Gay Mayor of Vicco, Kentucky, Reacts to the "Best Segment of 'The Colbert Report' Ever" 14&16AUG13

THANK God for the Colbert Report........

It's being called the greatest segment The Colbert Report has ever done.

On Wednesday night, the Comedy Central news-satire program aired the latest installment in its "People Who Are Destroying America" series. The segment is on Johnny Cummings, the openly gay mayor—and a part-time hairdresser—of Vicco, Kentucky, a hamlet of about 330 people. Vicco made news earlier this year when it became the smallest town in the United States to pass a ban on discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. (The ordinance passed by a 3-1 city-commission vote. According to Cummings, who introduced the ordinance to the city council, representatives from five other towns told him that they want to be the next ones to pass such a "fairness ordinance.")

"Everything considered, I was remarkably pleased with the way [the Colbert segment] turned out," Cummings tells Mother Jones.

"Russia's not the only place trying to defend its family values," host Stephen Colbert says, referring to the culture war over America's traditional "small-town morals," as he introduces the clip. What follows is a touching, funny, and stereotype-pulverizing look at a tiny Appalachian town and how its residents feel about the anti-discrimination policy and their mayor. Watch it here:

http://on.cc.com/17Pdq2K

"If God makes 'em born gay, then why is he against it?" a Vicco resident says, in the clip's moving final moments. "I can't understand that. I've tried and tried and tried to understand that, and I can't."

The night after the segment aired, Cummings told Mother Jones about why he agreed to do it. "We got a lot of attention after that New York Times article ran [in January], and we got these offers from production companies wanting to do all this crap," Cummings recalls. The "crap" here refers to how five production companies, including that of ABC, have recently shown interest in filming a reality TV show in Vicco. "So when some of them called, I was often quite rude to them…But then I got a call from [The Colbert Report]. I always watch The Colbert Report…To get your point across, sometimes you just gotta laugh. That's how I look at it. So I thought, okay, The Colbert Report would be perfect."

The Comedy Central film crew came to town to shoot footage last February. The show also featured a pastor named Truman Hurt, the lone voice in the segment raising objections to the so-called gay lifestyle. The pastor's objections, as well as local confusion over the legal specifics of the ordinance, were framed by some media outlets (such as MSNBC's Maddow Blog) as a backlash and controversy. In Cummings' view, no backlash actually occurred, and the town has been overwhelmingly supportive. "The only negative response we really got was the local TV station that played it up…and tried to cover it as 'backlash,'" Cummings says. "If you check out my Facebook page, there's not a negative thing on there about this. But some people tried to create a 'backlash,' I guess."

The 50-year-old Cummings has been praised by residents and others for leading efforts torevitalize the Kentucky town's infrastructure. Cummings is a Democrat (as is the majority of Vicco's population) but has switched between Republican and Democratic party affiliation. Aside from his mayorship and his gig as a local hairdresser, he plays the blues on his saxophone in his spare time. He is also a big fan of Josephine Baker, the jazz singer and political activist who helped the French Resistance fight the Nazis.

Front page image: Screenshot: The Colbert Report

http://on.cc.com/17Pdq2K
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/08/mayor-johnny-cummings-vicco-kentucky-interview-colbert-report?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Motherjones%2Fmojoblog+%28MotherJones.com+%7C+MoJoBlog%29

Colbert: Mars rover’s penis doodle proves America’s ‘galactic supremacy’ & Mars Rover 'Draws' Penis On Red Planet & NASA Picture Goes Viral (PHOTO, VIDEO) 25APR13

WHAT more can be said about nasa's rover drawing a penis on Mars?
 

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On Wednesday night’s edition of “The Colbert Report,” host Stephen Colbert presented a segment called “Tiny Triumphs,” in which he celebrated the fact that the Mars rover is now drawing penises on the face of the planet, meaning that America is now treating the Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor like a passed-out frat boy.
“Humanity has accomplished so much over the years,” Colbert began. “We’ve split the atom. We’ve mapped the human genome. We even put pizza on a bagel. Now we can have pizza anytime.”
Our next great frontier, he said, is Mars. Humans began to send probes and exploration satellites to the planet in the 1970s. Most recently has been the Curiosity rover, which has been driving over the planet in search of signs of life.
With its eight wheels, the Curiosity has “left humanity’s mark” on the planet, Colbert said proudly.
“We drew a penis!” he said.
“This giant graffiti peenie proves our galactic supremacy,” he went on to say. “America took a pristine planet, 140 million miles away and scribbled on it, like it was the face of a passed-out frat boy.”
Watch the video, embedded below via Comedy Central:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/425786/april-24-2013/tiny-triumphs---nasa-s-giant-penis-doodle

 http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/04/25/colbert-mars-rovers-penis-doodle-proves-americas-galactic-supremacy/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story%29

