This is so fucking genius: A redneck preacher by the name of Pastor Daniel Castle rails against Wonder Showzen, MTV’s infamously evil twin parody of Sesame Street, but he seems to think that it’s a real kids show, adding a bonkers meta-commentary that had me in stitches. It’s so absolutely perfect that I wondered if the Wonder Showzen producers had actually made it themselves. If they had, it would be like a perfect Russian matryoshka doll of piss-yourself funny multi-layered sacrilegious satire. Eventually I concluded that even those evil geniuses probably couldn’t have come up with this. It’s simply too real.

The top YouTube commenter nails it:

The addition of a sincere & oblivious commentary of outrage by a fundamentalist preacher to crowd of yokels shoves this to a A+ skit.  If I worked at Wonder Showzen I would add this as a special feature on the DVD and double the price. 

What about having Pastor Castle do an entire commentary? I’d re-buy the Wonder Showzen DVDs again in a heartbeat with that added!

The goofball who posted the clip, “savedbyjesusblood” described it like this:

Clips of MTV’s evil TV show “Wonder Showzen” explained by Pastor Daniel Castle. This is one of the most evil shows and spiritual exploitation of children I have ever seen.

He obviously doesn’t get it either…
 

 
Below, the first episode of Wonder Showzen, one of the most perverse and subversive things ever funded by a major corporation
 

 
Via Christian Nightmares/The Daily Banter

 
Bill Nye, the popular TV scientist, put out a video last year indicating his opinion that teaching Creationism in schools wasn’t such a hot idea and might, you know, intellectually stunt the mental growth of the children subjected to such nonsense. Showing up for college with an Old Testament notion of how the universe and life in it came to exist, might, you know, put your kid a lil’ behind the curve…

In any case, Ken Ham, the moron who founded the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY, challenged Bill Nye to a public debate and… Nye accepted! The debate is being touted in a message on the museum’s blog.

The February 4th event will ask “Is Creation A Viable Model of Origins?”

 
According to a recent Pew poll, for 46% of Americans—including 53% of Republican voters—the answer, sadly, appears to be a YES.

Nye’s original video prompted a response video from the Creation Museum (below). I wouldn’t put money on Ham to come out ahead in this debate!
 

She’s not a racist or anti-Semite, she just wants to break you free of “The Matrix”

Yesterday, Tablet magazine “broke” the “news” of former MTV star Tila Tequila’s public embrace of Nazism. Wasn’t it just in 2012 when she announced that she was converting to Judaism? She even claimed that she was learning to read and write Hebrew. Then she became a conspiracy theorist and now she’s a Nazi going by the moniker “Hitila”!

At her blog Hitila wrote a rambling post on December 7th titled “Why I Sympathize With Hitler Part 1: True History Unveiled” about why Adolf Hitler was “misunderstood.” It concluded:

There is much, much, much more to Hitler’s side of the story that has been buried so I will continue the PART 2 of it next time.  For now here are a FEW of MANY inspiring speeches Hitler did that shows his TRUE COLORS as a man of compassion and not some evil monster he was painted out to be.  All he wanted to bring his people and country back up.  Just like how AMERICA IS FALLING AT THE MOMENT YET I DO NOT SEE ANYONE IN OFFICE *AHEM* THAT IS BRAVE ENOUGH TO SAVE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE LIKE HITLER WAS WILLING TO SAVE THE GERMAN PEOPLE!  You know why? Because all of the American Politicians have been INFILTRATED by the enemies.  The same ones who have painted Adolf Hitler out to be a so called “MONSTER.”  Hitler never wanted a worldwide genocide.  That is the biggest lie ever nor did he want the genocide of all the jewish people.  All he wanted was to be able to feed his people from the depression, defend his country from being attacked unfairly, and they claimed the war and harassed him and his people first…. I bet you didn’t know about THAT now did you?  And if you watch some of these speeches I have attached you will see that a lot of what he describes sounds EXACTLY like what AMERICA is going through right now….. Yet, do you see our President trying to save our Country here as Hitler tried to save his?  NOPE!!!  They cheated and played Hitler so bad…. I feel extremely compassionate and sympathy for the man with a ruined legacy as well as a forever condemned great people of Germany!  They are some of the NICEST people I have ever met and that is the truth!!!! Oh yeah… Hitler was also a Vegetarian and HUGE animal lover… what a monster!

