater?

So

you don't have to use any of the city water?

In the old days, I would just get a hacksaw and hack off the downspout and put it into a rain barrel.

Now I have 10,000 gallons of rainwater stored underground.

Stored underground?

Yeah.

Wow.

And then it's pumped up, use it for irrigation.

It all comes in this drought year.

Several environmental friends.

We know where to go when we get in trouble.

Come on by, I'll give you a drink.

Mobbing your house.

If we don't get rain, we're going to be bathing in mountain dew.

We have to start

saving our rainwater in two ways.

We have to save it in tanks like I'm doing, or more importantly, really, to let it percolate down into the groundwater, let it recharge our aquifers and our important groundwater.

You are our lodestar, Ed Begley.

Ed Begley, Jr., ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much.

There he is, there he is.

Thank you, thank you.

Thank you, sir.

Let's meet our panel.

All right.

Did that come out of me?

Oh, all right, I'll just put that right there.

He hosts Slate's daily podcast, The Gist, Mike Pesca.

Hey, Mike, how you doing?

Hey, we're wearing the same coat.

She was a Wall Street techie, turned Occupy Wall Street activist, who is now the communications director for the other 98%.

Back with us, Alexis Goldstein.

How you like this?

Great to see you back.

And he is the former special assistant to President George W.

Bush, who's now a columnist for the Daily Bees, our friend Ron Christie.

Hey, Ron.

Good to see you.

How you doing?

Well.

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

All right, let's start with the pool party.

I'm sure policemen all across the country, especially the many good ones, are sick and tired of every week there being another video that we're watching.

And yet, every week some cop does some crazy shit.

And the victims seem to be getting all the more innocent.

I mean, 12-year-old kids, guys running away, shot in the back, now a 14-year-old girl at a pool party.

I think the reform with the police, well, first of all, has to start with admitting we need reform.

Secondly, we have to weed out

this guy.

Let's show a little video of that.

Yeah, this is the guy,

you know.

Yes, it's funny when Barney Fife does this kind of shit, but

and I think we

look at this.

I think we all know

this guy.

This is the high school loser.

Look at this.

This is the high school loser who wants to relitigate his shitty adolescence by being a cop because now he's got some power.

He can lord it over people.

It's not that hard to weed out that personality type, is it, if they wanted to?

I don't know.

I saw a lot of lingering there in that video.

Yeah, they were.

A lot of lingering left and right.

I think, on the one hand, I sometimes say to myself, you know, we are a country of 319 million.

So some cop somewhere is going to go too far and some kid with a cell phone is going to tape it.

And then I say, good.

And especially this time, we can have the conversation without a body on the ground, right?

So I do think that we are making amends and reforms.

And I think that the last conversation, Ferguson, needed to happen, but you could debate that back and forth.

I think that's debatable.

I think Eric Garner is less debatable.

But what happened here, we have live people, thank God.

We have a cop who quit, and we have also 11 officers in that video who didn't do anything wrong.

Okay, maybe now, but maybe now the

why do they need 12 cops to break up a pool party?

Well, because there was a lot of people who were in the city.

Why did 12 cops

have to do the job of say, hey, kids, turn down the music?

Well, but I think it's because you see research from the American Psychological Association that says that cops see black children as older and more criminal than their white peers.

I don't think it's just a matter of a few bad cops.

I think it's a systematic problem.

I think we have a system of white supremacy in this country, and we have to contend with the fact that we've had 200 years of affirmative action for white people in this country and that makes its way into our public policy, it makes its way into our culture and our media and that bleeds into implicit biases that people, not just cops, have.

You're going alone with all this.

I feel alone tonight.

No, I think there are two important things that need to be said here.

One is exactly right.

If 11 out of the 12 police officers who showed up, they acted properly.

They did their job.

They showed restraint.

You had one bad actor, and I think the police chief said he acted unprofessionally.

This guy had to go.

That's issue number one.

But the other thing for me, Bill, and I think it's important, is that we need to make sure that those of us who are parents and those of us who have young people need to make sure to our young people, we say, if you have an encounter with the police, there should be only about seven things you should say.

