Nov. 26, 2008

HOLLYWOOD--God bless America, and how’s everybody?

• Twilight sold out at movie theaters this week as every teenage girl in America went wild over a vampire. Teenagers influence everybody. This week every bank in New York City is begging for an allowance without even offering to take out the trash.

• The Screen Actors Guild urged television and movie actors Saturday to vote for a strike against the studios. The financial crisis has already changed the entire business. Movie actresses are having to sleep with Treasury Secretaries to advance their careers.

• Citigroup insisted Monday its bailout won’t affect its purchase of the naming rights to the New York Mets’ new stadium. It’s an ironclad contract. Under the agreement, the stadium will be called Citigroup Field and the team will always be badly managed.

• New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner stepped down Friday after 35 years of iron-fisted rule. It came just in the nick of time. President Bush is already including him in his presidential library exhibit of dictators he’s known and deposed.

• Prince Charles turned 60 years old at Buckingham Palace last week. The prince is consumed with the desire to save the Planet Earth and ward off global warming. He has so much in common with Al Gore that their kids even go to the same AA meetings.

• Rancho Cucamonga ordered a billboard company to take down an atheist group’s billboard Monday. There are two possibilities. It may well be that life is a series of random events and there is no master plan, or that could just be at the Treasury Department.

• President Bush went to the Asian Pacific Economic Summit last week in Peru. He was cheered like a returning hero. The farmers in Peru know he’s only got to stay clean for 60 more days and they have been in a recession ever since he quit using.

• Hillary Clinton accepted the Secretary of State job Friday after being assured that she will be a decision-maker. As always, we will get two for the price of one. Hillary will be in charge of foreign policy while Bill’s in charge of foreign affairs.

• Tim Geithner was named Treasury Secretary at four o’clock Friday, causing a 600-point closing rally on Wall Street. He’s a regulator, not an investment banker. If Barack Obama had named him at nine in the morning we would be back where we were two months ago.

• Mark Cuban was accused of insider trading by the Securities and Exchange Commission last week. They say he dumped a stock after being told by the company president its value was about to be diluted. If Abraham Lincoln were alive today, he would say that God must love billionaires with cash flow problems because he made so many of them.

• Iraqi Parliament members said Tuesday they are ready to run their own society. It is the one Muslim country that allows alcohol and dancing. The place is really jumping since Saddam Hussein replaced Benny Goodman two years ago as the King of Swing.

• Nixon/Frost starring Frank Langella as Richard Nixon received rave reviews on Friday. He also played Dracula and John Wilkes Booth. This guy has been on a career arc to play President Nixon ever since he resigned from the seventh grade in disgrace.

• President Bush and Laura take the nation on a White House tour tonight on the History Channel. They were happy to invite the cameras in. Insurance companies recommend that you videotape all your possessions before you rent your house out to strangers.

Argus Hamilton is the host comedian at The Comedy Store in Hollywood. He can be reached for speaking engagements by e-mail at [email protected].