Way back in 2005, when the liberal media would have had you believe that everything was economically hunky-dory, a fifth of Americans couldn't even pay for their basic needs like food, clothing, shelter, and "sizzlin'" fajita platters. But all you heard about in the news was "Alan Greenspan is so sexy" and "Let's invest in private equity" and "How to make money from dead Iraqis."

So what changed? Very little materially, since all the "wealth" of 2005 turns out to have been imaginary. Since this recession hit, our nation is buckling down and concentrating on what's really important: our spiritual needs. For those of the Christian faith, that means taking time to celebrate things like being with your family and fighting relentless culture wars against gays and women. And unions! Christians are now vociferously against unions, too! Jesus was not in the Gay Abortion Union.

Should America be?

It's a question each citizen must answer for himself here in America, a nation of God. We're not a land like North Korea, where our own heathen diplomats smuggle cigarettes from abroad in a desperate bid to raise enough money in the black market to avoid eating grass soup for yet another month. We're better than that. American may have given up on building their dream home, but we haven't given up on something far more significant: J.M. Smucker Co. The latest profits are through the fucking roof.

We Americans just cannot get enough of that good Folgers coffee, Jif peanut butter, and Smucker jelly. It is peanut butter jelly time. In America. Now. And forever.
[Pic via]

Dour Scottish Bible-readers have come up with some placards that they waved outside the theater on opening night in Glasgow yesterday, according to the BBC. They include: "Jesus, King of Kings, Not Queen of Heaven," and "God: My Son Is Not A Pervert." Seriously. They're actually funny if you yell them in a ridiculous Scottish accent.

The play, part of a festival in Glasgow called 'Glasgay!', was written by transsexual playwright Jo Clifford. The producer, Steven Thomson, said "Jesus Queen of Heaven is a literary work of fiction exploring the artists own personal journey of faith as a transgendered person."

"If Glasgow's council taxpayers were consulted, I doubt they would consider this was a good use of their money," responded a spokesman for the Christian Institute.

But it's fine because everyone is forgiven and happy! A blurb on the play's website reads: "And she does not condemn the gays or the queers or the trans women or the trans men, and no, not the straight women nor the straight men neither. Because she is the Daughter of God, most certainly, and almost as certainly the son also. And Gods child condemns nobody. She can only love…" Although apparently she can't punctuate, because 'God's' certainly takes a possessive.

No, seriously: this guy Chuck Ripka of Otsego, Minnesota was once in the news for advocating prayer in the workplace. He wrote a book about how God told him to open his bank, and that God would "take care of the bottom line." The above picture was placed prominently in their offices. And yesterday, Ripka's bank was shut down by the Minnesota Department of Commerce regulators after screwing themselves via mass real-estate lending. It's been bought out by another bank already. This was sometime after a gas leak killed three bank workers in one of Ripka's offices a few years back. Lesson learned: if Jesus saves, he doesn't do it in Minnesota. Or he won't be doing it anymore. Meanwhile, watch Ripka in action below, and decide exactly how godless you prefer your finance professionals to be next time.

The WSJ says that terrified religious types across the nation have given in to fear of the Satanic disease and are dispensing with the use of common communion cups. That's just what the pig flu wants you to do, people!

At a United Church of Christ congregation in the suburbs of Chicago, Communion servers now slice up bread into bite-sized bits before distributing Communion; they no longer offer congregants a loaf from which to tear a hunk of bread. In the interest of keeping fingers away from communion wine, communicants at All Saints' Chapel in Sewanee, Tenn., are now instructed not to dip their Eucharistic bread into the cup but rather to sip the cup directly, since hands are often more infectious than mouths.

Christ himself further suggests that "Maybe you guys can just gaze upon me from afar" until flu season is over.
[Pic via]

Crain is rolling the quarterly Creativity magazine into Ad Age. The Great Magazine Die-Off continues.


A high school newspaper scandal! That is always MONEY. A high school paper in the OC was totally censored by school administrators because it got a front-page scoop that the company the school hired to run its cafeteria is "a Christian company whose "mission" is to "serve God."" Outrageous! And the school was so skeered they pulled the paper! Good job young reporters. Expose these unscientific cockroaches wherever they may hide, especially within your cafeteria. We mean that.


A new study reports that America's best medical journals are plagued by "ghostwriting" from unaccredited contributors to medical studies. Yea, well. As long as they're not plagued by "making up science things."


Charles Pelton, the Washington Post marketing guy who came up with those brilliant paid advertiser-editorial "salons" that made the paper weep with embarrassment, has resigned from the WP because of some lie about his family and business or whatever.

Beausejour was on top of the corporate ad world, but left P&G in 2000 and joined the seminary. Crazy! But all the porn and the strip clubs and the hookers were eating away at his very soul. Here, he describes his defining spiritual moment, at a retreat in the mountains north of Hong Kong:

Every man who spoke had experienced an encounter with Jesus. I had been in church most of my life, but I never heard anyone talk about Jesus from personal experience like these guys. It was like the difference between talking to someone who knows Mel Gibson and someone who has only seen him in a movie.

