Republican Alabama lawmaker Gerald Allen says homosexuality is an unacceptable lifestyle. As CBS News Correspondent Mark Strassmann reports, under his bill, public school libraries could no longer buy new copies of plays or books by gay authors, or about gay characters.

"I don't look at it as censorship," says State Representative Gerald Allen. "I look at it as protecting the hearts and souls and minds of our children." ...read on

The sickness is spreading at a rapid pace. Next will be gay screen writers, gay actors, gay chefs, gay starbucks workers, gay Wal-mart employees...oh wait a second..they don't make enough money to count. The next question is where will Ken Mehlman go?

President Bush will hold a prime time press conference on Thursday night, his first in over a year, to offer more details about his plans to overhaul Social Security, the White House announced.

I hear Bush is going to call Dems obstructionists tomorrow. He should probably do 60 news conferences in 60 days.

The chairman of the Colorado Young Republicans was involved with the Denver Three incident

(Update-I changed the title of the post because after further review it was wrong)

I was corrected by BT who says Klinkerman is clearly not the "Fake SS" man who escorted the
Denver Three out of the event. That man is still unidentified and being sought:

The chairman of the Colorado Young Republicans was one of the people involved in a March 21 incident in which three Denver residents were forcibly removed from a speech given by President Bush because of a bumper sticker. Jay Bob Klinkerman, leader of the state group for Republicans ages 18 to 40, admitted in an interview that he was at the gate of the Wings over the Rockies Museum when the three people were stopped...read on

.

I have no idea what I said. lol

Anti-Castro Majority Leader Tom DeLay enjoys a fine Cuban cigar

via Eschaton

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes, according to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a cigar is an economic prop to a brutal totalitarian regime. Arguing against loosening sanctions against Cuba last year, DeLay warned that Fidel Castro "will take the money. Every dime that finds its way into Cuba first finds its way into Fidel Castro's blood-thirsty hands.... American consumers will get their fine cigars and their cheap sugar, but at the cost of our national honor."

I like this part of the story: Asked about the Majority Leader's consumption of a Cuban cigar, his spokesman Dan Allen replied there has been "no change in our Cuban policy."

The right wingers will probably start saying stuff like:

Powerline : " We still haven't been able to verify that the cigar in question is actually a Cuban cigar at all. Assrocket says that they counterfeit Cuban's all the time. I have been calling TIME magazine, and right now they aren't returning my calls which smells fishy to me.

Powerline Update: We have just been emailed from an anonymous source that reveals the the cigar in question actually came from Harry Reid's office.

Powerline Update II: The cigar came from one of Mel Martinez's aids. Tom didn't realize that it was a Cuban cigar so he smoked it. That aid has since been fired."

A comedy skit that was in really poor taste about President Bush that aired on The Randi Rhodes show has "supposedly" irked the Secret Service as reported by the sludge man, Matt Drudge. The feeding frenzy will begin on the right wing and it'll be all over FOX, and their affiliates. Click here to listen to Randi apologize and talk about what happened. Outside the Beltway says " It's more than a bit of a stretch, though, to interpret a national radio show skit as a legitimate threat." We agree. If Drudge's story is even true, to waste the resources of any law enforcement agency on this would be the far greater travesty.

-# 21

Had to do this one!

Impulse Control

via Digby (excerpts) The children are rewriting Democratic amendments to make them sound as if Democrats are trying to protect sexual predators. And no, this isn't happening in some obscure local backwater. It's in the US House of Representatives:...

Thank goodness the chairman of the committee stepped in and took control of his unruly charges.

Oh wait; he didn't. "And instead of decrying what I certainly expected would be revealed as a mistake by an overzealous staffer...The Chairman stood by those altered
amendment descriptions. "In fact...He said, and I quote..."You don't like what we wrote about your amendments, and we don't like what you said about our bill."

The problem is that these people don't really want to achieve anything. They are both in love with being victims and insist on being right. And they want everyone to acknowledge they are both right and victimized.

The Republican party has a bunch of action items and a bunch of constituencies who want specific things, but this erstwhile great party of sober, prudent conservatism has shown that when it comes to running the country is more like an wild gang of teen-agers, terrorizing the neighborhood and drawing graffitti on the capital building. They operate on impulses that they cannot control.

There is a strain of macho, pouty, puerile, "Lost Cause" psychology in American politics going back a long way. These same people wielding almost total power and attempting to run our government as an expression of their sense of righteous victimhood is a uniquely undignified and degrading spectacle.

Jon Stewart and Steve Colbert rip apart the hypocrities of Justice Sunday

Download | play -Real Player -hat tip to Dave for the video

Another Broken Record

via Think Progress

Another record was broken this year - the number of serious international terrorist attacks in a single year more than tripled, from a record of 175 in 2003 to 655 last year, according to recently released U.S. government figures.

This data, however, will no longer be in the annual report on international terrorism submitted to Congress by the State Department. Just over ten days ago the State Department decided to eliminate the report, “Patterns of Global Terrorism,” entirely.

All this comes not even a year after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had to publicly apologize for the first edition of the 2003 report - which severely undercounted the number of terrorist attacks. “The numbers were off,” Powell said, and “we have identified how we have to do this in the future.”

Apparently Condoleezza Rice doesn’t agree - her office had suggested an alternative method for counting attacks, and when the National Counterterrorism Center decided not to use this new method, the State Department eliminated the terrorism statistics in the congressionally mandated report altogether.