3243: Bullet Points and Punch Lines w/ Lee Camp
 

The history of KATG; Redacted Tonight and RT America; Elizabeth Warren’s endorsement; political ads, Joe Biden’s dementia, and Corn Pop revisited; Lee helping keep a man off death row; the Catholic Church vs. the Impossible Burger; Woody Allen’s publisher cancels book release following outrage and Stephen King is upset; the Hulu documentary Hillary: Bill Clinton talks about Monica Lewinsky; Colorado congressman Ken Buck dares Biden to take his AR-15

Guest:
Lee Camp
http://static-3.keithandthegirl.net/...MP-100x100.png


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That tattoo is in Papyrus. That's the most offensive font, in this graphic designer's opinion. The artist that made that happen should be tarred and feathered.

They were out of Comic Sans.

RT is a state owned propaganda wing of the Russian government.
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...ine-ofcom-fine

I would pay money to watch Keith shop at Bass Pro or Cabela’s. “A camo lazy boy? Really?”

I bought a turducken decoy!

Guys, I am SO disappointed in you for letting this guy on.

Supporting Bernie is one thing, but Lee is clearly trying to sow division and dissent among us. Making people upset that Biden might get the nomination means that many of them are likely to skip out on the general election.

This cost the Democrats and the country the election in 2016 AND in 2000 (there were many thousands of Green Party voters in Florida more than Al Gore would have needed to win).

RT - Russia Today - IS a propaganda outlet and they have every interest is making America weaker. Sorry to say this but you are getting played.

THAT SON OF A BIIITCH!!!!!

Hahaha! Lost it at that part.

Ya know, as much as I re-listen to old eps, I somehow had it in my head that Keith was divorced first. Good to hear a reminder of all the events cuz there's just too much history to remember

I did really enjoy that.

I answered Joe Biden in the poll not because that's what I would want but because I have lost any faith I might have had in US politics

You're right, if we all get behind Biden now, we'll definitely beat Trump! What swing state voter wouldn't get behind the "America, like as such as you know the thing" guy. I don't necessarily think Bernie has a real shot against Biden at this point, but I also think Biden will do terrrrrribly against Trump. Pretending like he isn't an awful candidate won't win us the election. As long as there's still more than half the states left to vote in the primary, criticizing Biden for his policies and the words he says is not "sowing division," it's making the party accountable to get the best general election platform we can so we beat Donald Trump. Pressuring Joe into supporting a better health-care policy (while unlikely) would be reason enough for Bernie to stay in.


RT might be owned by the Ruskies :eek:, but in my opinion the US corporate media is pushing just as much propaganda. How many anti-war voices do you hear on CNN? How much time has MSNBC devoted to the dangers of "Russian influence" since the 2016 election? Way more than they spent honestly looking at the failings of the Clinton campaign, and now they're giving us the 2020 Biden campaign which *feels* doomed to fail in the same way Hillary lost. Hopefully I'm pessimistic and wrong, I think Trump could lose if the economy crashes and everyone dies from the virus.

I voted Biden on the KATG poll, but voted for Bernie today at the real polls. I also brought my partner with me who had never voted in a primary. Apparently my state was real close to choosing Bernie in 2016 so I made sure I had twice the voting power. Suck on that, politics!

LOL. I agree. Trump could lose if everyone dies. Check on your American friends, guys. We're not ok.

Sending good vibes, not confident that it helps with how fucked up your system is but let's hope for the best

I heard something on a podcast yesterday that was depressingly accurate
• either Trump keeps doing nothing for the Corona virus and it still works out so he gets to claim he did good
• Or he keeps doing a bad job and many people die so he won't get re-elected BUT MANY PEOPLED DIED

I would just like to have been in the room as Lee, RT management, and JFOD discussed editorial matters.

America just wants to get rid of Trump. 3 million more people voted for Hillary (who has been vilified in the press for over 30 years now). They are looking for a generic candidate that isn't too offensive. Biden is as bland and "white" as they get. I'm not saying that I like it, but most Americans would vote for a cardboard cut out of him against Trump.

Who knows what kind of tomfoolery and ratfuckery the Republicans will pull before the election, but if all things were fair, Biden's margin in the popular vote should be over 10 million.


