Did Trent Lott fuck a male prostitute? And, if so, could this be the only honest business transaction he's ever been involved with?

"I just said 'what's up George?' it's a figure of speech... oh, never mind..."

You might say "who gives a shit why Trent Lott is resigning?" And, of course, you'd be right. It's good enough just to know that one more cuntservative parasite is out of office, even though his rat-like survival skills will guarantee him an even more lucrative post-retirement career as a lobbyist.

But the rumors are getting many-layered and interesting. The most sordid theory is that the great Larry Flynt was all set to expose Lott as a gay hooker fucker, but he's letting the story slide in lieu of Lott's resignation. "Senator Lott has been the target of an ongoing Hustler investigation for some time now, due to confidential information that we have received," said Hustler. But why the hell would Flynt play the gentleman, let Lott slither away and waste whatever high-caliber karmic ammo he has stockpiled?

And then there's Benjamin Nicholas, male escort, who is vehemently denying having fucked Trent Lott (well wouldn't you?) while the whole unappetizing scandal continues to swirl around him like flies round shit. According to Nicholas' blog "There are falsely pieced-together quotes that serve no purpose other than to sensationalize a completely fabricated scoop." Fair enough. But why does he then add "I will continue to offer a great sense of confidentiality to the people I see" if doesn't want to stoke up the self-publicizing gossip and direct more implied suspicion in Lott's direction?

This story is so fascinatingly sordid it makes your pubic hair itch... We have the KKK-friendly scumbag senator resigning with his "good" name entirely reliant on the discretion of America's most famous hardcore pornographer and his reputation saved by the male prostitute 'code of ethics.' Yeuch.

But the biggest reason for Lott's sudden retirement is way more prosaic and even less savory. According to Bloomberg:

(Link to this)

Today's grossest and most unfortunate news story? You got it.

A surgery meant to reverse a colostomy on a Dover man went horribly wrong last year, resulting in fecal mater being discharged from his penis and urine passing through his colon, according to a lawsuit filed in Superior Court. During the procedure, the suit alleges doctors at Kent General Hospital improperly stapled the colon to the bladder instead of the rectal stump. This left the patient with diarrhea, as well as gas and liquid stool passing from his penis. (And, in 'rectal stump' a great name for a punk rock combo should he ever decide to start a band.)

"These structures are very close to one another," said Dr. Scott D. Goldstein, director of colon and rectal surgery at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. "But it shouldn't happen. I can't say more than that." (Link to this)

The Christian wingnuterati are all aquiver over Islam again. There's nothing they love more than a good "isn't Islam intolerant?" story. But what about their tolerance for tolerance?

Today it's fuss over the plight of a British teacher in Sudan who unwisely chose to call a teddy bear Muhammad. I'm not an expert on Islamic theology and/or Shariah law, but this seems like a particularly dumb thing to do. Shariah law is barbaric. So isn't that reason enough to tread carefully when living within its jurisdiction? This story says way more about the teacher being a dumbass than it does about the flaws of Islam.

And before our Jeezuzlanders start sucking each other's dicks about how tolerant our "persecuted" Christians are, they might want to ignore this story:

For those Christians still laboring under the delusion that Islam is inherently more intolerant than Christianity, perhaps it might be a good thing to remember that the laws so rigorously applied by Shariah courts are based on the exact same rules set out in the OT. The only difference being that Christians choose to ignore the parts that seem too cruel and unusual given 4,000 years hindsight.

But if the Bible were to be taken literally as the unalterable word of God and those Abrahamic rules as strictly applied as they are under Shariah, we'd be cutting off shoplifters' hands, whipping beer drinkers and stoning gays with the best/worst of them. And arresting dumbasses for calling their teddy bears Jesus? It would definitely be happening.

What's my point? Secular legal systems good. Faith-based legal systems (as advocated by every evangelical wingnut in America) horrible. (Link to this)

The truth will out. Usually later than sooner.

Excerpt from Scott McClellan's forthcoming book "What Happened"
(Public Affairs Books, due out in April 2008)

Dave Lindorff, Rense.com (Link to this)

Ron Paul gets the hooker vote in Nevada, the MSM finally acknowledges his existence.

Implying at a glance that Tucker Carlson is a brothel owner, the layout above is somewhat insulting. Actually, scrub that, it would be a massive step up.

