Doesn’t anyone make pens in the U.S. anymore? At least the FBI should get some that doesn’t have “China” sprawled above the Bureau’s name.

• The Texas judge who ruled the death penalty unconstitutional last week has rescinded his ruling.
• California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has made furloughs for state workers an essential part of his budget balancing act. However, there is a problem with some of that. Furloughing federally funded disability determination workers are costing the state $30.6 million and delaying disability payments. Maybe he is trying to balance the federal budget.
• Nevada Republicans are complaining that a Tea Party candidate for Harry Reid’s Senate seat is a plant by the Democrats to siphon off anti-Reid votes from the Republicans.
• It looks like the State Department is preparing to lose track of $2 billion in aid for Afghanistan.
• Half of the 40,000 letters that Barack Obama receives everyday label him an “idiot.” Much of the other half seems to come from idiots, especially those who demand that the government keep its hands off Medicare. Obama responds by informing the letter writers that Medicare is a federally administered program.
• In 1951, residents of Pont-Saint-Esprit, France, suddenly began experiencing mass hallucinations. It turns out they were the victims of a CIA experiment with LSD.
• New York state Assemblyman Felix Ortiz wants to ban salt from New York restaurants.
• Monica Conyers, a former Detroit City Councilwoman and wife of Rep. John Conyers, will be going to prison for three years on a bribery conviction.
• Maine state Rep. Henry Joy has proposed splitting Maine into two states.
• India has banned Fashion TV for 9 days because it aired footage of partially nude women.
• A hard core porn director has announced that she is running for the UK Parliament.
• The Vatican is upset that an Italian high school has installed a condom machine in the girls and boys bathrooms. By the way, it is not the first high school to do this in Europe.
• Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown was accused of sexual harassment and defantion in 1998.

Any image of Mohammad is supposed to be blasphemy, but is a cartoonist really a threat to Islam?

Cartoonist Lars Vilks has a $100,000 bounty on his head with a 50% bonus if his throat is slashed. He has been under police protection since 2007. He is the twenty-first century version of Salman Rushdie, who has had a threat on his head since the 1980’s.

Four men and three women were recently arrested in Ireland for plotting to kill Vilks. That a cartoonist can still instill this type of hatred in some reveals just how wacko these Islamic extremists have become.

If you are having problems with the audio, you can watch the video here.

After 60 years of indoctrination, it is hard to imagine how any of the North Korean people can think of Americans as anything but monsters. Here are two posters from North Korea. You can see more at this site.

• Florida Governor Charlie Crist’s race for the Senate must be about dead. Marc Rubio is the frontrunner. Now Crist has taken to criticizing Rubio for using a Republican Party credit card for $130 back waxing. Rubio’s campaign said it was only a $20 haircut and some gifts.
• A plan for immigration reform includes a biometric card for all Americans.
• The Obama administration’s new definition  of poverty may make it nearly impossible to eliminate poverty.
• A day after Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty urged fiscal restraint to balance the budget, he took a government chartered flight costing $3,100 to a photo-op at a Tim Horton’s coffee shop.
• If the French media have it right, President Nicholas Sarkozy and First Lady Carla Bruni are both having affairs.  Well, it is France after all.
• Europe has moved ahead of the rest of the world at banning the financial instruments that brought on the current financial crisis.
• Cuba now pays for sex changes.
• The Senate has banned the Drudge Report because it is blamed for infecting Senate computers with viruses.
• Hardly anyone remembers that Thomas Jefferson grew medicinal opium poppies at his Monticello estate. That is because in 1987 the DEA required that Jefferson’s poppy gardens be removed. Score another one in the war against drugs. Now if only the DEA can do something about that pothead, hemp-growing George Washington.
• The ABC’s of waterboarding. It is something more than the “dunk in the water” that Dick Cheney called it.
• France’s First Lady Carla Bruni did not wear a bra for a state dinner and that is shocking to many Europeans.

The more the incident in a men’s locker room between White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel and former Congressman Eric Massa plays out, the weirder the story seems.

Massa’s story for retiring keeps changing. First, it was his health, then Massa claimed that the Democratic leadership pushed him out and then word came that Massa is being investigated for sexually harassing a male staffer.

