It’s time once again for my newish semi-regular feature. Let’s climb aboard the magic omnibus for another magical misery tour of what’s going on in this crazy world.

Gone To The Dogs: I have an admission to make. While I enjoy Stewart and Colbert, I’m not a regular viewer. The main reason is that I don’t want to steal shtick from them. I want to make my own bad jokes about politics. I respect them, it’s *hard* to do what they do, even with a full-blown staff, on a daily basis. I was one of the least shocked people in America when Colbert took the CBS Late Night gig. It’s hard to stay in character for that long and not feel burnt out. Besides, they backed a Brink’s truck up to his house…

Now that I’ve said that, let’s turn to John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight. It has many of the virtues of the aforementioned shows and the advantage of being on once a week, which means they can edit out some unfunny bits. He can also say fuck without being fucking bleeped. Fuck yeah.

That was a long way of introducing Oliver’s absolutely brilliant casting of dogs as Supreme Court Justices. Since the Supremes refuse to allow teevee cameras into their stuffily sacred precinct, all we ever hear are audio clips. And it took almost a century after radio came into being for that to happen.

Anyway, Oliver offered footage to any news organzation who wanted to use dogs playing judges and lawyers to spice up their SCOTUS coverage:

Rachel Maddow said that she’d “totally use it” if she were the Goddess of NBC News. I totally hope that she totally uses it on her own show. Totally.

More oddities and sodities after the break.

Continue reading “Odds & Sods: Dogs, Ducks and Populist Balladeer Edition”