Senator Barack Obama joined Stephen Thursday night with a message for the media: Stop with the petty, manufactured sideshows and start covering the issues that actually matter.

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“Manufactured political distractions…you are officially ‘On Notice”‘

Digg It! 

Be sure to check out “The Colbert Report” website for all things Stephen.

Senator Hillary Clinton dropped by the set of “The Colbert Report” Thursday night to help Stephen with some technical difficulties.

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Be sure to check out “The Colbert Report” website for all things Stephen.

As a big fan of being condescended to, Stephen knows how its done, and he’s got some advice to give the Presidential candidates for when they’re courting “small town” voters.

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Barack Obama’s wife Michelle joined Stephen last night in Pennsylvania to talk about the presidential race and to review some of the artwork he’s received from children around the country.

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Stephen Colbert and singer/songwriter John Legend deliver a wonderful rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” to kick off Stephen’s week long campaign coverage from Philadelphia.

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Almost as good as Denny Hastert’s performance.

Stephen tries his very hardest to coax Chris Matthews into announcing his intention to take a run at Arlen Specter’s Senate seat in 2010. Perhaps more interestingly, Tweety doesn’t seem like he’s ruled it out. In fact, he tells Stephen his childhood dream was to be a Senator. Even GOP operative Roger Stone has written about it.

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Although Stone repulses me, it looks like he’s got this one correct:

Unfortunately, like Pat Buchanan before him, Chris Matthews has hours and hours of television tape going back 20 years and thousands of words in columns written in the same time period. His Senate bid will die of his own words.

Specter v. Matthews in 2010? Now that would be interesting.

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Stephen Colbert has come up a way for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to disprove their detractors calls of inexperience: let them run a starter country instead.

Now both sides say that raising all this cash proves they have what it takes to manage something big. All it really proves is that this election, the Democratic party has more money than the GDP of a small island nation. So why not kill two birds with one stone and use that campaign cash and just buy a small country? Then they can get on-the-job executive experience, where it doesn’t matter if they screw up. Plus, real estate is a great investment. [..]

The point is either Clinton or Obama will prove themselves to be the better executive and then become the Democratic nominee. But if you’re still not convinced that experience with some other country is the best judge of leadership, look at how it worked for George W. Bush. He based his whole presidency on buying Iraq. And it only cost us $509,790,353, 54, 55,…I’m sorry, it keeps changing…

Many C&L readers remember the halcyon days when the worst lie Bill O’Reilly ever told was that his old show “Inside Edition” had won a Peabody Award, the oldest and most prestigious award given to electronic media. You may recall Al Franken also having lots of fun debunking that lie. Now it turns out that The Colbert Report, which “some people say” (ha) is a thinly veiled parody of The O’Reilly Factor, has actually won a Peabody award. Let’s hope Mr. O’Reilly sends Mr. Colbert a congratulatory fruit basket.

Update:  Okay, comment number 24 is good enough to bring up from below:

Colbert should run around saying he won a Polk, forcing people to remind him it was actually a Peabody.

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Colbert went off last night on all the goody-goodys out there who want to boycott the Olympics over the Chinese government’s violation of human rights.

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Stephen Colbert looks at the housing crisis and the suggested fix by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and tells us how to get bailed out:

Of course the big news has been the sub-prime mortgage crisis. As you may recall BearStearns went belly up when people who borrowed money to buy houses they couldn’t afford failed to all win the lottery on the same day. So two weeks ago, the Fed extended a $30 billion line of credit to JPMorganChase to buy BearStearns out. Now, this bailout raised some hackles among the anti-business pro-people set….

First of all, if they’re losing their house they’re no longer home-owners. Okay? Problem solved. But for those who still hold a mortgage the solution is simple…[Button: sell your children]….no, no. [Button: rent your organs]…not yet. [Button: buy a bigger house]…exactly. Asking the government to care about your six-figure mortgage is like praying to Jesus to get rid of your love handles. They’ve got bigger problems. But sink ten billion dollars into that home and suddenly, that room full of solid gold toilets is a linchpin of the economy. Bingo. You get a bail out.

Stephen Colbert points out that Barack Obama’s speech on race on Tuesday would have been completely unnecessary had Obama taken a page out of John McCain’s lesson book.

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But the real problem here is not whether the Senator attended church, or whether he was aware of his reverend’s views, but how he handled an inflammatory spiritual leader during a presidential campaign. If you want to know how to do it right, ask John McCain. He also has a long-standing and complicated relationship with controversial preachers: Jerry Falwell, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Now I’m not comparing Falwell and Robertson to Jeremiah Wright, after all, the Sunday after September 11^th, Rev. Wright said this:

Wright: “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

Chickens? Roost? That implies we have the terrorists cooped up in tiny cages for years and we didn’t do that until after 9/11. By comparison, Falwell and Robertson delivered a touching sermon three days after September 11^th:

Fallwell: “I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them, who tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”

Robertson: “I totally concur”

It is even more inspiring than their sermon about the two sets of footprints on the beach. The second set belongs to a gay dude sneaking up on you. Run, Jesus! But like the out of control Rev. Wright, Falwell and Robertson were also condemned by a presidential candidate. During John McCain’s 2000 campaign, he called them both “agents of intolerance.” But before this campaign, McCain did what was necessary to win. Here’s what he said about them this time:

McCain: I believe that the “Christian Right “ has a major role to play in the Republican Party.”

