I've been saying for a while now that I really enjoy the Overtime segments which run live on line for anyone to watch immediately following Real Time every Friday night, and that they are often times much more interesting to watch than Maher's hour long show. This week was no exception.
Bill Maher's guests this week included soon to be former Rep. Jack Kingston who just lost his primary bid for the Senate in Georgia, Salon's Joan Walsh, activist Matthew Segal, and actor Wendell Pierce.
The discussion on this week's segment ranged from our broken immigration system and how the Arizona for-profit prison system is taking advantage of it and making a killing locking people up, to the for-profit colleges that are supported by House Education and Workforce Committee Chair John Kline, who just won Maher's Flip a District contest, to Kingston's use of the word "Democrat" when he should be using "Democratic" while defending the status quo on our over-priced and increasingly unaffordable higher education system, to whether any Republican will ever dare to call out St. Ronnie for anything he's ever done wrong by name.
I was happy to see Kingston called out when he decided to play the how dare you ask the poor downtrodden blue collar worker who is out there driving a truck all day to pay for the elitist doctor/lawyer to go to college game when they were discussing whether everyone ought to have a right in the United States to go to college for free, paid for by our tax dollars and whether we ought to have more public universities, like they do in a whole lot of other industrialized nations that are apparently a lot more concerned about whether their children can compete in the rest of the world than we are these days.
As Joan Walsh discussed, that trucker driver may very well be paying for their own son or daughter to go to school even if they're not the one going to school themselves. Segal pointed out that it pays for itself many times over to be sending everyone to college. Maher finally managed to get Kingston to quit talking over the rest of them when he pointed out that maybe we could pay for a few less aircraft carriers and then we could afford to send everyone to college instead.
Of course we will never get Republicans to go along with that here because they'll demonize it as Socialism, or do what Kingston did here if no one is there to call him for it and play the divide and conquer resentment game.
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