1. Pat Robertson: Voice of reason?
Truly, we must have entered the end times. The day after creationist Ken Ham denied reality for several hours in a “debate” with Bill Nye about evolution and the age of the earth, Pat Robertson implored Ham to shut-up, because he’s making fundamentalist Christians look stupid. It appears that Pat Robertson has allowed his brain to be corrupted by a little bit of science. Now his head might explode.
There is just no way the earth could be 6,000 years old as Ham and the Young Earth Creationists hold, Robertson said. “There ain’t no way that’s possible. . . To say that it all came about in 6,000 years is just nonsense and I think it’s time we come off of that stuff and say this isn’t possible.” He later referred to geological formations, a very sciencey sounding term not found in the Bible, and begged Ham not to “make a joke of ourselves.”
Lest you think the world has gone mad, Robertson still said evolution is wrong.
Whew!
See more here.
2. Victoria Jackson, insane former SNL-er running for public office.
Oh, joy. A sober and thoughtful candidate is running for office in Tennessee. That would be Victoria Jackson, who has run away with the prize of SNL alum who turned out to be the most flat-out bonkers of all SNL alums. And that is a distinction. Other competitors include Dennis Miller, who turned out to be a right-wing a*hole, and Jon Lovitz who loudly scoffed at Obama’s plan to tax the rich, and asked who declared him “king.”
But Jackson, who first gained fame for reciting poetry upside down on SNL, and has since become a noted Tea Party activist, has now, praise the lord, declared her candidacy for a seat on a county commission in the state to which she fled from liberal New York City. Among her platforms: Islamophobia—well she doesn’t call it that, she merely says all “Islamic Centers are ultimately terrorist training camps;” hating liberals—because they embrace Shariah law and wife beheadings; climate denialism, and a general antipathy towards cities, because . . . umm, they concentrate people, and that saves energy.
Toonces the Cat, her former co-star, is said to be on board as campaign manager.
3. Ben Shapiro: Liberalism killed Philip Seymour Hoffman.
The terrible disease of addiction and a potentially lethal batch of heroin emerged as the leading theories of what killed actor Philip Seymour Hoffman last weekend.
But there is something far more insidious going on, as it turns out. And thank goodness conservative thought leader Ben Shapiro shared his deep thoughts on the tragedy, by helpfully pointing the blame where it really belongs. It’s those damn liberals again. They’re killing everybody.
“…his self-inflicted death is yet another hallmark of the broken leftist culture that dominates Hollywood, enabling rather than preventing the loss of some of its greatest talents,” Shapiro wrote in the National Review.
The math, or the logic, goes something like this. Hoffman was a liberal. He died of a drug overdose. Therefore, liberalism causes drug abuse and death. Liberalism quickly devolves into “libertinism” and a “penchant for sin,” Shapiro argued. No one in Hollywood has any spirituality, principles or standards.
Except maybe the scientologists. We’re not sure where they fit in with Shapiro’s cosmology.
4. Michele Bachmann: Stop the tide of immigrants who are not conservative Republicans.
Newsflash: Michele Bachmann is saying some crazy shit again. This time she claimed that the Soviet Union (earth to Michele, the Soviet Union is no more) is stealing our innermost secrets via Obamacare, because “Belarus may have one of the subcontracting contracts to build the Obamacare website,” she said in an interview on KTTH. They may or they may not, but anyway, be worried.
Also, she has special insight into why immigrants don’t like Republicans. It’s because Republicans love patriotism and the Constitution—and immigrants don’t. So, it has nothing to do with Republicans wanting to, say, build fences along the border with Mexico, patrol with drones, arm border patrol officers to the hilt, say things like immigrants have “cantaloupe calves” because they’re all actually drug mules, or advocate mass detainment and deportations. Nope, Republican racism has nothing to do with it.
And speaking of racism, she cited some interesting statistics—and by cited we mean she just said them. “If you look at Hispanics today, 77 percent respond that they believe in big government and like big government. Fifty-five percent of Asians say they believe in big government, they like big government.”
They love it. Especially when it detains and deports them without cause and builds huge walls along the border.
5. Richard Cohen lectures Justin Bieber about pot, because it was cool when Richard Cohen smoked it, but not anymore.
We’re sure we can all agree that columnist Richard Cohen is the arbiter of cool. That’s right, the guy who wrote that the Mayor of New York’s mixed-race family made people throw up is just the heppest of all cats. So when he pronounced both Justin Bieber and the singer’s raging pot habit “uncool” this week, well, the shockwaves in the stoner community were palpable.
To support this claim, Cohen cited an article in the New York Review of Books by Harvard Medical School’s Jerome Groopman. This is because Richard Cohen is super smart and reads long articles like that. Of course, he also distorts them. Cohen warns against the dreaded “cannabis use disorder” which “can be particularly pernicious when it comes to young people. It has a big effect on their little brains.” This dreaded disorder is listed in the new fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), so it must be terrible. Other things listed in the DSM-5 include “caffeine intoxication” (“Restlessness, nervousness, excitement, red face, gastrointestinal upset, muscle twitching, rambling speech, sleeplessness, rapid and irregular heartbeat”) and “caffeine withdrawal” (“headache, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, depressed mood and other issues”).
In other words, the DSM contains a lot of conditions.
