Now that Glenn Beck is perched over at The Blaze, we don't get to see much of his circus clown routine that he made famous on FOX.

Right Wing Watch:

It doesn't even seem possible, but every day Glenn Beck manages to go further and further off the deep end and there appears to be no end in sight. For example, last night he grew increasingly overwhelmed by his fear that "collectivism" is taking over this nation; so much so that he eventually ended up on his knees on the floor of his studio, providing imaginary medical aid with an American flag blanket to a mortally wounded Lady Liberty in a desperate attempt to save America ... before begging his viewers to remove their children from public schools because "they're indoctrination camps."

Glenn Beck's overwrought routine involved making believe the body of Lady Liberty is gurgling up blood. He then kneels on the floor, trying to stop the bleeding with the American flag. He tells us that in the movies when you see a body gurgling blood (he makes gurgling sounds), you know it's too late for them and they die.

Then he grows very calm and quiet as he tells his audience that he "doesn't know what to do" about the schools...

After you watch this clip , I'll bet you'll agree that the crazy only has grown stronger in his soul. He now believes he's under some spiritual attack, too. (Guess it hasn't occurred to him the source of his worry is within.)

That somehow morphed into a revelation by Beck that he and his inner circle have recently come under spiritual and physical attack by the forces of darkness, which made him realize that "we're not fighting man" and "that something is on the horizon."

"We are headed for a great depression," he went on to declare, "and we are headed for civil unrest, and we are headed for things that you never thought was possible in your country."

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If you thought the wingnuts in Arizona can't get any crazier, you were wrong. Check out this statement by Rep. Terri Proud (R-Tucson):

"Personally I'd like to make a law that mandates a woman watch an abortion being performed prior to having a "surgical procedure." If it's not a life it shouldn't matter, if it doesn't harm a woman then she shouldn't care, and don't we want more transparency and education in the medical profession anyway? We demand it everywhere else.

Until the dead child can tell me that she/he does not feel any pain - I have no intentions of clearing the conscience of the living - I will be voting YES."

But the War on Women is just an invention of the Democrats and the media to make conservatives look bad.

Proud should keep it up. With talk like this, she'll wind up with the Veep slot.

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While the Village press keeps presenting Willard as "the moderate" or "the technocrat" or the "sensible" Republican, the candidate himself is giving no indication he's anything of the sort. Check out this completely bizarre exchange in which a wingnut supporter asks Willard if he's going to "come and get my gun."

GUN NUT: There are over 9 million of us in that voting bloc and I just wondered what you're going to do, are you going to allow me to keep my gun, to protect myself and my family, in my home, and not come and get my gun. Because I want to keep it to protect myself and my wife and my family and against a tyrannical government, which I think we're approaching and we are in, very close.

ROMNEY: Thank you, thank you. I believe in the Second Amendment...

For Willard to stand there and thank this loon for saying that the federal government poses a physical threat to him and his family is truly appalling -- a dereliction of duty -- and should instantly disqualify him from the presidency. Seriously. The idea that you need to own a concealed weapon to fight off the FBI and ATF is beyond crazy -- it's black helicopter, Clinton-killed-Vince-Foster, McVeigh-Was-Right crazy.

At least when John McCain was confronted with similar ugliness, he responded appropriately.

Anyway, I hate to break it to this whackjob and thousands of other mouth-breathers just like him, but if the "tyrannical gubmint" -- which has a bunch of missiles, tanks and gunships lying around -- actually decides to take his gun, his cute little concealed hand gun isn't going to be much help.

Moran.

(h/t David)

RedState, home of CNN's Erick Erickson, front-paged this masterpiece of wingnuttery on Monday about Rick Santorum which begins,

Left-leaning elitist pundits are scratching their heads. After two weeks of liberals trying to convince women that Rick Santorum wants to rip the birth control out of their hands and put them in the kitchen, more and more women are supporting Rick Santorum. “How could this be?” they ask. Answer: We are smarter than you think.

If by "women" this blogger means "Republican women not in Arizona" -- and if by "more and more" she means "some" -- then yes, this statement is technically correct.

But just what is a "Femi-regular" you ask?

Let me offer a little primer on American women to the liberal elitist folks who spend too much time in New York and Washington DC and not enough time where Femi-regulars live. “Femi-regulars” is a term I coined during the 2008 election when leftists just couldn’t grasp the appeal of gun-toting Sarah Palin. Palin, I explained, like most women, was a femi-regular, not a femi-nazi (a tag coined by Rush Limbaugh to label rabid, man- hating feminists).