Tucker was in Nevada posing with a hooker (overstating his otherwise dubious hetero cred?) as part of a story he's doing about Ron Paul. Story? Ron Paul?? Yup.

So the media will do a story on Paul if he's getting backing from a pimp. Otherwise it's news blackout as usual for the only Republican most of the country can still stomach? (Link to this)

New Zogby poll reveals surprising truth about Republican voters and less surprising truth about the sad state of our democracy.

If all the careerism, corporate influence and showbiz bullshit could somehow be magically purged from our election process, we would be left with a straight race between Ron Paul and John Edwards in 2008. They are the only two candidates who still give a flying fuck about what used to be important in politics and, more importantly, what used to be important to the American people. But both are marginalized by the MSM and we're left with the prospect of an election that will suck more than a Christian Conservative in a Gay Pride parade portapotty. Who needs issues? Check out that hair... shut up and vote for whoever we bestow most airtime and fewest grunts from Hannity upon.

Don't believe me? Ask those men of science at Zogby. They just got done conducting a blind poll asking respondents which unnamed Republican candidate they'd vote for based only on their background information and policies. Ron Paul came out top with nearly double Ghouliani's support. As "Candidate A" his description read:

So what does that tell you? Even hardline Republicans favor immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Even hardline Republicans favor Ron Paul and his ideas more than they do Ghouliani, Thompson or Romney and their polished turds masquerading as policy. If only Paul could get them thinking on election day too...

The Zogby blind poll also confirms the depressing truth about our electoral process: it has nothing to do with issues. Our news media have striven so diligently to make elections devoid of substance that it doesn't even occur to potential voters that they should be choosing candidates based on the traditional determinants of what their policies are. Now pollsters have to conduct 'novelty polls' to explore what the candidates stand for while the news media gets on with the important job of wowing over Romney's hair or Ghouliani's bellicose vigor instead.

Now, for Republican voters, elections are just a homoerotic popularity contest based on media-friendliness and carefully accentuated manliness. And with Clinton still heading the Democrat field, the same seems to apply for Dems too. (Link to this)

Ever wondered how wingnuts square reality with their own wacked-out assumptions? Easy...

The trick is to draw parallels between different things that are totally unrelated, then draw slam-dunk conclusions that make perfect logical sense within the skewed reality of your own context. Don't talk apples for apples. Hell, don't even talk apples for oranges. The perfect wingnut analogy is more like apples for 1985 Buick LeSabres. It's a 2+2=5 phony logic that makes less sense when deconstructed than Gilbert Gottfried speaking in tongues. But what better way could there be to defend otherwise indefensible positions than by dragging the frame of debate away into your own world where you decide what constitutes sense?

Currently, the biggest fake-reality is The War on Terror which frames every debate about anything. From its evil womb squirt such mutant memes as: The 9-11 terrorists were Muslims, therefore Muslims are terrorists (or two plus two equals five); the president is the head of state, therefore people who disagree with the head of state are traitors (or two plus two equals Dennis Kucinich), etc. These conclusions make perfect logical sense. If you're three years old and/or a cretin.

But the most bizarro example yet of wingnut reality synthesis gone batshit crazy has got to be yesterday's WorldNetDaily op-ed by none other than Chuck Norris. Says Reverend Bowflex:

What the fuck are you talking about, Chuck??? The "liberal press" is laughing down its sleeve every time another soldier dies, but their traitorous hearts can't help bleeding for the plight of the turkey? Chuck's thesis is at once hilarious and mind-blowingly offensive to common sense and decency... a bit like watching him in Delta Force 2 without being high on glue. (Link to this)

Sure, blame booze when you wake up next to a Kathy Bates look-alike on a Sunday morning... but a bike? Or a stuffed dog..?

51-year-old Robert Stewart has been put on probation for three years and placed on the sex offenders' register after being caught having sex with a bicycle in a Scottish hotel room. His lawyer described his client as a "sad little man" who was trying to tackle his drink problem (spectacularly unsuccessfully he might have added). I'm no doctor, but if booze makes you want to fuck a bicycle then, yup, you got a problem... Unless we're talking Steel Reserve in which case it's only one of a raft of common side effects.

