(This has nothing to do with the article, I just have a fetish for brightly manicured coffin nails. She was just blowing you a kiss, fuckin’ bitch judge!)

The  unemployment rate for the entire United States is at last check, what, nine and half percent? Luckily, we have our government officials working to stem the tide of homelessness, disease, and hunger that plagues those Americans not lucky enough to be born into “screwer” class, right? The leaders we elected to drag uncomplaining (so far as we can hear) American paupers from their “screwee” roles are on top of this bitch, sodomizing poverty, grinding her cunt face into the hot summer pavement, blinding her with the sharp gravel of our dangerously untended roads… Well, just as soon as they get their buds reelected.

Look, you just ate, like, Monday, and these smear ads aren't going to run themselves.

Hey, foreclosed traditional nuclear family that doesn’t know where their next meal is coming from, let alone where they’ll be sleeping next week, how do you feel about 200 mil in unabashed corporate avarice going to make sure potential elected officials are in Sharpies, lawn signs, campaign headquarters and rock star tour buses? I’m sorry, what? Those figures, that came out today, are already outdated? You say that “the total could rise to roughly $300 million if it includes additional pledges for campaign spending from Americans for Prosperity, promising $45 million, the Club for Growth, $24 million, the National Rifle Association, $20 million, and the Susan B. Anthony List, $6 million?” Somebody needs to explain to me why the NRA needs to have Lex Luthor’s annual salary in foldin’ money.

Welp, because government shuts down every other year – because elections take about 9 months, and the other 3 are for siestas for the poor, tired politicians – and we’ll have to wait until November to start filibustering potential “poverty czars,” in the meantime we’re going to need an enemy we can all agree to be distracted with hate for. Here’s an idea: Those lazy assed, mouth breathing, sister humping marine animals. Seriously, call your sister and see if a starfish doesn’t answer the phone, smoking a cigarette and yelling at her for a fresh beer. I’m sorry you had to hear about it this way, bro.

In March, we reported (read: made a bunch of totally hilarious/hysterically insensitive jokes) on this, a story about a group of fundamentalist Christians that wanted to ritually slaughter a performing killer whale for doing its eponymous job, mangling the shit out of anything smaller than it, this time its trainer. The best part was they wanted to stone it, Old Testament style…

Well, to be honest, the BEST part was my bitchin' photoshop.

Literally Old Testament style, as their justification was copied and pasted from their favorite version of Exodus, and they insisted that God willed it. There is no greater justification in America for us to slowly and brutally execute a person, let alone one of His own creatures whose only method of intelligible communication puts him on the level of Joey fucking Fatone. With myriad national concerns that, while infinitely more pressing than a cetacean expressing captivity rage, are seemingly unsolvable without the application of a day’s, maybe even a week’s, consideration, the United States had found in subaqueous wildlife its new enemy. Let the floodgates open! JI-fuckin-HAD!

My favorite headline of last week was this: BP Burning Endangered Sea Turles Alive. Talk about biblical. The purportedly tragic implications of the story aside (whatever, hippies), can you think of a better headline to define our generation in a special edition future issue of LIFE Magazine? Well, I mean, I can. “BP Shoving Live Orphan Kittens Feet-First Into Rusty Meat Grinders,” comes to mind. That’s as viscerally stimulating as a handy from a phone-sex operator with Tourettes, but perhaps a little verbose for page 6. What about: “How Many Rabid Porcupines Can BP Fit Into the Anuses of These 5 Year-Old Cancer Patients?” I give up. If brevity is the soul of wit, just call me Corky.

Leave it to the internet meme guys to show my bombastic ass up. lulz.

In true American fashion, we’re exporting our aquatic animus to developing countries that need our moral guidance to advance to the next level of the XBox game called Democracy… Oh, and they need our moneys. Argentinians have been sending death threats to a psychic octopus in Germany.

Aside: When deciding to enroll in a Masters program in Creative Writing, I specifically wrote on the application that I

Pictured: As convincing a psychic as any I've ever seen.

did not want to have to study Milton, nor did I, under any circumstance, ever want to have to write the exact sentence I just wrote. Needless to say, The Reason for Church-Government Urged Against Prelaty was a laugh riot page-turner.