Russert: Do you believe that Jerry Falwell is still an agent of intolerance?

McCain: No, I don’t.

He embraced them. In fact, in 2006, McCain gave the commencement address at Falwell’s Liberty University. I’m telling you folks, the man is such a maverick, he is even independent from his own true feelings! McCain was able to cozy up to preachers who say that gays and Satanists are the same thing and it’s a non-issue. I think that Obama’s mistake is that he did it backwards. If he had denounced Rev. Wright years ago, then quietly embraced him for this election, he could have spent the time he wasted on yesterday’s speech focusing on the issues that really matter.

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Stephen Colbert looks at our economic situation and the reasons why politicians are so hesitant to be upfront about whether we’re in a recession.

Nation, it’s tempting to say that our economy is in the crapper.  But I think that’s unfair.  It is past the crapper, down the tubes, out the illegal runoff pipe into the ocean where lobsters are feeding on it.

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Stephen Colbert bids goodbye to Fox’s John Gibson and MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson on news of their cancelled cable shows and wonders who will cover the “Big Stories” like Elliot Spitzer’s resignation.  Speaking of which, Colbert also wonders if he didn’t play a part in Spitzer’s downfall:

Now, like most really important stories, this one involves me. Let’s look at the Spitzer timeline. On Feb. 12^th, the governor places calls setting up his liaison.  Feb. 13^th, he meets the prostitute in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington for a little game of “hide the integrity.” But look what happened in between those two events on the night of Feb. 12^th. He appeared on my show! I just feel so dirty.  Evidently, I am the meat in a Spitzer sandwich. By the way, a Spitzer sandwich will cost you $5500. And folks, you know, to be fair, maybe this is my fault. I tried to give him the “Colbert Bump” but I might have accidentally given him the “Colbert Bumpin’ Uglies.”

Stephen finally warms up to (read: begrudgingly accepts with the help of a pint of Ben and Jerry’s and some Jameson’s) the reality that John McCain is the GOP nominee, and once and for all, with a hand from his “true conservative” friends, says goodbye to hating McCain.

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He’s uh, you know, he’s dependable, you know? He’s been in the Senate for 20 years, you know? We both hate terrorists, you know? I mean, that’s something we have in common. I mean, I bet…I bet he’s the kind of solid guy who… who takes out the garbage and puts down the toilet seat and stays in Iraq for 100 years. I mean, sure, sure he doesn’t have a lot of money, he’s not young, and he’s not dynamic, and he’s not a great speaker and he’s got a bad temper, and he’s…he’s from a dry climate. And he has a reptilian air that reminds me of the albino alligator at the Miami Parrot Jungle…(groans) Oh God. Ok, ok, ok, ok, ok, ok, everybody calm down. It’s going to be ok. He’s turning it around, he’s turning it around! News is he’s getting advice now from sexy new friends: Karl Rove. Oh, he is dreamy. I guess I can see me and McCain together, you know, I…what I’m saying, John McCain, is that if you ask, I’ll say yes. Sure it won’t be a passionate embrace, but that doesn’t last long anyway. So John, sweetheart, I guess I could learn to love you. But first it’s time for me and my fellow true conservatives to say goodbye…to hating you.

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Stephen Colbert finds a bit of a logic flaw in the Clinton campaign claim that what matters most in the head to head for the Democratic nomination is that she’s winning the big states.

Barack Obama has a big problem here.  Sure, he’s winning a lot, but they’re just little states, like Maryland, Washington and Illinois. Hillary, Hillary is winning all the big states and everybody knows that if you win the big states in the party primary, you automatically win them in the general election.  For example, did you know that the Democrat who won the Texas primary went on to win Texas in the general election in every one of the last eight elections?  Therefore, Hillary will naturally win Texas in the general election.  Now I’m not saying that Hillary Clinton doesn’t face some challenges, after all, John McCain won Texas in the Republican primary, which means by the same logic McCain will also win Texas in the general election.  And folks, thanks to electronic voting, that might be possible.  As for the states that neither Hillary nor McCain won in the primaries, I assume they will simply cease to exist.  Now, the Obamamaniacs out there are saying, “Oh but Stephen, he won 26 states to her 16; he’s leading in the popular vote.” But, it’s not how many votes you get, it’s the geographic boundaries that contain those votes.  Getting ten million votes in one state is way better than getting twelve million votes split between 2 states.  So if Obama wants to compete, he’s going to have to win some big states, but there’s only one big states left: Pennsylvania. So his only chance here his only chance is to start making big states out of the small states he’s already won

As Colbert says in the end, the only thing that matters is that people think that’s a strong argument.  Looking right at you, Timmeh. 

The always hysterical Mr. Colbert hits another one out of the park with his “The Word,” segment dealing with the fear-mongering Bush administration FISA battle. It’s nice to see the writers back on their game.

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Colbert: The members of Donk-qaeda have used their House majority to block the renewal of the PAA. Which, as the name clearly states, empowers the NSA to tap your phones without a warrant. By not passing the PAA, the Demoncrats are placing in grave danger the safety of millions of innocent American dollars.

By using clips from classic horror movies like Silence of the Lambs, Nightmare on Elm Street and When a Stranger Calls, Colbert proves his point. The real purpose of the Protect America Act is actually to protect the Telecoms for participating in BushCo’s illegal wiretapping endeavor by gr