Former Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush speechwriter, Pentagon official, novelist, TV commentator, columnist and idiot Douglas MacKinnon appeared yesterday on The Janet Mefferd Show to promote his new book, The Secessionist States of America: The Blueprint for Creating a Traditional Values Country . . . Now.

It seems that MacKinnon, who you might see on Fox News from time to time, was inspired by the recent referendum in Scotland to consider what might happen in America in a similar(ish) circumstance, after a recent poll found that nearly one quarter of us would like to secede (although not necessarily for the same reasons).

According to The Raw Story:

[MacKinnon] told the religious conservative host that southern states – starting with Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina – should leave the United States so they can implement a right-wing Christian system of government.

MacKinnon envisions other states joining, but he hopes to leave out Texas because “there have been a number of incursions into Texas and other places from some of the folks in Mexico.”

Sure the Confederate states got a bit of a bad rap back in the Civil War days, but hey, that was then and this is now, right?

MacKinnon told his host that the Southern states had “seceded legally” and “peacefully” before the Civil War and that it was President Lincoln who was in the wrong. The rightwing pundit also recommended that the newly-formed country be dubbed “Reagan,” in honor of his old boss.

Although slavery was not mentioned during the program, he’s got a major problem with gay civil rights. MacKinnon took up the “persecuted Christian” canard with a passion, declaring:

“If you do believe in traditional values, if you are a Christian, if you are evangelical, if you do believe in the golden rule, then you’re seeing all of this unravel before our eyes daily,” he complained.

Nope, no gayz need apply for a visa to “Reagan,” and you doggone Lat-teen-o-types, apparently you ain’t welcome either (hence the Texas snub).

Here’s some excerpts from the interview as posted by Right Wing Watch:
 

 
With friends like these you won’t need enemies.

Some dumb Australians holidaying in Canada decided after a two-day bender that it would be fun to dump their sleeping buddy off the second floor balcony of their ski-slope chalet.

As one of these idiots allegedly said:

“Our mate Snowy passed out half naked on the couch after a 2 day bender. He needed a wake up, so we threw him off the second story balcony of our house into the snow.”

They’re lucky Snowy didn’t break his neck.

According to Live Leak, the video was allegedly pulled from You Tube and Facebook after complaints, and there are supposedly “rumours of a potential police investigation.” Supposedly…

(It’s more shocking than you think it’s going to be.)
 

 
Via Live Leak

 
A giant 50ft crab has allegedly been photographed lurking in the shallow sea waters along Whistable harbor in Kent, England.

The undated image appeared on Weird Whistable, a website dedicated to “phantoms, mysteries, tall tales and artifacts” with the following byline:

Giant Crab

Crabbing is a popular activity for children during the summer. Does this satellite photo of the harbour reveal a giant crab or unusual sand formation?

The picture of “Crabzilla” is curated alongside other “photographic evidence” of the “unnormal,” such as a giant eyeball washed-up on a beach (or maybe a Kraken?), a sea serpent apparently splashing about on the water, an ice mountain created by the frozen sea in 1940, and the paw print of a winged monkey.

All of which looks like the curious invention of an excitable imagination.

Kent Online has a slightly different quote taken from the site, which has (sadly) apparently been taken down:

The website reads: “This shocking image of a giant crab under a popular crabbing spot in Whitstable was taken last weekend.

“The boys were unaware of the danger, but as several passersby shouted to them, the crab slipped silently away under the water, into the dark, sideways.”

Like a Boy’s Own story, it’s always more thrilling when there are people at risk of a hidden, deadly danger.

The online paper is (rightly) skeptical quoting graphic artist Ashley Austen, who said:

“The image of the giant crab can be quite easily recreated in Photoshop.

“All the ‘artist’ had to do is find a suitable image of a crab, overlay it on to the satellite picture of the harbour and apply a few filters to it to get the realistic look.”

The fact Weird Whistable is selling prints of its “unnormal” curiosities says it all…

Crabzilla is already making headlines across Britain’s TV news channels and tabloid newspapers including the front cover of the Daily Star….
 

STAR FRONT PAGE: "Crabzilla" #skypapers pic.twitter.com/lHiF8Z1Nki

— Sky News (@SkyNews) October 13, 2014

 
The Star also has a report on the number of Brits scared of zombie attack:

Being attacked by zombies is scaring us to death.

Research by company One Poll, has revealed that fear of the undead is on the rise in the UK.

The poll, which was commissioned by makers of The Evil Within, showed that 27% of the population admitted that they’ve considered what to do if there was a zombie attack.

And 11% of bonkers Brits have even taken the extreme steps of working out an actual survival plan.

