Posted on Jan 18, 2019
(Photograph courtesy of CBS News) Since its release last month, Vice, Adam McKay’s satirical biopic of former Vice President Dick Cheney, has become an awards season juggernaut. Christian Bale won a Golden Globe for his performance (and in his acceptance speech, he thanked his inspiration for playing Cheney – Satan), and McKay has received both Directors and Writers Guild nominations. The film will likely receive several Oscar nominations next week,...
Posted on Jan 06, 2019
Last December, after comedian Kevin Hart had been announced as the host of next years’ Oscars, he was criticized for his homophobic jokes and tweets. Some of these jokes were mean-spirited; he said someone’s profile looked like “a gay bill board for AIDS.” Others were downright violent, like when he said that if he ever found his son playing with a dollhouse, he’d break it over his head and say “stop that’s...
Posted on Dec 12, 2018
In his latest book, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Stephen Greenblatt analyzes the Bard’s most power-hungry characters. The book never mentions Donald Trump by name, but it is easy to see the parallels between our president and the characters Greenblatt writes about, especially Richard III. “He is pathologically narcissistic and supremely arrogant,” writes Greenblatt. “He has a grotesque sense of entitlement, never doubting that he can do...
Posted on Nov 30, 2018
This week, outgoing Congressman Beto O’Rourke said he would not rule out running for president in 2020. Beto (one of the few politicians written about on a first-name basis), who took Texas and the nation by storm with his campaign to replace Senator Ted Cruz, has become one of the major figures in American politics, and many have surmised that he may be the Democrats’ best shot at taking back...
Posted on Nov 12, 2018
Photo: Jeff Mitchell/Getty Images Bernie Sanders lost the 2016 Democratic primary because black women – the Democratic Party’s most reliable voting bloc – voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton during the early Southern primaries, giving her a delegate lead he could never overcome. Despite his support for the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, he has always struggled when talking about race, and over the last week, he has been speaking about the topic in...
This week, New York Magazine posted an article called “12 Young People on Why They Probably Won’t Vote,” that profiled a group of millennials under the age of 30 who have either never voted before, or are so fed up with politics that they won’t start now. Here are some of these millennials’ unbelievably lame excuses for neglecting their civic duty: “I’d rather have an informed nonvoter than an uninformed voter going...
Posted on Oct 24, 2018
Win or lose in November, we need a better leader to stand up to Trump and McConnell....
Posted on Oct 09, 2018
Below is the full text of our interview with Scott Carter, exclusive to to Banter Members: Jeremy Fassler: Whose idea was it to bring Steve Bannon on to the show? Bannon had appeared on Real Time when he produced a documentary on Sarah Palin called The Undefeated, before many people knew about him. Any time somebody has been on, we generally keep in touch with them. This is the 16year of the...
Posted on Sep 24, 2018
The 2018 midterms are potentially America’s last chance to hold Donald Trump and his corrupt administration to account. But now, they have also become a referendum on Brett Kavanaugh and the sham hearings Republicans have foisted upon us. There were many red flags against Kavanaugh’s character from the onset, like credit card debts and gambling addiction. But with the newest revelations of his sexual misdeeds and the Republicans’ complicity in covering...
Posted on Sep 17, 2018
This weekend, Stanford Professor Christine Blasey Ford revealed that at 15, she was sexually assaulted by a then-17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh, who held her down and covered her mouth when she tried to scream. If there was ever a moment to end this farce of a hearing and yank his nomination, this would be it. However, the Republicans are shameless in their need to control the highest court in the land,...