It's never a good sign when you have to explain your neologism. But this blogger isn't referring to the same Sarah Palin who is one of the most reviled figures in American politics, is she? Because Palin's "appeal" seems difficult for the entire country to grasp, not just New York liberals.

Most women are femi-regulars. They are strong women who are too busy accomplishing important things to worry about the divide and conquer strategies of leftists. They are more interested in voting for principled, honest, strong, America-loving folks who will stand up to evil, advance liberty and let our free enterprise flourish—all things that they see in Rick Santorum. They don’t vote as women; they vote as Americans.

Let's take a look at how "most women" have voted in the last, say, three presidential elections.

2008
Obama 56 percent, McPalin 43 percent

2004
Kerry 51 percent, Bush 48 percent

2000
Gore 54 percent, Bush 43 percent

Those Femi-regulars sure love them some Democrats!

Anyway, I'm not sure I follow the logic here.

Most women are Femi-regulars who vote Democratic.
Most Femi-regulars support Rick Santorum.
Therefore, most Democratic women support Rick Santorum.

Sadly, this is what happens when your only three news sources are Faux News, Rush Limbaugh and Newsmax.

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The Fox freakout over the White House's new rapid-response media team headed by Jesse Lee picked up a head of steam last night on Sean Hannity's show, when Andrew Breitbart came on and sounded like his nemesis, Glenn Beck, for a bit, as he debated the token liberal, Democratis strategist Steve Murphy. All that was missing was the chalkboard:

BREITBART: Jesse Lee was at the forefront of the antiwar blogging movement, a point in time in which the same media that is out there saying that you can't criticize the president, Barack Obama, were out there saying 'dissent is patriotic' and so Jesse was protected by the media. Now he wants to go after Fox News, AM talk radio, Andrew Breitbart, and what he's doing is adding an extra protective layer to George Soros -- all the media that he's buying, and now Media Matters, which is a --

MURPHY: This is the Hannity show, not Beck.

BREITBART: This is a $15 million a year operation to try and shut up dissent. This is exactly what they do in totalitarian leftist nations like Venezuela. They try to shut people up.

At this point, Murphy thankfully jumped in and pointed out that Breitbart was being absurd -- this was a standard political media operation, only with more sophisticated media technology to work with. But Breitbart was intent mainly on smearing Jesse Lee:

BREITBART: He's a hit artist.

MURPHY: So are you!

Bretibart didn't really have much of a response to that one. He knew it was true.

It's not just the racist outbursts and the intense adoption of bizarre conspiracy theories about the president's birth certificate that pretty clearly identifies the Tea Partiers as truly a bunch of loons. Then there are the costumes.

We got a prime example earlier this week in D.C., when a group of "Tea Party" spokesmen got up in front of reporters dressed in Revolutionary War costumes and intoned a raft of nutty stuff about fomenting a new American revolution.

What they were really on about was their contempt for House Speaker John Boehner as a "Republican In Name Only" who was selling them out on their key monetary issues. The press conference was indeed about attacking Republicans in the House and warning them they face defeat in the 2012 primaries if they fail to live up to their demands. And the key demand this week is that Republicans refuse to raise the limit on the national debt.

The presser seemed to have been organized by WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah, who spoke second. But it was led off by a Georgia preacher named William Temple, dressed up as a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He explained:

TEMPLE: We do this colonial outfit to remind the current government of the first revolution. And we are in a revolution, the American people, right now.

Temple went on to claim, among other things, that he had led "1.9 million people" in the September 12 "March on Washington" last year that he claimed propelled Republicans to power. Um, right. In the real world, you see, he was one of about 90,000 people who mostly came to hear Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.

Of course, part of these people's delusion is that they believe they are far more powerful than they really are. So there they were, demanding that Republicans step up and toe their line on raising the debt ceiling -- even, of course, if it means the United States is forced to default on its full faith and credit.

Later, another colonial impersonator -- this time doing George Washington -- stepped up to the podium and made more vague threats against wayward Republicans:

And the funny thing is, Republicans really believe this stuff. They are completely cowed by the Tea Partiers. That's who owns them now.