One terrified resident, Matthew Hall-Turner, 29, from Cheshire admitted: “I’ve thought long and hard about what I’d do in light of a zombie attack, I think my best bet would be pretending to be one of them, walking really slowly, then escaping when the opportunity arises.”

Who said journalism is dead…?
 

 

 
Is TV evangelist and exorcist extraordinaire Bob Larson so down on his luck that he’s resorted to making house calls? Or is there a sudden and overwhelming demand of late for bogus exorcisms from callous grifters preying on the old and ignorant? I don’t know, but if you watch Larson’s TV commercial for his new house call business, you’d think pretty much the entire population is in desperate need of Larson’s soft touch to rid themselves of demons or other common household spiritual entities. The commercial is so ridiculous and comical it almost comes off as a Tim and Eric sketch or a commercial parody from Idiocracy.

As one woman named Rachel claims in the video, “...he already saw the demon within me before it was revealed I had Jezebel. Bob Larson’s amazing ability that he’s gifted with… I thank Bob Larson and most importantly I thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

Break family curses at the root! Discover the cause of destructive habits and addictions. Get rid of demons. Uncover hindering issues. Be healed of infirmities. No pastor, priest, or counselor has dealt with more spiritually bound people and seen them set free. This isn’t counseling. This isn’t therapy. This is intervention to get answers NOW! Your lifetime of suffering will end. Your torment will stop.

~snip

Need help right where you are? Is your house haunted? Are you unable to travel? Bob makes house calls. If you can’t get to Bob, he will get to you [emphasis added].

You better believe he will!

There are so many amazing one-liners and golden nuggets of fucking idiocy in this video that I don’t even know where to begin. You’ll just have to watch this craptastic commercial to understand what I’m talking about. The idea that there’s a commercial on TV like this in the year 2014 is just mind-boggling! By 2505, sure, but 2014?

Sometimes I feel it’s difficult to explain America to people who have never been here.

Bob Larson doing what he does best.
 

After the jump, Bob Larson’s incredible cameo appearance on Marc Wootton’s criminally unseen, bust-a-gut funny Showtime series La La Land…

 
Someone far funnier than I am described “adults” infatuated with the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand as being like the geek who discovered OMD in the 8th grade, had his mind blown and subsequently never gave up on the idea that they were the greatest group in the history of recorded music!

Admittedly I was a huge Ayn Rand fan when I was a kid. I’ve read nearly every word Ayn Rand published during her lifetime—including all of the magazines and newsletters, transcripts of her speeches, etc—and in the end, intellectually it’s just rubbish for small-minded twerps and people who don’t realize how illiterate extolling her “virtues” makes them sound.

Ayn Rand wrote novels for people who don’t read (a sort of literary Enya, if you will, a performer beloved by folks who don’t actually listen to music). Because she was capable of writing truly engrossing and well-plotted page-turners—pity about the shit dialogue and one-dimensional characters!—even many non-readers made it through Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead, giving them a sense of feeble intellectual accomplishment.

“Objectivists” (and 99.9% of doctrinaire libertarians) are never worth debating on the Internet because you will never convince them that she’s anything less than infallible. Objectivists feel about their hero the same way Scientologists feel about L. Ron Hubbard. (In my defense my own infatuation with Ayn Rand was during junior high school, but it was intense, I’ll cop to that).

When someone is thick enough to be a big Ayn Rand fan, they’re beyond being self-aware enough to realize how dumb they seem to literate people. A (very, very) large component of why Ayn Rand is so popular is because her philosophy is so easy to understand and because it sounds like something that some, er… intellectually less-enlightened readers already sort of agree with. No one who likes Ayn Rand seems likely to have ever read, say, Sartre, Hesse, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Dos Passos, or even ... Dickens. (I have no proof of this, but I have a strong hunch that being “well-traveled” ranks pretty low on the priorities of many of Rand’s apparently unsophisticated readers.)

Last night on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the philosopher of selfishness was skewered mercilessly:
 

 
Who the fuck didn’t see this one coming?

The general answer, of course seems pretty obvious—the perpetually clueless and tone deaf Republican Party—but the person in particular, apparently, to blame for this completely idiotic SCREAMING OUT FOR MERCILESS RIDICULE campaign is one of Mitt Romney’s former advertising guru “Mad Men” (and we all know how well that turned out), a Texan named Vinny Minchillo.