Moving on: The alarmingly superstitious Argentinians – it’s bad enough we believe in psychics in this country, let alone animal ones (imagine the reality teevee potential, though!) – don’t want to savagely murder the embattled cephalopod clairvoyant for the sake of God’s righteousness like good Americans would, but that’s never stopped us before. I mean, the Jews want to rebuild Solomon’s Temple because they believe it will usher in a new era of prosperity for their people, right? And America’s Christian leaders want the Temple rebuilt so that the world will end, their misuse of the planet’s resources will be justified, and Jesus, Charlton Heston, and Sarah Palin can finally separate the Democrats into “the damned” and “personal sex slaves (the more damned)”. Despite our differing motivations, we seem to be working well together, so why not Argentina?

Paul, the oracle octopus whose prescient premonitions perfectly predicted the outcome of all six German World Cup games, first generated anger from Argentinian fans who believe his percipient pick doomed Argentina in the quarterfinals. (HuffPost)

Ah. Soccer. You’re on your own there, filthy savages.

By Sean “I Care About Facts” Torrie

(Nail on the head, good sir! And with all the cultural sensitivity of mercilessly tickling a child of Thalidomide.)

I love the Tea Party Movement. I really do, I mean that. I’m a huge fan of a free show; this is why I go to the mall after I’m done with all my Christmas shopping, just to watch other people look insane. I feel like the Tea Baggers have all the potential to pull the severely retarded members of the Republican party out and into a third team and maybe we’ll have at least one political party that can function without a complete and undisputed majority, or without referring to their dark master for instructions on how to further deplete the United States of post-Enlightenment thought.

What I really enjoy is the complete lack of research with these folks. Are there any economists in this team? Is there a single lawyer who hasn’t been disbarred?

“Oh Sean, you’ve just been reading the wrong sources, you’ve been corrupted by your generation’s hard-on for ‘hope,’ and ‘yes you can’.”

No. But fuck you very much for judging me. I voted for Nader. I did it with a smile on my face because this Obama guy seemed too idealistic, and McCain TOTALLY SOLD OUT TO PANDER TO THE FAR RIGHT REPUBLICANS. I dug McCain as a presidential candidate, until he became a presidential candidate.

I’d have also loved to see a New Yorker in the White House, but Giuliani is a whore.

I’ve digressed.

Do you know what happens with the ginormous bank that you borrowed money from becomes bankrupt and has to close down? The answer isn’t that you get to own your partially paid for house. I’m not even sorry, you’re a nitwit if that was your answer. Your house gets sold and you get much, much less than a fair notice of eviction. Odds are good your house will be purchased by a less ass-backwards corporation who will know to demand a higher credit rating than the bank did, and either way you’re homeless. Then the government can pay for the construction of a few million shelters. We saw how well they did with that task in Louisiana a few years ago. [All dirtying up the Superdome with the filthy riff-raff and assorted hoipoloi - ed.]

I think it is pretty fair to say that the bank bailout was with a great deal of the “representation of the people” that the Tea Party claims a lack of. If your concern with this is a fear of socialism then you have a series of other concerns to address: like the fact we’ve been a socialist republic since the ’30s, or that while socialism is communism’s cousin, it’s communism’s cousin that got a degree in stable economics, not totalitarian politics.

“But Sean, the Nazis were socialist, that makes it bad, right?”

Ok. This is important, kids, and I think it is something everyone should know: under the correct temporal circumstances, everybody is Hitler.  I’ll shorten Godwin’s Law for you: The first person to bring a comparison to Nazis into an argument loses. It’s a god damned cop-out. You’re not thinking creatively enough to be winning an argument and have not only lost that argument, but for the sake of argument, all of your friends and loved ones because they don’t respect you anymore.

Lemme tell you about Nazis for a minute here. The fun things. Nazis had one of the strongest nationwide anti-smoking campaigns in history. That’s right, they were militantly against smoking cigarettes. Hitler was a vegetarian. He didn’t eat meat because he felt it was cruel. Hitler was also militantly loyal to his girlfriend. They got married like 2 days before his documented suicide. Never cheated on her. Ever. Period.

To be fair, his hobby of making adorable striped pajamas for mice didn't leave much time for browsing JDate.