Gee, it sounds like a match made in Tea Party Heaven: Sarah Palin and Jerry Boykin, appearing on the same stage to deliver a good ol' fashioned right-wing fundamentalist "Tribute to the Troops":

Former Alaska governor and vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin will be the keynote speaker for Tribute to the Troops, a military and veterans appreciation rally at Colorado Christian University on May 2, 2011.

Boykin will speak on "Our Debt of Gratitude". Not sure what that means -- but since it's coming from the guy who brought you both Abu Ghraib and Waco, it could be anything.

As Kyle at RightWingWatch observes:

Since leaving the military, Boykin has joined up with self-proclaimed prophet Rick Joyner and become the Religious Right's resident "expert" on all things Islam and a leading member of the Religious Right's Spartan-like army. He is also the man who exposed the fact that President Obama is a Marxist who intends to use the health care reform legislation to build an army of Brownshirts loyal only to him ...

Indeed, it was while elucidating on this charge that it became clear that Boykin is a direct military descendant of Gen. Jack D. Ripper himself:

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And of course, his "expertise" at all things Islam meant that he was the go-to guy when Glenn Beck was expounding on the looming "Caliphate" in the Middle East.

More recently, he's been declaring "Molon Labe" to the dirty America-hating secret-Muslim libruls who he's convinced are coming to take his "rights" away.

Combined with Palin's presence ... well, let's just hope that the critical mass of wingnuttery coming together in one place like that doesn't open a hole in the space-time continuum.

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Memo to President Obama: You may have thought you finally shut the Birthers up yesterday. But you will never shut them up.

These are people who are deeply invested, emotionally and otherwise, in believing that you are not a legitimate president. It's the only way they can cope with the concept of you holding the office of the presidency in the first place. All you really did yesterday was give them a nice shiny new toy to play with.

The proof was on Fox Business News last night, where Eric Bolling hosted a panel led by wingnut extraordinaire Pam Geller, one of the most reptilian creatures of the entire wingnutosphere.

The entire show was a discussion of Bolling's evident belief that what the president presented yesterday was a forgery:

BOLLING: Pamela, were any of these notation on here - I don't know if our camera can get it in too close --- you can see some of these numbers that are clearly written in handwriting on the side. We don't know what they are. Trying to figure out a zero, a two there, an X up over here, a one up here. Were they on the short form?

GELLER: Look, this is a certification of live birth. When I left the hospital, I left with a birth certificate. I'm sorry, I didn't bring with it me, but it looked very much like Donald Trump's. It's a little piece of paper, you've got the nurse -- you know what I'm talking about? Certificate - you know, birth certificate. This is a certification of a live birth. This is actually not a birth certificate.

BOLLING: I need to know this. You see this fold. This has clearly been photocopied from a book. You see that? It kind of folds back to, like, almost like a binding of a book. And then for some reason, there's a green border around it that had to be Photoshopped in. Trying to figure out why they would do that.

GELLER: Well, this whole border is suspect. I mean, if you're taking a scan of something, it would, to your point, it would be white. Why is this the color of the same --

BOLLING: Note this - note this, you guys, April 25, 2011 -- two days ago -- is when this was requested from the state registrar, Alvin Onaka. So we'll keep our eye on it. We'll keep digging. Hey, listen. It may or may not be, but certainly opens up the can of worms that there are at least questions for it.

The absurdity didn't end there. Perhaps the height of absurdity came when, as Ben Dimiero at Media Matters points out, Bolling suggested that the doctor who delivered Obama should have traveled forward in time in order to know that he had delivered the president:

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Digby, commenting on Rick Perlstein's marvelous piece in Mother Jones on the rise of our current "mendocracy" and the legitimation of lying by the modern media, added this:

This history provides an important foundation for my ongoing quest to understand the right's ability to operate without the constraints of hypocrisy or consistency in an environment of epistemic relativism so extreme that we end up believing that wrong is right. It's literally mind-boggling.

There are a couple of mechanisms by which this is occurring. An example of the first kind was this truly mind-boggling exchange between Monica Crowley and Stuart Varney the other day on Fox News, wherein Crowley leapt upon the recent releases of intelligence from Guantanamo via WikiLeaks to declare that they established once and for all that, by golly, torture really did work!

VARNEY: I want your judgment. Do you think President Obama would order it done?

CROWLEY: I think if there were an imminent threat, the commander in chief, regardless of who it was, would order it done, yes.

VARNEY: And you think it should be done.

