here's some news to warm the cockles of your heart:

Three guys named Joe are teaming up to try and help defeat one guy named Barack.

The Joes, three figures popular among many conservatives, are Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, 2010 GOP Senate nominee Joe Miller of Alaska and Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, better known during the 2008 presidential campaign as "Joe the Plumber."

They are teaming up Thursday night at a launch party and fundraiser in Montara, California for "The Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama," a group which is dedicated, as the name explains, to trying to beat President Barack Obama in the 2012 election.

The organization was launched by the "Our Country Deserves Better Committee," a conservative political action committee that's also the parent organization of the Tea Party Express, one of the leading national Tea Party groups.

The new organization hopes to raise money to run ads and build a grassroots network of up to one million supporters by next year's election.

Also scheduled to attend the event are Sharron Angle, last year's Republican Senate nominee in Nevada, and conservative activist Melanie Morgan.

The newly formed group recently ran television ads in Wisconsin supporting Scott Walker, the new Republican governor whose battles with the state's public sector unions made national headlines.

Miller went on Neil Cavuto's Fox show last week to promote the alliance. (It was a pretty lame performance, actually; Miller just yammered his rehearsed talking points, as he usually does, and insisted that the Tea Party movement is alive and festering. Or something like that.)

But this really is quite a remarkable trio, considering that all three of them have been associated to one degree or other with the dark side of the conservative movement:

-- Miller actually hired militia goons to rough up journalists during the 2010 campaign, and had numerous Patriot movement connections, including a long association with Schaeffer Cox, the militiaman just arrested a couple of weeks ago for plotting to kill cops and judges. (More on that from a long record of playing footsie with neo-Nazis and other extremists, not to mention implementing their agenda and aping their tactics.

-- Wurzelbacher the Plumber hasn't gone quite so far to the right. Instead he's just tossed the guy who made him famous, John McCain, under the bus, and indulged in the same ignorant incendiarism that brought him all that attention in the first place, including vicious and violent eliminationist rhetoric:

Wurzelbacher has a reputation for being a blunt, politically incorrect speaker. Referring to Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., more than once, Wurzelbacher asked, "Why hasn't he been strung up?"

...Referring to the Constitution as "almost like the Bible," Wurzelbacher said of the Founding Fathers: "They knew socialism doesn't work. They knew communism doesn't work."

You'll notice that joining them on the bill in California are two past masters of wingnuttery and eliminationism, Sharron "Second Amendment Remedies" Angle and Melanie "Hang em!" Morgan. That's quite a cast.

My favorite aspect of all this is that these characters are being underwritten by the same people who brought you the the Tea Party Express and Mark "Colored People change minds about emancipation" Williams -- an outfit that formed explicitly to oppose anything Barack Obama did even before he was elected and has been lying about it ever since, claiming (like all Tea Partiers) that they're not a partisan organization.

But it makes you wonder what's really going on here when you have a cast like this, notable for exciting the most violent and vicious parts of the American Right -- all in the service of attacking unions.

Of course, the constant litany at Fox has been that these union rallies are full of "goons." It's looking like that was just projection/cover for their own plans.