Meghan McCain stopped by MSNBC to chat with Thomas Roberts about, among other things, Game Change, the upcoming HBO movie based on a book that professes to offer a deeper look behind the scenes of the 2008 McCain / Palin campaign.

Last month, when HBO debuted the teaser trailer for their adaptation of John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s best seller Game Change, it became clear why they chose to cut out about two thirds of the book and only focus on the McCain/Palin half of the campaign. Clearly they decided that they’d rather do a Frankenstein-esque story about McCain’s staffers coming to regret the choice they made in bringing a little known Governor into the limelight instead of the epic battle of wills that made up the book’s Obama vs. Clinton sections. The full trailer, released today, continues the same theme and gives us even more famous actors getting their turn to stare in horror at the “monster” they’ve created.

Bill Maher tried to capture what he saw as the Republican reaction to President Obama’s State of the Union address this week with words, calling Republicans “sourpusses” and describing their reaction as “unprecedented.” But he only truly captured what he was trying to say by making this face– at once childish and elderly– as his panel descended into disarray, with Rep. Dana Rohrabacher trying to explain his party’s attitude and Kennedy making the point that parties don’t matter, while a mum Martin Bashir looked on.

Chalk this one up to a case of “opposites attract,” or perhaps things can be so vastly different that they circle back around to being near identical. Bill Maher had former Republican Presidential candidate Herman Cain on his program last night, and not only did the candidate not say “999″ or quote Pokémon (that we know of), the two laughed and chatted like old friends. Maybe the world won’t end in 2012 after all.

Politics is a name game. It is about who you know– at least in the sense that knowing who the players are in this elaborate dance that defines how we govern ourselves as a nation is critical to successful analysis. And then there are anomalies like Tim Tebow, black holes of cable news time and energy that, through no fault of their own, become fault lines along our political geography.

When HBO first announced their movie adaptation of John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s best seller Game Change about the 2008 election, many were puzzled. The movie would apparently only follow the John McCain/Sarah Palin side of the campaign which really only made up a third of the book. Everyone could imagine what the reason was. As fascinating as the Barack Obama vs. the Clintons side was, people just love them some Palin impressions. Well, now a teaser trailer has been released and that was clearly HBO’s thinking too. The clip is edited to treat Julianne Moore’s Palin basically like the shark in Jaws.

For years, the only way to watch HBO’s The Wire was either on DVD or through HBO’s scarcely-available HBO GO online platform. On Monday, this all changed. HBO quietly added the first four episodes of The Wire to its slate of offerings on HBO On Demand.

Last night marked the end of the season for Real Time, at least for the rest of the year. So given that Bill Maher wont be around for the holidays, he delivered his Christmas message early: a reminder to Republicans that Ebenezer Scrooge was actually supposed to be the bad guy in A Christmas Carol, not a role model.

Whenever Bill Maher has a certified Republican on his panel, the conversation usually gets heated quickly, and yesterday was no exception. In fact, yesterday he had Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, the chair of the House Investigations Committee, on the program, and got to ask him about that bizarre “In God We Trust” vote, demanding, rhetorically, “and you wonder why Congress’s approval rating is at 8%?”

On Real Time‘s New Rules tonight, Bill Maher said that “Republicans have to stop calling the Occupy Wall Street protesters ‘hippies’.” “Yes, they’re peeing outdoors and having sex in sleeping bags– or as Bristol Palin calls it, dating,” Maher explained. “[But] these people down there– they’re not the counter-culture, they’re the culture. They don’t want free love, they want paid employment. They don’t hate capitalism, they hate what’s been done to it.”

Bill Maher, Touré and Rachel Maddow were all in agreement that Herman Cain was in over his head intellectually in his run for the Republican nomination. “I think people have been reluctant to call Herman Cain dumb and an idiot like Sarah Palin, because they’re afraid that people will say ‘it’s because you’re racist,’” Maher surmised. “I’m not racist, I think he’s dumb; I think he’s really dumb!”

Bill Maher opened tonight’s Real Time by dedicating much of his monologue to calling out Republicans for not giving President Obama credit for helping kill Muammar Gaddafi. “They’re like the banks, they will not give a black man credit!” Maher zinged.

One would think that the anti-corporatist ideals of the Occupy Wall Street movement would receive some safe harbor on Real Time with Bill Maher, and one would be correct that their ideology gelled entirely with the audience. But before Alan Grayson passionately stood up as a spokesman for their cause, the panel spent a fair amount of time mocking the group ruthlessly, for their “bongo drums,” disorganization, and incoherence.

Much has been made about just what Glenn Beck’s plan has been in moving to the Internet from Fox News. Due to some of his own comments, it seemed like maybe Beck was merely trying to go younger. However, during a set tour yesterday with other reporters, it became clear that the real plan was to go bigger. Never was that more clear than listening to Beck compare his brand new network to such cable big boys as HBO and ESPN.