Now, I don’t know about you, but if you wanna worry about Nazis, then I’d be far, far more concerned about a pair of unmarried heterosexual life-partners who shop at Wholefoods, than a blink-of-the-eye decision to save a few million homes by throwing money at a failing bank, in order to protect the people of a nation. Frankly, people who shop at Wholefoods kinda make me uncomfortable anyway. Stop taking Eastern thought and forcing it down my throat with your Western approach of indoctrinating everyone around you.

This, however, again brings me all the way back to the point I was working to.

I’m a New Yorker. I’m amazingly proud of it. We are an aggressive, mean spirited, and cutthroat people who live (in the metropolitan area, anyway) in one of the wealthiest, most intelligent (average IQ here is the second highest in the world – and I hear living in Tokyo is hell) places on earth. Despite this, our local economy is in the gutter and now we’re taxing the living hell out of cigarettes, with a 20% increase that rolled around on July that will be impacting the entire state (not just the civilized part) and there’s word that Nassau county will be pushing another raise shortly, and further word that there’ll be a beer tax soon. Happy 4th of July: it’s $14 a pack in Manhattan if you wanna celebrate liberty in flavor country.

Now in one of the wealthiest states in the union, certainly we’re the only one with our own central bank, I find it impossible that it is a lack of proper funds responsible as much as an overt mismanagement of finance, and a nurturing attention to pork fat spending. So that, let us just assume, it isn’t so much that we don’t have enough money to run the county, as much as  the elected officials need to eat vegetarian meals with their long-term monogamous sexual counterparts, and not smoke cigarettes after sex, only to later ensure the county pays for the new story on their home, and corporations can jump through a tax loophole and not distribute their wealth. This, my dear readers, is some overt taxation without representation. Meanwhile there was a near-miss vote to close a school in the local district? Call me silly, but education seems kinda important to me. Undereducated people is how you get a standard for education lowered in a region: poorer performance becomes acceptable in colleges, and dumber (or socially ignorant, and therefore morally complacent) people getting business degrees, running the economy into the ground and causing a need for a bailout.

BA-ZING!!! How does he do it?

Now I get that the whole Tea Party thing is a primarily Midwestern thing and all, so would someone mind if I borrowed a small army of unemployment-beneficiary rednecks that are anti-socialism so that I can host either a protest or riot (whatever happens, right?) to get my cigars (sorry, if I’m putting a phallus in my mouth, lighting it on fire and nurturingly puffing on it, it’s gonna be HUGE) back down to a reasonable price? New York’s governor is black and blind too! So that should be all the motivation they need to really get going.

Hey, Dale. Where you going with that – - Oh, shit. Okay, you talk…

The only thing better than a candidate holding a rifle in his campaign ad is one that can’t commit to a single target. “Thugs and criminals” conveniently blanket Dale Peterson’s Republican opponent in the primary, the undocumented darkies that… do something implicit but surely horrible to horses, and Facebook. Dale Peterson wants you to know what is on the line here: unemployment, yard signs, dummies, family farms (I smell a down home Lifetime Original!)… Oh, yeah, and the five billion smackeroos you’d be handing him. Wait, are you a political candidate or a really honest old west bank robber? Just take the money, hoss, we don’t want any trouble in these parts.

The sheer volume of 12 gallon hats 5-kajil can buy notwithstanding, Dale Peterson will use that gun. He’d like Alabamans to know he has been a farmer, a businessman, a cop, a marine during vietnam, and not a dummy. He totally forgot “prolific and enthusiastic collector of white fences.” Still, he’s had more jobs that require him to shoot shit than grow shit, and he’s got his finger superglued inside that trigger guard. It’s only a matter of time before somebody loses an eye… or an opponent in the primary. This is how the founding fathers would have wanted it, I suppose. An intense fucking shootout, with plaid shirts and jodhpurs being blown right off of dudes, all to decide who gets to inseminate the cows. You can say a buncha fancy words ’bout constichents and who’s more American, but who’s going to argue with the man with the biggest penis substitute gun? Frankly, we don’t see enough of this in politics. I like a candidate who is willing to cap a bitch to be something as mundane as President of All The Farms In Alabama.

OR: Gorta Mor o’ Them Pancakes… (I’m incorrigible)

(From the handbook of this guy’s little toy: “Sure’n if it’s not to be used while inebriated, or to fahrther stereotoipes, or against people trying to offer you free fekkin’ pancakes.” What you don’t know is, he’s 0 for 3.)

