Friday salmagundi

• It’s not a good sign if your church has a high-priced corporate fixer PR guy on staff. It’s also not a good sign if that high-priced corporate fixer PR guy is pretentious enough to quote Shakespeare without understanding that maybe Polonius isn’t meant to be a trustworthy source of wisdom.

• Speaking of over-rated PR spinmeisters, I’m sure that former Bush White House spokesman Ari Fleischer doesn’t really believe that Nazi Germany “followed the law of war.” I’m sure that if you were talking to him in some abstract, contextless setting far-removed from the partisan spin that has been his career, he would likely agree that the Nazis were war criminals and that Nuremberg wasn’t wrong to find them guilty of war crimes.

It’s just that once you have — like Fleischer — committed yourself to contradicting President Obama about absolutely everything, then you’re bound to wind up uttering some wildly monstrous, foolish lies, like saying that Nazi Germany “followed the law of war.”

• The first Roger Ebert Film Festival since the beloved critic’s passing was a solemn, somber affair — with Ebert’s wife, Chaz, joined by Academy-Award winner Tilda Swinton for a moving musical tribute. I would like for this to happen at my funeral too. (via)

• Televangelist Matthew Hagee finally comes out publicly … against gay people coming out publicly. I’d always suspected that the younger Hagee was secretly pro-closet. It was brave of him to say so on television.

• I think Stephen Fry would be very pleased with this comparison. And now I’d kind of like to see him cast in a revival of 1776.

• And while we’re at John Fea’s blog … he asks, “Should the Democratic Party Dump Andrew Jackson?”

Yes. Yes they should. They should have a long time ago. Let the Republicans have him — make him the player to be named later in the same deal in which they claimed Andrew Johnson off of waivers.

And while we’re at it, let’s get him off the $20 bill, too. Replace him with Harriet Tubman. (Because can you come up with someone more deserving or more all-around awesome than Harriet Tubman? No. No you cannot.)

• The government is over-paying its government football coaches. After all, more than half the football coaches on the government payroll are losing more than half of their games. And half of all coaches are below average.

• Lying to school administrators about illegally bringing guns to school property? This kid sounds like Liberty University material! Give him a scholarship!

• Republicans are hoping that lying about Planned Parenthood won’t backfire disastrously like it did in the last election cycle.

• White evangelicals are hoping that lying about Planned Parenthood won’t continue to erode their souls and shrivel their hearts the way this habitual bearing of false witness has for the past three decades. (I’m very serious about the soul-eroding, heart-shriveling effect of this. Lying about “bad people” is really, really dangerous for one’s spiritual health.)

• If you don’t believe in democracy and voting, then the Benton County, Arkansas, Republican Party may be for you: “The 2nd amendment means nothing unless those in power believe you would have no problem simply walking up and shooting them if they got too far out of line and stopped responding as representatives.”

Don’t vote, shoot. Bullets, not ballots. You’ve gotta love it when the GOP and the NRA are quoting Chairman Mao.

• Arizona AG Tom Horne should resign, then run for mayor of Toronto.

Why is a minor traffic accident interesting? As it turns out, when Arizona’s attorney general hit another car and drove away without leaving a note, he very likely would have gotten away with it, except, unbeknownst to him, Horne was being followed by FBI agents who saw the incident and reported what happened.

And why were FBI agents following the state attorney general? Because federal law enforcement suspects [Tom] Horne may be guilty of breaking federal campaign finance laws, illegally coordinating with an outside political group.

What’s more, making this just a little more entertaining, the Arizona Republican drove away after hitting that other car in part because his passenger is one of his subordinates, with whom Horne has had an extra-marital affair.

Incidentally, Horne, ostensibly Arizona’s top law-enforcement official, initially lied about hitting the other car and declined to cooperate in the police investigation.

On the bright side for Horne: It seems he was sober at the time of the accident.