Yes, sir?

No, sir, and thank you, sir.

And I'm not blaming anybody.

But that was the same thing.

But the kids have

been sent left and right in that.

And that's also the idea that there's this perfect victim, and if everyone behaved perfectly, then people wouldn't end up dead, and that's just not the reality of that.

So, I think it's, you know what?

And one of those things could be, I can't breathe.

That should be

one of those things is that

I just spent a little time in Europe.

The cops don't act that way.

They don't demand this guy, the way he ran into that scene and demanded this utter compliance.

Get on the ground, don't look me in the eye, do look me in the eye, do this, do that.

That's not how cops are

disposed of.

So, this whole thing about you only say a few words to cops.

No, I don't want to live in a society where I have to be that way to a policeman.

He's working for me.

I'm the taxpayer.

He's working for you.

He's working for you.

He's working for all of us.

But I just think that it is not all one-sided of saying the cops are just inherently racist and they're doing all these odd things.

What I'm saying is I do think that the people who are involved should take responsibility and make sure that they don't antagonize the police.

But wait, Bill Bratton, who I like Bill Bratton, I know.

I don't like Bill Bratton.

You don't like him?

Okay.

I mean,

maybe I don't like everything he does, but he is the police chief.

It's a tough job in New York.

They asked him why there weren't more blacks on the force.

He said, so many of them have spent time in jail,

and as such, we can't hire them.

But that's part of the because the police.

Because the police over-police communities of color, even though communities of color do drugs at the same rate or less than white people do drugs, right?

I'm sure if we have some maybe drug users on this panel, right?

And so we over-incarcerate people of color in this country.

So, oh, surprise, you can't hire black cops.

When are conservatives going to realize that so many of the problems that they abhor are caused by the policies they support?

You know,

why aren't there more black kids with role models at home and dads?

Because you put them all in jail.

But just to be fair, liberals have been tough on crime for a while, so I think Democrats share a big portion of that blame as well.

I'm a New Yorker.

I have an uncle who was a cop.

I have members of my family who are cops.

And I should say the NYPD is not exactly as diverse as the city, but getting more diverse all the time.

And they're talking about relaxing the requirement that you become on the force.

You can't even have a misdemeanor and so forth.

I agree with you.

I think he's more on the side of reform.

I don't know what the dynamic in this country is, but it does seem that I really can't understand how you could say that when you watch that video, the thing we need to do is not talk to cops in a certain way.

That's not what I said.

What I said was very clear.

I think that video was disgusting.

I think the the way that that police officer acted was reprehensible.

I think the police chief said everything that needed to be said.

He acted the wrong way.

Don't put words in my mouth.

I'm being very clear.

I think that those students who were involved in that pool party, when things got out of hand and they saw the number of cops who were there, everyone, cops, kids, everyone, should have taken a deep breath and a step.

There shouldn't have been.

Oh, right, but the white kids weren't the ones being thrown on the ground.

And there was too much paranoia in the neighborhood because this is a classic American story of black kids in a white neighborhood in a pool, which drives people crazy.

I remember it all started because an old white lady said, why don't you go back to your Section 8 housing?

Allegedly.

But see, this is the problem with this one cache.

Everything now, Bill, we're looking at everything now.

Everything is black and white.

Everyone's racist.

Any interaction with someone who's black, white cops are automatically racist.

I think we need to take a step back.

There were black folks who were at this homeowners association who said they were the ones who were concerned about people jumping over their fences.

They didn't look at these as black Section 8 kids.

They looked at these as these were people who are in our homes and they weren't invited.

Okay, let me move on to another issue.

Scott Walker was in the news this week.

He's, I guess, not declared yet, but he's already really the frontrunner for a lot of people.

Spend a lot of time in Iowa for some reason.

He used the phrase, work hard and play by the rules.

He said, the belief that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can do and be anything you want in America.

And I thought, wow, shameless, because that was Bill Clinton's signature line, work hard and play by the rules.

And I just think that there are.

what?

No?

Bill Quentin work hard, play by the rules?

