Mike Huckabee said:

"That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair, he was getting ready to speak and somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor."

Here's the link to the video again. Please watch it again. At about the 50 seconds mark, Huckabee makes his infamous 'joke.' Quite clearly, laughter is heard. Is the entire audience laughing? No. Scattered laughter.

This isn't the first time Huckabee has joked about murder. In fact on a duck hunt where reporters tagged alongduring his presidential campaign:

Huckabee emerged happily from his hunt, three dead pheasants in tow, Oliphant reports. Asked for a metaphor to describe the hunt, he replied, "Don't get in my way. This is what happens."

But this diary isn't about the NRA. Right now I don't care about the NRA. What I do care about is the truth.

Remember the absurd, campy, embarrassing "It's Raining McCain" video for McCain? Daily Kos front pagers wondered whether the video was a real McCain fan production or a spoof, and the whole world waited with great anticipation to find out the truth.

Meanwhile, John McCain, his daughter, Fox News, and the world believed the video was produced by fans. Turns out they were majorly punked by the famous McCain Girls "It's Raining McCain" Video.

The silly video that 'supports' McCain was a hoax, a spoof, a parody, an April Fools joke made by none other than 23/6.com. Who's 23/6.com?:

236.com, a progressive political comedy and news media project site, is associated with both Huffingtonpost and also Air America dj Sam Seder.  

Follow me below the fold for more amusement-- I promise this gets much funnier.

Here's an informational alert on a new development in the state of the union's health care crisis.

Employer group plans, which usually have better benefits and coverage, are being dropped and switched to payouts to employees to buy their own individual coverage.

Bush's SOTU address did not address this trend specifically, but since Bush promotes private individual health plans as a panacea, this terrible new trend is likely to continue without government intervention and perhaps tacitly promoted as part of Bush's belief in rewarding insurance company cronies with private individual insurance as the 'solution' to our health care coverage crises. If this trend continues, Bush and his insurance company cronies will be in ecstasy while Americans suffer even more.

This is another diary to clutter up the recent diary lists. Reason being that I haven't been much impressed with the other diaries today, but this diary is not for complaining about that. The purpose of this diary is to cause more diaries to scroll away, and to help you properly write more diaries to clutter up the recent diary list as if you need any help, but you do, because they have become so... well boring isn't the word.

How does one write another diary to clutter up the Recent Diary Lists? How does one do it? Well, there are many methods, all of which involve some measure of thoughtlessness or one thoughtedness not much fleshed out though either verbose or brief.

Brief method involves what would really be an open thread comment but says, hey, here's what I thought, or what do you think about this? The best thing about those is when it's one of them where it's a topic that's already been discussed to death. That makes such a brief open thread style diary guidelines violating diary extra special. Other special brief diaries are ones where the spelling is as incoherent as the ideas.

In a remarkable article in today's San Francisco Chronicle, our Congressional Democrats are revealed to be stunned and shocked that Bush and his compatriots in Congress are "trying to screw them":

Congress "is the only business in the world where your colleagues wake up in the morning and try to figure out how to screw over their colleagues," said Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena. It's as if workers in a winery went to work each morning trying "to figure out how to mess up the next batch of Chardonnay that's coming out."

What is stunning is that the Congressional Dems neither anticipated this nor have adjusted their strategies to it; in fact amazingly their strategies were predicated on cooperation from Bush and his Republican Party in Congress.

You might have already heard last week was "Islamofascism Awareness Week",organized by former Maoist extremist and now RW extremist David Horowitz.

But Islamofascism Awareness week, a warped 'teach-in' at Universities about how liberals are helping promote America's demise at the hands of Islam, the Ayatollahs, and their -terrierists- er, umm, terrorists, is only part of an ongoing propaganda campaign already long underway. In fact this campaign has been viral in its dissemination throughout the RW media network of the blogosphere, talk radio and Fox TV News.

One element of this campaign is the bizarre charge, believed by wingers plugged into their media, that hateful Anti-American Islamic madrassa style teachings are being created in our public schools and universities (of course with the help of enabling evil liberals). This diary explores this bizarre charge and its source.

George W. Bush has opened a new front in his global war, potentially reviving the 'dirty wars' of Ronald Reagan in Latin America, favoring dictators and opposing citizen movements.

In an important article on Alternet.org, Benjamin Dangl (who has written extensively on Bolivia and Latin American politics) reports about some of the effects of Bush's operation in Paraguay, which has become quite an extensive support system for propping up and re-enforcing the military dictatorship, suppressing dissent, and providing more resources for multinational corporations and private military providers.

Dangl sees this as a prototype for a more extensive operation throughout Latin America to stem the tide of popular Leftist governments that oppose multinational corporate exploitation.

Lately it seems so many people around here have to weigh in on some topic everyone else is discussing or already weighing in on, which gets pretty light and unsubstantial. Or in the case of pie, too heavy, or in the case of pi, simply incomprehensible to the last digit. Which is entirely a digression from my main point: Please don't write stuff about stuff people are writing about.

There's a crying need for a tiny bit of stern scolding that people are diarying endlessly on a topic already diaried about endlessly, whatever that current topic is, today, or at the hour, or at the moment. Here it is: Please stop diarying about that topic, there are so many other important topics to diary about. Which is true, but who wants to hear that? Of course, a few people do.

Strangely, it seems here at Daily Kos that people are writing stuff about stuff people are writing about, almost every day! It's very hard to keep up with let alone put a stop to it. Therefore, my tiny little stern scolding is insufficient. However, your scolding can be diaried whenever needed, since there's a crying need for it almost all the time. But then that could also become stuff about stuff people are writing about, so be careful, if you will.