Minchillo hopes that his new “grassroots” campaign, on Facebook and on Twitter with the hashtag #imarepublican, will make it harder for people to demonize Republicans, as he told The New Republic:

“On social media, I’ve been called every name in the book,” Minchillo said. “It’s become socially acceptable to talk about Republicans in the most evil terms possible and that doesn’t seem right. We wanted to do this to really remind people that Republicans are friends, neighbors and do things that maybe you wouldn’t expect them to do.

“People, I’m afraid, think that Republicans spend their days huddling over a boiling cauldron throwing in locks of Ronald Reagan’s hair. … We thought let’s get out there and show who Republicans really are: regular folks interested in making the world a better place.”

Minchillo is clearly operating under the delusion that there’s something sly, clever or tongue-in-cheek about what he’s doing. I wonder how he’s going to feel when he watches Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, John Oliver, every pundit, Twitter, Facebook AND THE ENTIRE INTERNET trash this nonsense like it’s the stupidest thing anyone has ever thought up?

#SoylentGreenIsPeopleToo!

See how that works, Vinny?
 

 
MEMO TO THE GOP: If you need an advertising and social media campaign to convince a HUGE swath of people who already think you’re a bunch of fuckin’ assholes that you’re really not fuckin’ assholes, perhaps you’ve got a larger problem on your hands? If you have to TELL other people that you’re just like them, perhaps their perception that you’re not just like them is justified because you wouldn’t really need to point that out in the first place, now, would you?

It isn’t easy being a Republican these days.

There are people who will stick up for Genghis Khan before they’ll defend a Republican. (“Genghis was just misunderstood.”)

We love political discourse. We encourage political discourse. But when did “Republican” become a dirty word?

Here’s the deal: before you post another bullying comment, think about this:

Republicans are people, too.

And you know what? Some of them don’t even have tiny shriveled penises or require motorized scooters to haul their asses around. Many Republicans aren’t racists! Some of them are under the age of 65 and are not angry white males who watch Fox News all day long and shit in Depends diapers. WHICH IS EXACTLY THE PERCEPTION THAT THIS RISIBLE CAMPAIGN IS REINFORCING! All anyone is talking about is “the problem” that this is supposed to be combating!

If this isn’t the equivalent of a gigantic Las Vegas marquee-sized “KICK ME” sign on the back of the GOP, I don’t know what would be.
 

 
It’s the most ridiculous thing in… days to come out of the fetid swamp of what passes for ideas in the Republican Party. If hapless Vinny saw this goofy campaign as a way for him to jockey for position for the 2016 Presidential race, Vinny, I hate to tell ya, brah, you done goofed. This is the worst!

Here are a few choice comments taken from what are probably the most consistently intelligent forums on any political or news blog, Talking Points Memo. Just some random recent comments, I’m not digging deep for any of this:

I believe all Muslims are suspicious and should be rounded up into internment camps. #ImARepublican

Why, yes, my tattoos include swastikas #ImARepublican

“Redskin” is a term of respect, honor, tradition. #ImARepublican

My father punched me when I was a kid, and I TURNED OUT FINE! Right? RIGHT?! #ImARepublican

I am stupid, evil, and utterly devoid of humanity! #IamARepublican

I prattle on endlessly about the necessity for common citizens like me to own guns in case the government infringes upon the people’s rights, and then I vote for referenda that infringe upon people’s rights. #ImARepublican

Of course I’m a hypocrite. #ImARepublican

Disenfranchising minority voters is OK by me! After all, they’re not white like I am. #ImARepublican

I don’t think everyone deserves health care. #ImARepublican

My party will soon be demographically insignificant. #ImARepublican

I pledge allegiance to the Kochs… #ImARepublican

You get the idea. Here’s my favorite because it communicates SO MUCH:

I think this guy should be making decisions that affect millions. #IAmARepublican

 

 
It’s a mite (Mitt?) early for the memes to be showing up in any real number yet, give it a few hours (or even a few more minutes), but the ridicule on Twitter for the #ImARepublican hashtag is pretty good already.

And here’s the motherload of LOL, the video. You’ll note that it’s important for them to have you know that Republicans shop at Trader Joe’s(?), use Macs(?) and “have feelings, too”(?)—and yet there are apparently no members of the LGBT or Muslim communities in the GOP whatsoever. What. there were NO pics of fabulous drag queens, buffed WeHo boys or anyone with a beard and turban in the stock photo database?
 

 
For some reason that video reminded me of this classic Tom Tomorrow cartoon:
 

 

 
I’m very much feeling this anti-littering campaign by Live Green Toronto. I think it’s pretty effective in shaming lame-ass litterbugs. I feel like putting these under the windshield wiper of my neighbor who throws his fast food debris right outside of his car nearly every single day. It often ends up on my front lawn. We’re talkin’ chicken bones, cups, crumpled burger wrappers, lollipop sticks and mounds of cigarette butts.

