Great Post by Alec Baldwin on Huffington Post

Check out this excellent blog by Alec Baldwin reflecting on his appearance this past Friday on HBO's always entertaining and engaging Real Time with Bill Maher. Baldwin was excellent on the show, but gives great credit to co-guest Garry Shandling for the best line of the night. I wanted to hear more from Baldwin, frankly; he's strong and unsparing when he speaks and writes, and absolutely compelling. Smart, passionate, serious -- he really is somebody to be proud of as an example as an involved artist.

CNN's Christiane Amanpour was also a guest, and you don't get much smarter than she is, but I felt she was a little too supportive of Sarah Palin's symbolic place on a Presidential ticket, citing all the high-ranking women in other countries. All well and good, but that the U.S. has such a lightweight, obviously unqualified and cynically chosen -- to reflect and appeal to a specific radical slice of the demographic out there -- lady on the ticket doesn't say anything good about the state of the U.S. and what we'll settle for. Amanpour put forward that she felt she needed to defend the notion of her on the ticket, but liking the idea of having a woman on the ticket certainly doesn't mean that it should have been this woman, or just any woman. And that's just about what we've got in Sarah Palin. I just love it when somebody refers to her, boastfully, to boost her up, as the governor of the "biggest state in the nation." Since when do we measure qualifications by the square foot? Yikes.

I will leave you with Maher's "New Rules" segment, which starts out with a few assorted funny bits then seques into a cogent and frightening riff on Sarah Palin's extreme religious views. Maher makes it funny, but he's also dead-on and it's scary stuff.

There are quite a few clips from this week's Real Time with Bill Maher on YouTube right now, and the whole show repeats many times during the week, until the new show on Friday.

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