From The Daily Show:

Bill Clinton frees two journalists from North Korea, but Fox News is convinced there's a cloud attached to the silver lining.

(h/t Bruce Wilson of TalkToAction)

Newt Gingrich is really playing up being a Catholic now and is warning Christians that "pagans" have us all surrounded and Satan is going to eat your baby unless you get involved in politics.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee urged Christians to get involved in politics to preserve the presence of religion in American life.

"I think this is one of the most critical moments in American history," Gingrich said. "We are living in a period where we are surrounded by paganism."

They and other speakers warned about the continuing availability of abortion, the spread of gay rights, and attempts to remove religion from American public life and school history books.

Gingrich and Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, argued the rights of Americans stem from God and to ignore that connection is perilous. The two were among several speakers, including former U.S. Senate candidate Oliver North, at the three-hour "Rediscovering God in America" event. The event was closed to reporters but was broadcast live on God.TV, an evangelical Web site.

Running for the 2012 nomination is really getting to this man's cranium because I do not see "virgins" being abducted while the pagan---Devil worshippers are using them along with blood sacrifices anywhere, have you?

By the third century CE, its meaning evolved to include all non-Christians. Eventually, it became an evil term that implied the possibility of Satan worship. The latter two meanings are still in widespread use today.

I do know that dressing up as a "witch" is still very popular for Halloween, so maybe that's the big pagans' plan to indoctrinate our young people into the occult.

The story of an American airstrike on an Afghan village on the night of August 21 keeps getting stranger. At first, the US military said that militants had been killed in the attack, then Afghan officials alleged that only civilians had died - over 80, including at least 50 children. The US military investigated and stuck by its story and then mobile phone video of dozens of civilian casualties, ostensibly from the strike, turned up.

Now, the US has dispatched a general to Afghanistan to look anew at the events surrounding the airstrike and re-appraise the military investigation's conclusion.

But the story has taken a new turn - it appears the original investigation relied on the corroboration of an embedded journalist when it concluded that the airstrike had, after all, only hit militants. That journalist has now been revealed to have been former Iran/Contra conspirator and FOX correspondent Colonel Oliver North.

The US military said that its findings were corroborated by an independent journalist embedded with the US force. He was named as the Fox News correspondent Oliver North, who came to prominence in the 1980s Iran-Contra affair, when he was an army colonel.

Sources close to one of the investigations said that a video film was shot by Afghan officials the morning after the attack. It corroborates the doctor’s footage but has not been made public.

In a statement released on Saturday, the commander of Nato forces, General David McKiernan, appeared to back away from previous US accounts. He said: “Following the recent operation in Azizabad, Shindand district, we realise there is a large discrepancy between the number of civilian casualties reported by soldiers and local villagers. I remain responsible to continue to try and account for this disparity in numbers, but above all I want to express our heartfelt sorrow to all families that lost loved ones in this firefight.”

(Some of the mobile phone footage is at that Times link. It was shot by a doctor and the Times says "has been edited to remove the most graphic footage of dead children and adults". Even so, it's not for the faint of heart.)

As my colleague Anderson wrote at Newshoggers:

It is entirely unclear just what North did to "corroborate" US military claims of Taliban deaths, but his efforts to bolster the military stance appear about to go down in the same flames that killed 90 Afghan civilians.

While doubtful, perhaps the US military should rethink their reliance on the fantastical stories of a known bullshit artist and pathological liar, someone who by all rights ought to be in prison.

I wonder if we'll see North answer questions about what he said and why he said it on FOX? Somehow, I doubt it.

Keith Olbermann covered the airstrike massacre during his Bushed! segment, its disastrous diplomatic aftermath and North's involvement on Monday: "Realising that a) he's not a journalist b) he's not independent and c) his eye-witnessing includes seeing things that aren't really there, the US military has now reversed its stance..."

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Keith offered up a delicious wingnut trifecta of shoddy research and revisionist history Monday night.

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Bronze goes to Bill Kristol for (once again) making up facts not supported by reality in his attempt to smear Barack Obama and praise John McCain, his neocon brother-in-arms.

Comedian Rush Limbaugh gets the runner-up spot for disparaging a 10th grader's decade-old research paper as he tried to trash Barack Obama's astute observation that the current economic climate resembles the conditions that preceded the Great Depression.

And, of course, the coveted gold goes to convicted felon FOX News analyst Ollie North for having the sheer audacity to chide Barack Obama for suggesting we negotiate with Iran when he (North) was the principal architect in the Reagan-era scheme to illegally sell weapons to the Iranians.