Tracking Teh Crazie

In the past couple of days, these things have happened in this order:

• President Obama signed an executive order on Friday
• Some of the wingnuts went crazy because of it on Saturday
• Some other wingnuts said, "Eh...not so much." on Sunday

First here's the Executive Order.  Then teh crazie.
The Canada Free Press picked up this story at Before It's News.  It's so important it's titled with an exclamation point:

Obama Executive Order: Peacetime Martial Law!

The piece begins:

This Executive Order was posted on the WhiteHouse.gov web site on Friday, March 16, 2012, under the name National Defense Resources Preparedness. In a nutshell, it's the blueprint for Peacetime Martial Law and it gives the president the power to take just about anything deemed necessary for "National Defense", whatever they decide that is.

Then there's Ms "No Victory Mosque At Ground Zero" herself, Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugged:

It calls for a draft, but not just a draft. A civilian draft, of “persons of outstanding experience or ability” without compensation. If they think they need you, they can compel you to work for the government for nothing.

Then yesterday, World Net Daily (WORLD NET DAILY!) walks them back (but not before raising the panic level just a bit:

The White House’s late-week release of an executive order has sent the online community into an uproar, worried that President Obama had secretly provided himself means to institute martial law in America.

In the common practice of dumping government documents on a Friday afternoon, just as the news cycle is wrapping up for the week – a move critics say allows the administration to avoid widespread coverage of embarrassing actions – the White House released an executive order on “National Defense Resources Preparedness.”

Filled with language about “government-owned equipment” and a “defense executive reserve,” among other vague statements, rumors began to spread that the executive order expanded the president’s power to do everything from seizing whole industries to drafting private armies.

Then the walk back:

As it turns out, Obama’s executive order is nearly identical to EO 12919, issued by President Clinton on June 7, 1994, which itself was an amendment to EO 10789, issued in 1958 by President Eisenhower, and which in fact, was later amended by EO 13286, issued in 2003 by George W. Bush.

And:

A side-by-side analysis of Obama’s order compared to Clinton’s, conducted by Ed Morrissey of HotAir.com, reveals Obama’s order is essentially just an update to reflect changes in government agency structure.

“If one takes a look at EO 12919, the big change is in the cabinet itself,” Morrissey writes. “In 1994, we didn’t have a Department of Homeland Security, for instance, and some of these functions would naturally fall to DHS. In EO 12919, the FEMA director had those responsibilities, and the biggest change between the two is the removal of several references to FEMA (10 in all). Otherwise, there aren’t a lot of changes between the two EOs, which looks mainly like boilerplate.

Ah...when WND has to be the voice of reason, you know the fringe is drowning in teh crazie.