CROWLEY: I absolutely think it should be done. Listen, the commander-in-chief has one job, and that's to protect American lives. You need to do what's necessary when faced with an imminent threat to do it.

Nevermind that Crowley's evidence that torture works is dubious at best. But it's breathtaking how quickly Crowley and Varney leap over the question: If torture works, should you do it?

What seems not to cross either Crowley's or Varney's minds is the notion that the president might have a higher calling to the nation than simply keeping Americans alive -- that preserving the Constitution and, concomitantly, both our long-term security and our standing in the world as a moral beacon, might be such a higher purpose. The president has an obligation not to make America into a nation of torturers, too. (Of course, it's worth observing that the previous president -- an object of ardent admiration by both these pundits -- not only had a disastrous record on this latter obligation, he was also an abject failure in terms of preserving American lives, too.)

This really is a simple and clear moral issue: Does America torture or not? It is not just a cliche but a great truth that "the torturer is the enemy of all mankind". Which side are we on?

But in the inverted moral world of conservatives, that is not even an issue. All that is at stake for them is criticizing any liberal politician or policy and ardently defending any conservative or Republican. That's their moral compass.

This same imperative is what drives the second mechanism by which the Right's world is turned inside out. And that is a simple and uncomplicated refusal to accepts facts as realities and to embrace lies in their place -- if those lies burnish the emotional narratives upon which the Right ultimately relies for its appeal.

This is manifest particularly in the case of the Birthers, who are singularly immune to fact, logic, reason, or rationality, and ultimately reality. Instead, they've built their little bubble world and nothing, NOTHING will draw them out.

Here's Michelangelo Signorile dealing with a Birther on his radio show the other day, which provides a classic example of this:

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This is why President Obama's release this morning of his long-form birth certificate will not be the air-clearing catharsis he hopes it will be -- it's just the beginning of the next phase in the Birthers' conspiracism.

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You may remember how Russell Pearce, the Arizona Republican state Senate leader and architect of SB1070, went on Bill O'Reilly's show a couple of months ago and pushed hard for a recall campaign against Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik for daring to opine that extremist right-wing rhetoric played a role in the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. (An effort which, last we checked, was going nowhere fast.)

Well, karmic payback can be a rhymes-with-witch:

What may seem to some as an uphill battle is becoming close to a reality for a non-partisan political group as they gather signatures to recall Senate President Russell Pearce.

"I have no doubt we'll get enough signatures to force the recall campaign," said Chad Snow, chairman of Citizens for a Better Arizona.

The group has two thirds of the signatures needed to force a recall election on the senator they accuse of having an extreme agenda.

Now, there are lots of reasons to recall Russell Pearce along these lines (or better yet, never elect him in the first damned place).

There's the recent spate of Tentherism in which he seemingly urged people to declare themselves sovereign citizens.

Or the long-established record of playing footsie with the local neo-Nazis.

Or, if you like, he might be recalled for the corruption that's surfaced in Pearce's dealings and his intimate involvement in that monumentally embarrassing Fiesta Bowl scandal.

No, but what really has people torqued at Pearce is what you might expect from ultimately pragmatic voters: He has fiddled incessantly with his pet immigration fetish while Arizona has burned to a crisp economically. No wonder he's in trouble.

"We feel that Russell Pearce has completely thrown Arizona's economy under the bus so he could pursue one issue," said Snow.

That issue is immigration. Pearce sponsored the controversial SB1070 and even though the law has gained negative national attention, polls show an overwhelming amount of Arizonans support it.

But Snow told us Pearce has neglected what Arizonans really care about.

"He's done nothing for education, jobs or the economy. Instead he focuses on only immigration and gun control."

Then there have been stunts he's been involved in that have exposed the seamy underbelly of Pearce's fetish, like the racist letter read on the floor of the Senate (at Pearce's behest):

Citizens for a Better Arizona needs to collect over 7,700 signatures by May 31st to force a recall election, but Snow is confident they will get more, claiming the Senate President's actions are helping their efforts.

"He's had racist letters read on the Senate floor, he's been reported to have accepted thousands of dollars of gifts from the Fiesta Bowl that he didn't report as required by law. He feels he's above the law and doesn't represent the best interest of Arizona and he's unfit for public office," said Snow.

Oh, and let's not forget the Arizona Senate's latest achievement: A Birther bill that accepts the features of a presidential candidate's penis as evidence of his citizenship. The citizens of Mesa must be so proud.