In other inanimate object fucking news, a Canadian burglar was recently found by police in a neighbors garage enjoying a post-coital nap after screwing a stuffed dog. "He was lying there with his genitalia exposed next to the stuffed dog," said Crown attorney John Peden. "While the police report doesn't describe it this way, the dog might be appropriately characterized as now being anatomically correct, as opposed to its condition before he removed it."

And, speaking of unnatural sex acts with bikes, news also reaches us that Paris Hilton's latest sex tape is now loose on the Web. Personally, I'd prefer to rip a makeshift vagina in a plush toy or find an obliging 10-speed and have at it. (Link to this)

No more "all about the Benjamins", it's "all about whatever the hell that thing is..."

While wingnuts try to convince us all is well, common sense tells us that the American "empire" is in political and economic freefall. Under the auspices of the Bushco™ money burners, the dollar is weaker than it's ever been since the days of the gold standard. And our prosperity, pegged as it is to the failing international strength and popularity of our currency, is all set for a stellar-scale implosion.

Freemarket lobotomites may argue that you can't blame Bush and that the "invisible hand of the market" is really to blame for the slump. But the truth is that the hand is not so invisible and governments do steer economies. Unfortunately, this particular government has steered ours like a blind epileptic in a demolition derby and we are now suffering the consequences.

When the mighty Clenis bequeathed the biggest budget surplus in American history, it was not really a surplus, more an intelligently managed deficit. But Bush has done every boneheaded thing possible in the intervening 6 years to piss away whatever pretensions of economic security that 'surplus' may have presented. We've had multi-billion tax cuts for the wealthy, the Iraq/Afghanistan blood and money pits, the real estate meltdown, the pawning of our economy to third world lenders, the failure to respond to the ascendancy of the euro...

Bush, as the Decider, has always been a screw-the-consequences kind of dick who could well go down in history as the guy who killed our prosperity. Perhaps an anti-Eisenhower or a reverse JFK if you will.

But, of course it's easy to argue with reality - wingnuts do it all the time - so let's ignore the facts and consider the zeitgeist... Even the most closed-minded Bushbot must shudder to behold this portent of American doom:

So there you have it. The dollar is officially dumped. (Link to this)

Just when you think they couldn't get crappier, here comes a black guy doing a "Ching Chong Chinaman" routine. Way to go, Fox!

Rod Wheeler is a F(oxymoron) News contributor and a consultant to the "food and agricultural industry on matters of homeland security"(??) He's also an idiot with a penchant for grade-school racial humor according to recent evidence.

Wheeler was on Hannity & Colmes Sunday helpfully demonstrating for the Fox watchers what a Chinese person looks like. The saddest part is that he actually looked more like he was doing an impersonation of Colmes. (Link to this)

Lefty bloggers make him mad with all that swearing and vitriol. Does he hate us for our freedoms?

It almost felt like Karl was talking about me when he mounted his high horse to take a tilt at "blogs written by angry kooks" on the left side of the political divide.

"People in the past who have been on the nutty fringe of political life, who were more or less voiceless, have now been given an inexpensive and easily accessible soapbox, a blog," Rove said during a speech about politics and the Web. "I'm a fan of many blogs. I visit them frequently and I learn a lot from them, but there also blogs written by angry kooks... [they] often argue from anger rather than reason, and too often, their object is personal release, not political persuasion."

Rove doesn't explain how anyone with half a brain is supposed to live through 7 years of Bushco™ bullshit without resorting to vitriol. But at least it's refreshingly honest to hear a rethuglican come right out and express his contempt for free speech.

Rove also took a swipe at the liberal propensity to swear. Really? Ironically, one of Fried Wire's pet peeves is the conservative propensity not to swear and endlessly criticize those of us who do. It's just another example of compliant authority fags being happy to restrict their own freedoms and then getting pissy because not everyone else wants to follow suite.

Barret Smith, an angry wingnut visitor to Friedwire (who probably landed here by accident looking for chicks-with-dicks porn), once emailed me saying "Does your vocabulary have something other that four letter words? Were you ever education at any kind of school?" This, to me, is a perfect example of wingnut swear-o-phobia. While they think you're stupid because you swear, they often can't help betraying their own sub-par intellects via bad grammar and typos while attacking you. Of course, being a smug prick, I replied to Mr Smith saying "'Were you ever education at any kind of school?' Err... enough to know not to use a noun in place of a past participle."

