At the 2012 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, President Obama showed off his funny side by cracking jokes offstage on his “live microphone” and then continuing the fun onstage. Late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel hosted this year’s dinner (and was the brunt of some of the jokes).

via W. Kamau Bell

photos by Mike Theiler via WHCA

Barack Obama, Jimmy Fallon and The Roots joined forces last night to Slow Jam The News on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

Comedy fans from both sides of the Atlantic are excited for HBO’s new comedy series Veep starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the Vice President of the United States. The cast also includes Tony Hale of Arrested Development. But it’s the show’s British creator Armando Iannucci (and team) who has a proven track record of making politics funny.

Veep debuts on April 22, and the first episode will be available free on iTunes and HBO.com the next day.

Iannucci became known for writing and directing television series that themselves satirized TV news and TV talk shows: The Day Today with Chris Morris and I’m Alan Partridge with Steve Coogan, respectively. In 2004 he turned his attention to the corridors of British political power with The Thick of It a dry, documentary style sit-com set in the UK Parliament.

Iannucci first took on US politics in the 2009 film In the Loop which featured many actors from The Thick of It playing similar characters. The film features a diplomatic tour-de-farce between British and American officials in the lead up to a conflict that seems very similar to the Iraq war. Here’s Iannucci talking about In the Loop, which opened 3 years ago this week, with clips from the film including James Gandolfini (The Sopranos) as a US General:

Julia Louis-Dreyfus is best known for her role as Elaine on Seinfeld. Not everyone is aware that she was a cast member on Saturday Night Live in the early 1980s. Now you are one of the lucky ones. Here’s Julia in an MTV News sketch impersonating original “VJ” Nina Blackwood on a 1984 SNL episode:

Veep follows a bit of a trend of comedies with one foot each in England and America, including the David Cross show The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret on IFC and “Episodes” which stars Matt LeBlanc from Friends and Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan from British comedies Green Wing and Black Books (which is another favorite of mine).

Here’s a great behind-the-scenes feature on the making of the series that includes interviews with the cast and with veteran political writer Frank Rich who is an Executive Producer on Veep.

@jack_____enship is ready to trade in his 15 minutes of fame for 15 years as president of the University of Alabama.

In this humorous campaign video created by Daniel Roth, we learn University of Alabama freshman Jack Blankenship (aka Alabama Face Guy) is running for the presidency of The University of Alabama. After viewing the video, campus newspaper The Crimson White reports (in its April 1st edition, mind you) that “the University of Alabama System Board of Trustees announced Jack Blankenship as the next president of the University of Alabama.”

via The High Definite

image via The Crimson White

Point Roberts is a small town in northern Washington that is on a peninsula that connects only with Canada—a geopolitical oddity known as an exclave (Alaska is a large scale example). For an American to reach Point Roberts by land, they must cross the border twice. Point Roberts was the subject of a recent article by Nate Berg of The Atlantic Cities.

Point Roberts is also a good place to get away – or to hide out. Thanks to Canada’s fairly strict border crossing rules, it’s difficult for people with criminal records to cross over, so even ex-felons who can move freely about in the U.S. wouldn’t easily be able to find their way into Point Roberts. This is part of the reason the town is, unofficially, home to about 50 people in the U.S. Marshals Service’s Witness Security Program, or Witness Protection.

via The Atlantic Cities

“This is Not a Conspiracy Theory” is a new political web series by Kirby Ferguson, creator of the wonderful and recently completed series “Everything is a Remix”. The new series will focus on politics in the United States, and what has led to the current status quo. Ferguson is raising funds for the project on Kickstarter.

It will primarily be a work of perspective. It’s intended to give you some clarity and some context about where we are now. But it will also be my view of the material. It will have bias. I think it needs some commentary because frankly some ideas are bad, and this needs to be said. I’ll demonstrate these things and I’ll do it without cheap-shots or demonizing anybody.

Congressman John Fleming (R, LA) recently posted an article on his Facebook page showing disgust for Planned Parenthood’s “abortion by the wholesale.” The article titled Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex was created by The Onion in May 2011 as satire. Fleming posted the article thinking that it was real.

Someone commented under the post:

The Onion is satire, how exactly did you get elected?

via The Daily What and Literally Unbelievable

image via Literally Unbelievable

The White House has posted a behind-the-scenes look at the process of writing President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address.

The President has been brainstorming with the speechwriters and huddling with the policy team. He’s come up with new ideas, rewritten language, and reordered pages. For President Obama, this isn’t simply an editing exercise. He’s invested in creating the State of the Union because he sees it as his opportunity to take his vision for the country to the American people directly.

via Curiosity Counts

Last night Stephen Colbert announced he is forming an exploratory committee for his possible candidacy for the “President of the United States of South Carolina.” In order to do so, he transferred command of his super PAC, Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow to Jon Stewart. Colbert formed his super PAC—a political action committee that can raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, individuals, and other PACs—in June of 2011.

Colbert is currently exploring a run for President of the United States of South Carolina. Because of this, he cannot be associated with any Super PACs, although he has asked Americans For A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow to forward any periodicals of an “adult nature.”

Primary Elections Explained by C.G.P. Grey

KoPoint Wire is a new opinion and content-aggregating blog focusing on media, politics, sports, and technology. KoPoint founder Dan Patterson is starting off by hitting the road to cover the Republican presidential primaries.

