Many Democrats are bringing children and teachers from Newtown, as guests, to Obama's State of the Union speech tonight:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi announced on Friday that she will bring a fourth-grade child from Newtown who launched a petition to change gun laws after the shooting. Pelosi declined to name the child, but said she attends a school near Sandy Hook Elementary, where the mass killing took place. Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro will bring Carlos Soto, the brother of Sandy Hook teacher Victoria Soto, who was killed in the shooting. Another lawmaker from Connecticut, Rep. Elizabeth Esty, will bring Natalie Hammond, a Sandy Hook teacher who survived after being shot in the leg and foot. Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen also invited a guest affected by gun violence, Maryland woman Carol Price, an anti-gun violence advocate whose son was killed in 1998 by a neighbor with a 9 mm Luger pistol.

The invitations were delivered as part of an effort by Rhode Island Democratic Rep. Jim Langevin, who says he wants to "resensitize” people to the impact of gun tragedies. Langevin has been consigned to a wheelchair since he was 16, when he was accidentally shot in the neck.

The Republicans are inviting…. Ted Nugent.

"We know that the president will have the state of the union stacked and jammed with props, children, and victims of violent crime, " Nugent said. "And my friends wanted me to attend to counter that the way that I do: with facts, statistics and common sense and logic and a celebration of self-evident truths. So I will be taking on the media orgy following the State of the Union Address." 

Nugent said the media does not realize he is a "force to be reckoned with" and therefore he will "dominate them." 

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Nugent, an outspoken critic of Obama, had to be cleared by Secret Service this spring after saying that he would be "dead or in jail" if the president was re-elected. Nugent is a guest of Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX), whose spokesperson said the congressman invited Nugent “because he is a supporter of the Second Amendment and American values.”

It looks like the Party of Crazy is determined to stay that way.

This Stockman guy has only been in Congress one month, and is already making a name for himself as perhaps the most mad-fuck crazy Congressman in history.  After only a month, here is his list of wingnut craziness:

• He was only one of a handful of House Republicans to vote against John Boehner, boldly managing a "present" vote as the most spectacularly incompetent congressional coup of all time collapsed around its supposed planners.
• In the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School murders, his response was to introduce legislation repealing the gun free zones around schools, and for the same reason as the similar NRA blustering—because what we needed, according to both, was to have many morepeople wandering around school zones with guns, and that would probably work out just fine.
• He was abruptly cut off in a Fox News interview after comparing Barack Obama to Saddam Hussein, thus managing to rank as one of the few crackpot Republicans too nuts even for Fox News to stomach.
• When Obama introduced a set of executive actions that included things like "finally appoint a permanent head of the ATF, even if that makes Republicans sad" and "government scientists should be allowed to research gun violence", Steve Stockman threatened in an exceptionally frothing statement to impeach Obama, if necessary, in order to stop such obviously scandalous things. This may have been the first, biggest sign that Steve Stockman is in fact a bona fide moron, but he quickly surpassed even that.

Good times.