Derp Roundup: Your Weekly Dredge Of Drips, Dreck, And Drudge

 
 Welcome to another edition of Derp Roundup, the weekly feature where we bring you stories that didn't quite merit a post of their own, but that were too stupid to ignore altogether. As always, you may want to fortify yourself with whatever you believe necessary to get through the experience -- we suggest a couple of pan-galactic gargleblasters.

1. Our Top Derp this week goes to Matt Drudge, who back in January announced on the Twitters he was never ever ever going to comply with Obamacare, and then on Friday claimed that he had "just paid the Obamacare penalty," which he proudly calls a "LIBERTY TAX!" Nothing says "dedication to the basic principles of the Founding Fathers" like typing "liberty" in all caps, just like Jefferson and Madison always did. Of course, there are one or two problems with his story, the chief one being that the penalty for not having insurance won't actually be assessed until people file their 2014 returns next year. So Drudge is either a pathological liar (which is not outside the realm of possibility) or he estimated his 2014 income and paid the penalty a full year in advance for the sake of saying so on Twitter. He is so brave!

   Huffington Post did some math and some journalisming on all this, noting that

   For 2014, the minimum penalty for an individual is $95 or 1 percent of your taxable income minus the first $10,150, whichever is higher. The penalty is capped at $3,600 for a single person this year...

   And they also note that even if Drudge pays his estimated tax on a quarterly basis and added in a guesstimate of the penalty, the IRS hasn't even established a means of collecting the fines for taxpayers yet, since, again, the penalty won't be assessed until next year. In two later tweets -- both now deleted -- Drudge claimed that he had been forced to pay the penalty because of quarterly filings:

   Dazed team Obama media reporters think Opt-Out tax 'year away'? Not for small businesses that file Qtr estimates. We're there NOW, baby #pay

   Strange that he'd claim that he's being penalized for filing as a small business, since the penalty for businesses with under 100 employees was delayed until 2016. Are we supposed to believe Matt Drudge has over 100 employees? Or that he's filing quarterly as an individual and adding a penalty that the IRS is not yet set up to process? At most, Matt Drudge may be over-paying his taxes, but none of it is really going to pay his fakey LIBERTY TAX. The White House tweeted:  

   

   In any case, Dead Breitbart's Home For Dyspeptic Banshees has determined that all stories questioning Drudge are Liberal Lies.

   Maybe if Matty were to release copies of his taxes, that might settle it?

1. The smartasses at Deadspin noticed that CNN.com wrote the worst possible lede for a story on new crime scene photos of Kurt Cobain's suicide:

   "And I swear that I don't have a gun."

   — Kurt Cobain, "Come As You Are"

   Despite the pledge in those lyrics that went around the world in the early 1990s, police in Seattle say that Kurt Cobain did have at least one gun.

   CNN scrubbed that lede shortly afterward, but the smartasses at Deadspin decided they'd try to top it. We would be remiss if we didn't bring you a few of their attempts:

   • "Here we are now / Entertain us," Kurt Cobain once sang, but apparently we weren't entertaining enough, because he shot himself.

   • "I'm so happy / 'Cause today I found my friends / They're in my head," sang Kurt Cobain on "Lithium," possibly an ironic reference to the shotgun pellets that would later rip through his skull, ending his life.

   • "Load up on guns, bring your friends / It's fun to lose and to pretend," sang Kurt Cobain, who eventually did load up his gun, but there was nothing fun or pretend about what he did next.

   You get the idea. Obviously, this is a game that Wonketters are far too classy to indulge in, we bet!

1. On the missing Malaysian airliner story, we have two new super-S-M-R-T theories, If by "theory" you mean "dumbass guesses." Geraldo Rivera suggested that maybe the plane was hijacked and landed somewhere -- but not to turn it into a weapon or to fly anyplace else! No, in this scenario, "they" just wanted to "get to the secret passenger or the secret cargo,” and then just leave all the passengers sitting somewhere next to an empty plane and whatever landing strip was used, because there are a lot of places perfect for that, maybe. Rivera only thinks there's about a 5% chance of that guess being right, but we thank him for adding to the discourse.

