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Sunday, June 03, 2012
Heyman: Comedian Bill Maher now a part owner of New York Mets
Polite Musings from a Tim Byrdak Observer.
Television host and political comedian Bill Maher is a new limited partner with the Mets, CBSSports.com has learned. Maher’s Mets involvement wasn’t known until now, but baseball is something he said he’s very serious about.
“I’ve always been a a baseball fan but especially a fan of the New York Mets,” Maher said before Sunday’s game vs. the Cardinals. “I’ve lived in Los Angeles almost 30 years but I’ve never stopped rooting for the Mets. That’s one thing New Yorkers don’t do, switch allegiances. And I’ve never been a fan of the DH.”
Maher said he saw notice of the Mets selling limited partnerships sometime around December, and he quietly bought in. Those partnerships were advertised for $20 million to own a four-percent share, but Maher’s exact stake in the team hasn’t been confirmed.
...Maher said his family rooted for both the Mets and Yankees but that now when he wears his Mets hat around town (he was wearing one on the field Sunday), he hears about it, both good and bad. He also said he lost a little love for the Yankees during the George Steinbrenner era.
“I was so not a fan of George Steinbrenner that he turned me off to that franchise,” Maher said. “I don’t think he represented what New York should be.”
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RANDOM TERRIBLE POLITICAL QUIP!! IT'S GO-TIME!!!!!!!
I guess under the new system, someone can just change that to the "persecuted Mainlanders" tag to get this thread where it will ultimately belong.
Bill Maher whispers behind my back.
"I'm just a fan," Maher said. "I'm not going to get involved. I think my role is going to be bringing luck to the team— they didn't have a no-hitter for 50 years, I buy in and I come to town and there's a no hitter. Draw your own conclusions."
I think the Mets are lucky. That sort of cheering can be contagious.
He's had a regular show on TV since 1994, where he's also been the writer, executive producer, and assorted other things. I'd imagine he's probably built up a decent amount of cash over that time, so I guess it would be conceivable that he could have that sort of money lying around.
With that being said, yeah, it does seem like a lot of money for someone of his relative fame to be blowing on a single thing. You're probably right about him only having a partial share in one of those limited partnerships.
Even though he's been around for so long, I've always viewed him as a lesser Jon Stewart, or a late-age Carlin wannabe. He's only funny if you're liberal and seriously pissed off.
His early shtick was that of a sexist caveman libertarian liberal. His left of center politics (anti death penalty, pro "social justice" in the broadest sense) really haven't changed so much. He more-or-less created Ann Coulter because he needed a rightwing guest to counter him on his show.
Or, not even then.
That is nonsense. Stand-up stage personas evolve over time. Is Louis C.K. a sell-out for doing more personal storytelling stuff, instead of the absurd, surrealist comedy he used to do? Maher was doing political stuff on Comedy Central in the early '90s, years before FOX News and the Jon Stewart version of The Daily Show were part of the pop culture zeitgeist. He didn't gravitate to politics to make money. if anything, the money and opportunities gravitated to him because he was known in comedy/TV circles as a comedian who was extremely interested in politics.
The more successful a comic is, the more their act is about hotels and airplanes and appearing on TV. Write what you know.
Well, Mets are tied for 2nd, 3 pct pts back. But they're close!
I have no problem with the best point of the season coming in June. Everything from here on out is gravy. Though the team should get a boost from Tejada and Bay coming back eventually, and Young making a few starts before his should implodes.
The fans booing Beltran this weekend was weak-- the Mets traded him, he didn't leave on his own. And if Bay's contract wasn't on the books, they could have extended him if they wanted to.
The Pagan trade's not looking good right now.
Does Ike get sent down when Bay comes back? I was all for having patience, but the team has to at least try to win, and Ike's costing them a lot of runs right now.
Yea, but when your hobbies are hookers and blow, you typically burn through that money pretty quickly.
Wow, Bill would have been the perfect Mets owner for 1986.
Awesome. Stewart has been ruthless in going at the Mets the past couple of years. Glad he/you were at the game.
Virtual first, no games back. I'm counting it, baseball gods be damned.
GB is the only column that matters. The Mets are in first.