With all due respect to Senator Feingold and to Sally in SF, I still doubt Senator Feingold's Censure motions.

While Senator Feingold's motions for Censure as described in Sally in SF's diaries have their merits, there is one clear and obvious reason that they do not help the cause of restoring Constitutional rights and repairing the damage that the outlaw Presidency of George W. Bush has created.

That reason is that the mainstream news media, the DC Beltway insiders and their coordinated cohorts in the Republican Party will cry endlessly that Bush has been punished enough by the historic first ever Censure and that Impeachment would then be an outrageous act of political revenge that would distract the country and harm it.

My initial reaction to Senator Russ Feingold's diary and his appearance explaining censure on Meet The Pressis complete rejection. As Senator Feingold stated, this President and Vice President have engaged in the worst abuses of our Constitution in history.

I don't believe we should settle for half a loaf of bread. Impeachment is the cure precisely because it will tie up the country in exploring the nature, breadth and sources of the criminality of this administration which can only be cleared up by full and thorough trial of the players which reach not only through the administration but into the news media, the Federalist Society, right wing think tanks and their funders such as Richard Mellon Scaife who have all played roles in enabling this Administration's nefarious activities that left unchecked will carry terrible consequences for our country.

There is only one valid reason I can see for censure.

Another amazing, jaw dropping policy by Bushco is what happens to children of families swept up in anti-immigration raids. Often they are left on their own in their communities, while the parents are detained and/or deported.

These raids are becoming more and more common, by the day, yet no efforts are made to make sure the children are safe, properly taken care of, schooled as required by law, or reunited with their parents and caretakers. Many of these children are actually U.S. citizens, having been born in the U.S. to their illegal immigrant parents.

This cold hearted, inhumane, careless and outrageous way of handling living human beings is a logical part of the new Bush immigrant policies. Expect more raids in the coming weeks and months, as immigrant families are seized at work places or communities and placed in detention centers around the country indefinitely, especially as fees for green cards and residency status are planned to be raised much higherthan many will be able to afford.

Perhaps the most forgotten victims of Bush's War Crimes are the children now held at immigration detention centers here in the U.S., and U.S. detention centers around the world, including Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and other locations where renditions take place.

Here is a disturbing (but not graphic) photo of immigrant children facing a U.S. detention officer.

Here are (non graphic) photos of children who have been detained at Guantanamo.

Thanks for the memories, Dick Cheney.

(Sorry I'm not skilled in photoshopping, so you'll have to just click on the links because here pictures tell the story better than words really can.)

With this anniversary, we remember a hunter,a quail and  a face of a man shot full of holes.

To my mind, that picture of Whittington's face full of holes was picture of the year in 2006, so I was disappointed to see it turn up nowhere in any of the 2006 year in review photos in the MSM.

Washington Post reporter Bill Arkin was on NPR's On the Media program Sunday. He argued that troop movements of surge numbers are already being moved to Iraq while the media and Congress distract themselves debating the surge.

From his column on the subject:

A number of people have asked me whether the vote of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to oppose the deployment of an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq will stop the surge.

Hello people, the resolution is non-binding...

More important though, the surge is already on...

Amongst the other pablum, psychotic delusions of grandeur and aggression, and various other distractions, trivialities, and atrocities in the SOTU, the President's health care proposal has not quite recieved the kind of attention it deserves.

Here's the bottom line:

1.  This plan is a full assault on employer plans to switch us all towards private insurance plans.

2.  It is intended to reduce existing benefits and mandates provided by state governments and/or existing employer plans, and

3.  May raise taxes on almost half of the insured population while doing little to insure the uninsured.

Thinking of MLK today is always inspirational. Sad that he was slain, but also truly inspirational thinking of all he did. Today I'm thinking about how MLK inspired my mother to get active in New York State when I was a kid. She got involved, after hearing him speak, with one of the civil rights organizations there fighting for low income housing, desegregation, and better schools for minorities and lower income folks in Buffalo, NY. I mention this because it's how my political activism and consciousness started.

She took me on a march for fair housing and minority rights in downtown Buffalo. I must have been 8 years old. I remember the day vividly, warm weather, dogs, food, smiles, chants, passion, and the quest for justice.

Condi Rice is right to be so angry when she complains about those nasty liberals that hate and disrespect single women: How dare that rude Barbara Boxer lady question Condi's career choices, her independance and freedom from family ties that do not make her immune from personal achievement, elite Decider status, and personal sacrifice ability. Condi respondedwell in her practiced and polished best tone of indignation:

"in retrospect, gee, I thought single women had come further than that, that the only question is, 'Are you making good decisions because you have kids?' "

How dare Barbara Boxer lay into her for not having children to sacrifice, like say a Jenna or Barbara or Noelle of her very own, to either the typical Neocon family values dysfunctions of alcoholism, crank possession, fraud or other such embarassing issues painful for a parent to endure. Or in the case of Barbara Bush and her Crime Family, rampant criminal activities subsumed by huge financial and political power.

Today there's a diary on the recommended list that made me feel one strong feeling: This Is Wrong.

This diary recommends sabotaging the GOP GOTV operations and solicits suggestions on how to go about it.

Going down the wrong road folks. We haven't even begun to do everything we need to do when it comes to our own GOTV, or own counter defense of GOP dirty tricks. In fact we're good at doing good, but we're such amateurs at being bad, that we ought to use Halloween as a dress rehearsal for retaliating at the GOP, by only just pretending to be bad. It's one thing to wear a Cheney mask, it's another to be Mr. Waterboarding Buckshot himself. We're all past being angry, outraged, we're living livid, but we're just not cut out for doing the dirty tricks that lead to the mangled ethics that lead to graft, torture and stolen elections that the Rethugs do.