He's referring of course to Jared Lee Loughner and his murderous spree in Arizona over the weekend. Phelps wants you to know that "God sent the shooter" and that his devout/brainwashed followers, true to form, will picket the funerals of the six victims who died, including the service for 9-year-old Christina Green.

Sorry for making your blood boil so early in the week, but below is Phelp's taped message to the nation:

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"Mistakes and inattention or distractions cost Marines lives," he said on Tuesday, explaining how he came to his decision. "That's the currency of this fight.

"I don't want to lose any Marines to the distraction. I don't want to have any Marines that I'm visiting at Bethesda [National Naval Medical Center, in Maryland] with no legs be the result of any type of distraction."

OK. He obviously thinks highly of Marines, if he thinks that the mere knowledge that one of his colleagues is gay will distract a trained, professional Marine so much that his legs will fall off.

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It's not that the rush to arrest WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on "one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of rape" wasn't mighty questionable. After all, it's pretty funny how often individuals accused of sex offenses gallivant around the globe with relative impunity -- until they start publishing classified documents. And since the allegations first arose back in August, there have been several conflicting accounts, massive mishandlings and plenty of speculation over whether this is a case of abuse or just of a man who doesn't like to wear condoms.

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That's it. The Senate can't address a fundamental inequity, because the markets are down.

"I will not agree to have this bill go forward, and neither will, I believe, 41 of my colleagues, either, because our economy is in the tank," said Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee and the leading opponent of an immediate repeal.

For those playing along at home, John McCain conditionally supported the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" until Barack Obama got elected and began pushing the Senate to do something about it. Once military leadership told McCain the policy should be repealed, he said, he would vote to repeal it, and now that the Republican defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs have told McCain that it should be repealed, he is vowing to fight it with everything he's got.

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Mr. Rehyansky's immodest proposal — I'm going to spoil the end of the column for you — is that gay men (but not lesbians) should be forbidden from serving in the military because they are disease-ridden perverts, and the way to keep them out of the military is for straight soldiers to claim that the constitutional right to privacy protects them from having to shower with queers.

A lot of very weird assertions are made in this piece of work, but one very small moment clearly shows what sort of columnist we're dealing with, here:

What does all this have to do with force readiness and "Don't-hint-don't-wink" or whatever they're calling it these days?

"They" are calling it "don't ask, don't tell," which is also what they have been calling it since it was enacted in 1993. The nickname for the policy has actually not changed in 17 years.

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You know things are bad when an Oscar-winning actor and director's biggest release this year was the slew of epithet-laced telephone tirades purportedly aimed at his estranged girlfriend. And Gibson made headlines again this week when it was revealed that he admitted, in court documents, that he slapped Oksana Grigorieva hard enough to knock out her dental veneers during a vicious January argument. But it's OK because "I did not slap her hard, I was just trying to shock her so that she would stop screaming, continuing shaking Lucia back and forth." Oh, well, when you put it that way, Crazy Sauce.

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The message? Financier and philanthropist George Soros is a "puppet master" secretly at the center of a vast conspiracy that aims to destroy our economy and take over the nation through deceit. The proof? A lot of selectively edited quotes, wild innuendo and the fact that Soros "collapsed regimes" in "four other countries."

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From his recent interview with Matt Lauer, on the occasion of the publication of Bush's new book:

MATT LAUER: You remember what he said?

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Yes, I do. He called me a racist.

MATT LAUER: Well, what he said was, "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: That's -- "he's a racist." And I didn't appreciate it then. I don't appreciate it now. It's one thing to say, "I don't appreciate the way he's handled his business." It's another thing to say, "This man's a racist." I resent it, it's not true, and it was one of the most disgusting moments in my Presidency.

MATT LAUER: This from the book. "Five years later I can barely write those words without feeling disgust." You go on. "I faced a lot of criticism as President. I didn't like hearing people claim that I lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all time low."

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Yeah. I still feel that way as you read those words. I felt 'em when I heard 'em, felt 'em when I wrote 'em and I felt 'em when I'm listening to 'em.

MATT LAUER: You say you told Laura at the time it was the worst moment of your Presidency?

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Yes. My record was strong I felt when it came to race relations and giving people a chance. And -- it was a disgusting moment.

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(In case you haven't seen this yet, it's not very pleasant.)