Only if you're doing it wrong.
Looks like Bay will be back tomorrow. Especially after yesterday, I can't see them sending Nieuwenhuis to the bench.
If it's just a "persona," fine. But Maher certainly makes it seem as if those are his views, not just an act.
Add those DC Cab checks and you are golden.
That said, he did endorse Bob Dole back in 1996.
And #19. he's rather notorious for his support of the death penalty. (And euthanasia and abortion -- he's been called "pro-death") He's also more or less on the same page as Libertarians when it comes to Social Security. Pretty much every other issue that Libertarians have something approaching a consensus on, he's on the other side of the issue.
I don't really know much about Bill Maher but people's views genuinely change over time as well. Us being humans it's not always a clean or even self-acknowledged change either
I was 7 when DC Cab came out and when I first saw it...in a theater. My parents loaded up us kids in the Catalina and we drove to a suburban theater clear across the other side of Milwaukee because that was the only theater showing whatever PG movie we were supposed to be seeing (matinee), I think it was Never Cry Wolf. Of course, it was sold out when we get there, and my Dad furious as all hell, decides that we drove all this way, we're going to see something. So my Mother is just objecting to this, and ultimately walks over to the Jo-Ann Fabrics next door, while Dad, and three boys, ages 5, 7 and 11 go in and watch DC Cab on the big screen. I think the Mr. T appearance pulled us in, I mean how innappropriate could it be for kids under 12?
Arianna Huffington decided she was liberal?
I thought Arianna Huffington just decided she wanted to make more money and the left-side of the carnival offered a more lucrative and faster path to it...
I was thinking the same thing. I loved Politically Incorrect, great tv show, most of the time better than even the best that the Daily Show has to offer. But since then, he's taking himself to seriously, while at the same time continuing to be ridiculous. The movie Religilousity had such great potential, then it failed by imitating the worse of Rush Limbaugh/Michael Moore schtick by transparently making crap up and pretending it's backed by evidence. It ended up being basically a series of weak skits akin to the Daily Show skits. I mean you were making fun of religions, it's like shooting fish in a barrel, heck it's like shooting fish in a stack of fish, and yet he somehow managed to fail at it.
Mitt and Liberty U
mitt's onesies
You do know Maher can't open his mouth with mentioning legalizing drugs, right?
I like Maher at times, and am definitely on his side 100% WRT religion. I didn't watch Religulous until recently, and it was pretty terrible. The only redeeming parts IMO were the autobiographical ones, where he talks about how he came to atheism. Beyond that, even though I agreed in principle with his points, the execution was awful. I think I knew it would be, which is why I avoided watching it for a few years after its release. Making a coherent argument has never been his strong suit.
He does have some really interesting guests on his show, and being on HBO, this usually produces some fun moments. He's not good interviewer, though, so the one-on-ones tend to be disappointing.
1. The jokes at the end of the show nearly always come at the expense of something that was just turning into a good debate. And the jokes almost always suck, so it doesn't help.
2. He always has to have some conservative or other on the show for "balance" and most of the time that conservative is just not very good at this, not funny, not well informed, not much of anything. The libs on the other hand can have wildly different levels of debating ability but there is usually at least one of them who knows what they are talking about. This supposed "balance" really only ends up making whichever conservative that's on look like a blowhard (because they usually are) and the conservative viewpoint a weakened version of what it actually is as well.
That being said, Real Time is one of the 2 or 3 things I miss from my MASSIVE cable package that I dropped down to basic a couple months ago. From HBO, all I ever watched were Maher and boxing.
I used to catch Maher from time to time when he was on ABC. I don't get HBO (when I had it, the only time I tuned it was for Real Sports, so...) so I can't speak to his work now, but from the clips I've seen, he sounds pretty much like the same guy.
Especially when it comes to medical issues. He has no expertise regarding health, yet espouses incorrectly on it all the time. He makes such a big issue about his rationality, yet he is completely irrational on that.
Besides, he is just not that funny. I can forgive a lot of sins and disagreements on issues if he is funny.
Yeah, the ending jokes are like Catskills material. I'm not a Maher fan. Besides the hostility towards women, he always seems very smug.