   Also, wingnut columnist Erik Rush is now promoting a version of fellow wingnut Jim Garrow's crazyplane theory that Barack Obama ordered the CIA to remotely seize control of it, forcing it to land at the US base on Diego Garcia. Then a bunch of computer guys on the flight were tortured to extract their secrets, and then Obama just plain murdered everyone else aboard because he is a James Bond movie villain. Rush insisted that his information "has been confirmed at the highest levels of our government, though not the current one, if that’s cryptic enough for you.

   You know, the real government. The one that made Steve Guttenberg a star.

1. In Georgia -- the state, not the territory Obama allowed Russia to invade before he became president -- Mr. Darrious Mathis, a suspect in a sexual assault, claims that he can't be guilty of abducting a woman from a drugstore and raping her. His defense is that he's just so damned attractive that the woman willingly left the drugstore in the middle of the night to go have sex with him. (Just a reminder of the rules, kids: we don't wish prison rape on anyone here, not even on rapists.)

1. On a lighter note, rightwing talk show host Janet Mefferd, who previously has predicted that anyone who opposes The Gay Agenda will have to wear a yellow armband just like Jews in Nazi Germany, announced that she will be boycotting Honey Maid graham crackers because Nabisco made an ad with gay parents in it.

    
    She is so totally through, she says, with "the constant onslaught from the Gay Propaganda Machine,” which is apparently cramming gay s'mores down everyone's throats.

1. The Hypocrisy Hunters of Dead Breitbart's Refuge for the Easily Miffed caught out your alleged "president" in a complete betrayal of his populist rhetoric, as seen in the fact that Barack Obama's NCAA bracket "favors the one percenters of college basketball." Apparently since his picks include teams that have traditionally done well, he is totally racist against underdogs, because rankings are elitist anyway, ha-ha!

   It's a slur against equality for Albany and Florida to be labeled "16" and "1." Who is to say Florida is better than Albany or Albany better than Florida? Why not share the best Gators with the Great Danes to make it more of an equal playing field, eh, equal court?

   Conservative satire at its finest, folks. Oh, and also, just for good measure, please be outraged that "Pieces of Ukraine are falling apart and the health care plan's a mess. But we finally have a president who really knows basketball, and for the next three weeks that's all that matters."

   Yes, yes, Inpeach, etc. Is it just us, or does it feel like they aren't even trying to be outraged anymore?

1. Bill Donohue, the president and probably sole member of the Catholic League, had a great idea to troll this year's New York City LGBT Pride parade: He applied to march in the parade carrying a banner reading "Straight is Great.” And he was even accepted! But now he's decided that he cannot participate after all, because the perverts who run the parade wanted to force him to "attend gay training sessions." Parade organizers explained that what Donohue is actually boycotting is a safety orientation required for the heads of all groups participating in the parade. The organizers had initially welcomed Donohue's participation, saying

   “His group’s presence affirms the need for this year’s Pride theme, ‘We Have Won When We’re One.’ Straight is great -- as long as there’s no hate.”

   Donahue also claimed that the organizers were going to make him wear "LGBT paraphernalia," which we'll just assume was maybe a card identifying him as a registered participant. The organizers, speaking gay English, issued a gay denial and said they had not asked him to wear any particular outfit. And then they rolled their gay eyes and shook their gay heads.

1. And finally, something we meant to include in yesterday's story about Bill O'Reilly's claim that other cable networks are only covering the Malaysian airliner story because they're too afraid to "cover important stories like the IRS and Benghazi," but we were in a hurry and forgot (sometimes we just suck that way): Last week Fox contributor Lauren Ashburn acknowledged, on Fox's "Media Buzz" last Sunday, that while she works for Fox, when there's breaking news, she usually watches CNN, "because it is 24/7." No word on whether she remains a Fox contributor.

That is all the derp we have for you today. How on earth did we get through this without a single story about a Florida Man?

[ HuffPo / Breitbart / Deadspin / Mediaite / RightWingWatch / RawStory / RightWingWatch / Breitbart / RawStory / Mediaite ]

 Follow Doktor Zoom on Twitter. Incidentally, the Boise microbrewery in last week's roundup makes delicious beer. Yum.