Let’s be honest – “don’t ask, don’t tell” is absurd. So is the ban on homosexuals in the military. I therefore back the repeal measure sponsored by Massachusetts Democrat Marty Meehan.

A Massachusetts Democrat on Wednesday plans to re-introduce a bill repealing the congressional ban on homosexuals serving in the military.

Rep. Marty Meehan's Military Readiness Enhancement Act died last year in the Republican-controlled Congress. But with Democrats in charge, Meehan is more optimistic about passing the bill.

Meehan, who chairs the Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, plans to hold hearings as early as April, USA Today reported.

Meehan's bill would require the U.S. Armed Forces to adopt a policy of nondiscrimination based on sexual orientation -- allowing homosexuals to openly serve in the military, something they cannot do now.

Three Republicans have signed on, including Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida.

I’ll concede the policy might have once made sense, but it doesn’t now, given certain changes in social attitudes over the course of the last thirty to forty years. End it, don’t mend it.

I’m curious – when did an individual’s politics become the basis for whether or not they should be allowed in a certain business – or whether they should be allowed to operate a business in a certain area?

The millionaires who've turned to this state's left-leaning Legislature to authorize a $300 million tax subsidy for a new basketball arena have been playing right-wing politics. Two members of the new Sonics ownership group are heavyweight financiers of a national political group dedicated to banning gay marriage.

Together, co-owners Tom Ward and Aubrey McClendon donated more than $1.1 million to Americans United to Preserve Marriage, a conservative Christian group that opposes gay marriage.

The group is led by Gary Bauer, an outspoken leader of conservative groups including the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family.

I’m curious – should their position on homosexual marriage be the basis for denying the subsidy requested? Would a “conversion” be a legitimate basis for granting it? My answer, in both cases is “No.”

But then again, I don’t think the government should be in the business of subsidizing stadiums and arenas, any more than I believe they should be in the business of building factories for companies that say they cannot afford to do so.

It seems that a Florida legislator doesn’t think the term “illegal alien” is sufficiently nice, and wants to ban the term.

A state legislator whose district is home to thousands of Caribbean immigrants wants to ban the term "illegal alien" from the state's official documents.

"I personally find the word 'alien' offensive when applied to individuals, especially to children," said Sen. Frederica Wilson, D-Miami. "An alien to me is someone from out of space."

She has introduced a bill providing that: "A state agency or official may not use the term 'illegal alien' in an official document of the state." There would be no penalty for using the words.

In Miami-Dade County, Wilson said, "we don't say 'alien,' we say 'immigrant.'"

She said she encountered the situation when trying to pass a bill allowing children of foreigners to get in-state tuition at colleges and universities. Wilson, who directs a dropout prevention and education program in Miami, said she politely asks witnesses at public hearings on such issues not to use the term.

"There are students in our schools whose parents are trying to become citizens and we shouldn't label them," she said. "They are immigrants, through no fault of their own, not aliens."

Actually, you idiot, they are aliens, as the word means “one who is not a citizen of a place.” By your own explanation of who you seek to protect, you make it clear that they are, in fact, aliens, and that you are simply trying to debase the English language in the name of political correctness.

But if you would like, I would support legislation changing the proper term ti “border-jumping immigration criminal” – just for clarity’s sake.

I hate such stories – lamenting the fate of poor innocent folks who have been unjustly punished by an uncaring government, just because they. . . broke the law!

For more than a decade, the Kesbehs lived in Houston without proper documents, relying on the family's business selling American flags and other banners to get by.

Like millions of others from around the world, the Palestinians were in the United States illegally. They paid taxes, sent their children to school and tried not to be noticed.

Then, as pressure mounted on Muslims after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Kesbehs were found out, two members of the family were detained, and the whole clan was deported. They were sent to Jordan, a country the seven children barely knew.

They live in a cramped, cold apartment in Amman, the capital, where they rely primarily on the income generated by Noor Kesbeh, the eldest daughter, who has found steady work at, of all places, the U.S. Embassy.

Enterprising American dreamers or lawbreakers? Hardworking folk who should be welcomed back, or opportunists? Either way, the Kesbehs are desperate to return to the United States if they can find a way to do so legally.

The answer is clear – they are lawbreakers and opportunists. However, if they can legally get back in the country, they will be welcome in my book.

But as for all the hardships in the article, my response is simple – tough shit. That is part of the price you pay for your crimes.

Too much information – WAAAAAAY too much information!

FILM Queen DAME HELEN MIRREN has admitted she didn’t wear undies at the Oscars.

The star, 61, revealed her saucy secret on US TV as she showed off the gown she wore to the awards.

“It was all made for me so I didn’t have to have any underwear,” she told presenter OPRAH WINFREY.

“It fitted me like two angel’s hands,” she giggled, cupping her boobs to illustrate the point.

“I cried when I put it on, it is a work of art.”

TMI!

