New Rule: With the Super Bowl only a week away, Americans must realize what makes NFL football so great: socialism. That’s right, for all the F-15 flyovers and flag waving, football is our most successful sport because the NFL takes money from the rich teams and gives it to the poor teams … just like President Obama wants to do with his secret army of ACORN volunteers. Green Bay, Wisconsin has a population of 100,000. Yet this sleepy little town on the banks of the Fuck-if-I-know River has just as much of a chance of making it to the Super Bowl as the New York Jets — who next year need to just shut the hell up and play.

Now, me personally, I haven’t watched a Super Bowl since 2004, when Janet Jackson’s nipple popped out during half time, and that split-second glimpse of an unrestrained black titty burned my eyes and offended me as a Christian. But I get it – who doesn’t love the spectacle of juiced-up millionaires giving each other brain damage on a giant flat-screen TV with a picture so realistic it feels like Ben Roethlisberger is in your living room, grabbing your sister?

It’s no surprise that some 100 million Americans will watch the Super Bowl next week — that’s 40 million more than go to church on Christmas — suck on that, Jesus! It’s also 85 million more than watched the last game of the World Series, and in that is an economic lesson for America. Because football is built on an economic model of fairness and opportunity…

Read More of Bill Maher’s New Rule on the Huffington Post

Back in college, while I was busy pretending that a blottoed discussion of Nietzsche over $1 beers made me an intellectual giant, my fiftysomething father, who’d worked so hard to send me there, was quietly being saved. Having long eschewed any ties to his Southern Baptist upbringing, he suddenly found himself born again and on a quest to know God better.

As a longtime atheist, I was a little surprised. But eventually I came to be relieved by this development. While my friends’ fathers were buying flashy sports cars and exchanging their wives for models, my own father was turning inward and asking: Is there more to life than this?

I was also proud of him for becoming a student again. As I watched him pore over C.S. Lewis, Lee Strobel and even neoatheist thinkers such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, I thought it amazing that he still wanted to learn something new.

It was a revelation I’d experience over and over again – meeting faithful believers and discovering that, no matter how long they’d been in the fold, many were still on a dogged quest for spiritual knowledge.

And it’s why I decided to go back to school as well and study religion in a more meaningful way. It wasn’t necessarily an acknowledgment of a higher power, but a realization that I knew little about the beliefs I had railed so arrogantly against.

Which brings me to the problem with modern atheism, embodied by the likes of Harris and Hitchens, authors of “The End of Faith” and “God Is Not Great,” respectively. So often it seems like a conversation ender, not a conversation starter. And the loudest voices of today’s militant atheism, for all their talk of rational thought, don’t seem to want to do too much thinking at all. As James Wood wrote in The New Yorker, “The new atheists do not speak to the millions of people whose form of religion is far from the embodied certainties of contemporary literalism. Indeed, it is a settled assumption of this kind of atheism that there are no intelligent religious believers.”

What spiritual quest are they on, except to put an abrupt end to those like my father’s? For them, the science is settled, the data are conclusive and the book (no, not the Good Book) has been written. Time for everyone else to pack up and move on to other business, like, presumably, accumulating wealth and fulminating at the sight of the nearest Christmas tree.

The militant atheist wants nothing more than to spoil the believer’s spiritual journey. That’s both meanspirited and radically unenlightened…

[continues in the Daily News]

Bill Maher lambasts the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert “Rally to Restore Sanity” as misguided in its call for “moderation” at a time when clear-headed people should be standing up firmly for what’s right. Right on, I say.

“It’s a tricky thing, politically, to jump on that bandwagon because I think that maybe people see it as taboo still,” Zach said, and then pulled a cigarette from his jacket pocket and lit it. He took a drag and then passed it across the table to Fox News correspondent Margaret Hoover, who smelled the cigarette, laughed and nodded, and handed it back.

Galifianakis then took a couple more puffs and shouted, “Oh my God, look at those dragons!”

Here is a man who I say deserves a true Profile in Courage Award.

Bill Maher interviews Richard Tillman, brother of Pat Tillman, on the recent Real Time.

Any person, dealing with grief over their sibling’s death, that manages to stand up for what their lost loved one truly believed in light of a media circus, is A-OK in my book.

