Tonight's guest on the Daily Show is Tavis Smiley and the panelists on The Nightly Show are Bernie Sanders, Katherine Timpf, and Baratunde.
Tavis Smiley is talk show host, author, liberal political commentator, entrepreneur, advocate and philanthropist. He is on tonight to discuss his latest book
My Journey with Maya
Tavis Smiley and Maya Angelou met in 1986, when he was twenty-one and she was fifty-eight. For the next twenty-eight years, Angelou was a teacher and a maternal figure to Smiley, and they talked often of art, politics, history, music, religion, and race. In My Journey with Maya, Smiley beautifully recounts a friendship filled with conversation that began when he, a recent college graduate and a poor kid from a big family in the Midwest, accompanied the revered writer on a sojourn to Ghana.
Smiley stumbled into a relationship with her that shaped his future and affected the man he became. Like a mother to him, she was generous, challenging, and inspirational--as she was to so many. Here he shares his portrait of Angelou--a highly complex individual who left an indelible imprint on American culture.
It sounds like an interesting book. He was on today's episode of
Democracy Now discussing Maya Angelou, it was a good segment and I recommend watching/reading/listening to the whole thing.
TAVIS SMILEY: When I was 21, I was a young aide to the Tom Bradly, the late, great mayor of my city, Los Angeles, and Dr. Angelou was coming to town for an event. The mayor could not attend the event, and as aides are often assigned to do, I had the great honor of going to present her a letter, a proclamation, and I was literally in her presence for just five minutes, Amy. But in that five minutes I felt something so powerful and so strong I vowed to myself at some point in my life I have got to get myself back into this woman’s space. I had no idea that some years later I would be invited by her to go on a trip to Africa for almost two weeks, and my assignment literally was just to carry her bags. And for two weeks I carried her bags around Africa, but that didn’t stop her from allowing a friendship to blossom. I mean, she was already iconic at that point. This was in August of 1983 — 1993 rather, so in January of 1993, she of course I delivered that poem at Bill Clinton’s first inauguration. So she’s already world-renowned, and I’m just a nobody, but we’re hanging out together in Africa for a couple of weeks, and even though that distance between what she had accomplished and what what I had yet begun to do was so broad, she enveloped me, she embraced me, and 28 years later, until she passed away last May, we had a wonderful friendship.
But to your point, we disagreed on a number of things. But the beauty of that is that, you know, she allowed me to interrogate her. She welcomed hearing my opinions and my point of view. She wanted to have a contestation of ideas so that both of us could be made better. She started out a strong supporter of Hilary Clinton in 2008, obviously, because she had Arkansas roots. She is from Stamps, Arkansas. Bill Clinton, as we all know, is from a place called Hope. So they are friends from their Arkansas days so she starts out supporting Hilary. When Barack Obama wins the nomination, she obviously supported Barack Obama and there were people who thought that my commentary and my questions were a bit tough on the candidate. People thought that you were a bit tough on the candidate. And that happens in our business, when, you know, when we raise questions that I think, and you believe, ought to be raised. These are critical questions that have to be raised. People have to be held accountable. And you don’t do it just to the Bushes, you do it to the Clintons and you do it to the Obamas. That is what your role is on this great program, and I celebrate you for that, and that is what is my role is.
Bernie Sanders
is an American politician and the junior United States Senator from Vermont. Before serving in the Senate, he represented Vermont's at-large congressional district in the United States House of Representatives and served as mayor of Burlington, the largest city in Vermont. Sanders is a self-described democratic socialist, and has praised Scandinavian-style social democracy.
Sanders runs for office as an independent but caucuses with the Democratic Party and is counted as a Democrat for purposes of committee assignments. He was the only independent member of the House during most of his service and is the longest-serving independent in U.S. Congressional history.
In an interview with The Nation on March 6, 2014, Sanders stated that he is "prepared to run for President of the United States" in 2016. Starting in January 2015, Sanders became the Ranking Democratic Member on the Senate Budget Committee
Katherine Timpf
is a journalist and commentator from Detroit, MI living in Brooklyn, NY. She currently works as a reporter at National Review.
Timpf has been a regular guest on television programs including Red Eye and Fox and Friends, and has appeared on other national television news shows Stossel, Cavuto, and On the Record with Greta Van Susteren. Her stories have been featured on several national news outlets, including the Drudge Report.
She was also a 2012-13 Robert Novak Fellow, and completed a project titled, "As California Goes, So Goes the Nation: The Consequences of Following Golden State Policy."
Previously, Timpf worked as a reporter for Campus Reform, a digital editor for The Washington Times, the news anchor for NASA's Third Rock Radio, and as a producer and reporter at Total Traffic Network in Santa Ana, CA.
Baratunde
is a writer, comedian, and entrepreneur. Thurston co-founded the black political blog Jack and Jill Politics, whose coverage of the 2008 Democratic National Convention was archived in the Library Of Congress, and was director of digital for The Onion. In 2012, his book How to be Black became a New York Times bestseller.
This Week's Guests
THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART
Th 4/9: Sen. Elizabeth Warren
Next Week's Guests
THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART
Mo 4/13: Adam Horovitz
Tu 4/14: Fareed Zakaria
We 4/15: Billy Crystal
Th 4/16: Eric Greitens
Mourning Cloak Butterfly Nymphalis antiopa
I guess Spring is here, even if the temperatures are back to January levels at times this week.