Writing without swearing is like composing music using only harmonious chords. We should love the music of language, discordant or not, and respect 'bad' words just as much as 'good' words. Be a proud swearer... use your freedom. To the paraphrase the gun nut mantra, they'll have to pry my bad language from my cold, dead mouth. Motherfuckers. (Link to this)

Welcome to my Twilight Zone. Only Rod Serling could envision a world where Fried Wire, Andrew Sullivan and... gulp... Karl Rove agree.

Contrary to the unimaginative assumptions of the wingnut clones who troll my inbox, Fried Wire is no Democrat cheerleader. Just because I hate everything the Republican party stands for bends over for these days, doesn't mean I'm a fully-lobotomized member of anyone's glee club. Far from it. I suffer from that painful affliction I like to call 'thought syndrome.' And those wingnuts, who find it impossible to imagine thinking outside the boundaries of the two party constraint, should be damn glad they'll never know its rigors firsthand.

Like many TS sufferers, I find unconditional acquiescence to any party line anathematic. Sure, I cheered on the Dems when they won the midterms and was relieved to see the Bush Putsch hit a speed bump on the road to absolute power... But I couldn't really give a shit about the Democrats per se. My conditional support for them was defined only by their opposition to the Republicans and by the theoretical notion that they care less about the wealthy elite and more about the rest of us. So now, after a year of Bushco-enabling inaction, I can see absolutely no use for them.

So why are the Dems so determined to suck? What's their malfunction? Andrew Sullivan summarizes their miserable malaise in words so wise it's hard to believe he once voted for Bush:

But it gets scarier... I nearly choked on my morning liberal latté today when I found myself nodding in agreement with Karl Rove in his Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled "A Failure To Lead":

God help me. Short of ritual suicide or a stiff regime of antipsychotic drugs, is there any cure for a liberal libertarian with socialistic sympathies such as myself, who suddenly finds himself agreeing with Karl Rove? Is this the depth of horror we've sunk to? A Democratic party so shitty that Karl Rove doesn't even have to lie to make them look bad?

2008 promises to be the most negative, most pathetic and most pointless exercise in democracy America has ever endured. It's a double negative, race-to-the-bottom election with the Dems defining themselves in reference to the failures of the GOP while the GOP does a flanking maneuver and defines itself in reference to the failures of the fucking useless Democratic party. Man, I'd rather shoot myself in the balls than waste a vote on either set of clueless losers. (Link to this)

Why? I don't know. But it made me laugh and that's all that counts, bitches.

I like Tucker Carlson because he makes the sadist in me rejoice. I look at his chipmunk-like face with its quivery top lip, rerun the memory of those fucking ridiculous bow ties he used to wear and I laugh my ass right off. And the Chuck Norris of news TV has not failed to entertain this week...

First, he let's fly with the most schizophrenic tirade this side of Newsbusters.org when he said he was "outraged" by a statement from Rep. Charlie Rangel critical of Rudy Giuliani's "personal life," adding, "I don't think you should attack Giuliani for philandering." This comes hot on the heels of his earlier pronouncement that Hillary Clinton's marriage is "[o]f course" an issue in the 2008 presidential election and made reference to Bill Clinton's "philander[ing]" and "famous appetites." Thanks for the laugh, Tucker.

This week, Tucker also decided there were not enough women hating him so he acted decisively. When Feminist Majority Foundation president Eleanor Smeal remarked to him that we should be embarrassed that the U.S. is so far behind in terms of representation of women in politics, Carlson replied, "I'm actually not embarrassed by it at all. I don't know why that's embarrassing. You could make the counter case that most women are so sensible, they don't want to get involved in something as stupid as politics. ...They've got real things to do."

Is he on Aqua Dots or what? (Link to this)

Pat Robertson pledges support for Ghouliani. How low can they go?

"Thanks, scumbag." "You're welcome sleazeball..."

Evidently, Pat Robertson would rather back a styrofoam wig shop head in preference to having his flock herd stray toward La Clinton.

I would have thought it impossible for either Ghouliani or Robertson to sink any lower in my estimation before today. But now the God Squad's own feuhrer is giving fake-catholic, thrice-married abortion-supporting Giuliani a pudgy thumbs up? WTF? It's a sad day for money-grubbing bigots with religious delusions everywhere. (Link to this)

Christian Conservatives want to ban Penthouse from military bases.