Everyone knows it’s him! It’s right beside his car on a daily basis!

There needs to be one of these ads that reads: “Asshole.”

 

 
More after the jump…
 

 
Ted Nugent. Trophy hunter. Racist moron. Low I.Q. buffoon. Piss-and-shit-in-his-pants draft dodger. Tea party patriot…

After three casinos on Indian reservations cancelled Ted Nugent’s scheduled appearances recently due to his frequent offensive and insensitive public statements, the Nuge, to no one’s surprise, decided to escalate matters by calling Native American protesters “unclean vermin.” He seemed proud of having offended them.

On Thursday, Nugent vented again on his Facebook page about protesters from the United Urban Warrior Society:

WE ARE ON OUR JET NOW HEADING FOR TOLEDO RIBFEST JAM AFTER AN INSANE INCREDIBLE OUT OF BODY ULTRAROCKOUT at the Full Throttle Saloon in Sturgis SD! Simply astonishing gig! 4 stinkyass unclean dipshit protestors that admitted they hate me AND ALL WHITE PEOPLE THAT STOLE THEIR LAND BULLSHIT!!

See, it aint me they hate, they hate all Americans that produce & live the American Dream. Simply insane!

Or so says Sarah Palin with an electric guitar and loincloth.
 

 
A “Ted Nugent Rib-Off” Facebook page was set up to encourage turnout for a protest at Nugent’s concert tomorrow night in Ohio:

Sure, Nugent has a right to free expression under the First Amendment. But no matter what your political views, every citizen also has a right and in a democracy, a civic responsibility to protest bigotry and intolerance. That’s why we are urging everyone to add their voice, speak out, and join in protest of the appearance of this man and his vile stream of hate speech in our community!

Good on them. Toledo has some fine citizens. Who needs this jerk?

There’s also been some movement online to pressure various concert halls, venues and music festivals to cancel Ted Nugent appearances, or to simply not book him at all. Apparently many people booking these shows are quite unaware of Nugent’s penchant for xenophobic, sexist and racist comments, and in a sense, I applaud their innocence and ignorance of this man, because it’s quite reasonable to ignore such a malignant asshat, right? That’s why signing a petition like this—it’s sent to places booking him—actually matters.

If you’re booking a hall in a small town and you get a whiff of the sulphur trailing behind Ted Nugent, why would you want to risk embarrassing your town or losing your livelihood over a fucking loose cannon asshole like Ted Nugent? What positive effect can that possibly have on your career? The downside, for anyone with half a brain is… well, obvious. A Texas town paid toxic Ted $16,000 not to show up at its July 4th fireworks after receiving complaints over his scheduled appearance.

Even shock jocks should view this man with extreme caution, this much seems obvious by now. He’s a perpetual motion machine of what you probably don’t need to be associated with professionally. Just ask Mitt Romney!

Ted Nugent can be hurt—in his bank account, where it will affect him the most—if venues just say “no” to doing business with the guy the same way they’d refuse to do business with the Ku Klux Klan or a NAMBLA convention. Ted Nugent, he’s a pernicious herpes sore on the asshole of American culture—the living, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging cave man embodiment of “Idiocracy” if ever there was one—won’t you have some fun by signing this petition and then posting it directly to Uncle Ted’s Facebook page? (He personally reads everything. You can picture him getting enraged behind his keyboard like a bipolar bigot on Breitbart in each of his replies. He got into it once with my wife and when she easily bested him in an argument—even his fans agreed with her point—humiliated, like a little baby he deleted the entire thread.)

They let you make a comment when you sign. I encourage you to be creative and as emasculating as is possible and then to spread it around to all your friends

It’s First Amendment vigilante justice, the kind you’d think the Nuge himself might even appreciate if he personally wasn’t the helpless target. Ted Nugent can go suck on his own little machine gun. Not a shot will be fired—just Ted!
 

 
The reason Ted Nugent’s name is seldom seen on “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” lists isn’t because he’s a toxic bigot, it’s because he’s a shitty musician making terrible music for morons. Here’s Ted Nugent’s one good song, “Journey to the Center of Your Mind” performed with the Amboy Dukes. He’s been losing IQ points since this moment, the (sole) musical high point of his overlong career:
 

 
The concept of “Asian Nazis” is, of course, an extremely WTF??? proposition from the very start. It’s not really easy to figure out why such a subculture exists, exactly, but certain factors—low intelligence on the part of the participants, an affinity for militarism in general and naturally, you’d think, good old-fashioned anti-semitism—would obviously come into play.