Next, Massa comes up with a story where he and Emmanuel are naked in a men’s locker room, which the White House denies. Perhaps the weirdest of all is Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck embracing the liberal Massa as a hero of sorts.

Now Massa has admitted to “inappropriate texts” with male staffers. He also admits to “tickling” male staffers.

“It was horseplay. It was inappropriate horseplay,” Massa said.

Massa said the “horseplay” was left over behavior from his Navy days.

If guys are roaming the Navy tickling each other, then the military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is way out of date. Homosexuality is not a problem to worry about. Immature men running around with loaded weapons is a much bigger problem.

However this ends up, there is something bizarre going on with Massa. If I had to put money on it, I would bet that he has not yet come to terms with his sexuality.

Officials in Pecica, Romania, ordered 10 of these brightly colored signs. The signs were placed in a section of town populated by bars and restaurants. Apparently, there have been numerous accidents involving cars hitting drunken pedestrians. Some deaths have resulted. Few of the incidents have been the driver’s fault.

The sign reads: “Attention Drunks.”

If the problem is that bad, then the money spent on signs would probably have been better spent on a mass Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. It sounds like the city officials have major denial of the real problem…or they might just be looking out for their own welfare as they hop from bar to bar.

On Monday, five women slipped into Mexico’s legislative building to protest the policies of President Felipe Calderon. The women stripped naked and called for the resignation of Calderon.

The women unfurled a banner that read “We are exposing our bodies to expose the Calderon government.”

Claiming that they represented the “National Civil Committee,” the women demanded that a referendum be held in May on his Presidency.

Calling for both a referendum and the President’s resignation appears a little indecisive and baffling. Yet with five naked women parading around Mexico’s Congress, I doubt that Calderon or the other lawmakers had their minds on a Presidential resignation.

• Surprisingly, the world leader Barack Obama has forged his closest personal relationship with is Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
• Florida is considering withdrawing tax credits from films produced in that state that have “non-traditional family values.”
• Los Angeles City Council members have found a way to set their computerized voting systems to cast “yes” votes during meetings while they are in the backrooms meeting with lobbyists.
• The Texas Taliban.
• Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, was shocked to discover that his department’s emails are backed up in an archive system by the county. Arpaio’s department is being investigated by the FBI, and Arpaio told them that the emails they sought had been deleted.
• Detroit has a plan to bulldoze one-quarter of its area and turn the land back into farmland. With half the population it had during the 1950’s, Detroit wants to save money by shrinking.
• A New Hampshire justice of the peace was arrested for obstruction of justice after sending arrest warrants to the Concord police for the state Supreme Court.
• Innovative policies from New York, New Jersey, Michigan and Kansas reduced their prison populations from 5-20% without an increase in crime.
• Longtime white supremacist Tom Metzger is running for Congress in Indiana. In 1980, he actually received the Democratic nomination for a Congressional seat in San Diego before losing in the general election.
• Some want to remove Ulysses Grant from the $50 bill and put Ronald Reagan on it.
• The U.S. is supposed to have sanctions against companies doing business with Iran. Yet in the last decade $107 billion taxpayer dollars have been spent on companies that are cozy to the Iranian government.
• Andrew Young, former aide to John Edwards, is being threatened with contempt by the court for his handling of the Edwards’ sex tape with Rielle Hunter.

This is called a bad choice of words.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was caught on video speaking to the 2010 Legislative Conference for National Association of Counties about the health care reform bill. “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,” Pelosi said.

The five-second clip from YouTube is too brief to determine in what context her words are made. However, moments before Pelosi made that statement, she said:

“You’ve heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other.  But I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket.  Prevention, prevention, prevention—it’s about diet, not diabetes. It’s going to be very, very exciting.”

If Pelosi had stopped there, she would have made her point, but then she added, “But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.”

It does not matter what she was trying to convey. It reeks of political arrogance. Pass a bill and America will find out what it is about is not good PR. There is a reason the people in the House are called representatives. They are supposed to represent the people. Sometimes I wonder if any of them get that.