"Christian" conservatives love the troops. And there's nothing contradictory about them expressing that love while simultaneously endorsing ever greater numbers of them dying in miserable, flyblown shitholes overseas. Because Christian conservative love (unlike that limp-wristed simplistic stuff Christ espoused) is a complex thing that us secularist wastrels could never hope to understand.

But Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md) and his God-bothering brethren at the American Family Association have now gone too far. They're urging the Pentagon to ban the sale of mild-mannered tit mags such as Penthouse and Playboy on military bases. "If soldiers want to read that stuff, they can walk down the street and buy it somewhere else," Bartlett says. "I don't want (the military) to help."

I'd suggest to Bartlett that there might be certain logistical hurdles involved in walking off-base to score a copy of Penthouse in, say, Kabul or Baghdad. And I'd also suggest it's a tad ironic for him to be trampling on the First Amendment rights of the very people who have sworn to defend said constitution with their own lives...

But most of all, I'd like to ask where the hell this dickhead gets off wanting to deprive our troops of the right to cathartically crack one off to Penthouse at the end of a hard day dodging IEDs at his behest? What the fuck is wrong with "Christian" conservatives and their bizarrely skewed priorities??? (Link to this)

The Fun New Game For All The Family...

Michelle Malkin is screeching unoriginally about a conservative boogeyman of years gone by. So what's new? This time she's not railing about the venerable Clenis as if it's still 1995. Today she's bitching about Che Guevara as if it's still 1965.

Err... yup, Che killed some folks but he's been dead close to 40 years... What burning issues next? Joe Stalin not nice? Attila The Hun and why the liberals love him?

If, like Malkin, nothing enrages you more than a trendy student or a sweaty migrant sporting a Che t-shirt, perhaps you might also want to consider taking Andrew Jackson off the twenty-dollar bill for similar reasons? (Bonus point: he was a card-carrying Democrat just like Bill Clinton!)

After reading Malkin's posting on Che, I couldn't resist indulging in a bit of smart-ass liberal moral relativism so chin-strokingly smug I almost got mad with myself... Over at Cubanet.org, there's a rundown of facts about the state that Che built that shows how antithetic the authoritarian system in Havana is to Bush's America... or is it? I chuckle knowingly as I adjust my beret and preen my Che t-shirt:

Legal and Institutional Failings: Cuba
"Although in theory the different branches of government have separate and defined areas of authority, in practice the executive retains clear control over all levers of power."

Legal and Institutional Failings: USA
"President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that [the executive branch] has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress."

Political Imprisonment: Cuba
"Of seventy-five political dissidents, independent journalists, and human rights advocates who were summarily tried in April 2003, sixty-one remain imprisoned."

Political Imprisonment: USA
"It's time to drop the fiction that "there are no political prisoners in the United States." After the arrest of Steve Kubby, after the feds' murder of Peter McWilliams, after the indictment of hundreds of demonstrators on trumped-up conspiracy charges, after Waco, one must face reality: the United States government prosecutes people for political purposes."

"Thousands of detainees continued to be held in US custody without charge or trial in Iraq, Afghanistan and the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."

Travel Restrictions: Cuba
"The Cuban government forbids the country's citizens from leaving or returning to Cuba without first obtaining official permission."

Travel Restrictions: USA
"Beginning February 2008, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will implement their "Advance Passenger Information System (APIS)," the gist of which is that you will need permission from the United States Government to travel on any air or sea vessel that goes to, from or through the U.S. The travel companies will not be able to issue a boarding pass until you are cleared by DHS. This applies to ALL passengers, US citizens and visitors alike."

Freedom of Assembly: Cuba
"Freedom of assembly is severely restricted in Cuba, and political dissidents are generally prohibited from meeting in large groups."

Freedom of Assembly: USA
"The USA PATRIOT Act section 802 defines domestic terrorism so broadly that it could apply to an individual exercising his or her freedom of speech, expression, and assembly through acts of civil disobedience."

Prison Conditions: Cuba
"Prisoners are generally kept in poor and abusive conditions, often in overcrowded cells."

Prison Conditions: USA
"The US prison system is exacting an increasingly heavy toll, both financial and human. Surging numbers of prisons hold more than 2 million inmates, giving the United States the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Over the past few decades, the dominant criminal justice philosophy dropped rehabilitation in favor of sequestration and retribution. Opportunities for education, job training and drug treatment have fallen out of fashion. "Three strikes" and minimum sentencing laws have led to excessive punishments for millions of nonviolent offenders."

