Stephen Colbert

Herman Cain gave his own response to the State of the Union at the National Press Club where he talked about how grateful he is with the endorsement from Stephen Colbert because he wants to keep the "youth vote inspired" because

"they're not gonna go and watch the shows that some of us more mature people watch to find out what's going on in the race . . . they're watching The Stephen Colbert . . ."

As Stephen remarks:

"Well said The Herman Cains! The more mature people watch other things. But the more immature youth vote watches this show…"

Then, unfortunately, I realized the only reason I knew about this story was because I was watching The Colbert Report because I don't care about the Tea Party.... DAMN YOU HERMAN CAIN!

The fact is, this isn't about maturity, this is about connectivity. Young voters aren't going to pay attention to people that don't represent their issues or their values, even if the train wreck of their campaign is fascinating and hilarious. I encourage more Tea Party members to go on Colbert - at some point, however, they have to realize that he's just making fun of them thought, right?

On last night's Colbert Report columnist David Frum called for an economically inclusive, environmentally responsible and socially modern Republican party. He called out Tea Party activists saying

Frum: "If we could arrange it so that in 2012 only 40% of the American people came out to vote and only a quarter of them were over the age of 65 ..."

Colbert: "Republicans are working on it!"

Frum: "Ok... then the Tea Party idea might work. That's the thing that went wrong in 2010... This is a country of young people. This is a country that is full of people who are worried more about unemployment than about protecting their personal Medicare..." (it continues in the video below)

Frum isn't the only one who noticed that the Tea Party message and the conservative policies of today's GOP doesn't resonate with young voters. Data has shown that Millennials place more trust in the government than older demographics and certainly have less faith in the trust of corporations and the so-called "free market." It's no wonder the Republican Party is having such a hard time bringing in more young people...

Gotta love it when you make news calling out Ted Nugent. That's right, Stephen Colbert picked Kevin's hit on that old guy who wondered why we weren't joining the Tea Party.

McCain uses Wikipedia which is the voice of the people, thus McCain is using the words of the people... according to Stephen.

The Lieberman jokes are particularly funny...

It turns out that the much-fabled "Colbert Bump" is real. In a paper titled The Colbert bump in Campaign Donations: More Truthful Than Truthy (pdf), James Fowler, a political scientist at UC San Diego proves that Democrats appearing on the show receive 44% more money in the month following the appearance than those who do not appear:

As you can see, he also posits a Republican "Colbert Bust," though the data is less reliable.

So much for Nancy Pelosi's suggestion that Democrats stay far away from the Colbert Report.

(Hat Tip Chris Suellentrop)

As of this writing, Stephen Colbert has become the first presidential candidate to actually pass the 1 million strong mark, with 1,005,608 members in his Facebook group.

In other news, Chris Dodd, who has been a strong progressive voice on the campaign trail lately, is coming out strong against overpayment to corporate lenders by the government on student loans. Dodd wants the total costs of those over-payments recouped and funneled back into the Pell Grant program, which would raise the maximum grant by another $100 per semester.

Also worth checking out this morning - the Missoula Independent has an in-depth profile of Matt Singer, CEO of Forward Montana.