“Iowa Nice” by Scott Siepker and Paul Benedict is a punchy informational video that challenges a few stereotypes about the nice people of Iowa.

via Daily What & Towleroad

“Politicians Under Video Surveillance” by Spanish art collective Luzinterruptus is an art installation in which 75 fake security cameras were clustered around political candidate ads in Madrid. The installation occurred on November 19, one day before a Spanish election. We recently wrote about another work by Luzinterruptus: Radioactive Control, Installation of 100 Glowing Figures in Hazmat Suits.

For our installation Politicians under video surveillance, we carried 75 fake security cameras with us, of the type which detect movement and possess an intermittent red light and we trained them on the advertising used by the parties in their electoral campaigns, observing from close up the faces that were touched up for the photos, of the politicians elect.

photos by Gustavo Sanabria

via Super Punch

Our friends at Nerdist have announced who they have “officially endorsed” for the 2012 presidential campaign, a turquoise-farming puppet named Marvin E. Quasniki. The outspoken Mr. Quasniki (through Nerdist) has posted his presidential campaign announcement (filled with expletives) and a man on the street segment video.

Tonight’s episode of The Rachel Maddow Show opened with Rachel talking about Laughing Squid and my recent blog post about Moustair, the Tumblr blog with the strange collection of photos featuring men’s moustaches as their own hair.

Our beloved Doggie Diner Dog Heads make a cameo as well.

via Emma Welles

C.G.P. Grey takes a look at How The Electoral College Works and The Trouble with the Electoral College.

Bad Lip Reading has come up with a suitably silly and downright dada take on campaign speechifying that leaves Auto-Tune the News, the last great YouTubeness contribution to political discourse, way back in the rear-view mirror.

Here’s their groovy takedown of Barack Obama’s lip-flapping: “Trick The Bridesmaid” which confirms that there is no partisan exclusion to the parody-making. “Are you really drinking my bottled judgement?”, indeed.

But honestly, the current crowded field of Republican challengers is providing the best fodder for this innovation in words-in-mouthing. Like this little nugget from Texas Governor Rick Perry, “I cannot wait for a medieval cookie, a Cinnabon, hot yellow kool-aid and save a pretzel for the gas jets!”. I’m pretty sure he really said that.

Fans of interim Mayor Ed Lee of San Francisco pulled out all the stops to help earn him the permanent mayoral seat in this music video titled Ed Lee Is…2 LEGIT 2 QUIT which remixes the original hit song, 2 Legit 2 Quit, from rap artist MC Hammer. The video features some Bay Area personalities including Ashkon, MC Hammer, SF Giants pitcher Brian Wilson, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Will.I.Am of Black Eyed Peas, 49ers football legend Ronnie Lott, former SF mayor Willie Brown, Google executive Marissa Mayer and more.

My my my, music hits me so hard,
Newsom left and they put him in charge,
Thank you, for blessing me,
and the rest of the city with Mayor Ed Lee
Got us all sayin’ “Run Lee Run”
Only 5 ft 5, but he gets (bleep) done
So tell them other candidates to find a bus pass,
Unless you ridin with us…FEAR THE MUSTACHE!

The video was produced by Portal-A Interactive and was funded by a committee called San Franciscans for Jobs and Good Goverment which is headed by Ron Conway and Sean Parker.

via TechCrunch

President Obama has launched a Kickstarter project to solve the debt problem.

via Funny or Die

Is America Ready For Its First Gay Atheist Female Robot President?

According to The New New York Times, it might just happen in 2567.

original source unknown

via Guigo Reader, Chris Menning & meme-meme

Prolific prankster artist Steve Lambert is building a giant truck-mounted sign that reads “Capitalism Works for Me.” The sign will tour the United States on the bed of a truck, and passersby will be able to take part in the project by choosing “true” or “false”–their votes will be tallied on the sign for all to see. Lambert will document the tour with a website and eventually, a book. He’s raising funds for the project on Kickstarter.

You may remember Steve Lambert from such pranks as the fake New York Times edition that announced the end of the Iraq war, or his project to talk to anyone about anything. He’s also the guy with The Most Awkward 404 Not Found Page on the Internet.

I’m excited that this piece takes on what for most Americans is a taboo, or even nonexistent subject: whether global, hegemonic capitalism actually works for most people! But whew, talking about that is boring! And telling people what to think is worse! This sign gets passers by to participate in deceptively simple vote (True/False) which only pretends to offer resolution. Every aspect of the interaction draws them in to more complex questions and conversations, leading to new thoughts and ideas about a better world!

The hilarious speeches by Seth Meyers and Barack Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Seth and Obama really let Trump have it in their speechs. Trump’s reaction in the audience is priceless.

In “The Internet in Society: Empowering or Censoring Citizens?” by RSA, Evgeny Morozov presents a strong critique of the popular idea that the Internet breeds democracy. Maybe our tweets didn’t topple Tunisia’s authoritarian goverment after all.

See Also:
- Language as a Window into Human Nature on RSA Animate
- 21st Century Enlightenment on RSA Animate

John Stewart interviewed former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on The Daily Show, which included an often awkward, yet very insightful conversation about the war in Iraq.

On January 4th Gavin Newsom, the current mayor of San Francisco, will become the Lieutenant Governor of California. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors will be choosing his replacement. Jesse Sanford and Participant Labs have created a website where people can vote for a the new mayor via Twitter to help the supervisors make their choice.

A Twitter-based shoutout tally, the site allows visitors to choose one of the candidates for SF’s interim mayor and send a Tweet registering their support. It tallies all votes and presents the results for all to see; because the votes are based on Tweets, they are transparent and individually available for recounting.