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Conservative host Glenn Beck and "historian" David Barton on Tuesday debuted a new show called "Foundations of Freedom" and suggested that history proved that school shootings could be prevented if all elementary school children were armed.

After pointing out that some areas of the United States required every household to own a gun in the late 1800s, Beck told Barton that "everybody grew up with a gun" and it was "part of school."

Barton noted that guns were only fired in schools at the time to stop criminal activity.

"The great example, in the 1850s you have a school teacher who's teaching," the historian explained. "A guy, he's out in the West, this guy from New England wants to kill him and find him. So, he comes into the school with his gun to shoot the teacher, he decides not to shoot the teacher because all the kids pull their guns out and point it at him and say, 'You kill the teacher, you die.' He says, 'Okay.' The teacher lives. Real simple stuff."

Barton added: "There was no shooting because all the kids -- we're talking in elementary school -- all the kids pull their guns out and says, 'We like our teacher, you shoot our teacher, we'll kill you.'"

"Kids did not shoot each other," Beck insisted.

"No, no," Barton agreed. "Two accidents I have seen in 200 years of everybody having guns. It just didn't happen."

Barton's book, “The Jefferson Lies," was pulled from stores by his publisher last year after it was criticized for grossly misrepresenting President Thomas Jefferson.

(h/t: Right Wing Watch)

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It looks like someone is pushing to get The Young Turks Cenk Uygur his own show on MSNBC. Cenk gave the daily rant segment on The Dylan Ratigan Show and went after "Tea Partiers" Ken Buck, Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle for their absurdly on the issue of separation of church and state.

As Cenk pointed out, these wingers are more than happy to push their version of Christianity on the rest of us and want their religion pushed into our politics, but none of them would be too happy if we had a state sponsored religion, and that religion turned out to be Islam or Mormonism.

Ratigan's show is all over the map with him going between ranting about, and rightfully so the mess that Wall Street has left this country in and the fact that our government hasn't done enough yet to reign them in to bringing on right wingers like Tom Coburn and pretending that he's some rational person that isn't part of the problem with the way our Senate has been functioning, or not functioning and obstructing would be a better description, that deserves to be listened to.

Ratigan almost made up for having on the extremely unfunny P.J. O'Rourke on to tell people not to come out and vote just before Cenk came on. I guess we'll find out before long if he does the same for Cenk Uygur as Keith Olbermann did for Rachel Maddow and helps him get a permanent spot on MSNBC.

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Appearing on The O'Reilly Factor Thursday, Fox News' Glenn Beck took time out of his daily habit of railing against progressives to calmly explain that the country wasn't going to be destroyed by giving marriage rights to gays and lesbians.

Beck told Fox News host Bill O'Reilly why he didn't devote airtime to the issue. "Because honestly I think we have bigger fish to fry," said Beck. "You can argue about abortion or gay marriage or whatever all you want. The country is burning down."

"But isn't that one of the reasons because we are getting away from the traditional way we used to live into this progressive [agenda]," prompted O'Reilly.

"Your country is burning down," answered Beck. "I don't think marriage, that the government actually has anything to do with what is a religious right."

"Do you believe that gay marriage is a threat to the country in any way?" asked O'Reilly.

"No, I don't," said Beck. "Will the gays come and get us?"

Beck continued, "I believe what Thomas Jefferson said. If it neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket, what difference is it to me?"

Beck told O'Reilly that he wasn't worried about same-sex marriage rights as long as churches could choose not to perform the ritual on gays and lesbians.

While O'Reilly claims that he takes a libertarian view on gay marriage, in the past he has worried that it could lead to people marrying animals.

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This is really horrifying news. If oil industry expert Matthew Simmons that appeared on the Dylan Ratigan show and Sen. Ben Nelson's worst case scenarios turn out to be true the situation in the Gulf truly looks dire. Simmons said that they have grossly underestimated the size of the disaster and that it appears to be the result of the biggest blowout in the world and that most of the oil is not coming from the leak the BP cameras are showing, but instead "an open hole with no casing in it which sits about seven miles away from where BP had been trying to fix these little tiny leaks in the drilling riser".

(Rough transcript which I'll gladly add to or amend if someone else can understand what he was saying with that terrible web cam.)

