1. Texas GOP Candidate: Texas Can Be Its Own ‘Island Nation’

Barry Smitherman, aspiring attorney general for the Lone-Star state, thinks Texas is prepared to become its own independent nation, mostly because it has oil and its own energy grid. He compared the state to an “island nation,” which is curious given its geography.

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“Texas can operate as a stand-alone entity with energy, food, water and roads as if we were a closed-loop system,” he said in an interview this week. He stopped short of calling for Texas to secede from the United States.

Smitherman is Gov. Rick Perry’s appointee to the Texas Railroad Commission. He seems to see eye to eye with his boss on a number of issues, including those having nothing to do with his job—like regulating oil and gas in the state, and fighting the EPA and Obama administration tooth and nail.

He recently attacked China’s one-child policy in a speech for a pro-life group, and also said abortion could cause a plague—a Biblical one. He favors marrying young, abstaining from sex until married, then having lots and lots of children—Texan Republican children who use a lot of Texas oil and like to shoot guns, another cause Smitherman is really into.

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2. Fox Guest: No Money, No Lunch Is a Good Teaching Moment

Most people who don’t give a fig about the well-being of poor children are at least careful to disguise their callousness, or have the decency to gravitate toward work that has nothing to do with kids. But not all of them, as it turns out. The award for most blatantly heartless comment of the week goes to Fox & Friends guest Thomas Kersting. Kersting is a therapist and school counselor (!) who told Gretchen Carlson he agrees with a New Jersey school district’s plan to punish kids who lack the funds for lunch, or whose parents failed to fill out proper paperwork, by throwing the kids' lunch away. This, he said, would provide a “teaching moment.”

Even host Gretchen Carlson was a little taken aback, asking Kersting if he “had a problem with the fact that the kids ultimately end up being punished in this situation when it really is the parents’ fault.”

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Kersting replied: “We have more food than any other nation. No kid is going to starve. You know, if one day a kid doesn’t have lunch, right, maybe that’s a teaching moment when that kid doesn’t have lunch. That may sound harsh saying that, but we’ve got to get people to start being responsible for themselves.”

Kersting has worked for close to 20 years in the school district, and claimed he gives kids money all the time. “And I’m broke from doing that over the years. No, I’m kidding.”

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About which part? Oh, ha ha ha.

3. Christian Radio Host: Military’s ‘Homosexual Takeover’ Could Doom Attack on Syria

A U.S.-led attack on Syria is wrong on so many levels, but for one Bible-thumping Christian radio host, the issue is fairly simple. Any attempt to intervene in Syria’s civil war is doomed by the fact that homosexuals and pregnant women have taken over the American military. Yes, there has been a coup. The American Family Association’s Sandy Rios offered up this cogent piece of analysis on Monday arguing that the hostile takeover of the military, which resulted from the overturning of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy and allowed women to fight, has hurt the country’s military readiness.

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“When I looked at those battleships in the Mediterranean, supposedly getting ready for battle in Syria, I couldn’t help think about all the stories I’ve read about how women are now in the ranks of the Navy, getting pregnant at exponential numbers,” she told listeners.

Wow, exponential pregnancy numbers! That sounds bad. But there’s more.

Rios continued, “When I think about the folding in and the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the homosexual takeover, really, of our military, I’m not sure how effective those naval ships will be.”

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4. GOP Spokesman Calls McConnell Opponent an ‘Empty Dress’

Mitch McConnell is getting pretty desperate. The arch-conservative Kentucky senator is in real danger of losing his seat. And since, as the cliché goes, desperate times call for desperate measures, desperation is what he and the Republican machine have resorted to.

This week, the communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee called McConnell’s democratic rival Alison Lundergan Grimes an “empty dress” in an interview with The Hill. This piece of sexist pablum about a candidate who could be the first woman to represent Kentucky in the Senate, was brought to you by the oh-so-talented-at- communication Brad Dayspring. Dayspring also infantilized Grimes by comparing her to a high school student who “babbles incoherently and stares blankly into the camera as though she’s a freshman in high school struggling to remember the CliffsNotes after forgetting to read her homework assignment.”

The attack comes at an awkward time for McConnell, who has been doing his level best to “woo” women voters despite never having supported legislation that would help them with wage equality, healthcare or reproductive rights.

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5. Anonymous Portlander Threatens to Out Food Stamp Recipients

Another nominee in the meanspirited category is too cowardly even to show his face, preferring to do the important work of shaming disabled people and people who are impoverished enough to need food stamps, anonymously.

This a**hole reportedly distributed flyers under cover of darkness this week in several Portland, Oregon neighborhoods saying: "There are 27 people in this neighborhood who vote and receive food stamps. The names of these people are being posted where they can be seen by taxpayers and the neighborhood can decide who is truly in need of food."

Well, the flyers are not entirely anonymous. They are signed by "Artemis of the wildland," after the Greek goddess of the hunt. Artemis would have had to hunt for those names, as food stamp recipients are not in the public record. Or Artemis would need to have a mole in the U.S. Department of Agriculture to gain access to the files.

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Last month, Artemis was similarly incensed about people who both vote and receive disability checks.

6. Christian Radio Host to Flock: You Can Attend Gay Weddings if You Tell Grooms ‘They Shall Both Be Put to Death’

In a bid to be invited to as many same-sex weddings as possible, a Christian radio host said he’d be happy to attend as long as the grooms were both told they have “committed an abomination,” and therefore should die. Kevin Swanson advised his listeners that it would be okay for them to do the same.

Swanson’s term for gay weddings? "Neronic weddings," after Nero, the Roman emperor who apparently invented them. Generally, Swanson avoids such weddings (though we suspect the invitations are pouring into his inbox), but then he came up with his solution. “I think you can attend [such] a wedding if you hold a up a sign that reads Leviticus 20:13 . . .You know, word for word: ‘If a man sleeps with a man as he sleeps with a woman the two of them have committed an abomination and they shall both be put to death.’ You could attend a wedding and hold up that sign."

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“And I guess if it comes down to it, if you bake a cake for a homosexual wedding, you could put Leviticus 20:13 on the cake.”

Festive!

7. Glenn Beck: Can’t We All Just Get Along? And Progressives Should Be Hunted Like Nazis

Far-right radio host, Internet entrepreneur, and—how shall we put this?—utter and complete lunatic, Glenn Beck (seriously, Google the clip where Beck talks about how fast-food companies have implanted a chip in our brains that will turn us all into zombies when they decide to throw the switch), gave a very dignified interview to the New York Times this week.

In it, he made a Rodney King-like plea for the country to heal its divisions and unite.The only problem is, we must all unite on the crazy, right-wing side, and only after progressives have been hunted down, because progressives are the “biggest danger to the world” and they inevitably leave “millions dead.” Like Mao.

That’s how this whole “big government” thing always ends up. Like Mao. Millions dead. Then they come back to life as zombies when the switch is flipped. And then they have to be hunted like zombies. Got it?