Well, he said that over and over and over again.

I think he worked hard, played hard, and played by his rules.

Ooh,

I liked it.

But the point I'm trying to make is

I don't think there are any current set of rules by which a lot of people can succeed in America.

I think if you're a single mom or a recent college graduate saddled with a lot of debt, trying to get a job or one of those black or Hispanic kids who graduates from what they call the dropout factories where like 60% of the kids don't get a high school diploma.

I don't think there's just any situation where how I think we have a lot of people who do play by the rules.

I think we need new rules.

New rules.

That's what I get.

That's my thing.

That's your stick.

Well, but we have a lot of rules that only the wealthy know how to play, right?

Like the system is really easy to navigate if you can hire a lobbyist and you know which lever to press or you know which staffer to call.

But the ordinary American, if you want to contact your member of Congress, you go to a contact form that goes to a black hole.

You don't know the right person to talk to, right?

But everyone else knows how to navigate the system.

Well, at Walmart, I see, in July 1st, raising wages from $10.30 an hour to $13 an hour for their managers and specialty workers, whatever they are.

Newsflash, you still can't live on $13 an hour.

hour.

And

all the Republicans these days are talking about income inequality.

And yet, their solution, oddly, is the same solutions they had before they gave a shit about income inequality.

They don't want to raise the minimum wages.

They'll want to get rid of Obamacare.

They want to get rid of the Consumer Protection Bureau.

Rick Perry announced for president a couple of weeks ago, he said, the American people see a rig game where insiders get rich and the middle class pays the tab.

Yeah, boy those fucking Democrats.

But he wants to lower the corporate tax rate and doesn't want to raise the minimum wage.

So

what is this with identifying the problem but having the exact same solution that you had before you cared about the problem?

Well they have really good polls now that say you got to say it's a problem.

So they say it's a problem.

And the polls say but stick to the regular solutions.

And another huge problem aside from the inequality is it used to be the case that even though there was inequality, there's always been more inequality in America than a lot of European countries, but there was also more mobility.

So, a kid who was born poor or in a second-to-last quartile could jump to the front if they went to college, maybe worked part-time, and afforded college.

Totally impossible now.

So, I'm really worried.

I'm worried about the wealth gap, but I'm also worried about the fact that it's just impossible for all but everyone who's not born in the top, whatever it is, 20%.

And that shouldn't be the case.

That's extremely antithetical to what America is.

Should be.

I noticed that the Republicans have not been shy about throwing George W.

Bush under the bus on Iraq.

They're all saying the Iraq war was a big mistake now.

But none of them say the Bush tax cuts were a big mistake, and yet they increased income inequality, and they did not create jobs.

So why don't they get on that page?

Well, I think it's more than that.

I think it's more than just income tax reform.

I think you need to really look at education.

Was that a good idea, the Bush tax cuts?

Well, if you look at the revenue that came in after the 2001 and after the 2003 Bush tax rate cuts, yes, there was more money coming into the Treasury.

That's a fact.

Well, there may have been more money coming into the Treasury.

I don't think there was more money going out to people.

But

is it the business?

And this is where I think the federal government has a legitimate role to play.

I think education really honestly is the civil rights issue of the 21st century.

If we can't equip our students, and I think your point was was exactly well taken, of if you can't equip a child in an inner-city community with the schools and the skills and the tools they need to compete, Bill, it's over before it starts.

And that's one of the things that nobody's talking about that we need to have the competition.

But they've been selling this education idea for forever.

And what I would, if you really want to like interrogate income inequality, do something about income inequality in the Republican Party, I have a suggestion.

Go back to what Ronald Reagan said.

Tax capital, tax investments at the same rate as labor.

AKA hedge fund managers don't get this special bracket, pay lower taxes taxes than everybody else.

That was something Ronald Reagan proposed.

And all the Republicans want to conveniently forget that.

But to your point as to taxes, Grover Norquist, who runs this jihadist group that will never let you raise taxes, is now Bobby Jindal, who you mentioned, who's definitely not going to win.

But you should, and I'm sure you know, but your audience should read what's going on in Louisiana.

