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Bill Maher used the recent news that Rep. John Dingell was being celebrated as the longest-serving member of Congress at the ripe old age of 86 to make the point that maybe some of these extremely old members of Congress should be retiring before we're rolling them out in wheel chairs like we saw with Robert Byrd and Strom Thurmond.

As Maher noted during his "New Rules" segment this Friday, it seems there only three ways a Congressman goes out: "They die in office, they cash in as a lobbyist, or they mistakenly tweet a picture of their dick."

I'm quite sure there are a lot more reasons than that which many of us could list here that finally led to a lot of them retiring or being run out of office, like being sent to prison, or if you're a Republican having some wingnut teabagger beat you in a primary race, among others, but I digress.

I agree with him completely on the average age of our Senators and some in the House being way too old. Sadly the fact that we're regularly getting really horrible legislation passed that any member of Congress may or may not have a clue about, probably has a whole lot less to do with the age of those in Congress than it does the fact that so many are bought and paid for by special interests that don't have the interest of the American people at heart.

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Bill Maher asked what it's going to take to get our politicians to "evolve" on the issue of marijuana legalization during his New Rules segment on this Friday's Real Time With Bill Maher:

And finally, New Rule: pot is the new gay marriage. And by that, I mean it's the next obvious civil rights issue that needs to fall.

Now, if I asked you, what has been the biggest change in American society over the past 20 years, what would you say? Instagram? Coconut water? Crocs? All important, but no. It's that a generation ago, the closest thing to gay marriage was Liza Minnelli and David Gest.

In 1988, only 10% of Americans approved of gay marriage. Today, that figure's almost 60%. So what happened? What made gay marriage so normal, so quickly? Now, sure, part of it was Dancing With the Stars. But mostly, it was because gays simply demanded it. They didn't care that gay marriage wasn't popular, they put it on the agenda, and they made it popular. The same way they made every woman in America want to wear giant bug-eyed sunglasses.

Now the Democrats, believe it or not, have that kind of power too. They just don't use it, because Democrats operate from a place of fear: unwilling to appear soft on crime, soft on terror — or in Anthony Weiner's case, soft on camera.

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Bill Maher had some advice for Obama haters who have been going crazy over what Susan Rice said on the Sunday shows and who are claiming that the drummed up Benghazi B.S. by Republicans is somehow the "worst scandal in American history" during his New Rules segment this Friday night.

As he noted after running through the list of scandals that are actually worse which we went through during Republican administrations, if anyone actually believes that nonsense about Benghazi "then your hard-on for Obama has lasted for more than four hours, and you need to call a doctor."

That about sums up what's been wrong with Republicans ever since the black guy got elected president, but I don't think they're going to find a cure for their hatred any time soon.

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From this Friday's Real Time, Bill Maher told his audience that he and his staff think they've found the "smoking gun" that proves the IRS had unfairly targeted the tea partiers who are upset about having to wait to get their 501(c)(4) status approved.

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Bill Maher's New Rules segment from this Friday evening and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed hearing him rip John McCain for his endless appearances on the Sunday morning bobblehead shows.

MAHER: New Rule. John McCain has to try spending a Sunday Morning with his family. Look, Senator, I'm with you. Anything to avoid church, but come one. It's Sunday morning. There's got to be an easier way to tell Lindsey Graham you don't want to cuddle.

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Bill Maher had a warning for North Korea's Kim Jong-un, who seems all too willing to push his luck with the United States given the fact that our country has been addicted to war for far too long. Maher also told his audience that it's time that we "start defining peace as strength" instead:

In the last part of his weekly “New Rules” segment, Maher lambasted “Kim Jong Pugsley of North Korea” for his threats of war with the U.S. and the West.

“Have you seen a North Korean rocket test?” he asked. “They don’t even look like real rockets. They look more like that thing the Russian kosmonauts were in when they crashed on to ‘Gilligan’s Island.’”

No, he said, the real threat here is the war-mongering Americans who are looking for “any excuse to ramp up the war machine again.” [...]

“Just like we’re the gun country,” he said. “Come on, we’re the war people. We don’t need a lot of encouragement. Have you ever met John McCain? Offering to go to war with the U.S. is like offering to go out to drinks with Lindsay Lohan. We’re already in the car.”

“Just in my lifetime, we’ve invaded Vietnam, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, Granada, Panama, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iraq again,” he said. “That’s when you know you’re war-mongers, when some countries are coming up twice.”

“At some point, don’t you have to look in the mirror,” he asked, “and say ‘Maybe it’s me?’”

“America needs to start defining peace as strength,” he said. “Do you know who the role model for every president should be? Jimmy Carter. He was the one out of all of them who figured out how to sit in office for four years and never fire a shot.”

“And every president’s negative example,” he concluded, “should be Dick Cheney, who even shot his friends in the face.”

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Bill Maher wound up his New Rules segment on this Friday evening's Real Time by going after today's crop of Ayn Rand worshiping Libertarians in a rant where Maher basically said he didn't leave Libertarianism, it left him. As he noted, even though he's expressed support for the philosophy in the past, it was because it "meant he didn't want big government my bedroom, or my medicine chest and especially not on the second drawer of the nightstand on the left side of my bed."

I'm sure he'll have all of the Ron and Rand Paul supporters mad at him after he lumped them in with their fellow Ayn Rand fan, Paul Ryan, for basically taking the movement and turning it into a “creepy obsession with free market capitalism.”

Maher thinks the movement has basically lost its collective mind these days, and I would argue you could say the same for the Republican party as well, which as a whole has adopted these very same "principles" if you want to be generous enough to call them that.

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On this Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher, documentary filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi was once again sent out to do interviews for the show, this time in New Jersey in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. After watching so many of these so-called "tea partiers" who were out there waving signs saying to keep the government's hands off of their Medicare during the health care debate debacle, the responses here were not that surprising.

In the end, none of the people she talked to wanted to have Social Security, Medicare, education, unemployment insurance, hurricane relief or anything else cut to balance the budget. About the only thing they agreed on was cutting Congressional salaries and foreign aid, which as Maher rightfully noted when the segment was over, doesn't do anything to balance the federal budget.

The cognitive dissonance on display was disheartening, but sadly, not unexpected or surprising. Tragically, what was also missing was any meaningful follow up on the fact that Social Security doesn't add a dime to the deficit or about the root causes of what's driving up health care costs and what can be done to help lower the deficit without destroying our social safety nets, which even self proclaimed "tea party" members don't want to see happen when it affects their own lives.

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Bill Maher let his audience know what he thought of the Catholic church just making up their own sets of "new rules" over the years during his New Rules segment on Real Time this Friday evening.

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It looks like Bill Maher still isn't too worried about Donald Trump and his lawyers, because The Donald ended up on the butt end of another orangutan joke on this Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher on the topic of text shaming -- with Maher citing some examples he "found on the Internet" of some well known figures and their "confessions."