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Bill Maher had a warning for North Korea's Kim Jong-un, who seems all too willing to push his luck with the United States given the fact that our country has been addicted to war for far too long. Maher also told his audience that it's time that we "start defining peace as strength" instead:

In the last part of his weekly “New Rules” segment, Maher lambasted “Kim Jong Pugsley of North Korea” for his threats of war with the U.S. and the West.

“Have you seen a North Korean rocket test?” he asked. “They don’t even look like real rockets. They look more like that thing the Russian kosmonauts were in when they crashed on to ‘Gilligan’s Island.’”

No, he said, the real threat here is the war-mongering Americans who are looking for “any excuse to ramp up the war machine again.” [...]

“Just like we’re the gun country,” he said. “Come on, we’re the war people. We don’t need a lot of encouragement. Have you ever met John McCain? Offering to go to war with the U.S. is like offering to go out to drinks with Lindsay Lohan. We’re already in the car.”

“Just in my lifetime, we’ve invaded Vietnam, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, Granada, Panama, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iraq again,” he said. “That’s when you know you’re war-mongers, when some countries are coming up twice.”

“At some point, don’t you have to look in the mirror,” he asked, “and say ‘Maybe it’s me?’”

“America needs to start defining peace as strength,” he said. “Do you know who the role model for every president should be? Jimmy Carter. He was the one out of all of them who figured out how to sit in office for four years and never fire a shot.”

“And every president’s negative example,” he concluded, “should be Dick Cheney, who even shot his friends in the face.”

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Despite their insistence that they really don't want the United States to go to war with North Korea after all of the bluster we've heard from Kim Jong Un and his warnings that his country is authorized to wage nuclear strikes against the United States, Fox's Sean Hannity and his guest, Rudy "Noun, A Verb and 9-11" Giuliani did their best to push the notion that the United States should do just that.

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not in the mood for a bunch of bluster from a couple of chickenhawks on Faux News, thumping their chest and complaining that President Obama hasn't been aggressive enough with his foreign policy to suit them.

I'm also not sure why someone who put the Office of Emergency Management in the basement of the World Trade Center and who lies constantly about his so-called "expertise" on terrorism is qualified to weigh in on anything, much less whether we should start a nuclear war.

Hannity is still bound and determined to rewrite history and pretend that George W. Bush's brand of foreign policy and preemptive invasions "kept us safe." He's been ranting and raving about this all week (Giuliani actually wasn't the worst of the recent guests complaining about how "weak" President Obama is on foreign policy. The day before, he had on Iran-Contra criminal, Oliver North.)

Faux "News" is becoming a bad parody of itself, day after day.

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Welcome to the Secretary of State job, John Kerry: North Korea appears to conduct 3rd nuclear test, officials and experts say:

Hong Kong (CNN) -- North Korea appeared to have conducted its third underground nuclear bomb test Tuesday, officials and experts said, as U.S. seismologists reported activity centered near the site of the secretive regime's two previous atomic blasts.

Although North Korea had warned the world of its plans to carry out a new test in a vitriolic statement last month, the move is still likely to rattle the security situation in Northeast Asia as analysts try to determine the power and complexity of the device the North is thought to have detonated.

If confirmed, it would be the first nuclear test under the North's young leader, Kim Jong Un, who appears to be sticking closely to his father's policy of building up the isolated state's military deterrent to keep its foes at bay, shrugging off the resulting international condemnation and sanctions.

It also provided a provocative reminder of a seemingly intractable foreign policy challenge for President Barack Obama ahead of his State of the Union address later Tuesday.

The area around the reported epicenter of the magnitude 4.9 disturbance in northeastern North Korea has little or no history of earthquakes or natural seismic hazards, according to U.S. Geological Survey maps. The disturbance Tuesday took place at a depth of about 1 kilometer, the USGS said.

Officials suspect a nuclear test

Government officials and security analysts had little doubt about the cause of the quake.

"We believe North Korea conducted its third nuclear test," said Kim Min-seok, a spokesman for the South Korean defense ministry. He added that the magnitude of the "artificial tremor" suggested the size of the blast was in the order of 6 to 7 kilotons, more powerful than the North's two prior nuclear tests. Read on...