They tie themselves up in knots to not call a tax hike a tax hike.

And people are mocking him that it's the Jindal Norquist 2016 campaign.

They have the Republicans in such thrall.

Maybe Rand Paul will float it, but I don't even think anyone will.

And I think it's the easiest solution and the hardest solution.

Income inequality, the highest tax rate, not just hedge funds.

That's only a very small solution.

The highest tax rate on the richest earners just has to go up.

Okay, I agree with that.

All right.

So

last year on this show, we introduced a new literary genre called conservative erotic fiction.

Uh-oh.

No, for a good reason, because Rupert Murdoch's company bought Harleck in romance.

Rupert Murdoch, who stepped down this week.

Ugh, what a loss.

He gave us Sean Hannity and Tits on page three of British newspapers.

What a legacy.

Anyway,

so then we found out

a couple of weeks ago that Bernie Sanders, Democratic, giant liberal,

had written his Fifty Shades of Gray type piece somewhere way back when he was in college.

So we realize now that there is a market for liberal erotic fiction, and we have a sample here.

It's called Be Still My Bleeding Heart.

It's really meant to get liberals hot.

Are you for hearing some of this?

Would you like

I was at Whole Foods buying organic seaweed for my rescue goldfish.

When I noticed her working the checkout counter, she had a body like Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Yeah!

Yeah!

It just wouldn't quit.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Our eyes met, and suddenly I was harder than the wall between church and state.

I placed my craft beer on the belt, and she asked asked me, Did you bring your own bag?

My head was spinning like a wind farm.

I knew she was flirting with me, but I told her I wanted to respect her personhood and

boundaries and not disempower her with any patriarchal microaggressions.

That's when she showed me her pussy.

I summoned all my white privilege.

When do you get off, I asked.

When Elizabeth Warren talks about credit card abuse, she said.

In minutes, we were back at her place.

I threw her down on her sustainably grown cotton futon.

And we went at it like two rabbits humanely raised on non-GMO corn.

I ran my fingers through her long, luxurious hair.

Then, when I was done with her armpits,

I placed her hand on my sizable entitlement.

I told her, I think you're going to like it.

It's gluten-free.

I put it in, and she screamed like Howard Dean after a hard-fought primary.

But, like the 1%, she took it all.

until she finally came with a thunderous cry oh god oh god oh god has no place in the classroom

we lay back taxed and spent

I lit a joint and told her, you're the sexiest woman I've ever met.

Woman, she said, and gave me a look.

Oh no, call me Caitlin.

All right.

Let's bring out Jeff, his Comedy Central special, Jeff Ross, Rose Criminals.

Debuted Saturday night.

He'll be performing at the Amos South End in Charlotte, North Carolina, June 17th.

Our friend, Jeff Ross, is right on the hero.

Hey, everybody.

Hi, guess.

Jeff Ross.

Now, Jeff, I loved your special.

Thank you very much.

It's on tomorrow night.

I saw an early version of it.

You were always one of the funniest guys out there, and you came up with a great idea that you were going to roast people in a prison, and you spent three days in a, oh, it's a jail, right?

It's a maximum security county jail.

Right.

And you lived there, you slept there, you talked with the prisoners to get material,

and then you roasted them.

And you lived to tell it.

Yeah.

It was an adventure.

It really was.

It was,

I went in kind of cavalier, thinking, oh, this will be a provocative, dangerous roast.

Having roasted Charlie sheen and justin bieber i thought right criminals should be next

i was warmed up you know ready to go and it wasn't until i got there that i started to find some compassion i mean obviously there's some real dirtbags in prison and they don't deserve a show but 90 percent of the people that i perform for are coming out of jail someday they're our neighbors see i thought you had that before you went to the jail no

i thought you did this because you understood that our our criminal justice system is out of control.

We put more people in jail than any other country in the world, one out of a hundred Americans.

That's insane.

It's a national emergency.

I had no idea how severe it was.

As I started to research my material, I wanted to write like a roast a specific act just for the inmates.

Wow.

These facts, we have more black men locked up right now than were slaves in 1840.

