Category: Full Interviews With Our Guests

Mort Sahl (11.22.13)

 

We kick off our series of printed highlights from the radio show with the father of modern standup comedy Mort Sahl. On the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination Mort Sahl  talked to us from his home in Northern California.

David: Mort Sahl, thank you so much for joining us.

Mort: Well, it’s a pleasure, David.

David: All right so November 22nd, 1963.  When you first heard that President Kennedy was shot, what was your first suspicion?

Mort: I wanted to know the detail. I didn’t like the communal crying.

David:  What do you mean you didn’t like the “communal crying?”

Mort: There was a lot of sobbing, and it’s a terrible thing that happened and they all can’t stop crying. But there were a lot of questions. For example where was the presidential security detail? They were at Fort Hood, they were told to “stand down.” Oswald shot from the window, but why didn’t the Secret Service nail down those windows and the manhole covers? Where’s the detail? They say, “Well, we’ll know more when we get Oswald.”

Then they questioned Oswald for 10 hours, there’s no record of the interrogation. Then Jack Ruby comes in there and they say, “This patriot shot Oswald.” But the patriot turns out to be a bagman for the mob in Chicago. It started to fall apart right away.

Unknown

After Mort Sahl stopped touring in order to join Jim Garrison’s investigation into JFK’s murder his income plummeted from $400,000 a year to $19,000.

 

David:  You couldn’t stand the communal sobbing?

Mort: Yeah.

David: That’s a distraction, the tears and the patriotism.

Mort: It’s an indulgence. The Hungry i closed when that happened. The second time when Bobby got it and Enrico (Owner of The Hungry i) said, “We’re going to close” I said, “No we’re not. We’re not going to be lead in communal mourning by Walter Cronkite. We are going to ask, ‘Who did it?’”

David: So by making something sacred, it enables the cover-up, doesn’t it?

Mort: Oh, yeah, sure! That’s the whole thing. Then you can’t say, “The movie was lousy.” “What are you talking about? Oprah Winfrey made this movie. Are you a bigot?” It’s that thing again. The liberals. They are all on the side of the angels. So how come I ain’t happy?

David: Conservatives do it with the American flag, and patriotism, they hide behind our soldiers, they hid behind 9/11. I mean, both sides do it.

Mort: That’s one of the reasons the liberals should have unmasked 9/11 if they were really liberals.

David: They should unmask 9/11? What do you mean by that?

Mort: In other words, why is the 9/11 Report incomprehensible? And I saw the hearings. They still don’t know if they used thermite in that building and there are no answers. Incidentally, the only book that really took 911 on was a book by a Republican professor from Claremont College.

Mort Sahl on the cover of Time magazine.

Mort Sahl on the cover of Time magazine.

David: Okay, so when did you go to work for Jim Garrison in New Orleans?

Mort: About 1965.

David: You were at the height of your popularity as a comedian and you gave it all up to pursue the prosecution of Clay Shaw?

Mort: Well, I didn’t think there was going to be any America; I thought it was going to be a fascist country. If they can do that and not give an explanation, you have got to oppose them, you can’t go along with that madness. Look who they got to go along, Earl Warren. They targeted everybody. They’re still lying. PBS by the way contributed Wednesday night, they said Oswald turned out to be a “lonely looser, a degenerate Marxist.” That’s an awful lot for one guy to accomplish at that age. There’s no evidence of any of that. What happened was that Garrison followed everybody in the case, and he found out that they all worked for the federal government, that’s how he got started. Then we began to get a lot of resistance. Why aren’t the archives open? Why was Allen Dulles on the Warren Commission? Where is the president’s brain?

David: Obama’s brain or JFK’s brain?

Mort: JFK’s brain is missing. They can’t find it in the archives.

David: Didn’t Bobby Kennedy take it?

Mort: No, that’s a contrived story. We had that whole thing for several years too, that the Kennedy family believes these investigations are gruesome and so forth. Until they killed Bobby. Nobody believes Sirhan Sirhan killed Bobby. The fatal wound is behind his right mastoid. There were 22 bullets in that board behind him and Sirhan had a 6 shooter. And the LA police took the board down. And then you get the coroner in the case Thomas Noguchi. I don’t believe them. The guy who wrote the book that the conspiracy is all hokum is Vincent Bugliosi. Who of course with the LAPD and Noguchi solved the Manson case. Notice how they solved it, they scare you more. But that’s the last time the D.A.’s office won a case in LA by the way. You know, Garrison never lost a capital case in eight years.

Mort Sahl invented modern standup comedy.

Mort Sahl invented modern standup comedy.

David: Do you believe it was the CIA working with the Cosa Nostra?

Mort: No. As Jim used to say, “The guys at the CIA make the Cosa Nostra look like Shirley Temple.” They’ll do anything as you can see from Snowden’s revelation. And they did. And it was out of the Western hemisphere of the CIA, with David Atlee Phillips.

And of course our witnesses kept getting killed remember? George de Mohrenschildt.