It’s truly a difficult (and ridiculous) subject to be “fair” about, but from what I’ve read, Germany’s role in WWII is not really something that’s taught much in schools in the region. Furthermore, some Asian Nazis fetishists claim that their affinity for Nazis chic comes from a love of “the fashion,” like a form of cosplay. This implies both an innocence, and a profound (but plausible) ignorance, of what they’re doing and the outward image it projects. Nazi cosplaying occurs in Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, parts of China and South Korea. Obviously, other than to the Asian Nazis enthusiasts themselves, who are too stupid to realize it, the optics of the matter telegraphs adject idiocy loudly and clearly. At least to visitors. Locally, not so much.

And besides that, how many of these self-styled Asian Nazis have even met a Jew? Even a single Jew?
 

 
That’s what I thought about while I was looking at the Fun With Asian Nazis Tumblr (subtitle “fascism as a fashion accessory”) and then stumbled down a “Hitler Chic” Internet K-hole right afterwards. These people should be strapped to chairs and forced to watch Schindler’s List with their eyes pinned open like Alex in A Clockwork Orange.
 

This instant Hitler costume was marketed for seven years in Japan before a complaint from the Simon Wiesenthal Center saw it withdrawn. A spokesperson for the manufacturer said that they had never had a complaint: “This was meant purely as a joke, as something that would easily be recognizable.”
 

Here’s a display from Chinese retailer Izzue. The company’s fourteen stores were festooned with swastikas back in 2003 before some foreigners complained, prompting Izzue to take out a full page newspaper ad apologizing that read in part “We have absolutely no intention to recognise or promote Nazism and [we intended] no political implication ... on the usage of the swastika.” The store’s marketing manager Deborah Cheng told the South China Morning Post: “This is Hong Kong, and Chinese people are not sensitive about Nazism.” She added that “most of the complaints are from foreigners.”

See a pattern developing here?
 

The happy couple. Is there a baby Adolf in their future?
 

Chilling with Ronald McHitler outside of the Hitler fried chicken chain in Thailand.

This Thai-language billboard reads: “Hitler is not dead” to advertise a wax museum. Until the Israeli envoy noticed it, no one had raised an eyebrow.
 

Imagine buying your “Bart Simpson as a Rasta” shirt in a store selling tie-dyed Third Reich clobber?

An actual Korean skin product commercial.

And finally, here’s a totally fucking berserk Nazi-themed music video from Mongolia. I’ve posted this Third Reich meets P. Diddy item in the past, but it’s worth repeating. Wait for The Carpenters interlude!!!
 

 
Via Nick Abrahams

 
Fox and Friends’ resident cheerful idiot Steve Doocy is obviously one of the stupidest people on television. Doocy comes off as so completely brainless that his utterly gormless co-hosts Brian Kilmeade and Elisabeth Hasselbeck look good (or at least slightly better) by comparison. One would have to think that Fox News viewers with low to barely average IQs would be perceptive enough to realize that Steve Doocy is an abject buffoon. I don’t think SNL even does Fox and Friends parodies anymore, do they? Why bother?

In any case, this morning Doocy made a game attempt to get a small number of “Fox fans” (as he called them) to react negatively to the new multigender bathroom signage at Illinois State University (This is the latest “outrage” on Fox News, in case you aren’t aware of it, even though they are for single-occupancy restrooms!)

Here’s how it went down, live on Fox News as Chyron captions read: “Bathroom Boondoggle: Are New Gender Signs Just Too Confusing?” and “Gender Bender”!

Doocy: “See, they were designated as ‘family restrooms’ in the past and now, apparently, they’re going to be known as ‘all-gender’ restrooms! Does that make sense?”

Woman: “Restrooms for both genders.”

Doocy: “That’s right. Bathrooms for both genders, or transgenders!”

Man: “Transgender, that’s right.”

Unable to rile up even the slightest bit of “moral” indignation, let alone any anxiety even among these “Fox fans,” the floundering Doocy quickly threw it back to his co-tool Brian Kilmeade in the studio who then, astonishingly, offered up pretty much one of the truest things that I’ve ever heard a Fox anchor say (if only accidently):

“Well, they’re better people than us.”

Yes, indeed they are. Most people are better people than bigoted Fox News morning show hosts, I’d have to agree with that and this segment proved it. In spades!

Just yesterday, Fox News ran a story mocking the University’s attempt to accommodate everyone with equal respect.
 

Bonus clip, Steve Doocy before his tenure at Fox and Friends, back when he was a serious journalist…
 
Via Media Matters