That's right.

This is awful.

I know.

It's crazy.

There's more jails and prisons in America than there are colleges and universities.

We say we're a free country, but we're locking up people for minor drug offenses.

Right.

And that's, yes.

And what I love about it is it humanizes them.

And we somehow got it in our head back in the law and order, dirty Harry era, that once you put them there, you don't have to think about them.

They're just, they're inhuman.

And of course, you know, yes, there are, of course, some people who are just irretrievable.

Right.

But most

prisoners are, they're human.

We call them correctional institutions.

Did you see a lot of correcting going on?

My opening line was, where my murderer is at.

And

now five people raised their hand, and I moved back a little bit.

But to be honest with you,

there's a lot of people there that deserve a second chance.

And a lot of people are just put away.

Back in the 70s, Wayne Dickey, who's the jail administrator down there, he explained to me that back in the 70s, America closed up mental institutions.

Hundreds of thousands of beds got closed up.

So these jails and prisons are now de facto mental hospitals.

We just sort of put people out of mind, like lock them up, forget about them.

They're human dust.

They're something

solitary.

Did they have solitary at this time?

I went and checked out.

It's truly cruel and human to keep people in solitary year after year.

That would make anyone even crazier.

I went into a rubber room.

You have to basically.

A rubber room.

Yeah.

That's what they call it?

They still have rubber rooms.

I I thought that was a mental institution.

This is in a jail, Bill, in Texas.

A room where you can bang your head against the wall and not get rid of it.

Oh, I see.

Because you go so crazy, you would try to kill yourself if it wasn't rubber.

Precisely.

And you have to basically use a little hole as a bathroom.

I'm a comedian.

Or for other reasons.

Right.

I don't know.

I'm just saying it's lonely in there.

It's very lonely.

Okay.

How do you keep your sex drive alive when you're in solitaire?

You wait for a bug to crawl by?

Slow down, little lady.

I'm a comedian.

I would go crazy in solitary.

I'd just start roasting myself after a few days.

Right.

You look like you ate Bruce Willis, you fat fuck.

Hey, wait a second.

I thought I looked good.

Stone-cold Steve Auschwitz?

Fuck you.

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

Nobody in solitary.

What the fuck did you do?

So you must be watching this prison break that's being obviously all over the the news

covered lately.

People will do anything to get out of one of my shows.

But I think, you know, what they're not reporting on is the fact, and it's so germane to the discussion we're having, is that this little town that these guys broke out of, it's a company town for the prison.

Prisons in this country, because it's such big business, they're like military bases.

We don't really need so many of them.

them.

But the prisoners are the customers, and it's a jobs program, and that's why we keep it going.

It's a $75 billion job, like everything in America, money, the root of all evil.

I say in the special, I say, they say crime doesn't pay.

It pays, it just doesn't pay you, motherfucker.

Pandemonium in the jail, but the truth is,

incarceration in America is a huge, huge business.

It's heartbreaking to think about.

But as far as this jail break, the way I think about it is I got to know a lot of the detention officers when I was down there, and this is a very, very challenging job.

And when this, something like this happens, two guys bust out, it's heartbreaking for the people involved in this.

It's not an easy task babysitting these bad, bad people and the mentally ill people and everyone else in jail.

So my heart does go out to the people who have to, who are challenged with the job of keeping these people alive and incarcerated.

So I hope they find these two guys.

You think about it, these guys tunneled out.

They came up a manhole cover.

Their getaway car wasn't there.

They had to wait for an Uber for God knows how long.

Yes.

Have the cops called Uber?

Maybe these guys.

So, all right, before I move on, I have to ask you one more question.

Get your take on this.

I'm going to address this next week

because it really pissed me off as anything about political correctness does.

But I'm sure you saw our colleague Jerry Seinfeld this week made a statement about how colleges are too politically correct.

And by the way,

if Jerry Seinfeld is too politically incorrect for you, maybe you should look in the mirror.

What is your thoughts on this?

I appreciate Jerry, who's not necessarily thought of as an edgy comedian, sticking up for comedy as an art form.