Hitila’s new song, “It’s Going Down!” gives some further insight into her tiny, tiny mind. Here are the lyrics so you don’t have to listen (if you do like to make your ears bleed, the track is posted below):

Every time you hear my name it’s going down, goin down X 4
Feeding yo mind with GMOs
while givin yo babies flo flo
not flo rida but flo ride
that shit that burns yo third eye

Jewluminati motherfuckers hate me
Oh no they don’t wanna date me
Nor you nor you nor you too
Worldwide Genocide blame it on the jews

So now they call me a nazi
no bitch I’m just good at yhatzee
Espionage is my middle name HA!
I got you good while rolling through yo hood

Hitler no Hi Tila
Hitler no Hit Tila
Hitler No Hi Tila

You get the picture.

But sensing there was more comedic water to draw from this particularly poisoned well, The Raw Story‘s Arturo Garcia decided to see how the white supremacists at Stormfront.org were reacting to Tila’s abrupt Judaism to Nazism conversion. Hilarity ensued!

It’s exactly what you might expect.

“It’s insulting to Adolf Hitler to have that promiscuous, degenerate, mongrel defending him. She makes me want to vomit.”

“The sad part is this no one will listen to her.”

“I congratulate her for finding the truth.”

“Brave woman to throw her career away for truth. Jew Hollywood and media will never hire her again.”

“Very, very strange. Her entry almost seems copied and pasted from this website. I wonder if she wasn’t somehow ‘encouraged’ — either overtly or covertly — to promulgate this information in an attempt to discredit it. I, for one, am quite skeptical.”

“She sounds perfectly lucid to me.”

“She’s not a truther, she’s a plant.”

“We need more people like her spreading this type of message. As long she does not preach racial mixing, has no kids, and eventually commits suicide, it is all good.”

“She’s got 2 million followers. People will listen to her. The Zionist veneer is finally crumbling.”

“I posted a supportive comment on the page. I think we all should to show her that she is not alone in her beliefs.”

Saving the best for last:

“Is she of Jewish racial ancestry?”

[Add sound effect of your choice here]

The YouTube commenters are actually more insane than the posters at Stormfront, who at least weren’t as confused by what she’s selling….

Here’s “It’s Going Down!”. Going viral like an STD, baby…
 

 
Mind rot at its finest: “Tila Talks Ep. 9: Parallel Worlds, Nazis, Zionists, the Matrix & Illuminati”—she’s like a mentally challenged character in a Philip K. Dick novel. One that he burned.
 

Why—HOW—does this clown-man have a job?

Georgia Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens, a Republican, is the asshat who bragged earlier this year that his office was deliberately creating bureaucratic hurdles to slow implementation of “Obamacare” in his state. As reported in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Hudgens boasted to an audience of Republicans, “Let me tell you what we’re doing (about Obamacare). Everything in our power to be an obstructionist.”

People in the audience—presumably people who believe themselves to be followers of Christ—shouted “Amen!” when Hudgens made these remarks.

Hudgens apparently just doesn’t know when to quit and he should have quit the day he uttered those foul words in public, but instead he was just pissed off that he was videotaped and the public mockery it led to:

“I didn’t realize I was being videotaped and that got on the Internet,” he said during another speech. “I never received so many nasty e-mails. I’ve been told that they hope I die. I’ve been told that they hope my children had cancer, just all kinds of things.”

Well, what did you expect from the people that you—you personally, Ralphie boy—are keeping from getting affordable health care??? Frankly Hudgeons seems damned lucky that a few impolite emails are all that’s happened to him, if you ask me. Imagine you are the parent of a child with major health issues and you’d meet Ralph Hudgens on the street. What would you say to him to his face… with a tire iron or a broken bottle?