This is speaking “Truth to Power” in its finest sense. Anyone willing to call out these opportunistic politicians who showed up at this brother’s funeral, and co-opt what he (Pat Tillman) believe against their own self-interest…

I agree with Bill Maher. I’d be happy to share a beer with Richard Tillman any day of the week…

So we get to find out fun things like Tea Party favorite Christine O’Donnell dabbled in witchcraft and believes it’s wrong to tell a lie under any circumstances (that certainly won’t work for her in the Senate).

Man, do I like Maher’s proposed strategy to try to get Candidate O’Donnell on his new show:

Whenever a major political party tries to “rebrand” itself, aesthetically, it inevitably ends in disaster. Last time it was GOP.com, but to prove the graphic failure is bipartisan, the Democrats have come up with a new logo, and a new slogan (“change that matters”). An exasperated Bill Maher tried to help out the party by offering some new slogans, like “fighting for you (to a point)” and “we got Lisa Ling’s sister out of Korea.”

The logo (which, it should be noted, The Atlantic has already called out for plagiarism from a Midwestern pizza place), is a small “D” in a blue circle. The hours spent thinking up this complex design must be incalculable. Maher presents it without comment, though his face says it all, and to add insult to injury, Jon Hamm of all people deadpans from off-camera, “Radiates power, doesn’t it?”

A longtime critic of how the Catholic Church has handled abuse allegations, Hitchens believes the current Pope was actually involved in the cover-up before he took the top job.

Hitchens also contends that the Pope is subject to criminal prosecution due to his involvement in the latest sex scandal.

Bill Maher. Photo: David Shankbone (CC)

Bill Maher rants in Variety:

New Rule: Conservatives have to stop complaining about Hollywood values.

It’s the Oscars this weekend, which means two things, one, I’ve got to get waxed, and two, talkradio hosts and conservative columnists will trot out their annual complaints about Hollywood: We’re too liberal, we’re out of touch with the heartland, the theater floors are always sticky, our facial muscles have been deadened with chicken botulism, there aren’t as many Goobers in a box as there used to be, and we make them feel fat.

To these people, I say — shut up and eat your popcorn. And stop bitching about one of the few industries in America that still makes something people all over the world want to buy. Not to rub it in, but “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel” made $400 million. And that’s a squeakquel.

Last year, Hollywood set a box office record: $10.6 billion. Sixteen billion worldwide. Not bad for a bunch of socialists. You never see Hollywood begging Washington for a handout, like corn farmers, or the auto industry, or the entire state of Alaska. Except for Kevin Smith, we pull our own weight.

What makes it even more inappropriate for conservatives to slam Hollywood is that they more than anybody fall in love with any D-list celebrity who happens to lean to the right, to the point where they actually run them for office. You don’t find the equivalent of Sonny Bono on the left — or Fred Thompson, or George Murphy, or Congressman Gofer from”The Love Boat.” And let’s not forget, the modern conservative messiah is a guy who co-starred with a chimp. That’s right, Dick Cheney. But also Bonzo’s buddy, Ronald Reagan. Now, I like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he is an Austrian ham who bragged about drugs and gang-bangs and could speak no English, but when he said he’d run, the family values, anti-immigrant party terminated in their pants.

Which brings us up to the right wing’s most recent teen crushes: a couple of cute kids named Sarah Palin and Scott Brown. Sarah is a former Miss Wasilla who served as the weekend sports anchor on station KTUU in Anchorage before eloping with her high school sweetheart and eventually answering a call to public office. Scott is a former Miss Cosmo Guy, and his turnoffs are people who don’t drive trucks and having to wear clothes. Scott’s a senator now, but — shout-out to the folks at”The Bachelor” — if you need a stud for Season 19, Scott’s totally there…

[continues in Variety]

Evan Bayh is not a centrist, he’s a corporatist, according to Bill Maher.

Maher appeared on “Anderson Cooper 360″ Tuesday night to comment on the state of affairs in Washington, D.C. He argued that Evan Bayh, the retiring Senator from Indiana, is what’s wrong with Congress. The Senate is “where legislation goes to die,” Maher says, because “corporatist Democrats” like Bayh act like Republicans.

Maher told Cooper that politics are not polarized enough and that the U.S. lacks a real progressive party.