I mean, why do comedians have to water down

comedy is medicine.

It's the best medicine, laughter.

You don't want it generic.

You want it potent.

We have a responsibility to shine a light on the darkest aspects of society.

And by the way, Jerry Seinfeld not performing at colleges anymore.

There's a lot of hot chicks, good money in colleges.

A groan's as good as a laugh.

Let's go.

Come on.

A terrible answer.

Part of it is just having fun.

But do you think it's a generational thing?

Do you think it's a liberal conservative thing?

Because liberals are definitely more PC.

I mean, I used to fight with this audience all the time because we used to get the audience strictly from liberal sources.

Then we got the audience from everywhere.

And I've had a much better time the last couple of months.

People are sensitive.

Too sensitive.

Why do people have to

comedias shouldn't have to adapt to change to PC?

People that are too sensitive should become more thick-skinned.

You know what it is?

I once did a show for sensitive people.

They wanted to become better at taking a joke.

That's what was so great about roasting criminals.

I was curious if they would laugh at themselves.

I think that's the first step towards rehabilitation.

And some of these PC police should try that.

Laughing, not taking themselves so seriously, not taking everything so seriously.

Okay, so you have been to Iraq.

You've not only entertained now prisoners, but you've entertained the troops.

Let's talk about Iraq a little bit, because Obama this week

getting us back in there.

He must feel like Michael Corleone and Godfather 3.

Every time I want to be out, they pull me back in, except I don't know why he has to go back in.

Yes, ISIS took Mosul about a year ago.

They took Ramadi a couple of weeks ago.

Does it really matter who controls Ramadi or Mosul to an American?

You know, this war does not have to go on forever.

Even American Idol is ending.

No!

What?

I just don't think we have to always be the world's policemen.

Right.

Well, I want to know what the mission is, right?

Because he said this week that he was going to put 450 American troops in.

Then he said he wanted to have more forward operating bases, and then it starts to be available.

Well, advisors.

Right.

Not troops.

But again, if they're in a corner.

What new advice could they give them?

Because they've been training them.

Yes, what's the advice?

The maniacs with the beards, shoot them.

Yes.

Well, and we can't be global cop for the world forever.

And I also think that every time we go into this region, what happens?

We pick a winner, we pick a loser, and then five years later, the winner that we picked is all of a sudden the force that we're fighting.

And Barack Obama said that there is no military solution to ISIS, and I think he should listen to his own advice in this category.

No, but

ISIS needs to be the loser.

ISIS is not along the lines of, oh, just another sectarian force.

I'm not saying that they will definitely overrun everything.

We have the resolve to fight them, despite what the critics like Lindsey Graham say.

We can beat them, but they must be defeated.

They're horrible.

First of all, they cannot be defeated.

You cannot defeat an idea.

Second of all, they are just like any other group.

They're just better at social media.

They're not.

But then it's a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, right?

And every time we go into this region, what happens?

First, we arm the Islamists against the USSR.

Then we go in, we take over Iraq, and then we de-arm the Iraqi military, and then the Sunnis get pissed off.

And then the Sunnis form ISIS, right?

Every time we go in, oh, and now we're spilling things all over the place.

We mess things up.

There's no, we can't.

I hope ISIS takes Baghdad.

Come on.

No, no why why why do you think they takes because maybe then it would awake the people who in the region who are so worried but seem to always have to rely on Uncle Sugar to do their work for them

well when the Taliban took Afghanistan that created a staging ground that killed thousands of Americans so the same thing can happen if ISIS does that the reason we have to be the world's policemen and by the way we have killed 10,000 ISIS fighters we have run 6,000 bombing missions and really only four Americans have died and that's tragic but the fact that we could name these aid workers on one hand, I mean what is the definition of fighting and what is the definition of sacrifice?

I think they will be defeated but Bill I really think they need to be defeated because they are of a different stripe than everyone else.

Things that scare you.

Crazy head.

Well it's not things that scare you.

En Al-Qaeda thinks these guys are super crazy.

Look, the thing that really concerns me...