Biden has never been a politician of extraordinary bravery or principal. They call him a "consensus politician." He wants to make most of his constituents happy. It is lame, but this also means that his platform is significantly more "left" then Hillary's was and we (progressives) have allot of leverage still to pull him further to the left.

One of the things that he and his campaign will have to do after Bernie throws in the towel (which he should do soon) is try and make friends with all of the Bernie hard-ons that are saying that they will not vote/vote 3rd party/vote for Trump. This means that he will potentially make concessions on Healthcare and Student loans. This is my hope anyway.


RT is most certainly Russian propaganda. It is owned and controlled by the Russian state. Lee's BS about "voting Green" was a very clever seed intended to sabotage the opposition party during the election, as it has previously done in Florida in 2000, etc.

The US mass media ABSOLUTELY has an agenda. It is owned entirely by people with lots of money and LOTS of interests in all major corporate sectors. It existentially threatened by anyone that legitimately aims to weaken corporate influence over the political process. Publicly funded elections? Never. The politicians NEED to beg us for money to get elected.

Consider how much money health insurance and drug companies pump into advertisements. Even if we pretend that the guys that own the media outlets do not have large diversified investments in healthcare/defense/energy, etc. companies, they also depend on them for ad revenue, which is the whole reason they exist.

Still. Even they know that we are teetering on disaster with Trump. Biden will have tailwinds heading into the election. Only Fox News (and the other outright propagandists) will seriously work against him.

This episode brings back memories of Keith AFAICT seriously considering voting for Trump for the kicks. In a similar moment in time, the gang was laughing at how many times Hillary needed to swipe the subway card.

It tells you about one's political awareness and orientation if they throw everyone in the same bag, wrap it up nicely and label "the elites". That may be an accurate perspective if their positions are on the extremes, but if healthcare/human rights/environment are the priorities, it's not an extreme.
It's particularly problematic when Dems & Reps are (not the partisan inner workings, but rather why people sign up to one and not the other): if ending up with arguable policies are as bad as denying facts and lying, your satisfaction bar is so high that you're not going to be able to establish or maintain a democracy where problems can be solved in a reasonable manner.


Same with voting third party and not voting. Even in countries where 5+ major parties is the norm, if you're directed by purism-idealism, not only will you get nothing, and your vote will be effectively shredded by things like minimum thresholds, but it will remove you from the equation to benefit then-biggest runner.
But with the electoral college ("first we let you vote towards your state's decision, and then use very old and rough numbers to decide how important your state's decision is"), you also get to create something that has an important psychological and political impact: the popular vote result. So forget how blue your state is, because your vote will contribute to whether the majority of people - not land - coast to coast, stands for reason, or for bigotry. Imagine how perfect of an argument it would be for malicious populists, according to whom if most people vote that "2+2=5", then it's an established fact. It's slapped right out of their hand, and clearly shows how they're not the people's favorite.


I often ponder if the US would be better off with a President + Prime Minister system, just because everyone could elect their favorite TV show host, singer, actor, etc. for the highest position with no actual power and leave actual governance to people who know what they're doing. Follow the Trump/Oprah/Kardashian White House drama while not panicking they'll have to handle a viral outbreak or denuclearization (denu-what?).

I hope you're right! Living in PA I will be doing my part to not see four more years of Trump by voting for *gulp* Joe Biden or whoever else the nominee might be. There's just been some troubling trends (like Trump's approval ratings going up during the impeachment trial) that make me worry they're going to make another false equivalency between the (undeniable) corruption of the Democratic party and the fucking wacko evil Trump Republicans.

And I'm not a huge Lee fan, I think he comes across as kind of smarmy on his show, although I liked him a lot on this episode, good to know he can hang with the gang. But now we're calling anyone who advocates for 3rd party voting a Russian hack? Lee's point seemed to be he'll vote Green in Washington D.C. because the democrat is 100% going to win there. The two party system has had us by the balls for decades, acknowledging that and trying to move towards something better is good!