Death Penalty: Cuba
"Under Cuban law the death penalty exists for a broad range of crimes. Because Cuba does not release information regarding its use of the penalty, it is difficult to ascertain the frequency with which it is employed. As far as is known, however, no executions have been carried out since April 2003."

Death Penalty: USA
"279 people have been executed in the US since 2003. A total of 1,099 have been killed since the reintroduction of the death penalty in 1976."

...and let's not even mention this. (Link to this)

Taxation without representation? You got it. Or, more precisely, your grandkids will.

Smirk 'em if you got 'em... how much more damage can one unrestrained idiot do in a year?

Not content with screwing over currently extant generations, King George is busily screwing over those yet to be born according to David M. Walker, Comptroller General of the United States.

Seems Our Dear Leader has found a neat way to avoid going down in history as a tax hiker (the worst possible fate for a Republican, just ask his dad) and still get the national debt payed off. With US debt hemorrhaging past $9 trillion, it will be down to future generations, not us, to pick up the bill and face the tax hikes.

As Walker points out, this is just one more way Bush is showing his contempt for the constitution. What could be more antithetic to the spirit in which this nation was founded than subjecting Americans to taxation without representation? Nice one, George. (Link to this)

New drug craze warning...

Seems the cops in Collier County, Florida, are concerned that American school kids could soon succumb to the temptation of doing "Jenkem" - a drug for the very poor and very desperate that's popular with African street kids - and have issued a warning to parents.

"Basically, the new drug is a mixture of solid human waste and urine, turned into a gas that can be huffed." Says Wink News. So far, Snopes.com is undetermined on whether or not Floridians have really taken to getting high on (very literally) their own supply, but we are talking Florida here... so all bets are definitely off. (Link to this)

Republicans broke the media, now they're bitching about how it doesn't work. Cry me a river, bitches.

There's a story at Investor's Business Daily titled "Even Harvard Finds The Media Biased." How those words must give boners to all those wingnut bloggers still pushing the liberal-biased media cliche in the face of so much plain evidence to the contrary.

But the joint report by Harvard University and the Project for Excellence in Journalism is really only about how the MSM spends more time talking about Obama and Clinton in a "favorable light" than the Republicans in the run up to 2008. So it's not really proof of wholesale liberal media bias.

And, instead of showing political bias per se, doesn't the MSM's favoring of the Dems with more air time really just show a natural bias toward more interesting program content? Think about it... Irrespective of political leanings, isn't the prospect of a black guy and/or a woman running for president for the first time in history infinitely more interesting than discussing those tired hacks vying for the Republican candidacy? Would you really rather watch an analysis of Fred Thompson's latest Alzheimer's-addled prattlings about the Soviet Union? Or maybe count how many more times "9-11" can be squeezed into a Ghouliani stump speech before it dissolves into numeric gibberish?

Then, of course, the more Machiavellian M.O. also exists: it's actually very much in a conservatively biased media's interests to talk up the Dem candidates and their likely chances of success. Why? In order to scare the conservative base into actually getting off their fat, Jeezuz-loving asses to mobilize against them. It's not that much a far-fetched notion. So are we supposed to believe Roger Ailes is too dumb to have had it occur to him?

And lest we forget, dear wingnuts, if you're pissed about the MSM not favoring your side with equal attention, blame your precious Saint Gipper for trashing the media Fairness Doctrine back in the 80s. Seems like a bit of a "having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too" scenario for you to dump something called a "Fairness Doctrine" then complain when you perceive yourself to be treated unfairly. (Link to this)

Hear ye, hear ye, Gays: straight people do not think you're funny because of your sexual orientation. But if you wear fake boobs and dress as a woman, whether gay or straight, that's an entirely different proposition.

Here comes another family-values Christian busted in drag soliciting gay sex:

At least he wasn't wearing real women's breasts... But, laugh not. The normally frisky Pam at Pam's House Blend has a serious point to make which kinda bums one out:

I can see the point and I would be first to admit I find all these scandals hilarious. But I don't agree that there's anything anti-gay about poking fun at these closeted conservative freaks and I don't believe that it aids the conservative anti-gay agenda or reinforces the mainstream stereotype of the ridiculous "funny gay."

