Manatee of the Airwaves

Join Now!

Of course that could mean two different things from tonight's show. First of all and most important, if you join Stephen's Colbert Super PAC, and if you donate some money, cha-ching, your name will at some time crawl across the bottom of the screen while The Colbert Report is on the TV Machine in what Stephen calls a Cash Crawl.

The other thing it could mean is to Join Now at Newt Gingrich's website. But the really strange thing about that is that when Stephen was showing us what New Gingrich's website looked like, it was a bit different from what it looks like now, just a short time later.

For one thing, the photo is a bit different. Gingrich looks happier now. He's wearing a blue shirt and red tie, not quite as good as wearing the American Flag for a tie, but still, it is the right color combination. And it has a lot of donate buttons, but one of the buttons is different. Instead of saying Donate Now, it says Join Now! Did that get changed because Stephen talked about it tonight? Or is it just a case of website updates occurring at random times?

Also, the wording is different. Instead of saying "Support Newt today to help make sure our winning message reaches all voters" it says "Join the Campaign to get the latest news, announcements, event information and exclusive updates." And of course, the website I'm looking at now has a very nice American flag in the background instead of the word Conservative (okay okay, onservative but I assume it would be Conservative if I could see the whole word).

Now that makes me wonder. You can "join now" and get exclusive updates. But if anyone can join now, and it looks like everyone can, it doesn't seem very exclusive to me.

Great, now Stephen has gotten me so interested that I'm looking all over the Gingrich website. Now I'm looking at the Gear you can Get. And before you say, "whoopie I wanna get some gear" you need to know there are flaws, well some flaws. You can get a yard sign, but when I look at it, it's so small it would work out better as a Blue Hat sign. But ouch! Those two metal poles would need to be poked into your hat and thus into your head. And then there's t-shirts, but they are all wrinkly at the bottom. There are also Newt buttons, but they are actually more like body armor. I'm looking at the images on the website right now and the buttons are bigger than the t-shirts! It would get the message across to everyone who sees you, because the button stretches all the way across your chest. If it was up to me, I would have the buttons be smaller so that they just took up a small amount of space on the t-shirts. I would make the yarn signs much bigger, about 30 times bigger than the hat.

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Okay, you want to look at the Gear, don't you. Fine, I'll put the link up. But, you have to promise to play the guessing game that I made up. It works on my computer so I hope it will work on yours. Go to the Newt Store (not the one at the Nature Center) and pick one item, any item. Memorize its location. Hit the refresh button on your browser a few times. Did the items change place? Okay then you can play the game. Try to guess where your selected item will be the next time you hit Refresh. Keep track of how many times you are correct. It's harder than you think to predict where the items will move to.

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But I digress way too much. Back to what Stephen talked about. He did say that Gingrich owes $800,000 for his website. What? Are you kidding me? I would have done it for a mere $100,000 and I would have given him way more Donate buttons. Stephen did sort of mention that the website is full on Donate buttons: Donate, Donate Today, Donate Now, Donate to support the campaign. (Oops, he forgot the plain old link at bottom of page that just says Donate. That's okay Stephen. Maybe it wasn't there earlier today.)

You know what, here's a free Donate button that Gingrich can use. That would help save money on his website cost. And if Gingrich had hired me to do his website, I would have done a much better job of getting good domain names and getting all the necessary domain names.





Stephen had a lot more stuff on the show about different guys with really interesting things to say. For example, Rick Perry said this on July 16, 2011:

"I'm getting more and more comfortable every day that this is what I've been called to do."

And on July 18, 2011, he had this to say:

"There's a lot of different ways to be called. My mother may call me for dinner."

(I hate to break it to Rick Perry, but hasn't Michele Bachmann already been "called" to run for POTUS?)

And Rush Limbaugh, the famous "Manatee of the Airwaves", had this to say recently: "Obama's out there pushing this August 2 deadline to get this thing done. That's because," (wait for it....) "Ramadan is August 1."

However, Representative Louie Gohmert (R - TX) had this to say on July 17, 2011:

"I can't help and be a little cynical here. Because we find out the president has a big birthday bash scheduled for August the 3rd, celebrities flying in from all over, and lo and behold, August 2nd is the deadline for getting something done so that they can have this massive maybe the biggest fundraising dinner in history for a birthday celebration."

Uh oh. Someone is a little bit peeved. Take a look at this Wikipedia page on Louie Gohmert and pay special attention to the part, right after his name, that says born August 18. Yep, someone is afraid his birthday won't get any attention. And is it my imagination or does that photo of Louie Gohmert look like he could be Stephen's identical twin brother?