But like I was saying, Hudgens doesn’t know when to quit and now his very own words, caught on videotape again, are starting to percolate outside of Atlanta.

It’s positively mind-blowing, even for the most callous Republican clown to say something like this:

“I’ve had several companies come in and they have said just the fact—just the fact—that in the individual market pre-existing conditions have to be covered on Jan. 1, that that is going to double the cost of insurance. And if you don’t really understand what covering pre-existing conditions would be like, it would be like in Georgia we have a law that says you have to have insurance on your automobile. You have to have liability insurance. If you’re going to drive on Georgia’s roads, you have to have liability insurance. You don’t have to have collision. You don’t have to have comprehensive. You don’t have to have rental car or towing or anything else. But you have to have liability.

“But say you’re going along and you have a wreck. And it’s your fault. Well, a pre-existing condition would be you then calling up your insurance agent and saying, ‘I would like to get collision insurance coverage on my car.’ And your insurance agent says, ‘Well, you never had that before. Why would you want it now?’ And you say, ‘Well, I just had a wreck, it was my fault and I want the insurance company to pay to repair my car.’ And that’s the exact same thing on pre-existing insurance.”

That’s one nastyass politically poisonous phlegm ball to cough up, ain’t it? Even in a red state, that’s taking it a little too far.

Worth noting that when he was in the state Senate, Hudgens sponsored a bill that would end the law requiring insurance companies to cover mammograms. At one point a video clip went around with footage of Hudgens at what appears to be a candidate forum questioning why insurance companies should be forced to cover screenings that can help detect breast cancer before it spreads.

And yet he won the election for Georgia Insurance Commissioner anyway… Awfully counterintuitive vote there, Peach State. You might want to think harder next time before pulling that lever again for Ralph Hudgens?

Due to the policies of Hudgeons and Atlanta Governor Nathan Deal blocking the federal government from offering Medicaid coverage, they’ve denied health insurance to more than 600,000 lower-income Georgia citizens.

UPDATE: RALPH HUDGENS HAS A PRE-EXISTING CONDITION HIMSELF!!!

Here’s the video taken from Hudgens’ appearance last month at the CSRA Republican Women’s Club meeting. It will be interesting to see what ‘The Daily Show’ will do with this
 

Below, watch how proud of himself this slimy Republican weasal seems to be about keeping people from getting affordable healthcare in his state!

 
Aside from this utterly hilarious 90s-era Creationism vs. Evolution school assembly speech (Come on, who came up with these graphs?), it’s the cutaway shots of the totally bored teens that are the true gems in this mess. One male teen in the audience is so bored that he actually starts to nibble on his hand to pass the time. Others bite their nails, yawn, give the side-eye to one another and so forth…

They definitely don’t want what he’s selling. You can’t blame them with lines like, “That stupid theory of evolution that’s included in the books as if it is a fact and it’s nothing but a Pagan religion.”
 

 
Via Christian Nightmares and Everything Is Terrible

“Some people are shits, darling.”—William S. Burroughs

Like Republicans.

I live in Los Angeles, where I honestly don’t know ANY Republicans. I’m sure there must be at least a couple of them living here, but I’m not planning to actually go out looking for them any time soon. Let ‘em stay under those rocks. In fact, I don’t even know a single Republican who I am not related to by blood or by marriage. As in none, not one, zero.

These family members aside, I do not like Republicans. I hate them. If you are a Republican, I hate YOU. Seems like the majority of my fellow Californians might feel the same way, luckily—the GOP is a politically insignificant entity in California, where the Democrats hold a supermajority and practically every top job in the state—so Republican idiocy will probably never touch my life in any sort of meaningful way, except, of course, for reading annoying, blood-pressure raising articles about the GOP asshats we do still have here, like this at The LA Times.

Opponents of the Affordable Care Act never stop producing new tricks to undermine the reform’s effectiveness. But leave it to California Republicans to reach for the bottom. Their goal appears to be to discredit the act by highlighting its costs and penalties rather than its potential benefits.