The victim is 23-year-old Lauren Valle, a MoveOn.org activist who was attending Monday's Senate debate to confront Paul for his fealty to corporations. Paul's supporters, apparently, thought that made her a threat, and so they threw a slight 23-year-old woman to the curb and stepped on her neck and head, to restrain her from ... briefly annoying Rand Paul. Valle suffered sprains and a concussion.

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So went Virginia "Ginni" Thomas's message (delivered, according to Jane Mayer, "in a singsong voice") for Anita Hill, the woman who accused Thomas' husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence, of sexual harassment 19 years ago. The voice mail was left on Hill's office phone, at 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday, suggesting ... well, what, exactly? What did any of this mean? Why would Ginni Thomas even do this? What drives a woman to reopen an ancient public wound via weekend voice mail on a work phone?

Gawker immediately concluded that Ginni had been drunk. Jezebel theorized that maybe she's just stupid.

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The wealthy Buffalo developer, addressing Orthodox Jewish leaders last weekend, made an interesting argument: While we shouldn't necessarily violently attack gay people, we should make sure that everyone knows that we hate them.

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Now, first of all, "a lotta people" do not actually "think" that will happen. It's something pundits like Mark Halperin fantasize about. But wishful thinking is not the same as an actual reasonable prediction of future events.

So, King asks Bob Woodward, America's most famous journalist -- the man who speaks to everyone worth speaking to in the corridors of power, who just finished what he always refers to as "hundreds of hours" of interviews with everyone at the White House from the president on down -- did he hear anything about a shocking and unprecedented Clinton-Biden switch?

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Shirvell's crusade against a gay college student went national this week when Shirvell inadvisedly decided to appear on Anderson Cooper's CNN show to explain himself. In case you missed the amazing video of Cooper interviewing this odd character, here are all 10 excruciating minutes:

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Yes, Bishop Long's anti-gay crusade took a grim and familiar turn this week when Long found himself slapped with lawsuits from three men who say the pastor coerced them into "sexual massages" and oral sodomy while they were still in their teens. His three accusers, now in their early twenties, say that Long recruited them into his youth ministry and began pursuing them sexually, lavishing them with "cars, clothes, jewelry and electronics" and treating them to trips in private jets and fancy hotels. But Long's lawyer Craig Gillen explained this week that his client's largesse was merely "part of a mentoring program." And if you can't mentor somebody in the Times Square W Hotel, where can you mentor him?

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D'Souza, longtime conservative pseudo-academic and current president of a 200-person evangelical Christian college, was born and spent his formative years abroad, which made him a super-Christian patriot, but made Obama an anti-American radical.

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In the ensuing 12 months, Mr. West has beaten a path back into our good graces in his usual unorthodox way. For a while, he laid low -- to the extent that such a thing is possible for a man who has appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in a crown of thorns. He went to Hawaii to toil on his new album. He managed to not upstage anyone at the Grammys, Oscars, Golden Globes, Emmys or even the Kids' Choice Awards. But come on — Kanye not being a loose cannon is about as much fun as a Real Housewife not tipping over tables. It was only a matter of time before he'd return to form.

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Brewer's debate performance has been charitably described as "painfully awful." Her opening statement is a thing of beauty:

But things actually got even worse after the debate, when a gaggle of reporters asked Brewer to explain something she refused to respond to in the debate: why she claimed, falsely, that illegal immigrants were beheading people in Arizona, and leaving the bodies in the desert.

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It started two weeks ago, when Paterson joined the chorus of people declaring that the Park51 Islamic community center proposed for lower Manhattan be moved. He even said the state would help them find and buy a new location, further away from the World Trade Center site (not necessarily out of "sensitivity," but more in order to make the angry people shut up -- a noble, completely misguided goal). The only problem with this plan is that it made no sense and was probably unconstitutional.

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A few weeks ago, Davidson's campaign began distributing fliers showing Davidson posing on a golf course with Saban, who last year led the Crimson Tide to their first national championship since 1999. The fliers read, "Nick Saban fully supports Dorothy 'Dot' Davidson and thinks she would be an excellent Mayor for the City of Bessemer." (The other side of the fliers featured college football schedules for the upcoming season.) But the photo was altered -- and not particularly well. Davidson simply inserted herself into a 2007 photo of Saban and his wife.

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