Mars Rover 'Draws' Penis On Red Planet & NASA Picture Goes Viral (PHOTO, VIDEO)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/24/mars-rover-penis-draws-nasa_n_3148422.html
NASA's high-tech Curiosity rover may be getting a little cheeky over there on Mars.
In a photo of Curiosity's track patterns, published on the robotics section of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory site, the Mars rover appears to have traced out a very phallic design on the Red Planet's dusty surface.
The rover's picture went viral after being posted to Reddit's r/funny subreddit page Tuesday, earning close to 40,000 "upvotes" in a matter of a few hours. According to The Huffington Post UK, NASA's website crashed due to increased traffic as word of the "drawing" spread.
The car-sized rover landed on Mars last August with a mandate to explore the planet and analyze whether or not Mars could have supported life forms. Curiosity is controlled by a team of NASA engineers, who send two sets of instructions to the exploratory craft each day, according to Space.com.
Some of the tracks made by Curiosity's six wheels can be seen from space and were documented by the HiRise camera of NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in January.
LOOK:

Colbert skewers Texas GOP on ‘critical thinking’ 19JUL12

THE Texac gop / tea-bagger political platform opposes teaching critical thinking skills in school. Maybe that is because if people actually think about the policies of the gop and tea-baggers they will discover those policies are not to their benefit. This look at the controversy from Stephen Colbert....

By Valerie Strauss

I thought I’d heard enough about the Texas Republican Party’s platform that rejects the teaching of critical thinking skills until I heard Stephen Colbert’s take on it.
I wrote about this recently here, quoting from the platform:
Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
After this was ridiculed, Texas GOP Communications Director Chris Elam told TPM.com that it was a mistake and that opposition to “critical thinking” wasn’t supposed to be part of the platform. Since a party convention approved the platform, it can’t just be dropped, he said. Sure thing.
Colbert returned to “The Colbert Report” from vacation this week and couldn’t resist taking a hilarious shot at this as part of a piece that is described on the show’s website like this: “The minds of young people are being poisoned by knowledge, but thankfully Texas is the Large Hadron Collider of denying science.”
Here’s some of his bit:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/416535/july-17-2012/the-word---on-the-straight---narrow-minded

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..The minds of our young people are being poisoned by knowledge... I have long praised the Texas Board of Education for their valiant work rewriting our nation’s history textbooks. But now I believe they’ve got some stiff competition from the Texas GOP, who recently put a plank in their 2012 party platformn regarding children’s education which says, and I quote, ‘We oppose the teaching of critical thinking skills.’ Amen brother. For too long we have blindly accepted the idea of not blindly accepting ideas.
“And you know who I blame? I blame Galileo.... For centuries we had a perfectly good explanation for the order of the universe. Bible says the sun goes around the Earth, making us the center of the universe. And you know what? Everyone was happy. And then numnuts over here gets a telescope for Christmas, uses his precious critical thinking skills and suddenly the Earth goes around the sun, blah blah blah and now we have lesbians.
I’m here to tell you now the Texas GOP is on to you, critical thinking skills! They know that you have quote the purpose of challenging the students’ fixed beliefs, and a good teacher’s job is to maintain whatever fixed beliefs a student has when they enter first grade.
Frankly folks, I am embarrassed that we conservatives did not think of this sooner.... Sure,we discredited the liberal activism of the ‘60s and the socialist policies of the New Deal... But folks, all of that is just child’s play compared to the Texas GOP, who with this one plank of their platform have called for the repeal of the Enlightenment.
And as if to illustrate what is possible once you are freed from the shackles of critical thinking... The Texas GOP, when asked about this position, explained it as an oversight and should not have included the words ‘critical thinking skills.’
Now, when they were drafting the platform, somebody had to say ‘no critical thinking skills.’ Somebody else had to type those words and then the Texas GOP had to approve those words. Do you really think that would have been possible if anybody had been thinking critically? But thank God no one was. And if they get their way, nobody will be...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/colbert-skewers-texas-gop-on-critical-thinking/2012/07/18/gJQAn7nsuW_blog.html?wprss=rss_national