The device chosen by the Assembly’s GOP caucus is a website at the address coveringhealthcareca.com. If that sounds suspiciously like coveredca.com, which is the real website for the California insurance exchange, it may not be a coincidence. Bogus insurance websites have sprung up all over, aiming to steer consumers away from legitimate enrollment services. Just a couple of weeks ago California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris shut down 10 bogus insurance sites, some of them with names very similar to the real thing. She must have overlooked the GOP’s entry.

A goddamn fake healthcare website! How low is that? If you click on a tab that reads “Don’t have health insurance” on the homepage, you are taken to a “penalty calculator” and not a premium calculator. Shits! They’re evil shits. Imagine that you’re an earnest person with preconditions seeking affordable health insurance and you stumble into this site by accident. It would be infuriating.

The GOP site also takes careful pains to explain to the young how THEIR money will be subsidizing health care for the old. Keep it classy GOP… Hey wait a minute: I thought old people were the GOP base?

And don’t young people eventually become old people? This may have already occurred to some of them. Bit of a mixed message there, isn’t it? Not like cognitive dissonance has ever been much of an impediment to Republicans, but this strikes me as being as incompetent as it is evil and in such a small, petty way. There’s even a section devoted to scaring people that signing up for Obamacare will result in identity theft!

Shits.

Hunter at Daily Kos wrote:

If you are so nasty a person that you can’t live with the thought of insuring yourself because it means some other person might get healthcare using one one hundredth of a cent of your money, the world will certainly not be missing you much after you are gone. Godspeed!

This is yet another of the reasons the current incarnation of the Republican Party is little more than a political oozing sore. There is probably a downside to trying to kill off your own voters to score a momentary political point, but let’s just say the members of the party brain trust in my state could meet in a closet and still have enough room for the vacuum and boxes of Christmas decorations.

Yep, that’s our Republicans. How I love California.
 
 
 

 
As the editor of a blog that used to generate a lot of traffic with virtually any item, however small, that mocked Sarah Palin, believe me when I tell you that five years after her debut on the world stage, no one really cares that much about the snowbilly grifter anymore.

Not like they used to. Not even close.

Nope, an item on Sarah Palin will bring in a negligible amount of traffic, so little, in fact that it’s not even worth the effort anymore. “Sarah Palin does something stupid AGAIN” has stopped being effective as “click bait,” in the same way that “Glenn Beck says something outrageous AGAIN” has. Or “The 25 greatest moments from Murphy Brown” (as actually seen on Yahoo! earlier this week, I didn’t make that one up). Or whatever idiocy Ted Nugent is into. Who gives a shit about these assholes? No one does. At least our readers don’t. You let us know loud and clear how disinterested you are in these people and we see the evidence of this on Google Analytics, ChartBeat, and in Twitter, Facebook and Google+ shares.

Which brings up the question: Does a Sarah Palin appearance on The Today Show, or even Fox News, really bring in ANY extra eyeballs? Based on my own (admittedly left-leaning, but very large as these things go) control group, I’d have to wager that the answer is a definite “NO.” Going on what I’ve seen, she’s a total bust these days. Doesn’t move the needle on the traffic dial. Flatline. Nothing. Why do we still see her all the time saying “words” in the “lamestream media”? I honestly couldn’t tell you, but given that every newsgathering or content aggregating entity has access to the very same traffic measurement tools that I have, I don’t expect that she’s got much left cultural currency after this current round of “war against Christmas” media appearances to promote her new book that someone else wrote, for people who don’t read…

Having said all that, I certainly would have thought there would have been a terrific amount of interest in an NBC correspondent suggesting that Sarah Palin should have someone shit in her mouth and piss in her eyes, and this is exactly what Martin Bashir did in an MSNBC commentary segment on Friday that is, for the most part, only being discussed on the right.

How did this escape wider notice?

If you will hit play, you will see one of the most incendiary things I have ever seen someone say on a cable news channel about another person… ever.

