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“The following anger is based on a true story. This is The Colbert Report!”

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Funder Enlightening: “Tonight, I take a close look at campaign finance laws. And what I find is that Doritos takes snacking to the next level!”

• Guest Massie Ritsch, communications director of the Center for Responsive Politics

Smother Nature: “Plus, my new feature about the environment. No polar bears were hurt in the making of this segment. They were killed instantly.”

• Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s odd dishes on CNN’s Planet in Peril series
• Earth Attacks! Defeating the Enviro-Menace

Da Venter Code: “Then, my guest Craig Venter has successfully decoded his own genome, which has been hailed as a breakthrough in the field of medicine for Craig Venter.”

• Guest: Dr. Craig Venter of the J. Craig Venter Institute

Guest Plug:

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INTERNET COL-BOMB SITE OF THE DAY:
OpenSecrets.org
Presenting political news and disclosing information on political candidates.

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In closing: Well, that’s it for the Report. Hey Nielsen families, join me tomorrow when my guest will be… Andrew Jackson, if you know what I’m talkin’ about. Goodnight, everybody!”

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NOTABLE MOMENTS

• The toss: tonight’s show: two little doggies (Mr. Fox, is that you?) in Stephen’s hands! And a touch of attitude from both Jon and Stephen.
• Apparently Barack Obama, right here, has turned down Brad Pitt’s offer to help his campaign! Brad, um, Brad, I know this must hurt. So let me be your rebound. I think me and you, or just me and your abs, would make a great ticket. Colbert/Brad Pitt’s abs. we wouldn’t even need a platform – we could use your abs. All I’m saying is, think about it. And adopt me.
• Hail to the Cheese, Stephen Colbert NachoCheese Doritos 2008 Presidential Campaign… Coverage!
• But the media just can’t keep their sticky fingers out of my populist pie.
• For the record, I would never knowingly violate any federal election laws. Luckily, I don’t know any federal election laws.
• Even Papa Bear O’Reilly took a break from protecting America from Dumbledore’s flaming wand to issue me a tongue-lashing! *“Now Colbert’s run for the presidency is being sponsored by Doritos, which may be illegal. So we hope Colbert is sentenced to prison, or to house arrest, where he has to continue to watch his own program.”*
• Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. If I’m sentenced to house arrest and I have to watch my own program, me, if you’re watching this rerun in custody, I have hidden a nail file somewhere on your person. Find it and file your way through the locks. I will give you a hint – you wish I hadn’t put it there.
• I have to spend less than $5,000 on the whole campaign. So far, I am way under. I have saved a lot of money on my campaign bus because I stole it. It was not hard. There was no campaign staff left to guard it.
• But what offends me is that the good people at *crumples bag, deafeningly* Are we picking that up on the mic? The good people at Doritos who want to give my campaign a nacho cheese blast are denied that right!
• And corporations have the right to free speech! To use the only voice they have! Cash.
• He [Romney] has always believed in unlimited contributions to his campaign from himself.
• Here to tell me why Doritos can’t pay for my campaign is the communications director at the Center for Responsive Politics, Massie Ritsch.
• What open secrets are you people revealing?
• How much money do I need to be raising, like, day-to-day these days?
• Ritsch: Well, you’re competing in South Carolina, right? And Hillary Clinton might be, sort of, in your targets? About a million, million-and-a-half a day before the primary.
• Stephen: Okay, how can I use some of the Doritos money?
• Could I call up the head of Doritos and say ‘have everybody in your company who makes more than $200,000 a year, you know, suggest I be a good candidate to give the maximum amount of money to’?
• Ritsch: They could do that to an extent, and in fact that’s what happens at a lot of these companies, is that the word comes down from the boss, that this is the candidate that we support, we like his ideas, we think he’ll be good for us in Washington, in Congress, or in the White house, it’s on the boss’s letterhead. It’s not unlike someone walking around the office selling Girl Scout cookies. And you may not like Thin Mints or Samoas but you buy it, because it’s someone you work with or it’s your boss.
• Stephen: So the Girl Scouts could give me money, is what you’re saying.
• Folks, these days you cannot swing a dead cat without hitting some eco-nut trying to make you feel guilty for killing that cat.
• Folks, if you are having dinner with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and you feel chopsticks creeping up your pant leg, get the hell out of there.
• Now I have always felt that nature was a far bigger threat to us than we are to it. Nature’s got bears, tornadoes, lava, and daddy longlegs… What have we got? Styrofoam cups? Ooh, nothing.
• So tonight, a call to arms to fight back against nature, this is Earth Attacks! Defeating the Enviro-Menace.
• Normally I’d be all for incinerating Hollywood. That’s why I always bring a Molotov cocktail on the Universal Studios tour. But burning Hollywood is man’s job. Not nature’s. You don’t see me converting the sun’s energy into chlorophyll.