You can read Beausejour's entire inspirational confessional here, but that 'Mel Gibson' bit is really the best part. Except for when he says "Once we found a strong church, I found a men's group. These guys rubbed off on me."
Sorry.
[via Ad Age/ BNet]

Prior to giving a speech yesterday to the Chamber of Commerce in Fernley, Nevada, Ensign explained to a reporter how his affair with the wife of his friend/longtime staff member, who also happened to work for him, was so very different from Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky.

I haven't done anything legally wrong...President Clinton stood right before the American people and he lied to the American people...You remember that famous day he lied to the American people, plus the fact I thought he committed perjury. That's why I voted for the articles of impeachment.

Now, technically Ensign has a point, but just because his affair broke no laws — that we're aware of at this point anyway — doesn't mean that his isn't the more repugnant of the two situations. After all, Bill Clinton wasn't living in a temple owned by a mafia-inspired Jesus cult when he was getting sucked off by Lewinski, was he? But then again, in Ensign's mind, him sticking his pee-pee inside of his staffer's vagina was entirely the will of Jesus Christ, and if Jesus wants you to fuck somebody, well, you kinda just have to.

Kansas City's alt-weekly The Pitch has the scans, and points out that depicting Muhammad is something of a no-no in certain parts of the Islamic world, especially when he's clearly depicted as subordinate to some guy in a blazer. Shouldn't Scientologists know better than anyone what can happen when you screw around with violent, angry, religious zealots who brook no dissent and will stop at nothing to defend their twisted authoritarian cult?

• Sherri Shepherd says she's been trying to help Andy Dick turn his life around by leading him to God. She says that he'd call her in the middle of the night seeking guidance and she even brought Dick to the Pentecostal church she attends but he wound up hitting on everyone there, including the pastor's wife. [Gatecrasher]
  
  
• Heidi Montag claims that her little boy-goblin husband delivers 20-30 orgasms per day for her. Imagine how much she'd get off if she were actually boning a real man on the regular! [Page Six]
  
  
• Kim Kardashian's mouth may actually be bigger than her ass! Apparently, little sister Kourtney was trying to keep the name of the guy who knocked her up a secret to create drama on her new reality show, but Kim went and blabbered all over the damn place and screwed it all up. [Page Six]
  
  
• Is George Clooney gay? That's been the dirty little rumor for some time now, and now Brad Pitt is doing his best to fan the rumor flames, just as any good pal should. [Sun]
  
  
• Why don't the single ladies want to bone Nick Lachey? He reportedly went out to Avenue the other night and got a table and tried to get ladies to come over and hang with him, but he wound up having a party of one for most of the night. [Page Six]
  
  
• Somebody hired Lindsay Lohan! She's filming a movie right now in Texas titled, Machete. Sounds like a masterpiece, no? [Sun]
  
  
• Kanye West's girlfriend Amber Rose says that Kanye was undeterred by her past as a bi-sexual stripper when they started dating. Well, duh! [Mirror]
  
  
• Mischa Barton has one of the weirdest bodies ever! One day she'll look really slim and pretty in a photo and the next she'll be bloated and now she's riddled with cellulite in her legs. [Daily Mail]
  
  
• Vincent Kartheiser, the guy who plays Pete Campbell on Mad Men, says that this season of the show will be especially brilliant and uses the word "asshole" a lot when talking about his character. [Starpulse]
  
  
• Good God Victoria Beckham looks like a monster in these photographs of her heading into work as a judge on American Idol. [Daily Mail]

Did you know that Amish people were allowed to work in RV factories? Apparently the Amish are a bit more *permissive* than you thought, if you know what we're saying. Anyhow, god has conspired with the economy to solve this problem by seeing to it that Mr. Freeman Wingard, Amishman, was laid off from his RV-making gig, forcing him to start selling jellies and jams and quilts like a good Amishman should, not some damn modern contraption designed to take people to and fro but not closer to god.

In this way we see that—at least for one of the largest Amish communities in Indiana—the recession has an upside. And for fans of jelly, as well! But there is indeed a darker side to that shining Jesus no-money cloud: and, as always, chicken plant workers are the ones to suffer. Pilgrim's Pride wants to close its Douglas, GA chicken plant. The city wants them to sell it off and save the jobs. Things happen, back and forth, and at one point the company CEO writes an official email including the sentence "we need to remove chicken from the market," which is just a great collection of words.

