Bill Maher donates a million dollars to Obama ‘super PAC’
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Bill Maher won’t return to ‘Real Time’ on HBO until March 2, but when he does you can be sure he’s going to be talking about so-called super PACs.
Why? Because the comedian just entered into the world of big-time political donations with his announcement on Thursday that he’s donating a cool million to the pro-Obama PAC known as Priorities USA Action.
The comedian made the announcement onstage in San Jose at the end of his comedy special ‘CrazyStupidPolitics,’ which was streamed live on Yahoo. He even had a giant prop check.
It will be interesting to see how Maher’s more liberal guests will deal with the host’s big-money investment in Obama’s reelection. Just earlier this year, Maher engaged his panelists, including active lefty Rob Reiner, in a discussion of super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited amounts of cash in support of political candidates but are not allowed to coordinate their activities with the candidates.
‘This to me is one of the worst things to have happened this election cycle,’ Reiner said on the Jan. 13 episode of ‘Real Time with Bill Maher.’ ‘When you think about what’s happened in this country in the last year. You have this huge movement with the tea partiers. You have this huge movement with the occupiers. These are disenfranchised people from both ends of the political spectrum who are very angry because they don’t have jobs. And they are not going to matter one bit in this election because of all this money that’s coming from very wealthy people .... And it’s disgraceful.’
On Thursday, Maher told his audience that the million dollars he was donating was ‘the wisest investment I think I could make.’
Maher isn’t the only comedian to get into the super PAC game this election cycle. Earlier this year, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart had some fun with Colbert’s PAC, Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, which revealed earlier this month that it still had more than $800,000 in donations in the bank.
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-- Patrick Kevin Day
