Inside this chest beats a plastic heart

• Sound advice: “Do Not Call 9-1-1 When Subway Puts the Wrong Sauce on Your Flatizza.” Also via The Consumerist’s Subway beat: “Police are looking for a man who removed a toilet from a West Seattle Subway restaurant Sunday night. …” Yep, he made like Hemingway at Sloppy Joe’s and stole the toilet. Stifling urge to make a Taco Bell joke here.

• Fox News fabulist Todd Starnes doesn’t have his own direct-mail fundraising organization, so he has to monetize the scary stories he invents the old-fashioned way — by selling books. Alvin McEwen takes a look at Starnes’ book and isn’t impressed. Here’s a choice taste of Starnes’ handiwork:

I grew up in a much simpler time — when blackberry was a pie and dirty dancing meant somebody forgot to clean out the barn for the square dance. It was a time when father still knew best — when the girls were girls and the men were men.

Ignore the flubbed Dirty Dancing record (that 27-year old pop-culture reference is to a movie set in the very same “simpler times” for which Starnes is pretending to be nostalgic). That last bit is another piece of evidence that Starnes really is a grifter and not a true believer in the garbage he’s selling.

Yeah, we could analyze the stunted sexist ideology of “girls” and “men,” but that would miss the more obvious point: Starnes is quoting the theme song from All in the Family. He’s just trolling. That line is a knowing wink at the camera, an acknowledgement that he’s selling the rubes a rewarmed version of a satire of their Fox-addled views, and that he’s convinced that they won’t know the difference.

Starnes is peddling “simpler times” to people he regards as simpletons. It’s a money-making strategy, and as such it will probably “work.” Starnes’ con game doth profit a man, and it will gain him the world. It may suffer him a loss of something else, but he seems OK with that.

• I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record.

• We need a Dignitatis Humanae for white evangelicalism. Prior to Vatican II the Roman Catholic church endorsed secular government to ensure religious liberty wherever Catholics were in the minority, but embraced a “Spanish model” of established, official religion wherever they were in the majority.

Here’s a Christianity Today post commending the Indian Christian Secular Party, a new party formed and led by Christian Dalits (the designation for those of the “untouchable” lower caste). White evangelicals in America seem able to recognize that a wall of separation between religion and state is necessary and good for the Christian minority in India. It’d be nice if they recognized the same thing for the Christian majority in Indiana.

• In their defense, the Republican Party here in Pennsylvania has talked about removing white supremacist Steve Smith from his post on a GOP county committee. They’ve been talking about that ever since he elected himself to the post two years ago by writing in his own name and winning the local vote 1-0. But two years later, there’s still an open, determined white supremacist serving as an officer on a Republican county committee here in Pennsylvania.

• So, do we think that NBC can be trusted to adapt Hellblazer for the small screen?

If done well, this could be fun. If done poorly, then at least we can look forward to Sam and Dean making fun of this on Supernatural.