Right, and they're fighting Al-Qaeda and Afghanistan.

Let's fight each other.

Okay, but we can laugh about this.

This is serious.

The Australian intelligence came out this week.

We just said you have to laugh at everything, Ron.

It can't be that guy.

But look, the Australian intelligence seems to indicate that they now have enough material that they could build a dirty bomb that could be used, that could be detonated here.

That's why I'm worried.

We need to take these guys out before they detonate a dirty bomb.

Yeah, but what happens?

We have thousands of vehicles and weapons and all the things that we brought to Iraq.

Now they have it.

Every time we go in, the weapons turn against us.

Every time we go in, we screw it up.

Can I read what Ron Paul Rand Paul said a year ago, before he was a candidate and had to compete with the other knuckle-draggers?

He was talking about Mosul.

He said, you have to ask yourself, am I willing to send my son to retake a city, Mosul, that they weren't willing to defend themselves?

You were in, right?

You were in Mosul and Ramadi, right?

Most of the cities I performed in for the troops have now been overtaken by ISIS.

About five of them.

Fallujah, al-Assad, Mosul.

I don't blame you, Jeff, by the way.

I don't.

My jokes are considered torture by the Geneva Convention.

Bill, the difference, by the way, is that as much as I like the too hot for the GOP version of Rand Paul, Ramadi is 80 miles from Baghdad.

And this is where Obama did not intercede in Mosul, and we did fight them in the Turkish border towns.

But there are some lines.

And so this is 450 advisors is not 4,000 troops who died when George Bush sent them in.

But this is something that needs to be done.

He doesn't want to be the Democrat who lost Iraq.

But he didn't lose Iraq.

Bush and Cheney did.

Cheney said...

Cheney said in 2005, he said, the Sunni insurgents, I think we're seeing them in the last throes.

Remember that?

Well, they became ISIS, that it wasn't the last throes.

He also said it would be a cake walk.

No cake, no walk.

We'd be greeted as liberators.

Well, they greeted us with detonators.

They said the war would pay for itself.

We're counting up to $6 trillion now.

How wrong does somebody like Dick Cheney, who I know you're a great admirer of, have to be before we just say, go away?

You don't get to talk anymore.

He actually has, let me address this.

He actually has gone away, and it was President Barack Obama in 2011 who said, we are leaving a stable Iraq.

We are leaving a democratic Iraq.

After the president fulfilled his campaign promise in 2011, withdrew the troops, what happened, Bill?

That wasn't a campaign promise.

That's an agreement Bush made that Obama had to do.

Obama said that he was a very good person.

I love the way that fulfillment is.

Obama said he was running for re-election.

Obama said he was running for re-election

to fulfill his promise to pull the troops out.

We've seen the troops

and we've seen

the peace go to hell.

I've been talking about Gitmo, and I knew when he said it, he would never actually be able to do it.

I've also gone there.

It's never going to close.

There's no place to put those inmates.

And again,

never actually able to do it because they blocked him, because Congress blocked him.

Got to go.

Thank you, panel.

Time for New Roll, bro.

All right, New Rule.

Malaysian authorities who claimed, in all seriousness, that the earthquake near Mount Kinabalu was caused by tourists taking nude photos on the mountain

must be told they're being ridiculous.

Ask anyone here in modern America, natural disasters are not caused by tourists and nude photos.

They're caused by abortion and gay marriage.

Neural the geniuses who just announced Apple Music, the new killer app that features professional humans instead of machines constructing real-time playlists, have to be congratulated for inventing radio.

New rule of Disneyland has to make a rule not to use selfie sticks on the roller coasters.

Then the magic of this kingdom is that people this stupid got this far.

Or maybe they need even more signs like mermaid can breathe underwater but not you.

Large duck in sailor suit, not real duck, do not eat.

New rule from now on, all religions must perform this ritual.

I don't know what it is.

This guy could be getting baptized.

He could be getting punked.

Who cares?

Genghis Khan is pimp-slapping him with a wet cross.

It's perfect.

It's perfect.

Especially for people who think gay pride parades are weird.

Thank you.