• Of course, cutting down the forests and hauling them all away might take a long time. The quickest thing is to burn them all down.
• And Nation, don’t listen to the warnings from some bear. Am I the only one who wonders who he mauled to get that hat?
• Atlanta may run out of water by December 31st. That means, at the New Year’s Eve party at CNN’s Atlanta headquarters, there will be no water to wash down Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s four-penis party mix. Sssalty.
• If you get thirsty, drink Coke. It’s Atlanta, it’s the law.
• It is a minor adjustment to change your baseball team to the Atlantis Braves.
• A heap of debris floating in the Pacific that’s twice the size of Texas. Now, let me put that in layman’s terms. It’s a heap of debris, twice the size of Texas. Now to give you some idea of the scale, Texas is a heap of debris that is one time the size of Texas.
• My winner of this week’s Greendumb award is the green funeral movement.
• Folks, you might as well bury yourself wrapped in a big white flag. When I die, I don’t just want my body pumped full of formaldehyde, I want it engorged with mercury. With a coal-fired engine rotating my lead casket to keep the worms off. No free rides, worms. Now forget about planting flowers on my grave – ain’t nothing gonna grow there.
• Editor’s note: um, out comes the genomics freak here (heh). I tried to keep the interview quotes to a reasonable amount, but I couldn’t help myself.
• My guest tonight is a scientist who found out he had the risk-taking gene. He must – this is his second time on my show.
• Your next project is very interesting – you decoded your own genome. Not somebody else’s. And you’ve written about it in this book, ‘A Life Decoded: My Genome, My Life.’ Um, now when you decoded your genome, was there any marker there that proved that you were some sort of narcissistic egomaniac?
• Venter: Um, I think that goes with the territory. You understand that, I’m sure.
• Stephen: Proudly so, proudly so.
• What did you learn? What was the most surprising thing about your own genome? Cause I found out some surprising things when I had my genome sequenced. Turns out that I – my family used to be in Africa two hundred thousand years ago.
• Venter: I think we have common ancestors there.
• Stephen: Evidently, yeah, we’re 51st cousins.
• Venter: I think we found that we’re far more different from each other than we thought even a few years ago. We found that we’re one to two percent different instead of one letter out of a thousand base pairs. We don’t all have the same genes. We have major differences. As an individualist I find that very encouraging.
• So you now own your own genome.
• Venter: Well, I talked about patenting my own genome, and then I got a call from my mother, who complained that she had something to do with the invention.
• Oh, you’re only patenting creating life out of nothing, that’s all.
• Can you create heat with your gaze?
• Stephen: You created a bacterium that – tell the people what you did.
• Venter: Well we’re trying to make a synthetic chromosome so in the last fifteen years we’ve been digitizing biology, including the human genome. Now we can go from that digital information on the computer and make DNA that can lead to new life forms that we can harness for understanding biology or perhaps, uh, coming up with new energy sources.
• Stephen: New energy sources? So how can you make new energy sources out of DNA?
• Venter: Well, we can code for genes that can produce, for example, hydrogen from sunlight. We can actually make octane or different kinds of gasoline right from sugar by metabolic processes themselves.
• If this genetic engineering becomes a viable commercial thing, you’re the king, right? You own everything! If you live long enough to, uh, for this industry. Which you will, cause you’ll never die, because you’ll engineer your head onto a robo-skeleton or something like that.
• Venter: The biggest issues are food, water, and energy. Those are the main things that we utilize now on this planet. Biology can contribute to all three. Fresh water may be the biggest problem. We have biological fuel cells that can take waste material and make either fresh water or electricity. This is a chance to, instead of going to major refineries, shipping oil all over the world, each home may have its own biological fuel cell. We may be able to generate locally the energy that we need to use for modern society.
• Stephen: So I could have some sort of microscopic creature in a vat that’s giving me my gas.
• Venter: Ah, well, it could be what you ate, as well.
• Editor’s note: *snort* ahahaha biologist’s humor.
• Stephen: What do you say to people who say to you, by engineering life in any way, you’re trying to improve on the perfection of God.
• Venter: Well, we argue that that’s in fact not the case.
• Stephen: That God is not perfect. You just said God makes mistakes. Your words, sir.
• Venter: He’s made some pretty horrible mistakes –
• Stephen: I’m sorry, that’s all we have time for. Dr. Craig Venter, the book is ‘My Life Decoded.’ We’ll be right back!

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Fangirl Suit Report:Dark grey suit, white shirt with purple pinstripes and barrel cuffs, purple paisley tie, WristStrong bracelet

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Videos coming soon, courtesy of Comedy Central’s Motherload!

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Related posts

• Episode 4070 (05/29/2008)
• Episode 4069 (05/28/2008)
• Episode 4067 (05/15/2008)
• Episode 4066 (5/14/08)