The House International Relations Committee has approved a Democratic measure to amend the State Department authorization bill for 2002 which will overturn Bush’s re-imposition of the global gag rule. Thank God for Congressional Democrats finally getting something done against Bush’s Napoleonic Hundred Days.

The beautiful, but evil, Arianna Huffington has continued her tilt away from nouveau conservative pundit and towards the decidedly awesome with her column blasting the Bush administration’s vacuous attempts to appear environmental around Earth Day [Salon.com]. I’m remembering Pappy Bush’s declaration in the early 1990s that he would be the environmental President (which still makes me laugh today).

Teen crime down, but more girls are going to jail [Salon], often for no clear reason other than overt gender bias. As it turns out, young women are much more likely to be arrested than young men if they are committing public disturbance or other behavior that cops can attribute to boys being boys. The message: Shut up, girls, and be good! Go on out there and have some fun, boys.

Sometimes reality is so damn surreal that it simply defies satire. Such is the case with the Republicans’ continuing cult of personality for Ronald Reagan.

In the end though, I do hope that they build a Reagan Monument on the Washington Mall. Why? Because left-wing protestors are often down around the Mall, and we need a place we can vandalize! I mean, sure, Thomas Jefferson could be a real jerk, but if you mess up his monument most people won’t understand and will think you’re just a bunch of good-for-nothings. But defiling the Reagan Memorial would be appropriate, understandable, and relevant to the current political climate! It’d be great!

Meanwhile, I should point out that I agree with Brooke Shelby Biggs on The Unbearable Lameness of Project Censored [MOJOwire], that Project Censored has become predictable, boring, and is not actually exposing anything we hadn’t already heard about, since its own success has produced a bounty of left-wing and alternative press publications which break the stories well before the Project Censored kids get their hands on them. While Shelby Biggs seems to think that Project Censored should simply be discontinued, I do think that releasing a survey or newsletter of the top 25 left-wing Stories of Record is a good thing for helping get attention and clarify our priorities. But Project Censored needs to drop the name and the moralistic rhetoric, because when all of its stories are coming directly from reports in pre-existing publications — whether mainstream or alterna-stream — it simply is not breaking any silences anymore.