Thank you, sir.

New rule: if you get in a fist fight at Walmart that starts with you getting out of your rascal scooter and ends

and ends with you telling your five-year-old Donnie, punch your fucking face!

You're white trash, yeah.

And for now on, these videos.

Oh, oh,

oh, oh,

oh.

For now on, these videos have to end like one of those movies where everyone gets a freeze frame and a where are they now.

Star up TLC's, here comes Tubby Punch Punch,

Governor of Alaska,

and Police Officer Orange County

And finally new rule the ad slogan what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas must be expanded to include the entire country and then written into the Constitution as a proclamation that we are tired of everyone watching us all the time.

The NSA tracks your calls.

Your web browser knows you like nipple slips.

And Verizon knows when you call your dealer to ask if those shirts came in.

Last week I bought a pair of shoes online.

I don't know who told Facebook.

But now it thinks I'm obsessed with shoes.

Listen, Zuckerberg, I don't need shoes, okay?

Because I just bought some.

But you already know that, don't you?

And by the way, that inflatable doll I bought is so I can drive in the carpool lane.

That's a good idea.

Right.

Now, there's an old saying that character means doing the right thing even when no one is watching.

Well, if that's true, people growing up today will never know if they have any.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, that's a law that was written to stop traders from destroying records that reveal fraud, but now it's being used to charge anyone with the crime of merely clearing the browser history on their laptop.

And if married people can't clear their computers, how can they indulge in the six perverted fantasy life that keeps their relationship healthy?

And of course, it's not just what you type.

Merely having your phone on you lets other people know exactly where you are.

A spouse has to be Jason Bourne to get a little action on a business trip.

You've got five seconds when the drone blocks the view of the satellite.

Make it count.

You know, I've always said it's okay to trade some privacy for security.

I have.

Ask anyone who reads my email.

But there are over 6,000 surveillance cameras on the streets of New York, and former Mayor Bloomberg said the argument against using them is just this craziness that, oh, it's Big Brother.

Get used to it.

Well, I don't want to get used to it.

I don't like strangers watching me.

Present companies.

But we're not all Kardashians.

We didn't all sign up for this.

Donald Sterling is a man who is a number of not great things, like creepy and a bad team owner and a slumlord, and such a fool he thought a young girl found him attractive even though she had to wear a welding mask to fuck him.

But it's just plain un-American that he was drummed out of his own life for something he said in a private conversation in his living room.

Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert is another creep, but I don't see why he should be indicted, as he was, for making bank withdrawals of over 10 grand of his own money, which banks must report to the government.

Hastard, as it turns out, was making hush money payments to a former student he molested back when he was a wrestling coach.

But he wasn't charged with diddling kids.

The FBI understands that's just a part of being a wrestling coach.

No.

No, no, we got hastard for the inappropriate way he touched an ATM machine.

Now, of course, it's easy to point to a Hastard or a Sterling or a Wiener or a Spitzer and say, oh, look, we caught a guy doing something bad.

Isn't surveillance great?

No.

There's a price.

Ask anyone over 40 how thankful they are that they got their first job at a time when not every stupid thing you ever did was recorded and uploaded to the internet for all eternity?

I don't blame today's kids for being overly medicated.

If I knew there was a video out there of me twerking to nickelback or

passed out with a cat taped to my nuts or something, I'd be on Zolof too.

We're not just changing how we live.

We're changing human nature itself because, you know, when everything is recorded, there isn't any right and wrong for its own sake.

It's just caught or not caught.

And perhaps even worse, there's never a moment when we can let our guard down.

With everything always recorded, everyone starts altering their behavior for the camera.

Except for the cops.

They could still give a shit.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the Fox in Riverside, California, June 21st.

Matthew Hoe and Boulder,

July 18th, and Hungries in San Diego, August 2nd.

Hey, I want to thank Mike Pesca, Alexis Goldstein, Ron Christine, Jeff Ross, and Ed Begley Jr.

Join us now for Overtime on YouTube.

Thank you, folks.

You were great.

Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 11 or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand.

For more info, log on to HBO.com.