I don’t know how I missed this, but last month, Denny’s went all anti-Irish. I mean, with all the green blood shouldering laboriously past corned beef and congealed car bombs caked in my veins, you’d think I’d notice when an ad runs that totally makes light of the most horrific tragedy my mick ancestry can trace. Irish all over the world are shittin’ kittens over this promotion and its accompanying ad, and there’s this Facebook boycott group you should totally join if a big chunk of your happiness stock is tied up in getting pissed off (i.e. if you’re Irish). Well shit, let’s boycott the whole restaurant chain, right? The ad is entirely unavailable on the internets, which is ridiculous because offensive shit is like 70% why I pay my internet bill. But it must have been pretty awful to stir up all this IRA level rancor right?

The ad, which ran in late February and has since disappeared online, touted unlimited pancakes and fries to customers in celebration of the Potato Famine’’s end… “They were poking fun at a tragedy that took millions of lives,” says Sarah Conaghan, who administers the Facebook page. (Asylum)

Well, cancel their float in the parade. How dare they mark the end of a nation’s suffering in a time of famine and tyranny by celebrating the fact that neither exist today? “Hey, the British aren’t mismanaging THIS restaurant, and we have this Idaho thing, POTATOES FOR EVERYBODY!” That’s like celebrating the end of the Holocaust by not putting people in concentration camps anymore. Come on Denny’s, you think two million Irish immigrated to a one mile square plot in the south of Boston just to have it rubbed in their faces that their Shepherd’s Pies will never have to go bald again? Way to remind them of their lack of suffering, you insensitive pricks. The tenor on Facebook reflects this:

How dare they take a tragety and try to make a profit. Filthy oppertunists… I cannot believe that they would do that! How dare they! Not funny!

That’s absolutely right. I mean, look at Guinness. St. Patrick’s Day is a day to celebrate the exiling of all snakes from Ireland and the loss of all logic, reason, and prepubescent innocence on the island. You don’t see Guinness profiteering at five to nine bucks a pint on it. Those bastard snakes were drinking all of our whiskey and green beer, which is why we have to compensate once a year now! And you know Sara Lee donates all their profits from their July spike in apple pie sales directly to the  Rockets Red Glare charity, and that’s why nobody is yelling ineffectually at Facebook about them.

Do you people even know what Valentine’s Day is?

Protesting Denny's: A completely reasonable use of your time.

Little known fact: The Potato Famine happened to the Scottish (and to a lesser extent the entirety of Europe) too. You don’t see a bunch of Scots bitching about it. They learned to eat the gross parts of their animals and fix the USS Enterprise. Fuck, the Scottish are so cheap they’d eat free pancakes off of their dead mother’s back. Seriously, when was the last time you saw a son of Erin in Starfleet (I swear to god, nerds, don’t). The Scots didn’t just lay down to die, or bail en masse like chicks from an Opeth concert for the land of milk and Springsteen. They put on utilikilts and invented Belle & Sebastian. That’s balls.

An interesting part of this spirited and intelligent debate is what all these ripshit Irish are attaching to the end of their complaints. It’s all somewhere along the line of: “Their food is inedible anyway,” or “Denny’s sucks, and not fit for dogs.” Ok, first of all, that’s bullshit, and you know it. Denny’s is delicious and a half, and cheap. Maybe we should start a Facebook group protesting the unnatural and insensitive prejudice against Denny’s. How do you think they feel? The only people that visit them are old people at 3 pm and stoners at 2 am, and high school kids that like to sit for hours on end, chain smoking and researching the absolute limit of free coffee refills.

Second of all, fine. You asked for it, Boondock Ijits. From now on, not only will Denny’s not offer free potatoes and pancakes in celebration of your lack of suffering, harps will be given no potatoes at all. Is that what you wanted? Their hash browns are fucking delicious, and you’ll have none. There is now a 21st Century potato famine in all franchises of the great American institution of breakfast anytime. For, let’s say, about 7 years. Or until you get your shit together, and get angry at the British and fags like we trained you to do.

(One day you’re going to grow up with an inflated sense of importance, and nobody is going to like you. Yes you are, yes you are!)