Simmons: When this blew out there had to be resevoir pressures of 40-50,000 pounds per square inch other wise the fire wouldn't have been so intense and what would have come out first is the blowout preventer would have popped out of the water more like a cork. And then what would come out second is the casing. That is what used to kill people on land based blowouts, the casing would come right up to the mouth of the (inaudible) and fall on people. And so we have an open hole that's spewing I would guess somewhere between 100-150,000 barrels a day of oil which is why you now have over a hundred mile oil lake at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico that's apparently 4-500 feet deep.

Now one of the most important things that went on this week is the Thomas Jefferson, the United States biggest research vessel is now on location, it was actually in the general arena... area doing ocean bottom profiling and NOAA four days ago put if off and sent it over. They're going to basically find where these plumes are and why there's this oil lake.

I would think by the end of the week we will discover that we have an open hole with no casing in it which sits about seven miles away from where BP had been trying to fix these little tiny leaks in the drilling riser. I bet where (inaudible) of the drilling riser is still connected to the (inaudible) of it and so they've done everything wrong.

Ratigan: So you say they've done everything wrong, what do you mean specifically when you say that?

Simmons: Well they basically are trying to patch a little leak in the drilling riser. You've got to remember that what we're seeing on television, the drilling riser is 22.5" in circumferance. Most of it is a elastomers to make it bouyant. In the middle is a 7" column with the annulus where the drill bit goes down, so coming out of that is a little plume of gas. It's not oil and it's only about four feet high.

That could not by any way have actually covered 40% of the Gulf of Mexico, so what we're going to find when the Thomas Jefferson finishes its work is we have an open hole with no casing in it and the only way we'll shut it off is either let it complete which might take 30 years which could maybe not only poison the Gulf of Mexico but maybe the Atlantic Ocean or to put a nuclear device down the hole like the Russians did in the 70's and actually encase it by turning the turning the rock into (inaudible).

Ratigan: If you accept the inevitability of this oil flow, best case scenario for months, worst case scenario for years is there anything that we could be doing right now or should be doing right now from a containment perspective that we're not doing whether it's not just booms but booms with a curtain that goes to the bottom of the sea, tankers, again it's obviously beyond my pay grade, but is there something we should be doing that we're not doing?

Simmons: The booms don't work because the oil's coming from the bottom of the ocean. They slip right under the boom. It's not on the surface. One thing they should be doing is every time we unload a tanker at the Louisiana offshore loading port which has all this supertanker offshore loading, they should go right over to the oil lake and start sucking up this black crude at the bottom and putting it on the tanker and get it out of the Gulf wet shorelands because when the hurricanes arrive the hurricane actually blows this oil on shore it will basically paint the Gulf shore black and it will shut down the refineries, the power plants and it will be America's worst catastrophe and nightmare.

It appears Sen. Ben Nelson agrees with Matthew Simmons on the failure of the casing. From bmaz at FDL, BP Well Bore And Casing Integrity May Be Blown, Says Florida’s Sen. Nelson:

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This is rich. C-Street Family member Tom Coburn who along with his fellow Family members have been doing their best to inject religion into the health care debate, uses a quote by Thomas Jefferson about separation of church and state, and takes it out of context.

h/t jenyum at Daily KOS who has more -- Dear Senator Coburn: Liberals Can Quote Jefferson, Too:

During today's Senate health care bill debate, Senator Tom Coburn held up a big graphic displaying a quote from Thomas Jefferson:

To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical

This quote resided in the background while Coburn went on and an about earmarks, and abortion, and waste and fraud in the federal government. If Senator Coburn had actually read the original source of the quote, however, I don't think he'd be so quick to use it.

Jefferson's actual words originated in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom:

to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical

The Statute goes on to say...

our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry, that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence, by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages, to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right, that it tends only to corrupt the principles of that very Religion it is meant to encourage.

Obviously among other things too long to list, Tom Coburn's irony alert button is broken. He'd better hope he doesn't wind up in trouble for his part in his buddy John Ensign's affair that the press has been giving him a pass on. As jenyum noted:

Jefferson's words when not taken out of context are hardly a rallying cry for a party that opposes health care reform on religious grounds.

Couldn't have said it any better myself.