Here’s hoping that before the foreign companies are forced to turn over their property to the corrupt Castro-wannabe they have some demolition experts rig the places to blow sky-high.

President Hugo Chavez ordered by decree on Monday the takeover of oil projects run by foreign oil companies in Venezuela's Orinoco River region.

Chavez had previously announced the government's intention to take a majority stake by May 1 in four heavy oil-upgrading projects run by British Petroleum PLC, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp., ConocoPhillips Co., Total SA and Statoil ASA.

He said Monday that has decreed a law to proceed with the nationalizations that will see state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA, taking at least a 60 percent stake in the projects.

"The privatization of oil in Venezuela has come to an end," he said on his weekday radio show, "Hello, President." "This marks the true nationalization of oil in Venezuela."

By May 1, "we will occupy these fields" and have the national flag flying on them, he said.

The law is expected to be published shortly in the government's official gazette, and the companies will have four months from then to negotiate terms and conditions with PDVSA to decide whether they will take part in new joint ventures as minority partners, Chavez said.

Chavez did not detail how the government will pay for its increased share in the projects in which the companies are estimated to have invested some $17 billion.

Leave the bastard with nothing but wreckage – sort of like he has made of the rest of the Venezuelan economy.

I liked his show when he was on the air, but I’m pleased to see Jon Matthews is going to jail like he deserves.

Former radio talk show host Jon Matthews was ordered to spend three years in prison after a Fort Bend County judge this morning revoked his probation.

Matthews, 61, left the courtroom of state District Judge Brady Elliott after agreeing to a three-year sentence on a charge of indecency with a child.

The state claimed Matthews violated several terms of the probation he received two and half years ago after he pleaded guilty to exposing himself to an 11-year-old girl. Matthews did not dispute the claims made in court this morning.

Matthews, a fixture on Houston's radio scene for almost two decades, was jailed in August after prosecutors filed a motion to revoke the probation and asked that he be sent to prison. He was later released on bail.

Court records show Matthews violated several probation conditions the court set in 2004 when he entered his plea on the charge that stemmed from the October 2003 incident.

The violations included testing positive for alcohol, being terminated from a sex offenders counseling program and engaging in sexual fantasy activity over the Internet, court records said.

The man is a sick freak who needs to be out of circulation for far longer, but we’ll take what we can get. Still, it is a sad end to a sordid story.

Proving once again that some folks really don’t believe in freedom, the food fascists are at it again, attacking fast-food restaurants and urging government regulations and legal bans on certain restaurants and entrees.

It starts with criticism of the food choices offered based upon the preferences of diners.

Chain restaurants in the United States are promoting dangerous "X-treme Eating", a US watchdog has said.

They are serving up "ever-more harmful new creations," says the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

It says that some individual dishes can exceed 2,000 calories, more than the recommended daily intake for women.

As more than one in five US adults are obese, it says restaurants should list nutritional information on their menus to make consumers more aware.

The next step, as we have seen in the past from CSPI, is to call for regulation and legislation to take away choices from people.

One such food fascist is calling for bans on one chain restaurant.

The Prince of Wales told a nutritionist in Abu Dhabi Tuesday that the “key” to people eating healthily was to ban McDonald’s fast food restaurants. Prince Charles was attending the launch of a public health awareness campaign aimed at fighting diabetes in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

He visited the Imperial College London Diabetes Centre and watched as a group of children chose from a selection of “good” and “bad” snacks for their school packed lunches.

Talking to Nadine Tayara, a nutritionist from the centre who had put the children through their paces, he asked her: “Have you got anywhere with McDonald’s? Have you tried getting it banned? That’s the key.”

Well, that is enough to keep me saying “God save the Queen” until her moron son has passed into the next world. Charles, surrounded by wealth, luxury and privilege, so he thinks it is his place to dictate to everyone else what and where they eat. Even though I agree with him on the relative merits of a fast-food diet, I simply reject the notion that it is the place of government to choose for us what and where we can eat.

But if Prince Up-Chuck is going to get involved in our diets, consider this comparison.

One is marketed by McDonalds. One is marketed by Prince Charles.

Which one is worse for you – but which one does he want banned?

I have to say that I agree with this analysis, even though Rudy is not my candidate.

Many on the right profess amazement at the lead he's opened up among Republican primary voters, considering his pro-choice views and sloppy personal life.

Meanwhile, writers on the left express disbelief at the notion that a pro-choice Republican candidate might be able to win the GOP nomination. According to the best Leftist analyst of American politics, Michael Tomasky, abortion is simply "too fundamental an issue for most Republican caucus goers and primary voters (even in California, with its likely Feb. 5 primary) to work around."

There's a perfectly simple answer to the Rudy paradox. When Republican voters look at Rudy Giuliani, they know one key fact about him: They know he's no liberal.

* * *

We're going to hear a lot about how rude, abrasive, arrogant, high-handed, combative, isolated, difficult and aggressive Rudy Giuliani was as mayor. And yet he was the key factor in turning New York into the safe, clean, pleasant, polite, neighborly and genuinely nice place it was when we were attacked on 9/11.