Terrible casualty list of potential witnesses, people are being beaten and threatened, but the fact wouldn’t go away. The president was gone and this country went to perpetual war, perpetual.

David: Thank you Mort Sahl.

Mort Sahl is the father of modern standup comedy. You can follow him on Twitter.

Click here to listen to our full hour with Mort.

Read More »

Henry Phillips, Comedy Crackerjack

henry phillips

Henry Phillips is a musical comedian from LA known for his “Comedy Central Presents”, semi-autobiographical movie “Punching the Clown” (winner of several awards, most notably the Audience Award at the “Slamdance Film Festival”) as well as his songs for two award-winning musicals, “Blake: the Musical” and “Chips.” He also performs in a series of satirical You Tube cooking videos called “Henry’s Kitchen,” in which he tries and fails to cook food, make friends, and impress women. Henry’s also appeared on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”, “Bob and Tom”, “The Dr. Demento Show,” and the podcasts “WTF with Marc Maron” and “Comedy Bang Bang.” He joins us with Jeremy S. Kramer and Will Ryan And The Cactus County Cowboys along with Jimmy Lee Wirt. Portions of today’s program were written by David Weiss. Please subscribe to our show for free as a podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.

Read More »

40 Percent Of White Males Arrested By Age 23

Here in the United States one out of three black men will go to prison in their lifetime, a statistic Americans have grown comfortable with as our prison population, the largest in the world, swells to nearly two million.

Now comes news that 40 percent of white males in America are arrested by the time they’re 23.

All this according to a new study published today in the journal of Crime and Delinquency.

Joining us is Dr. Robert Braim, he is a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina, and the lead author of this study.

Read More »

Hello 2014

2014

We welcome 2014 with Paul F. Tompkins, Eddie Pepitone, Janie Haddad Tompkins, Laura House, Mark Thompson, Frank Conniff and Chris Pina. Eddie talks about last month’s anxiety attack before, during and after his audition for The Middle. And Mark Thompson talks about creating Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? and how it led to the creation of The Bachelor. Portions written by Ben Zelevansky, Steve Rosenfield, and David Feldman. Please subscribe to our show for free on iTunes and Stitcher.

 

Read More »

“Green Wednesday”

coloradoweed

It’s legal to buy pot in Colorado on January 1. We go to Denver to talk with Associated Press’ Kristen Wyatt about Colorado becoming the first state in American history where it’s legal to buy marijuana over the counter. America has lost its taste for capital punishment as 2013 turns out to have the second lowest number of executions in 40 years. We talk with Richard Dieter Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Plus Will Ryan and The Cactus County Cowboys. Please subscribe to this show for free as a podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.

Read More »

Professors For Sale

professors for sale

How Wall Street buys professors to teach, write and testify on Wall Street’s behalf with two time Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist David Kocieniewsk from The New York Times. David Kocieniewski wrote two investigative articles this year about Goldman Sachs and Apple that we discuss all the time on this show. His latest investigative piece will make you question everything you’re told by economists and professors. Then Film Critic Michael Snyder lists his favorite movies for 2013. Also Will Ryan and The Cactus County Cowboys, Jimmy Lee Wirt, Janie Haddad Tompkins, Hal Lublin and Jeremy S. Kramer. Portions of our show are written by Hal Lublin, David Weiss and David Feldman. Please subscribe to our show for free as a podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.

David Kocieniewski is a business reporter who has been covering the nation’s tax system for The New York Times since 2010. Previously, Mr. Kocieniewski had been a reporter on the paper’s Metro desk since 1995 where he focused on law enforcement, corruption and its offshoot and the New Jersey government.

In 2013, he was part of the team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting

“for its penetrating look into business practices by Apple and other technology companies that illustrates the darker side of a changing global economy for workers and consumers.”

In 2011, Mr. Kocieniewski examined the efforts by businesses to lower their taxes and the debate over how to improve the tax system in a series titled “But Nobody Pays That.’

In April 2012, the series was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. The Pulitzer jury said his work

“penetrated a legal thicket to explain how the nation’s wealthiest citizens and corporations often exploited loopholes and avoided taxes.”

Mr. Kocieniewski joined The Times in 1995. Previously, he worked at The Detroit News from 1986 to 1990, and New York Newsday from 1990 to 1995. He has covered criminal justice and politics for most of his career.

While at New York Newsday, he wrote a series of stories about corruption in the New York Police Department that led to the Mollen Commission hearings and won a handful of awards from various organizations, including the New York State Bar Association and the National Association of Black Journalists.

Mr. Kocieniewski is the co-author of “Two Seconds Under the World,” a book about the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the F.B.I.’s failure to takes steps that might have prevented it. He also wrote “The Brass Wall,” an exposé about corruption in the police department’s Internal Affairs Bureau that nearly cost a hero undercover detective his life; the book was cited as one of the top 10 nonfiction books of 2003.

Mr. Kocieniewski was born in Buffalo, N.Y. He graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1985, and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1986.

Read More »