Beginning on August 27th, CNN will air HBO’s Emmy-winning, four-part reality series 24/7 Mayweather/Ortiz. The series offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse into lives of professional boxers Floyd Mayweather and Victor Ortiz leading up to HBO’s September 17th pay-per-view match against the two.

The first episode will air on HBO on Saturday, August 27 at 10 pm ET/PT, followed by CNN’s airing at midnight.

And while two men fighting is always cool (and the series is narrated by Liev Schreiber, who is handsome) we have to admit that this seems like a rather odd choice of programming for CNN, particularly since it essentially leads up to a pay-per-view event on another network.

Last night, a monologue on the virtues of socialism and the shame of not openly embracing it was received with hearty applause, exuberant cheers and the kind of laughter so loud it makes you wonder if its source producing it at gunpoint. I wish I could tell you it’s from Hugo Chavez‘s weekly variety hour Aló, Presidente. It’s not. It’s Bill Maher‘s “New Rules” segment, where he attempts to convince Americans they’re actually really into this socialism thing, whether they know it or not.

Bill Maher got a fairly hearty media lashing for a program riddled with crass jokes at the expense of Sarah Palin and Rep. Michele Bachmann last week, so naturally he opened this week’s show with… crass jokes at the expense of Sarah Palin and Rep. Michele Bachmann. While the latter got off easy for her migranes, Maher spent a good deal of his monologue mocking the Palins for welcoming a new grandchild, quipping, “I think they think abstinence is Latin for ‘no anal.’”

It became apparent the moment guests started speculating about the Bachmanns’ sex life that last week’s Real Time would be hard to top– and this week’s edition was certainly more substantive than the last, with an extensive debate on how Congress should balance the budget and the elusiveness of compromise. But it had its tense moments, too, as one panelist, a Pennsylvania mayor, (jokingly?) offered to “take it outside” after being sarcastically told to be proud of his town’s poverty.

Sean Hannity is making it abundantly clear he is not covering Bill Maher‘s transgression on Real Time last weekend just to have something to talk about. Hannity dedicated a second segment on his program today to Maher’s comments about Sarah Palin and Rep. Michele Bachmann last Friday, noting that he had contacted the National Organization for Women and they were prepared to respond. But in the meantime, Hannity had a bone to pick with “angry, bitter” Bill Maher.

Bill Maher has found himself in a familiar place. Hosting a program that routinely indulges in off-color political humor and taunts the lines of decency in our public discourse, Real Time may have crossed its own lines. The highlights of the program are already well-known: calling Sarah Palin‘s family “inbred weirdos,” speculating as to what Rep. Michele Bachmann‘s sex life is like, wishing Congressional Republicans dead. Yet sad as it is, Maher can count at least one battle won in the war for vulgarity, as some on Fox News have taken to speculating about his sex life in retaliation.

Last night’s incredibly zany social salad on Real Time included a number of people who would have otherwise likely never been in a room together– Bill Maher included with Ann Coulter, Chris Hayes, and Chaz Bono, which of course let Maher explore some of his curiosities. For example, he asked Bono– who completed the physical process of becoming male– if, given how advanced car parking technology is, “how are they doing with dicks?”

Every time you purchase a cup of coffee that carries the warning “Coffee is Hot,” you probably think about Stella Liebeck without even knowing it. She’s the woman whose lawsuit against McDonald’s has become the go-to parable for proponents of “tort reform.”

The new must-see documentary Hot Coffee powerfully exposes the myths behind Stella’s case, and tackles “tort reform” through the compelling stories of alleged rape victim Jamie Leigh Jones, persecuted state Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz, and brain-damaged infant Colin Gourley.

Earlier this week, outgoing Fox News host Glenn Beck illustrated David Carr‘s criticism of Midwesterners as “neanderthals” by doing an offensive caricature of a mentally disabled person. Mediaite’s Frances Martel wrote a relatively mild critique of Beck’s performance, given the level of offense, and for her trouble, conservative website Big Journalism has accused Martel of anti-disabled bigotry, and defended Beck’s vile minstrelsy by (I’m not kidding) asserting that those offended are mentally deficient.

Glenn Beck seemed to have reached the pinnacle of potential shock value to be had out of The New York Times‘s David Carr making a bad joke comparing Middle Americans to neanderthals on his radio show this morning, calling it the sort of comment “that leads to mass death.” He managed to top himself on his television program today, however, imitating a disabled person to give viewers a sense of what he thinks Carr believes people in the middle of the country are like.

Last week, Obama impersonator Reggie Brown stole the post-Weinergate spotlight by telling jokes so scathing to Republicans that he was yanked mid-routine from the Republican leadership conference. Never a fan of censorship, Brown caught Bill Maher‘s eye, and the comedian invited Brown onto his program last night to finish the act he started a week ago.