June 11, 2012 By Miles Leicher
Bill Maher, John Waters, Dambisa Moyo, EJ Dionne, Michael Brendan Dougherty, Susan Burke
The show is over, but the conversation has just begun. In this week’s Overtime, the panel takes on everything from bath salts and voter fraud to why the Mormon faith is a perfect match for America.
Don’t forget to submit your questions for this week’s panel at HBO.com!
June 8, 2012 You tweeted – and Bill answered! See what he has to say about baseball, magic underwear, sock puppets and more:
Got a question for Bill? Tweet him @BillMaher!
June 8, 2012 Tonight’s top-of-show interview will be with lawyer Susan Burke. She is featured in the documentary “The Invisible War,” which won the Audience Award at Sundance this year and premieres in select cities June 22nd.
The Panel
John Waters is a Filmmaker and author of Role Models. Waters recently completed a cross-country hitchhiking trip – just in time to accept an award on behalf of Johnny Depp at the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s annual Fashion Awards.
E.J. Dionne is the author of Our Divided Political Heart and a columnist for The Washington Post. His latest article examines the failed recall of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and sees a lesson that both parties could stand to learn.
Michael Brendan Dougherty is the Politics Editor of Business Insider and Contributing Editor of American Conservative. He recently tweeted, “Technically my beard was invited to be on REAL TIME, I'll be attached to it during the show. It might say something to John Waters' stache,” so be on the lookout for that.
Joining Bill mid-show is Dambisa Moyo, author of Winner Take All: China's Race for Resources and What it Means for the World. An excerpt from her book was featured this week in The Atlantic.
June 5, 2012 By Bill Maher
Mexico's greatest living writer became its greatest non-living writer last month, when Carlos Fuentes died. That’s okay, he was 83, and he had sex with a lot of actresses (like Jean Seberg and Jeanne Moreau) and wrote 60 books and almost won the Nobel Prize, so he did all right. But one of the things that got him down, late in life, was Mexico’s drug war, and here’s what he said last year:
"Violence and crimes are rampant in my country. We’ve had revolutions and wars, but they were political figures, fighting for political causes. The drug lords in Mexico don’t bother about this, they say, 'We are here to fuck you. We are here to be nasty. We are here to be criminals.'"
Which is weird, because that was also on Mitt Romney's business card at Bain.
Fuentes lived through a lot, but the drug war seemed to really get to him. His last novel, Destiny and Desire was narrated by a severed head. And it's a sitcom this fall on TBS. No it's not. But -- spoiler alert -- the head was severed by drug lords.
What's with severed heads, by the way? I feel like that used to be a Middle Eastern thing, but now everybody's doing it. Like pita bread.
But what about his point? We know how to fight other countries; we even know how to fight terrorists, more or less, but how does a society deal with criminals who just want to fuck you? You know, like JP Morgan Chase?
Here's the funny thing about Fuentes, though. His daughter died of a drug overdose -- wait, that's not the funny part -- but he still had an idea for ending the drug war that might surprise you: Legalization.
Fuentes:
"Why is everybody who takes drugs, and is captured, taken to a jail? They should be taken to a hospital, and not to a jail. The end is that drugs should be legitimate. They should be prescribed or whatever, but they should not be the object of criminal action as they are now."
The drug war in Mexico started six years ago, when President Felipe Calderón decided to crack down on the country's six cartels. (Because of term limits, Calderón can't run for reelection this July.) Since then, 50,000 corpses have piled up, which is more dead people than in Afghanistan, the desert full of drugs we do care about. Calderón used the army to replace the police, who were riddled with corruption, and it worked about as well as you might expect: Now the army is riddled with corruption. He also created a new national police force, 35,000 strong. Is it working? Oh, yeah. There's no drugs anymore.
Instead, what seems to be happening is that the cartels are consolidating -- like the banks did here; now everything is Chase -- and it feels like the war will end when we get down to two teams, and one of them is dead. But how long will that take? And what stops it from crossing the border, except fear of Jan Brewer? As Fuentes (yep, him again) once said:
"It is a failed policy. (Calderón) declared war on the drug cartels, and the drug cartels declared war on him. It's warfare… the government wins one battle and the drug lords win three."
Why don't we care about the war 75 miles south of Sea World?
Someone once said:
"What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others."
Do they have a point? And yes, by "someone" I mean "Carlos Fuentes."
June 4, 2012 
Bill Maher, or "Coach," as he’s now known around the office, catches up on the news of the day.
June 1, 2012 By Miles Leicher
On Friday's show, Weeds star and SNL alum Kevin Nealon joked that, "Vetting is when they take the candidate to the vet, and they have him dewormed and neutered." We caught up with him backstage afterward and, as it turns out, that’s not all they do:
June 1, 2012 By Miles Leicher
EXTRA! EXTRA! Kevin and Miles discuss newspapers, as people do, and Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update.
May 30, 2012 By Miles Leicher
Check out what went on behind the scenes of last week’s Real Time episode!
