We have comedians in Russia...

Yakov Smirnoff has long been a favorite comedian in this household. His signature line might be What  a country! ....my dad's favorite...but mine is:

Many people are surprised to hear that we have comedians in Russia, but they are there. They are dead, but they are there.

All week my thoughts have drifted back to the Soviet entertainers like Smirnoff or movies like Moscow on the Hudson and White Nights. Comedy in today's Russia isn't much safer than it was under the Soviet Union. Aleksandr Dolgopolov had to flee Moscow after he said, along with a few other pointed remarks,

Our population has split into two camps. On one hand there are those who support Putin; on the other, there are those who can read, write, and reach logical conclusions.

Last Monday, July 15th, Stephen Colbert referred to President Felon's settlement with CBS/Paramount thusly:

As someone who has alway been a proud employee of this network, I am offended. And I don't know if anything will ever repair my trust in this company. But just taking a stab at it, I'd say $16 million would help.  

Paramount knows they could have easily fought it because in their own words 'the lawsuit was completely without merit.' And keep in mind, Paramount produced Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, they know 'completely without merit.' 

You may take our money, but you will never take our dignity. You may, however, purchase our dignity for the low, low price of $16m. We need the cash."I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles. It's big fat bribe because this all comes as Paramount's owners are trying to get Trump administration to approve the sale of our network to a new owner, Skydance.

Two days later,  on July 17th, CSB announced the cancellation of Late Night with Stephen Colbert at the end of May, 2026....but only for financial reasons. 

Sure. And I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. 

Of course, President Felon celebrated this turn of events with a post on NoTruth Social:

This week public broadcasting took major hits on both the radio and television side. 

What objections could the White House possibly have to classical music on the radio or in depth science programs and British dramas on tv? I mean, how can you not like Sesame Street or Dora the Explorer? And who takes the biggest hit here?

The smallest, least funded radio and tv stations will be hit the hardest. Blue Ridge Public Radio continued to broadcast after power, internet, and cell service was out for a week in North Carolina, becoming the only source of news and weather for a large part of that state during the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. KSUT in Colorado services remote communities where internet and cell service is unreliable. In parts of Alaska, public radio is the only source of weather reporting in places where weather can kill. Those stations, and stations like that will be hard pressed to continue operations. Minnesota Public Radio's classical station provides classical programs to stations across America and the globe. Someone has to pay for those programs and with MPR losing millions of dollars in federal support funds, those programs will disappear with no one to buy them.

According to MPR News 16 Minnesota public broadcasting outlets stand to lose more than $17 million in funding:

This includes funding for MPR News, the Current, YourClassical, regional PBS stations, north Minneapolis’ KMOJ, Jazz 88, KFAI and small radio stations transmitting from across the state. 

American Public Media President Chandra Kavati said between the federal and state cuts APMG, MPR’s parent company, is facing a $6 million deficit for this fiscal year. 

This administration has also cut funds for Voice of America, with Kari Lake declaring it ideologically biased. White House VOA bureau chief said:

It would be comical if it weren't so tragic. My colleagues and I are not just losing our jobs and journalism, we are abandoning the 360 million people around the world who depend on us weekly for independent news and abdicating the United States' voice and influence in the world.

As kids we used to joke about state run media and how that could never happen here because of freedoms guaranteed in the constitution. Like most Americans, we know Colbert won't be the last to be disappeared. Jimmy Kimmel will probably be next, or Jon Stewart will.  I imagine someone in the bowels of the White House is already working on how to revoke John Oliver's newly minted citizenship papers. A new form of blacklisting,eh?

Back in the 1950s, McCarthyism lacked the technology we have today; it relied on rats, informers, and stoolies to put together their blacklist. In hindsight, no one thinks what McCarthy and his cronies did was good, right, or just. We still talk about it as a nightmare of political censorship. Are we heading down that same path now? The current administration is doing a great job of whitewashing American history as it erases Blacks and Latinos from libraries, museums, and other institutions. Joe McCarthy would be proud. 

The deal cut by CBS/Paramount to merge with Skydance is nothing  but a harbinger of what's to come. They paid off President Felon and have attempted to silence one of the most influential voices in the United States. Sure. he's a comedic actor, but so was Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Will going after Kimmel, Oliver, and Seth Meyers be enough to make We, the People, understand that this is real time? And speaking of Real Time, despite his wishy-washy stand with MAGA, he won't escape unscathed. When all news programs are clones of FOX News, will that be enough?

Interestingly, the Jeffrey Epstein debacle has shown MAGA has an unhappy underside. If President Felon is not on the client list...if there even is one....who is being protected? Is it even remotely possible that parts of the base are glancing behind the curtain?  Or are these unhappy few looking to establish an even more conservative regime?

Everyone is writing about the late night talk hosts, but what's got me up at night is looking beyond that. Purges at other networks and news organs are not far behind. In 1976, NETWORK hit the big screen and Paddy Chayefsky's character, Howard Beale, brilliantly excoriated his audience:

Peter Finch as Howard Beale

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job, the dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter, punks are running wild in the streets, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air's unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit and watch our tee-vees while some local newscaster tells us today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We all know things are bad. Worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like every thing's going crazy. So we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we live in gets smaller, and all we ask is please, at least leave us alone in our own living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my tee-vee and my hair-dryer and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything, just leave us alone. Well, I'm not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad.  

I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to write your congressmen. Because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the defense budget and the Russians and crime in the street. All I know is first you got to get mad. You've got to say: "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more. I'm a human being, goddammit. My life has value." So I want you to get up now. I want you to get out of your chairs and go to the window. Right now. I want you to go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell. I want you to yell: "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more!"

"I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more!" became an anthem for the ages. You still hear it referenced, applied to a whole lotta stuff. But that was not the most important thing Howard Beale said. That honor goes to:

The world is a business; it has been since man crawled out of the slime."

That's the excuse they are using on Stephen Colbert. It's the same excuse this regime is using to kill scientific studies in medicine, the environment, agriculture, and food safety. The human has no place in this equation. It's about profit, not people. It's not about the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or even the Emancipation Proclamation. It's budget cuts to maximize profit and if people die along the way, well, everyone's gotta go sometime. 

What's happening in America is the harvesting of hope, of dreams, of the belief that one generation can do better than the next...and tossing it all into a trash compactor. RIght now, America is about creating an underclass that cannot afford food, shelter, or health care while servicing the rich. 

Money buys manipulation of the media. Just ask the Emir of Qatar how much he spent to make Hamas look like heros to the west. Lester Holt is missing from NBC Nightly News, Norah O'Donnell has been replaced at CBS. This is not coincidental. Just keep your eye on 60 Minutes; President Felon already has a hard on for that group. 

And when all of your news spins right, and anyone who doesn't fall into line is disappeared, ask yourself why. Ask yourself why you didn't notice while it was happening. 

Go ahead; close your curtains then tell yourself you just didn't know. That's what the good Germans did.

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

On July 19th, The Wifely Person Speaks

turned 15 years old. 

That's 786 episodes, about 420,000 page hits.

Whaddya think?