Incendiary, sure, but I’d have to say… he’s right. Without further ado, here’s Martin Bashir saying what a lot of people think about Sarah Palin:
 

 
“Bubbafication” is a term referring to the affectation of redneckishness by a refined, cosmopolitan, wealthy, or otherwise privileged person. Why would you do such a thing? Well, endearing oneself to the reactionary, white working class can pay off big.

For example, George W. Bush, born into a millionaire family (with an alleged “pork rinds” fan for a patriarch) went to Harvard and Yale. That didn’t stop him from buying a ranch and playing cowboy, an act he conveniently trotted out most frequently during election season. And here we have Morton Downey Jr., son of a famous singer, already quite rich and famous in his own right as the king of trash TV, singing a Merle Haggard song about the supposed decline of America, a subject he gleefully monetized with his every utterance.

I won’t go so far as to say I’m sympathetic with Merle Haggard, but I will say I understand his particular brand of resentment and disaffection. Those are the people I come from—not “Okies from Muskogee” per se—but a rural, southern, culturally insular, god-fearing folk. Many of them manage to be conned by wealthiest of the wealthy politicians, over and over again, so that no matter what happens in their shitty lives, they always manage to blame immigrants or black people or feminists or the decline of religion or god knows what else.

Check out some of the lyrics to Haggard’s “Are The Good Times Really Over”

I wish a buck was still silver
It was back when the country was strong
Back before Elvis
Before the Vietnam war came along

Before The Beatles and ‘Yesterday’
When a man could still work, still would
The best of the free life behind us now
And are the good times really over for good?

Are we rolling down hill
Like a snowball headed for Hell?
With no kind of chance
For the Flag or the Liberty Bell

Wish a Ford and a Chevy
Could still last ten years, like they should
Is the best of the free life behind us now?
Are the good times really over for good?

I wish Coke was still Cola
And a joint was a bad place to be
It was back before Nixon lied to us all on TV

Before microwave ovens
When a girl could still cook and still would
The best of the free life behind us now
Are the good times really over for good?

It’s all been downhill since Elvis? Ah, that bullshit nostalgia for those non-existent “good ole days!” It’s the very zeitgeist of the Republican base! What’s earnestly ignorant in Merle Haggard is ambitious and unctuously detestable in Morton Downey Jr, but man if it doesn’t work, over and over again. You know damned well there must be dozens of Republican pols kissing the asses of the Duck Dynasty and Hillbilly Handfishin’ casts, even as I type this.
 

 
If you haven’t seen the video yet of Congressman Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) on the floor of the House asking for a clarification on the rules of the shutdown, believe me, it’s well worth watching.

There’s a compelling reason it’s been garnering hundreds of thousands of YouTube plays the past few days: Very simply it shows—beyond the shadow of any reasonable doubt—that the Republicans not only planned the government shutdown in advance, but that they made damned good and sure that when their neanderthal putsch started, there would be new rules in place to prevent it from being voted on.

It’s astonishing. It’s not like I expect that this clip will be discussed on Fox News anytime soon, but a Republican with even a modicum of intelligence, honesty and decency would be obliged to see exactly same thing that the rest of us see when we watch this clip.

If you’re unclear of exactly what’s happening, under normal circumstances any Congressperson can call for a vote on any bill at any time.

Not anymore! Prior to the shutdown, the Republicans very quietly passed H.R. 368, a measure that only House Majority Leader Eric Cantor can call for an end to the shutdown.

That’s right Eric Cantor and ONLY Eric Cantor—not even Speaker of the House John Boehner or any other ranking Republican—unless Cantor gives his express permission for a designee to do it. Via Talking Points Memo:

So unless House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) wanted the Senate spending bill to come to the floor, it wasn’t going to happen. And it didn’t.

“I’ve never seen this rule used. I’m not even sure they were certain we would have found it,” a House Democratic aide told TPM. “This was an overabundance of caution on their part. ‘We’ve got to find every single crack in the dam that water can get through and plug it.’”

Congressional historians agreed that it was highly unusual for the House to reserve such power solely for the leadership.

“I’ve never heard of anything like that before,” Norm Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, told TPM.

