• 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.

You might imagine that if a city proposed manufacturing snow out of reclaimed wastewater, for use at a nearby ski area, that some people might have a problem with it. After all, it might be considered a tad distasteful to ski down a pristine white slope — made from toilet water and other treated effluent.

On the other hand, such a plan makes environmental sense in an arid place that can’t afford to dump water indiscriminately.

A plan to do just this has caused major headaches for the city of Flagstaff, Arizona, but not because of health concerns.

Native tribes in the area have been battling additions to the Snowbowl ski area for years on the grounds that any development desecrates the mountains there, which they regard as sacred ground. Most recently, Hopi and Navajo leaders sued over the reclaimed-water-as-snow idea.

Because the manufactured snow will be made of recycled water drawn from a treatment facility in Flagstaff, where wastewater from “homes, hospitals, and even funeral parlors is processed, the Navajo and Hopi believe it contains impurities that will taint the mountain,” according to the Christian Science Monitor.

Now, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has stepped in … to negotiate the use of potable water in the snow-making process.

Officials, including both Arizona senators, object strongly to the added expense — some $11 million over 20 winters — and they also point out that this would violate court decisions that have said it’s okay to make snow at Snowbowl from treated wastewater.

The negotiations, revealed Monday by the Arizona Daily Sun, involve city officials and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has withheld permission for Snowbowl to build while it negotiates with the tribes to attempt to arrive at a compromise.

U.S. Sens. John McCain and Jon Kyl blasted the U.S. Department of Agriculture in a letter Monday, though they each support snowmaking at Arizona Snowbowl. They called for Agriculture to grant Snowbowl permission to build “immediately.”

“We oppose the use of taxpayer dollars to subsidize snowmaking at Arizona Snowbowl, and we will object to any attempt to secure an earmark or congressional approval of this project,” they wrote.

The potable water source being proposed isn’t strictly fresh water. It’s called “stored” water, which is located underground and downstream of the water treatment plant, and is mixed with natural surface and groundwater.

It’s entirely possible that the Hopi and Navajo will have a problem with that, too.

• Sharon Osbourne, the wife of Ozzy Osbourne, is eyeing a political career.
• 70% of Swiss voters rejected a referendum to give animals their own lawyer.
• The UK’s controversial equality laws will now give vegans, teetotalers and atheists the same protections against discrimination as religious groups.
• Trying to get a handle on the third highest divorce rate in the nation, family values politicians in Oklahoma debated three laws increasing government regulation of marriage and divorce.
• New York Democratic Rep. Eric Massa said that he is being railroaded by the Democratic leadership because he voted against the health care reform bill.
• China is preparing to step up the use of its weather modification techniques.
• China is demanding that Google either follow internet restrictions or leave the country.
• Dan Rather’s watermelon quip about Barack Obama.
• In defiance of the European Union’s ban on seal products, Canada will serve seal meat in its parliamentary restaurant.
• Longtime opponent of gay rights, California State Senator Roy Ashburn was arrested one week ago on a DUI after leaving a gay bar. Ashburn admits today: “I’m gay.” Reason he has opposed gay rights: his constituents did not support it. Still waiting for: “I’m an alcoholic.”

Minnesota State Senator Tarryl Clark must know something about what state employees like to watch on the television than the rest of the public knows.

Clark introduced a bill that would ban state employees and elected officials from staying at any in-state “facility that makes pornographic images or performances available to its patrons.”

Associated Press is circulating an article that this bill only involves violent porn. They got it wrong. The language in the legislation is broad enough to exclude just about any porn.

Senate Bill 2861 defines a “pornographic image or performance” as “a sexually explicit image or performance that objectifies or exploits its subjects by eroticizing domination, degradation, or violence.”

Clark and her supporters believe this will remove the state from supporting sexual violence. Yet porn, by its nature, is edgy. There is hardly a porn flick produced that does not have some hint of “domination, degradation, or violence” in it.

The idea of getting rid of sexual violence is commendable. This bill might even get a few hotels to drop porn, but maybe not. After all, porn is profitable and popular.

It is also legal. That raises the question if the state should interfere in directing what state employees do in their free time, even if it is a state-paid hotel room. Why stop at porn? There are many R-rated movies that are more menacing with sexual violence that is graphic or psychological. Clark and her colleagues do not seem to be interested in banning HBO though.

The best part of the bill is that some bureaucrat in the Minnesota Department of Administration is going to have a job watching porn and defining which porn flicks have “domination, degradation, or violence” and which porn flicks do not.

Porn producers do not list their products according to the levels of “degradation.” How does Clark figure any of this is going to be implemented? Does she think that the porn companies are going to capsulate summaries for Minnesota bureaucrats to read?

The only practical option is to avoid all hotels that have any porn.

There is a clause in the bill that if porn-free hotels cannot be found, then the ones with porn are acceptable. In the end, this may be a lot of talk for nothing. Even if it passes, state employees may still end up going to the same hotels as before.

If nothing else, then at least the state of Minnesota will have an official and experienced porn reviewer.

Former Rep. and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay thinks that he knows the cure to unemployment. Get rid of the benefits.

DeLay gave his nod of agreement to the claim that the “People are unemployed because they want to be.”

“There is an argument to be made that these extensions, the unemployment benefits keeps people from going and finding jobs. In fact there are some studies that have been done that show people stay on unemployment compensation and they don’t look for a job until two or three weeks before they know the benefits are going to run out,” DeLay said.

Basically, DeLay is saying that the first run of unemployment checks is the only money someone needs to get a job. Extensions keep unemployment high.

That reasoning did not seem to work in the 1930’s when unemployment was beyond what we experience now. People were unemployed for years without a financial incentive to stay unemployed.

My guess is that DeLay has never taken an unemployment check and realized that it does not begin to cover all of a household’s expenses.