Also hurt: the chickens.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Most depressing of all: "A new study out Monday by the American Institute of Architects shows that Americans have fallen out of love with McMansions." People want smaller houses. Great, just great. You've given up, America. You're letting down the Amish dude who needs to sell more RV's so he can stop getting up at 3:30 a.m. to put jelly in a fucking jar. You're letting down the chicken plucker who needs to sell more chicken so he or she can continue to live in Douglas, GA, and not be forced to move to an even cheaper, shittier small town, wherever that may be. And most of all, you're letting down yourselves. Don't you deserve a McMansion? One that you can buy with a cheap, no-ID loan, and pay back with home equity loans? I think you do. I think you do, America.

A Kentucky pastor is encouraging people to attend a service with guns in holsters, enter a raffle to win a free handgun, and be sermonized by operators of gun stores and firing ranges.

In what's being called an "Open Carry Church Service," Pastor Ken Pagano of New Bethel Church in Louisville (Yes this is actually happening in the state's most metropolitan city and not somewhere in Appalachia!) says that he's just trying to "think outside the box" to grow his flock.

The event, slated for late Saturday afternoon, June 27, is being promoted with online posters, including one using a red font resembling splattered blood with the words: "Open Carry Church Service."

Pagano said the poster wasn't intended to glorify bloodshed and that the lettering was just "a font that somebody developed." And he said he didn't want the event to be confused with regular Sunday worship at the Assemblies of God congregation.

"It's just a celebration we're doing to coincide with Fourth of July," he said. "There are people who own firearms and do so responsibly and enjoy them as a sport, maybe like golfing or bowling."

Win Underwood, one of the owners of Bluegrass Indoor Range, said he would try to attend the event if family responsibilities allow.

"I'm not aware that anybody's ever done anything like this before," he said.

New Bethel members regularly have outings at the firing rang, he said.

"You would be surprised how many churches use shooting for recreation with fellowship," he said.

Underwood said he's a religious person himself and believes the First and Second amendments are closely tied in the nation's Revolutionary War history.

"Guns are the one thing that secured freedom of religion for our country," he said.

Dave Lowley, an elder at the church and a military veteran, supported the event as part of the congregation's efforts to conduct creative evangelistic outreaches.

"We're advocating gun safety and gun awareness," he said.

At the end of the piece, Pastor Pagano explained the Christian justification for all this.

"Not every branch of Christianity is pacifistic," he said. If someone is "not against the First and Second amendments, I'll be glad to sit down with anybody to say, 'How can we do this better?'"

Jesus must be looking down on all of this beaming with pride right now. You just know if he were down here with us he'd be packing, and probably using his heat to murder OB/GYNs who perform abortions.

Valley Station Church to Hold Gun Service [Louisville Courier-Journal]
via The Sugar Sheet
Christ Kills Two, Injures Seven in Abortion Clinic Attack [The Onion]

On Monday evening, May 4, I went back to the Cox office to pack the rest of my boxes and clean out my cubicle. And there it was, on my desk, a coffee stain in the image of the Virgin Mary.I was a little surprised. Why me? I'm Jewish.

But his wife's uncle was a Catholic Bishop. This proves that Jesus hates blogs.
[Romenesko]

It's because all those cutbacks at Newsweek give Americans fewer chances to learn about The Historical Jesus.

Fargo is currently protected from the swelling Red River by dikes. These dikes are 42 feet high. Never in recorded history has the Red River topped 40.1 feet. But tomorrow, it's expected to exceed 42 feet, and stay that high for several days.

People have been desperately filling and placing sandbags for days. This morning, they worked in a windchill of four degrees below zero. This cold temperature causes sand to clump and makes the levees less effective. Already, one has sprung a leak. Outlying areas are already flooded. The old and infirm have been evacuated. Now, Fargo is just sitting and waiting for the river to crest the dikes, at which point the entire city of 90,000 people will be consumed by icy river water. For days.

This will also ruin America's largest spring wheat harvest.

If that is not the opposite of 'fun,' we don't know what is. [Pic: Getty]

Note that these segments always seem to come at the end of the broadcast, when people could use a reprieve from all the murder and house fires and terrible political machinations of the day. We need the Savior! And look how often we get Him (and sometimes her). Faith works, folks.

[via Everything Is Terrible]

The new details from the SEC focus not only on top boss "Sir Allen" Stanford, but his top lieutenants, James Davis, and the firm's chief investment officer, Laura Pendergest-Holt. They seemed so wholesome! They both came up from small-town Mississippi, they worked in Memphis, and they loved Jesus:

Mr. Davis projected a wholesome image, drinking protein shakes and regularly working out in the gym or jogging, according to the former employee. Mr. Davis was also known as a deeply religious man, opening many Stanford Financial meetings with a prayer that Stanford executives would make the right investment decisions, according to another former financial adviser.

But you know what they loved more? Fraud, and lying about it to the SEC. When the chief investment officer got called in to tell the SEC about her company's "Tier III" holdings—which showcased the firm's worst financial irresponsibility, and which she had just been briefed on at work—she said, "If I knew anything about Tier III, I'd tell you ... God's honest truth."

This marks the first time religious people have lied. [NYT]