“It is absolutely true that House rules tend to not have any explicit parliamentary rights guaranteed and narrowed to explicit party leaders,” Sarah Binder, a congressional expert at the Brookings Institution, told TPM. “That’s not typically how the rules are written.”

The rule change was made to prevent a majority vote from becoming even a possibility without the expressed consent of ONE MAN! Fewer than 25% of Americans support the GOP’s shutdown and yet here we are. 

This is democracy? It’s thisclose to being fascism. The dummies are in charge. Minority moron rule. Joseph Stalin or Il Duce would laugh at what America has become. The whole thing is worth watching—and infuriating—but by around the 5:00 mark, the cat’s out of the bag thanks to Congressman Van Hollen.

Judging from the rapidly escalating number of YouTube views, I think it’s safe to say that it’s not going back in again. Please share with everyone, even, make that especially, your Uncle Ronnie the Teabagger. He’s never going to hear about this from Rush or see it on the Fox News, but Uncle Ronnie really needs to know about this…
 

And then there is this, an earlier, less dramatic, but in no way less revelatory confrontation that took place two weeks ago when Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) noticed something seemed fishy and asked some uncomfortable questions of the Rules Committee chairman Pete Sessions (R-TX), who flat out admits that she’s right!

“That’s what I’m saying. We took that away.”

Sessions tells her of GOP “resolve” in the debt ceiling battle. Here’s her response:

“Oh, Mercy. It just gets deeper and deeper. I want to tell you the resolve that I think you’ve got. And despite the fact that every one of you said, over and over ad nauseam, that you didn’t want to shut the government down, we spent some time down in my office watching so many of your members — right after they were elected in 2010 — saying how much they would like to shut down the House to great applause.”

“I think it is really shortsighted, I think it is an atrocity to the Rules of the House. And I think you’re putting the whole country through this angst and this aggravation that we did not need to go. This one we could have done without.”

“And I must tell you that I’m more and more angry now that I understand what you have done is take away our ability is to really make a motion for that Senate vote.”

Guess what? The Tea party-led government shutdown came THE VERY NEXT DAY!

Go right to 1:20 and start from there. If this isn’t an admission of guilt, I don’t know what would be…
 

 
I had to laugh at the way Slavoj Žižek so masterfully ended his Guardian op ed piece, “Who is responsible for the US shutdown? The same idiots responsible for the 2008 meltdown.”

Žižek’s subtitle is “In opposing Obamacare, the radical-populist right exposes its own twisted ideology” and in the essay, he poses a provocative question that I’ve been wondering about a lot myself recently: “Barack Obama is accused of dividing the American people instead of bringing them together. But what if this, precisely, is what is good about Obama?”

I’d like to read Žižek—or Jonathan Chait, Brian Beutler, Alex Pareene, Michael Tomasky, Charles Hugh Smith, Frank Rich or the great Charles P. Pierce—taking on this topic in further detail once the dust has cleared.

The conclusion Žižek draws at the close, though, is simply sublime:

One of the weird consequences of the 2008 financial meltdown and the measures taken to counteract it (enormous sums of money to help banks) was the revival of the work of Ayn Rand, the closest one can get to an ideologist of the “greed is good” radical capitalism. The sales of her opus Atlas Shrugged exploded. According to some reports, there are already signs that the scenario described in Atlas Shrugged – the creative capitalists themselves going on strike – is coming to pass in the form of a populist right. However, this misreads the situation: what is effectively taking place today is almost the exact opposite. Most of the bailout money is going precisely to the Randian “titans”, the bankers who failed in their “creative” schemes and thereby brought about the financial meltdown. It is not the “creative geniuses” who are now helping ordinary people, it is the ordinary people who are helping the failed “creative geniuses.”

John Galt, the central character in Atlas Shrugged, is not named until near the end of the novel. Before his identity is revealed, the question is repeatedly asked, “Who is John Galt?” Now we know precisely who he is: John Galt is the idiot responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown, and for the ongoing federal government shutdown in the US.

Standing ovation!