His record is clear: He fought the left mercilessly, and he not only won politically, he won as far as history's proper judgment of his tenure in New York.
Is it any wonder conservative Republicans are so eager to think the very best of him?

Well-said.

Why put in a feeding tube? After all, he is only killing himself.

An Eta prisoner on hunger strike has ripped out his feeding tube, sparking fears that he is close to death after 112 days without eating.

The Spanish prison service said that Iñaki de Juana Chaos, the Basque separatist leader convicted of killing 25 people, mainly soldiers and policemen, in the 1980s, had received no nutrients since Friday. A lawyer who spoke to de Juana said that he had pulled out the tube keeping him alive, apparently furious with media reports that he had abandoned his protest.

The case has exposed the deep divisions within Spain and placed the Socialist Government in an excruciating dilemma. More than 75,000 people rallied in Madrid on Saturday, calling on the Government not to free de Juana despite a recent Supreme Court judgment making him eligible for parole.

The only tragedy here is that the Spanish government didn’t send this mutt to Hell years ago, due to Euro-weenie opposition to the death penalty. Let him get there of his own accord, the sooner the better.

Well, now it is even a member of the panel that approved the drug coming out against mandating the Gardasil vaccine for all girls.

The chairman of the federal panel that recommended the new cervical-cancer vaccine for pre-teen girls says lawmakers should not make the inoculation mandatory, as the District and more than 20 states, including Virginia, are considering.

Dr. Jon Abramson, chairman of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's advisory committee on immunization practices (ACIP), also said he and panel members told Merck & Co., the drug Gardasil's maker, not to lobby state lawmakers to require the vaccine for school attendance.

"I told Merck my personal opinion that it shouldn't be mandated," Dr. Abramson told The Washington Times. "And they heard it from other committee members."

Dr. Abramson said he opposes mandating Gardasil, which prevents the cervical-cancer-causing human papillomavirus (HPV), because the sexually transmitted HPV is not a contagious disease like measles and he is not sure states can afford to inoculate all students.

"The vaccines out there now are for very communicable diseases. A child in school is not at an increased risk for HPV like he is measles," Dr. Abramson said.

Gee, that argument sounds familiar to me. Where have I heard it before? Oh, yeah – that is the same argument I made against the vaccines on day one, only to be told how wrong-headed my position was. Anybody want to reconsider that criticism now?

Oh, and there is this minor consideration as well.

Middle-school girls inoculated with the breakthrough vaccine will be no older than 18 when they pass Gardasil's five-year window of proven effectiveness -- more than a decade before the typical cancer patient contracts HPV, The Washington Times reported last week.

Infectious disease specialists and cancer pathologists say the incubation period for HPV becoming cancer is 10 to 15 years -- meaning the average cervical cancer patient, who is 47, contracted the virus in her 30s and would not be protected by Gardasil taken as a teen.

Dr. Abramson said the panel thinks the vaccine will last for at least 10 years. Even if it provides 10 years of protection, it would still leave girls given the inoculation in the sixth grade vulnerable during their late 20s and early 30s, when most cervical-cancer patients contract HPV. At that point, another round of Gardasil would be necessary.

So it seems to me that folks like Rick Perry and others seeking to play doctor with the little girls of the nation are not merely engaged in bad politics, but in bad medicine as well.

How this sort of criminality was allowed to run unchecked for so long is beyond me -- and how the individuals in question were allowed to retain the credentials necessary to continue to work in education is unfathomable.

A long-simmering scandal over sexual abuse of juveniles at schools for youthful offenders broke into the open on Tuesday with an outraged state senator calling for a takeover of the troubled Texas Youth Commission.

At a school in West Texas, a youth commission official acknowledged at a hearing of the State Senate Criminal Justice Committee, the school’s superintendent was aware that two supervisors routinely awakened boys for late-night encounters behind closed doors in deserted offices.

The two supervisors — one of whom had been transferred from another state school after pornography was found on his work computer — were allowed to resign in 2005 without charges. One became the principal of a charter school in Midland, Tex., state officials said. The superintendent was promoted to director of juvenile corrections, a post he still holds, the youth commission confirmed.

“It’s outrageous,” said State Senator John Whitmire, chairman of the Criminal Justice Committee, who accused the commission of a cover-up.

Whitmire asks a valid question -- does the agency need some much more intense supervision, like being placed under completely new leadership ? The answer would appear to be yes, given that the TYC director was allowed to stay in place until last Friday and one of the freaks in question is still working for the state in a policy position that gives him direct control over the lives of juveniles!

Frankly, it is looking like one more failure on th part of Rick Perry -- and one more reason for the legislature to consider whether or not Perry is fit to remain governor.

Oh, and interestingly enough, Houston's "paper of record" couldn't even be bothered to cover this story on the front page -- or link to their coverage from the paper's homepage.