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From Raw Story -- Maher panel responds to footage of Mississippi voters:

Filmmaker (and daughter of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi) Alexandra Pelosi traveled to Mississippi at the behest of Real Time with Bill Maher to film voters and get their opinions of the 2012 Republican primary. Before showing the footage, Maher explained to the audience and his panel of guests that the people in the video were not “cherry-picked” and that the intent of the video was not to make fun of anyone.

However, it becomes clear fairly quickly that some of these people are not going to be shortlisted for MacArthur “Genius Grants” any time soon. After the clip, panelists John Hamm from AMC’s series Mad Men and former RNC Chairman Michael Steele joked about the number of teeth the interviewees possessed, but otherwise refrained from poking too much fun.

The Pelosi segment is above and the panel segment is below the fold and I'll give them credit for actually having a pretty substantive conversation about what leads to the sort of prejudices shown in the video by Pelosi, whether anyone thinks that the people she interviewed are representative of most of the people in that state or not, I've never spent any time in Mississippi, so I don't consider myself qualified to say one way or the other what most of the population there is like, although I do know they've got abysmal records when it comes to education and poverty. I found it strange that the coverage by Pelosi did not include any black people from that state, but they weren't specific about what area she dropped off in and what the ethnic breakdown there is compared to the general population of the state.

I'm sure there are a lot of people who will find the footage insulting, but I think the larger arguments about addressing the prejudices of the people interviewed is a good one to have for all of us and how to not dismiss them, but attempt to address them and understand what the underlying causes are, which I think the panel here at least tried to do in the limited time they had to discuss it.

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As we've already discussed here, Bill Maher has become somewhat of a punching bag from both sides of the aisle over the last week or so, both for saying that liberals looked bad for not accepting Rush Limbaugh's "apology" and with the false equivalencies by the right, screaming that what he said about Sarah Palin is somehow the equivalent of what Rush Limbaugh did with his attack on Georgetown University student Sandra Fluke.

On this Friday night's Real Time on HBO, Maher addressed both, starting with his criticism from the left.

MAHER: Let me tell you something. I got crap from both the left and the right this week because... okay... let me address the left first, because I found this more disheartening. They were very mad at me because I tweeted that people like Rush Limbaugh, who I absolutely disagree with, I've never said a good word about him. I did a whole monologue on what an asshole he was only a week ago. But I said, I don't like it that people are made to disappear when they say something, or people try to make them disappear when they say something you don't like.

That's America. Sometimes you're made to feel uncomfortable, okay? I mean, can we put this in perspective? No one died. A guy made a bad joke, a bad joke because a., it was a disgusting sentiment that he was evoking and also because it wasn't even a joke. He's a stupid fat f**k whose not funny and it annoys me that... it annoys me that people people who cannot keep two disparate thoughts in their own mind, lump me in together with him and say I'm defending him. I'm not defending him. I'm defending living in a country where people don't have to be afraid that they might go out of the boundaries for one minute. Do we all want to be talking like White House spokesman?

Okay, fair enough on a few points like defending free speech and the fact that it's unfair to lump the two of you together. But I'll make a few points in rebuttal. First of all, you did not just say that you didn't like the idea of people pushing to get Limbaugh off the air. You said liberals looked bad for not accepting his apology. What Rush Limbaugh did was not an apology.

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