Would Pam suggest that people like Schum and Larry Craig are really staunchly heterosexual gay-haters who are volunteering to take one for the team and get themselves arrested on purpose just to make gays look silly and thereby make the general public less sympathetic towards treating them equally under the law? I know Republicans are sneaky bastards, but somehow it doesn't seem likely that they'd be shooting down so many of their own side when there must be some cross-dressing Dems around they could pick on. And most importantly, speaking for the average non-gay, I don't think there's anything funny about being gay anyway.

Just to back up my point, let's contrast two famous gays: Gay A), Mr Richard Simmons, is hilarious. Gay B), SA founder Ernst Ernst Roehm, not so much. I'd confidently posit that Richard Simmons would be just as funny if he was straight so his team affiliation is really not the issue.

Sorry Pam, us straight folk don't laugh at the conservative crazies getting busted because we think gay = funny. We laugh because it's amusing to see hypocrisy come home to roost and because there is no way anyone can picture a mustachioed school principle hookered-up in drag and fake knockers without at least succumbing to a smirk. Sexual orientation is not the funny part. (Link to this)

It seems the commenters at Gateway Pundit are for real, but I still can't figure out if the blog is a parody or not. Is the joke on me?

How confident wingnut bloggers always seem to be of their own intelligence. So isn't it sad that most of what they say betrays evidence of borderline retardation?

These witless fucks nibble at leftiness with their hamster-like jaws of intellect and regurgitate bilious garbage that they then mistake for insight... They present woefully flawed arguments to the world with all the smug superciliousness of morons who actually think they know what they're talking about... and the mouth-reading authority fags, Jeezuzlanders and wingnuts lap it up. It doesn't matter if it's true or not, it doesn't matter if it's fucking stupid or not... just slap a pro-Bush, anti-Clinton "Fact" on your blog and, presto, you're a conservative pundit.

Today's example of conservative thought comes from GatewayPundit:

Let's ignore the fact that they're cheating on methods for determining the unemployment rate in order to make it seem lower than it really is... and they still show a rise. Let us instead consider how impressive it is that the guy who drew that insane graph (has a difference of 3 ever been more dramatically portrayed?) can't even spell 'unemployment'? And that the dumb bastards at Gateway Pundit faithfully re-typed the typo in their post title? Oh my, such mighty intellects at work... (Link to this)

Almost a week has gone by without a Republican sex scandal... I was worried.

Former Washington state Rep. Richard Curtis, in his first public pronouncement in more than two days, repeated that he has done nothing wrong.

"I've done a lot of God damn good for this community," Curtis said in a brief phone interview with Columbian Editor Lou Brancaccio Thursday morning. "I am not the criminal here."

True, a "Family Values" Republican lawmaker putting on lingerie and offering a gay porn model $1,000 for unprotected sex in a porn store isn't technically a crime but... call the police: my powers of visualization have been brutally assaulted! (Link to this)

All hail our comatose, fascist-enabling MSM!

To accuse the Bush misadministration of flirting with fascism has now moved far away from the province of subjective rhetoricism and left-wing cliche. It's embarrassingly obvious for anyone who's paying attention that it's a fact of life, as is the creepily enabling MSM silence on the ongoing strapping down of America.

This weekend, for example, their were coordinated antiwar protests in at least 11 American cities. Even though only 26 percent of us approve of the war, they were sparsely attended. Why the poor turnout? Could it have had something to do with the virtual MSM news blackout both before and after the marches?

To deliberately ignore these expressions of popular democracy and indulge in self-censorship in support of a powerbase obsessed with eliminating dissent is not a sign of us living in a fascist state, then what exactly would be? (Link to this)

Corporate welfare, tax breaks for billionaires and three jobs for your mom.

During an interview with NBC television, Warren Buffett (current worth: $52bn) brandished an informal survey of 15 of his 18 office staff at his Berkshire Hathaway empire. The billionaire said he was paying 17.7% payroll and income tax, compared with an average in the office of 32.9%.

"There wasn't anyone in the office, from the receptionist up, who paid as low a tax rate and I have no tax planning; I don't have an accountant or use tax shelters. I just follow what the US Congress tells me to do," he said.

Nice to see that year-old Democrat majority sticking it to the man. (Link to this)