UPDATE, 4:30 p.m.: We just finished an exclusive interview with Jones.
UPDATE, 2:30 p.m.: The Secret Service is investigating
Pastor Terry Jones' Dove World Outreach Center for hanging a dummy of President Barack Obama outside of its church.
"The Secret Service is aware of this incident and will conduct appropriate follow-up," said spokesman Brian Leary.
A spokeswoman for the church confirmed the effigy is real and passed on numerous news releases for Jones' newest movement, "Stand Up America," including one that bore the headline "Terry Jones on Obama -- Hang 'Em High."
It says Jones will be holding a news conference today to announce his candidacy for president and an included YouTube video includes Jones saying, "We have chosen to hang President Obama as a symbol of what America needs to do. We must remove him; we must vote him out of office."
A photograph sent to the Pulp shows the gallows in front of the church, though an Uncle Sam effigy is hanging, with the Obama dummy holding a gay pride flag next to it. A photograph from the Smoking Gun shows Obama hanging in a noose with Uncle Sam standing by.
"President Obama is killing our nation. We have hung Uncle Sam to represent that," Jones said, in a YouTube video posted Wednesday:
President Obama's policies on same-sex marriage, his policies on abortion, President Obama has no problem killing babies. He has no problem supporting radical Islam, he has no problem supporting and giving financial support to the Muslim Brotherhood...
It is time for the United States to stand up. It is why we have chosen the hanging of Uncle Sam to represent how Hussein Obama is destroying our nation. And that is why we have now chosen the hanging of Hussein Obama to represent how the American people must, in a peaceful way, stand up and reject President Obama, reject his anti-American policies. It's time for us to stand up.
It is time again for America to become America, for us to hold our government accountable, for us to resist, for us to send a very clear message to Washington, D.C. and President Obama... That is why we have chosen to hang President Obama as a symbol of what America needs to do. We must remove him, we must vote him out of office.
Original post, 1:25 p.m.:
Everybody's favorite Qur'an-burning Florida pastor has found a new way to bolster his hard-fought title of Biggest Asshole in the State: He's gone and hanged the president.
Apparently getting antsy from a lack of publicity about its crushing ignorance and stupidity, Pastor Terry Jones' Dove World Outreach Center now features a gallows with a Barack Obama dummy hanging above American and gay pride flags, according to the Smoking Gun.
Jones, along with his mustache and followers, was last in the news last March, when they set a kerosene-soaked Qur'an on fire during a church service after threatening to have a whole Qur'an-burning event in late 2010 that was canceled after the State Department asked Jones to please not cause an international incident by being such a monster idiot.
"At no time did we say we were anti-Muslim," Jones told the Pulp. "We tried to make it very clear that we were not against Muslims. We were aiming that action, which we said many times, towards the radical element of Islam... In that sense, we are not against Muslims."
(It must be in another sense, then, that Jones is hocking "Islam is of the devil" sportswear on his website.)
In any case, that ingenious message of moderation didn't make it to Afghanistan, where, after Jones' burning, a mob killed ten people.
And now he's directed his Jackass Diplomacy Tour a little closer to home.