Now Richard Cohen admits that he smoked pot as a youth (and somehow avoided “cannabis youth disorder.”) But when Cohen smoked weed, it was different.
“I was of the generation for which it was a rite of passage, apiece with sexual freedom and, much more importantly, civil rights and the anti-war movement. Old fogies warned about pot, J. Edgar Hoover hated it and Richard Nixon made war against — three good reasons right there to have a toke,” he wrote. No irony detected.
No old fogies around here. Least of all Richard Cohen.
6. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong blames sick babies of two employees for cuts to 401K plan.
AOL head honcho Tim Armstrong loves conference calls. Last year, he famously fired someone on a conference call. In a more recent conference call, he announced to everyone that two sick babies had driven up healthcare costs and so the company would no longer be able to contribute matching funds to 401K plans. Don’t blame me, the inference was, blame those new moms.
“We had two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were OK in general,” Armstrong said on a conference call that was first reported by Capital New York. “And those are the things that add up into our benefits cost. So when we had the final decision about what benefits to cut because of the increased healthcare costs, we made the decision, and I made the decision, to basically change the 401(k) plan.”
Beyond being remarkably divisive and insensitive, it’s a dubious claim according to health care experts ThinkProgress contacted. A large self-insured company with more than 5,000 employeescan easily absorb the additional health care costs associated with problematic pregnancies, because large employers typically buy reinsurance to cover large claims.
Obamacare, the catch-all scapegoat, is also to blame even though this happened before Obamacare. But never mind.
And don’t worry about Armstrong’s $12.1 million compensation. That’s safe. We’re sure he’ll let us know, probably in a conference call, if he decides his salary needs any trimming.
Full story:
And here.
7. Bryan Fischer wants homosexuality outlawed because of his deep love for black males.
Bryan Fischer honored National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, this week on his radio program. His conclusion, after reading from a CDC fact sheet that "blacks make up only 12% of the U.S. population but had nearly half (44%) of all new HIV infections in the United States in 2010," is that homosexuality must be outlawed.
If you think differently, you are the hater, not him. Or, as he ranted,
“You have no compassion in your black heart for black males because they're being decimated by HIV/AIDS ... So why am I opposed to the normalization of homosexual behavior? Because I love black males. I want black males to live long, prosperous, healthy, disease-free lives."
Feel the love black males? (Not you gay ones, the other ones.)
8. Fox Guest MeMe Roth fat-shames the idea of a plus-size Disney princess.
First we should probably introduce the relatively unknown MeMe Roth, who is trying to make a career out of fat-shaming anyone over about size 5 with her website National Action Against Obesity website and personal blog which carries the tag-line “ MeMe Roth: Reporting From FATOPOLIS.” In the past, she has compared obese people to sex criminals and advocated for nutrition plans that resemble anorexia. And she has done so despite not appearing to have any degrees or training that would lend her an iota credibility on nutritional topics.
Just the sort of dubiously-qualified, opinionated loudmouth Fox News loves to give a platform. This week, Roth was invited to discuss a petition asking Disney to have a plus-size princess, one that might make little girls who don’t conform to Disney-princess, or Barbie- body standards, feel better about themselves and more included.
This would be a disaster of epic proportions, Roth told Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Such a Disney princess would “glorify obesity.” She is pretty sure the petition comes from fat people, who are diabolically plotting to make us all fat. “If you’re going to do a storyline with obesity, then you need to do Princess Diabetes, Princess Cancer, Princess Fertility Problems,” she spewed.
OK, now we are going to go throw up.
9. Republican official says Satan’s gays should be purged from GOP.
Another day, another enlightened person seeking to pick up the mantle of the GOP. This time, it’s a new candidate for a Michigan seat on the Republican National Committee. Her name is Mary Helen Sears and she has a modest proposal: that gays be "purged" from the GOP because homosexuality is a "perversion" created by Satan himself.
In a post on a Schoolcraft County Republican website last April, Sears laid out her view that homosexuals prey on children, and "Satan uses homosexuality to attack the living space of the Holy Spirit." Republicans "as a party should be purging this perversion and send them to a party with a much bigger tent."
Some of her other views include the fear that Communist college professors are indoctrinating young people, and Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory "gave rise to Hitler’s Third Reich, Mussolini’s Italy and Stalin’s Russia."
So, calm, cool and intellectually collected. Just the sort of leadership needed for the new more inclusive GOP.
Satan will just have to switch parties.
10. Restaurateur brags about refusing to serve “freaks,” and “f****ts,” also Muslims, blacks and people with metal in their face.
Ms. Sears (above) would probably feel right at home at an Oklahoma restaurant where the owner says he doesn't want to serve gay people.
According to the Huffington Post:
"I really don't want gays around," Gary's Chicaros Club owner Gary James told NBC affiliate KFOR-TV after a reporter asked him about several comments accusing the restaurant of discrimination. "Any man that would compromise his body would compromise anything.
"I've been in business 44 years. I think I can spot a freak or a f****t," James told the news station.
Other things James really does not like: people who wear hats inside, “girlie men,” “men with all kinds of metal in their face.” Wait, so are braces out? We should also throw in the fact that James hates blacks, Muslims, and Democrats.
Sadly, while those latter groups are legally protected from discrimination, refusing to serve a gay customer appears to be legal in Oklahoma.
To the patrons of Gary’s Chicaros Club: Side of hate sauce with that taco?
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