As you all know, I like Bill Maher. I think he is funny and he is right about a lot of politics. But I get very angry at him when he is egregiously wrong. This happened most recently during the presidential campaign. Goldie Taylor was on his show. She claimed that Obama would win 330 electoral votes. Maher claimed that this was an example of the “liberal media bubble.” But as I pointed out at the time, it was no such thing. When Taylor made the claim, there was a 21% change of Obama getting that many votes. And in the end, he got 335 votes.

Last week on his show, he discussed another conservative canard that for whatever reason he just accepts at face value: more people are on disability and we should be outraged. In his little brain, this is all about the Paul Ryan hammock: Americans are just getting more lazy. It goes right along with Maher’s libertarian inclinations. The problem is, it just isn’t true.

The Congressional Budget Office looked at this question last July. And they found there are three primary reasons why there are more people on disability. First, the workforce is older; older workers are more prone to career ending disabilities. Second, because most women work now, there is a larger percentage of the population that works; more workers causes more people on disability. Third, the Reagan administration changed the qualifications for disability to be more fair; more workers qualified for disability causes more people to be on disability.

This is not hard stuff to understand. What’s more, this isn’t news. A Google search of “rise disability rates cause” brought up that article above. So Maher is either just following his prejudices or he’s listening to conservatives with an ax to grind. Regardless, I really expect better of him.

I know that not long ago, I checked Wikipedia to find out if Jim Nabors was openly gay. And as I recall, there was really nothing about it. Of course, I assumed he was. I don’t know why. There are those stories about Rock Hudson. Everyone assumed. And maybe it is just that no one cared, Nabors being so obviously such a good boy.

Regardless, open secret or just no one caring, it seemed to me that Nabors was kind of living as a closeted gay man. And that always makes me sad. Well yesterday, he told Hawaii News Now that he got married to his longtime boyfriend Stan Cadwallader.[1] And I am almost giddy with joy!

But let me nip one nasty rumor that is going around. Nabors is quite a lot older than Cadwallader. When they first got together Cadwallder was 26 and Nabors was 44. This is not an unreasonable age difference, even at that young age. By the half plus seven rule, we have: 44/2+7 = 29. And that means that their relationship is officially not creepy. [Oops! I got that wrong! It was a little creepy. -FM]

So in honor of their marriage, I offer you Jim Nabors performing Oh My Papa!

Afterword

Look at the direction of that clip. That is a lot better than other TV of that time.

[1] Hawaii has some kind of civil union, but not same-sex marriage. As a result, Nabors and Cadwallader were married in Washington state.

I am not a big fan of video porn. But like any American male of my age, I know Ron Jeremy. According to USA Today, Mr. Jeremy is in the hospital, following heart surgery for an aneurysm. The article claims that Jeremy is a “porn star.” And indeed, he has “starred” in over 2000 porn films. But you have to ask: is Ron Jeremy really a star?

Was William Kempe a star? Because Kempe was to Elizabethan theater, what Jeremy is to porn: comic relief inside the larger structure of the drama. But while Kempe undoubtedly was a major draw, I’m not sure that Jeremy is. Did anyone rent Debbie Does Dallas Part II because of him? I doubt that. But I don’t doubt his value to the films. He provides much needed (and easily created) padding for films that, left to themselves are more like training films for gynecologists than entertainments.

I was very struck by the following tweet that his manager sent out.

The PrayForRon hashtag is probably why so many people love this man. And it is certainly why I decided to write this article. Because despite what Althea says in The People vs. Larry Flynt, we do want our religion and porn mixed. In fact, I don’t see much difference between them; they’re both 99% narcissism.

God may not exist, but Ron Jeremy probably does. #PrayForRon!