I wonder if this is true for everyone else, but I'm still burned out from the 2008 election.
(Also, (a) Maher was more famous, meaning a bigger target, and (b) Maher was on TV, giving the outrage brigade a place to aim -- advertisers. A lot easier to organize a boycott of a show/advertisers than to boycott an author.
54
Yes, you are right. His comments were more nuanced than my statement represents (although I think he still had a good point), and that, trying to parse things in a situation filled with emotional upheaval, on TV can be suicidal of course.
Yes, that was a neat rhetorical trick of bringing it back on the original point.
This is true sometimes, but just as often Maher will get trounced by a conservative on an issue he brought up. And he's not getting trounced because he's wrong, he's getting trounced because he sucks as a debater, and some of his guests, conservatives and liberals, are actually experts in the subjects they're talking about, or put more than 30 seconds into prepping for the show.
Were.
Is this a function of Maher picking bad "conservatives" or conservatives having a shallow pool of options, most of whom come off as unfunny blowhards? Like most here, I find Stewart's humor to be far more entertaining, I've never been into the hyper-parody medium of Colbert, and Maher has never struck me as particularly *funny.* He will maybe throw out a political point worth making on out of every 20 tries, though that's probably overestimating his hit rate.
But the problem with "conservative" panelist options isn't that they're being selected poorly by Maher or the producers, but that the conservative commentariat have spent the last 30 years self-selecting for blowhards and humorless buffoons.
Get back to me when the Braves were.
Pretty epic game, though.
Yeah. Gee's looking good. But the Mets can't count on CG shutouts from Johan and Dickey every game. With the caveat that we may be laughing at this question in a month, at what point do they have to think about making some upgrades to the bullpen via trade? Maybe they can call the Brewers and see if K-Rod's available?
Keith made the point today that sending Ike down might upset the defense, Wright in particular. But damn, it's really hard to score runs with both him and Nickeas in the lineup.
Well, 1-for-20 isn't great, but it would be an improvement for, ahem, some people around here.
Admittedly I haven't listed to his act closely in quite some time, but to the best of my knowledge he's used those kinds of words to express his contempt for specific public figures. Bachman and Palin come to mind. And he's equally insulting to male politicians. Just slightly different word choices.
Is it OK to use racial epithets toward those you disagree with? I suppose if that isn't a problem, crude misogynist insults wouldn't be a problem, either. However, I didn't think that was the standard.
Comedians have always been given larger berths with language and offense than run-of-the-mill folk. The jester can say things the king needs to hear, not what he will listen to.
The one other thing that irks me is that he'll get on some pretty interesting guests and then just kind of let them sit there or else use them in ways that don't really showcase their abilities. Like a year or two ago, for instance, Maher had Carl Sagan's wife on the show. I get that the Sagans were into legalizing pot and all that, but Jesus... you have the wife of perhaps the greatest man in terms of getting the laity to understand science in the 20th century at least and possibly ever, and you're going to spend that entire time talking to her about Mary Jane? Really?
And, of course, the health thing. I'm not sure whether or not Maher is an anti-vaxxer (I think he's not because I think he's ripped on Jenny McCarthy in the past) but he does disbelieve the germ theory of medicine, which makes him a retard. I have a really, really hard time with some skeptic groups portraying him as one of them with that particular viewpoint. I guess if you're sufficiently anti-religious everything else is okay...
Didn't seem to work for Michael Richards.
Anyone watching that video would know better than to mistake his unhinged outburst at the heckler as part of any sort of comedy routine. You can't do comedy when you're rage-blind and incapable of considering the pivot beneath the joke.
Surely, somewhere there is a group of obscenely wealthy men and/or women who want to take the Braves off of Liberty's hands, right?
Imbalanced humors? Leeching? Magnetic bracelets?
I'm guessing Stewart doesn't have the money Maher does.
Believing in woo-woo BS? I think specifically Maher is one of those nuts who think that all or nearly all maladies are caused by poor diet or lack of exercise.
he wasn't funny
You saw that coming like a freight train.
Which ones aren't?
The ones caused by genetic defects, bacteria, viruses or prions. So, most of them.
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