You can learn a lot watching Bill Maher or not.

caution..he’s a big time potty mouth

I know a lot of people don't like Bill Maher, but I love his show because it's about people letting their hair down and discussing the current topics of today. Last night, he covered all the topics that I wanted to hear about.

Bill Maher was attacked last week by the right and the left relative to the Rush Limbaugh thrashing. Bill answered the posters and others who say something and then qualify it by saying, “it’s just a joke." No it's not. Bill Maher gets a pass because he delivers jokes in front of 3,000 people for a living; what Rush did wasn't a bit humorous. I too believe that if you love "free speech" it means we have to acknowledge a person has a right to say things that may be obnoxious to us.

Bill Maher brought me back down to earth. I've seen the polls, the uptick in the economy, a sensible foreign policy and I see the current Republican field, so I started to get complacent. Bill Maher pointed out that the race will be tight down to the end because the partisans will align with their respective parties, but that independent voter will see two people that are pretty much alike, but one is white and the other black. For the record, Bill Maher said the same thing in 2008 and look what happened.

Last night Bill showed a segment of Alexandra Pelosi's new documentary about Mississippi voters. Mississippi is the poorest state in the union, and also the most conservative and Christian, and they vote accordingly. Alexandra asked several Mississippians as to why they hated the healthcare bill, and almost all said that they didn't like anything government or free. One responder qualified receiving food stamps by saying that he was out of work and deserved it. They bought into that conservative message that" prosperity is almost around the corner" if you just let the corporations keep more of their money. I really don't expect them to know that the father of capitalism, Adam Smith, warned against the concentration of wealth at the very top. Adam Smith was for strong unions or other mechanisms that would lead to a robust consumer base. Several people Alexandra questioned didn't like President Obama because he was a black, a Muslim, not trustworthy, a socialist, not one of them, and he wanted to take their guns away. Several were waiting for the south to rise again.

The panel discussed a new law that the Arizona Republican legislators are voting, which will allow a doctor to lie to their patient, if it convinces her not to have an abortion. Arizona wants to overturn any law that's not Republican enough. I understand that Republican women are not single-issue voters, but I personally think that they need to take a stand and say, “enough is enough" unless they want to be characterized. They need to stand up and be more like Hillary Clinton when she famously said;" I'm not sitting here as some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette." Its true Republican women think that abortion will never affect them, but it's the other female health issues that they should be concerned about such as Texas cutting funding for those clinics providing health services to poor women, if there's a remote chance that the clinic will perform an abortion.

It's one of the best Bill Maher shows that I have ever watched because it covered so many subjects.

Don't forget to watch the premiere of HBO's “Game Change" if you like politics because it's a backdoor look into the 2008 presidential campaign. It features some unflattering moments that Sarah Palin endured.

Completely, off topic but a funny story (now) that I wanted to share. I believe all of us at one time have used jumper cables either to get our dead battery charged enough to start the car or vice versa. The other day my daughter called from Aloe School saying that her battery was dead, so I naturally said I would be there in about 20 minutes. It was a simple job, and I had plenty of experience but not to be. I parked my Prius in front of her Hyundai, popped open my hood and gasped" Where is the battery?" I must have popped open every plastic cover and latches but the closest thing that came to even looking like a battery was the fuse box. It was starting to get dark, so I told my daughter to look through her manual and find the free roadside assistance that came with the price of the car. After several minutes of looking for that telephone number, my wife noticed that it was attached on the windshield. When the tow truck arrived and everything was back to normal, I embarrassingly asked the driver where my batter was. He looked at me and said he didn't know but lucky for us, he was inquisitive. It wasn't on the floorboard of the front and back seat as he suspected, but it was in the trunk enclosed in a plastic covering with latches. It was a cute battery about the size of a router.