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The 2000 U.S. presidential election was a mess. There were hanging chads, a controversial Supreme Court decision and JibJab rap battles that somehow passed for entertainment back then.

In the end, future war criminal/Ellen Bff George W. Bush took the White House, while his opponent, Al Gore, was forced to concede. But losing the election had one silver lining: It meant that Gore was totally free to host Saturday Night Live in December of 2002.

At the time, the question of whether or not Gore would be seeking the presidency again in 2004 was very much up in the air. And SNL played with the suspense in their promo for the episode.

Gore had an interview with 60 Minutes booked for the Sunday after his hosting debut, and reporter Lesley Stahl just assumed that the SNL appearance was confirmation of his intention to run, because SNL was “one of the ritual stops now on the campaign.

This is the season of political town halls, but there’s one on Monday evening that is garnering some attention in the media pundit class: An event featuring Sen. Joe Manchin (D-wv) and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman designed to promote the group No Labels.

The streamed event from Saint Anselm College in Manchester, Nh, is designed to outline a No Labels policy agenda as the group looks to get behind a third-party presidential ticket, focused on the idea that there is a “common sense” bipartisan solution to political polarization.

Kevin Cirilli, correspondent for Scripps News and former chief Washington correspondent for Bloomberg Television, is serving as moderator of the event. He is not affiliated with No Labels.

No Labels has had plenty of pushback from Democrats, who see such a third-party bid as hurting Joe Biden’s reelection chances more than it would a Republican nominee, potentially returning Donald Trump to the White House.

Tablet Magazine announced today that Joshua Malina, whose breakout role in the beloved presidential television drama “The West Wing” made him one of the most respected actors working today, will be joining the Jewish publication’s wildly popular podcast, Unorthodox. He will join current hosts Stephanie Butnick and Liel Leibovitz. Malina’s first episode as co-host will be available to stream and download from Thursday, May 25, 2023, wherever you get your podcasts, and on the Unorthodox website.

Unorthodox, which has been airing weekly since 2015, has a passionate audience of tens of thousands of listeners, who call themselves the J-Crew. Each episode features a segment called News of the Jews, as well as interviews with both a Jewish guest and Gentile of the Week.

Previous guests have included actors Nick Kroll, Kathryn Hahn, David Duchovny, and Clive Owen; food personalities Molly Yeh, Jake Cohen, and Adeena Sussman; spiritual leaders Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks,...

R.I.P. to the great Jerry Springer, who died Thursday at 79. This man revolutionized daytime TV — he was the Martha Graham of afternoon talk-show slap-and-punch choreography. His eponymously titled show was a beautifully bizarre pageant of dysfunctional American life: you watched strangers sit down onstage, listened to them confess horrible betrayals, and waited for them to lunge out of their chairs and scream. There was something so cathartic in it. You felt cheated if you watched an episode where nobody got into a brawl.

Jerry was not like other talk-show hosts.

“Jackass” star Steve-o recently admitted on Mike Tyson’s “Hotboxin'” podcast (via IGN) that the long-running MTV comedy series deserved to be vilified in its early days for being “legitimately a bad influence” on children. Three seasons of “Jackass” aired on MTV between October 2000 and August 2001. The franchise then took the big screen by storm with four movies and the spinoff film “Bad Grandpa.”

“I think in the beginning of ‘Jackass’ we were genuinely worth vilifying because back then they didn’t have YouTube or video on the internet and we were legitimately a bad influence,” Steve-o said. “When ‘Jackass’ came out, little kids were showing up in hospitals all over the country and maybe the world because they saw us doing this crazy shit and they wanted to do it themselves. So, little kids everywhere got video cameras and started fucking themselves up and showing up in hospitals and getting really hurt.

Harry Reid, the by-turns scrappy, mild-mannered and acid-tongued former Democratic Senate leader, has died of pancreatic cancer. Reid was 82.

Reid was a dominating figure in Democratic politics for decades, using his home base in Nevada to rise to the top of the Senate. As majority leader from 2007 to 2015, Reid proved a steady hand, guiding passage of the bank bailouts, the Recovery Act and the Dodd/Frank re-regulation of Wall Street. He also won the landmark passage of Obamacare in 2010. Serving in Congress for more than three decades, Reid left his...

The tweet seems harmless enough, on the surface. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s account slapped its logo atop a John Hickenlooper for Colorado ad and gave the presidential dropout a big thumbs up.

Hickenlooper, the Dscc wrote, “is running against Cory Gardner — the most vulnerable Republican up in 2020! If we want to end the gridlock, cut the costs of health care and prescription drugs, and act on climate — we need to flip this #COSen seat.”

The Democratic Party endorsing a former Democratic governor in a Senate race may not sound like a headline.

Pelham Bay Park — a 2,765-acre oasis of century-old shade trees and freshly mown ball fields, hemmed in by a pair of three-lane freeways — is about an hour by train from Midtown Manhattan, on a good day. This being an average day on Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Mta, it takes closer to two, and I’m late to meet Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the Bronx. I’m anxious about locating her in a park she’ll later tell me, proudly, is the largest in New York City — more than three times bigger...