Don’t do it, Fisher Price. Belgian college retards have developed a toy for babies that tweets for the kid. The creatively named Twoddler (man, that prefix has stayed fresh in the box, huh?) is an activity center like the child of any less pretentious parents would have, complete with flashing lights, buttons, and dials. Only whenever the kid touches it, it sends out a message to Twitter on its own personal account. Phenominal.

The promo page for this bad boy should be warning enough. “I am a toddler and want my mommy and daddy to know how I am doing while in nursery.” Groan! Assigning dialogue to your child is assinine as hell. I would seriously rather someone wave their cat in front of my face saying, “My owner and your girlfriend have noticed you kicking me around the yard and feeding me small doses of poison. Why won’t you wuv me?”

What the hell, continue anyway, University of Hasselt’s web page. “[My parents] are so busy, but are thinking of me all the time. I want to let them know I am also thinking about them. I can’t phone them, I can’t mail them and I can’t write letters, but I CAN twitter! They love to feel my presence and know that I am active.” Ah, perhaps this baby is making a better point than most of my adult aquaintances are capable of. Keeping the parents informed while their kids are at day care is probably an attractive option. But, I think what we have here is a case of over-estimation of the beast known as the American Mother, the mythological creation of annoyance that will tell you about her spawn’s every move as if it were your idea to make the little shit. 

Here’s a new book idea for you Laura Joffe Numeroff (Jesus, your name is a children’s book on its own): If You Give a Kid a Twitter. I’ll start it out for you. “If you give a kid a Twitter, his mother is going to want her friends to follow it. If her friends don’t follow it, that will be OK, because she’ll post the kid’s activities on Facebook anyway. If she posts it on Facebook, she’s going to expect some cooing. If she doesn’t get the appropriate level of cooing, she’ll wonder why her child isn’t special. If she wonders why her child isn’t special, she’ll begin to question her genetics. If she begins to question her genetics, she’ll get in a fight with her mother, and have to go to therapy. If she goes to therapy, she’ll find out the problem is really her expecting anyone to give a shit about a drooling midget pants-shitting human being without the ability to talk, and probably take her own life. If she takes her own life, the kid will probably ask for another mother…” Oh, wait I finished it.

What we don’t need is another way for mothers to clutter the internet with crap about their kids. The more people pimp out the uniqueness of their children, the more they develop a sense of self worth they didn’t earn with accomplishments, which is why we have more lazy, greedy children than we ever have. We already have Barney the Liar Dinosaur drilling into their heads that they’re special, that EVERYONE IS SPECIAL, which is straight up not true. Look at the people surrounding you: do most of them look special? Most of them didn’t even have a chance. So keep that filth in Belgium, where mothers probably have the capacity for abstract thought and a sense of propriety. How about, in America, let’s give the baby something it can actually use: Mustache Cookies! Kids like cookies, right,  and they’re tasty (unless you don’t want them to be, that would be hilarious too)? Your kid can be pretending to be Snidely Whiplash or a 70s porn star in no time, all while enjoying a snack! Also, your friends will want to hear about it, because that means there’s cookies at your house. Teach the kid to say, “I’m Tom Selleck, bitch!” and we’ll even consider coming to its birthday party.

This has been all over the damned place today, trending on Twitter, on Radio Exile (probably the best music blog on the ‘net), and your facebook news feed. It really is spectacular, a true return to showman form for the Muppets, the pinacle of showbusiness excellence for decades, so why no Scumbag Style as well. It’s also a decent justification for YouTube upgrading to 1080p. I dig how Pepe the King Prawn and the Swedish Chef have pivotal roles, and the ending scene is pretty funny.

What I don’t understand is the franchise’s continual reliance on Miss Piggy. Drop it, dude, she’s not funny. I’d like to see Kermit nailing Janice, the guitarist from Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. It would probably piss Floyd Pepper off, if he’s not too drugged out to notice, but he should have expected it. I mean, she’s always talking about walking around naked and doing nude photo shoots. Not to mention she went through, like, half of the band. Get that rash checked out, Zoot. That sore ain’t from playing sax. Those hippy chicks are all just whores anyway.

Though you wouldn’t know it from today’s fervor, the Muppet ‘net phenominon is not new. Meticulously outlined by Worlds As Myth, a blog that puts way more work into this stuff than my lazy ass cares to, the Muppets have continued the tradition of education and comedy their late founder imagined for them, in the digital age.