I just think a lot of the Russia hysteria is overblown - yes they may be trying to stoke the fires of division between us or whatever, but those divisions exist and the US corporate media is all too happy to discount alternative, left-wing voices as Russian propaganda.

I’m with you for most of your points but I don’t agree with this one.

In a system with a well established multi party system it’s perfectly useful and frankly necessary to vote for smaller parties.

Mainly because not doing that would bring it screeching back to a two party system and that’s clearly a shitshow.

But also because there is often coalition governments where the smaller party will have considerable influence on policy because they are needed to get the majority votes. In Germany we got a whole lot of progressive ideas implemented during a SPD (similarish to Democrats) & Green coalition because the Green Party was able to push them outside their comfort zone.

And because people know that coalition governments can and do work they feel more comfortable voting for different parties based on their actual campaign goals and not ‘oh I always voted red gotta keep doing that’.

BUT the US doesn’t have that system so just vote for whoever the democrats eventually decide on pretty please.

I don't think so at all. If there has been one clear winner on the international stage over the past 3 1/2 years, it has been Russia and Putin. He has increased his influence in the Middle East immensely, seems to be operating without checks in Europe and is otherwise untouchable. This is all possible because Trump is covering for him.

As far as Lee goes, he is literally on Russia's payroll. Maybe he got the gig because his politics aligned with Russia's goals in the first place, but at the moment he is furthering their goals. Convincing people to opt out of voting against Trump or voting Green is 100% beneficial to Russia.

RT is undeniably a Russian-State backed outlet. Ask yourself this: Why would Russia be operating a(nother) news channel, of all things, in the US?

They are not trying to promote Russian films or culture, they are not trying to compete for advertising dollars with Fox news, CNN, etc. They are looking to put out stories or spin stories that benefit Russia.

Absolutely - to be clear, I mean voting for new parties/candidates promising to "change everything", by getting 2% of the votes, and 0 seats. That's especially tragic if the country in question applies something like the D'Hondt method that disproportionally boosts top runners (intended to help form a stable government).

Handling >2 runner voting results in a fair manner is more complex than it sounds, but generally, elections where you can rank your favorites ("Sanders, otherwise Biden, otherwise a cardboard cutout of Biden") and provide good-enough representation would get rid of most strategizing the average person isn't equipped to parse.

Of course, any two-party system beats a gerrymandered, over-bureaucratized, registration-requiring, purging-allowing, no-holiday, count-deadline two-party system.


In some cases it's ironically healthy to amplify certain divisions (by dragging issues into mainstream, letting people get accustomed to it and form own opinions), but it becomes problematic when close to US elections.

Speaking of divisions more broadly, here's Trump in office; right now when you take a look at Sanders folks' Twitter feeds, the current state of affairs is that Biden has a mental illness (pretty much a conclusion on KATG as well); and the plan is to vote for the nominee (and that's just a shortcut term, because whoever it is, they're going to a much better choice than Trump - we know the options). Lack of very loud, very clear, very simple endorsements on behalf of every reasonable candidate and movement involved in the election may result in 2016 v2. Most reasonable arguments are not the loudest, it's the opposite - so odds are that people barely interested in politics won't go out for the nominee, because they misunderstood how democracy works.

Also, let's not mix hand-wrestling Jesuses with attempts at establishing relationships with upcoming/present administration. The former is a nuisance solved by raising an educated society (and perhaps kept in check by campaign conduct oversight), and the latter a political fiction-level counterintelligence nightmare.

I'm weary of how a lot of the talk around Russia sounds like it's coming out of the 1950s. Russia and lots of other authoritarian regimes around the world try to influence the media. I don't think it's worth putting too much thought into, compared to the other global catastrophes we're dealing with. I think if the Democrats had spent the last four years fighting Trump's policies on immigration and healthcare rather than his Russia connections, we'd be in a much stronger position right now. Obviously the hindsight of the Mueller investigation and impeachment flopping makes it easy to say that.

With everything being awful I’m sure Biden will be nominated.
He was together with Bloomberg my least favorite candidate.

I’m currently listening to all the episodes called out in the beginning of the show. Each one of those leads me to another episode which leads me to another etc etc. I love being a VIP member! There is always content. Congrats on the 15 years guys!