In yet another expansion of the federal government, President Bush today announced a “limited” bailout of homeowners that face foreclosure.

The move marks a historic expansion of the role of the FHA, a Depression-era agency that has traditionally served low- and moderate-income families and first-time buyers, but not delinquent borrowers. Nearly 16% of subprime borrowers are behind on their ARMs, and an estimated 2 million subprime ARMs totaling about $600 billion will reset to higher rates through the end of next year.

When will this madness stop? And please, don’t even think of pinning this one on the Democrats.

The program, which doesn’t need congressional approval, should take effect early next year.

No, this one lies completely at the feet of a Republican president. Why do we vote Republican again?

In describing the plan Thursday, senior administration officials avoided using the word “bailout.” Friday, Bush also emphasized that the plan was limited in scope.

“It’s not the government’s job to bail out speculators or those who bought a home they knew they could not afford,” he said.

That’s freaking hilarious. With a straight face, he goes in front of the American people, expands government, bails out people that shouldn’t have been able to purchase a home in the first place, bails out lenders that shouldn’t have approved the loans in the first place, bails out the insurers that shouldn’t have insured the lenders that shouldn’t have approved the loans in the first place and has the stones to tell us it isn’t a freaking bailout! I’m beginning to feel like a Daily KOS’er.

Still, the plan is sure to incite critics. “If you’re going to help someone to refinance, you’re going to bail out the person who financed him in the first place,” Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute said Thursday night. “This will only cause the problem to arise again.”

Wallison said the lenders who provided the financing in many of these cases likely knew that the borrowers couldn’t meet the financial obligations of the loan.

“If we’re going to allow (lenders) to be refinanced out, what we’re doing is saving them from their own greed. … It might be good politics, but it’s very bad policy.”

Good politics, bad public policy. Bush has found his legacy.

Given the good news that arrived yesterday regarding CLOUT’s lawsuit to enforce state constitutional spending limitations on the legislature, it looks like we are finally getting closer to the day when elected officials in Austin — most deliciously Fred Hill — are going to have to put their fat lying butts in a chair and offer depositions.

We’d love to stream the whole thing live on the Internet and quickly upload everything to a site like YouTube for later viewing– all in the interest of open government, of course.

Doing so, however, poses some technical challenges that are a little bit daunting for our merry band of blog warriors.

So we thought we’d open up the situation to all of you, our readers, in the hopes that one or more of you might know how to pull off a project of this sort (or know someone who does).

We asked one friend of LST, and here are their thoughts about what would be involved.

1) Quality video camera, audio equipment and lighting. This is mostly likely already taken care of since there would be a videotaped session in the first place.

LST Note: That may be taken care of, but we don’t want to have to rely on someone else’s camera and audio equipment, if we can avoid it.

2) Getting the video from the camera to a place on the Internet (ie: server) where it can be broadcast. This requires a computer on-site to compress the video/audio as it exits the camera. This also requires a speedy Internet connection to get the video from the PC to a server on the Internet in a timely manner.

LST Note: Help!

3) Server to stream the video. You need a server capable of sending the stream to all the people who request it. You need an appropriate amount of bandwidth to sustain all those requests. When talking about video streaming, you need to have some idea of how many people will be watching the stream because this helps determine how much bandwidth
you’ll need.

LST Note: Truthfully, we doubt more than 100 people would want to watch any of this live. Perhaps 20 reporters. Maybe 80 readers. It’s going to be a lot like watching C-SPAN. The audience will be greater for the “best of” clips that are edited down later.

The live streaming thing is mostly about the psychological torture of the politicians, knowing that every dissembling lie they tell is being beamed around the world instantaneously.

Heh.

4) After the live show is over, you will most likely want to have a person edit the depositions down to the best clips and then make those available on the Internet. This is the same as taking a 1000 page text deposition and posting only the highlights to a blog or similar.

LST Note: Help!

If we had the answers, we wouldn’t be posting this.

This is “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” time, and we need all of you to “blog swarm” this issue to actually get it resolved.

Ideas? Offers of assistance?

Leave a comment or contact us privately at lsteditors AT gmail DOT com.

The headline caught my eye, “Early voting begins in NISD rollback election“. I thought, cool, another group of taxpayers has decided to scale back the growth of government, similar to the Texas City attempt earlier this year. Ha. Fooled again.

This is no attempt by taxpayers to slow the growth in government. This is actually an attempt by the Nacogdoches school board to increase the revenue stream for their school district. How can that be, you ask? Simple.

You ask voters to raise the tax rate above the state mandated reduction and call it a rollback election because the proposed rate is below the previous year’s rate even though total revenues are higher than the state mandated rollback. Whew. Confused? Lucy, ’splain please.

If a person wishes to support the board and the district recommendation of $1.37 tax rate, they will vote “for” on the election ballot. If a person does not wish to support the board and district recommendation, instead opting for the $1.24 rollback rate, they will vote “against” on the election ballot, Linda Engle, NISD chief financial officer, said previously in a Daily Sentinel article.

Although the $1.37 tax rate is a 22-cent reduction from last year’s $1.59 rate, it is still higher than the state rollback rate of $1.24 per $100 valuation, which was set as a result of action taken by the Texas Legislature during its last session.

There, see how easy that is? But, you say, it’s still a revenue reduction. No, it isn’t. When the state mandated the lower rates, the lower property tax revenue was replaced by other funding mechanisms. Ever heard of the business tax? It’s actually more complicated than that but you get the point.

You have to love how politicians and bureaucrats explain the facts of life to voters.

If the rollback election passes, NISD will receive an additional $3 million, which is a combination of $1.8 million from local taxes and $1.2 million from state funds, according to Dr. Rodney Hutto, NISD superintendent.

“Part of the reason for calling a rollback election is to access $1.2 million in new revenue from the state that we will not have access to if we do not take advantage of the timing issue,” Hutto said. “The rollback election will result in a reduction in taxes for all property owners, which will result in $1.8 million in taxes from the community while accessing $1.2 million in new revenues from the state.”

If the rollback election fails, the district will not receive the additional $1.2 million from the state, he said.

Back to Lucy for an explanation. What Dr. Hutto is saying to the voters of the N.I.S.D. is this: if you don’t pony up an additional $1.8 million from your pocketbook, the state will not give me another $1.2 million from someone else’s pocketbook. Got it now?

And Dr. Hutto brings out the classic propaganda to sway voters his way.

First, the teachers:

“If the rollback election is successful, employees will see the increase reflected in their first paycheck after the election,” Hutto said. “Nacogdoches lags behind most comparison districts in their pay for teachers.

Next, fuel costs, those dastardly Arabs.

“When you look at the fuel market, we are paying more for fuel today than we did last year due to the instability of the energy market and the season,” Hutto said. “For the last few weeks, there has been a reduction in cost of fuel. When you prepare a budget for fuel consumption, you make sure that your estimates of cost are enough to cover fluctuations in pricing during the fiscal year.”

We will have to overlook the contradiction in that statement.

Finally, he tells the voters that the buildings will fall down without the increase, er, rollback.

If the rollback election is not successful, general maintenance issues will not be addressed, he said.

At least he admits that life will go on.

“We will have school,” Hutto said. “We will not have access to the $1.2 million in new revenues from the state as well as the $1.8 local revenue which will be used to offset price increases. We will not address facility issues that were not intended to be addressed with the bond election as quickly as we could otherwise.”

How about we take a look at Dr. Hutto’s budget for this school year and see if there has been a cutback.

Hmm. Looks like a 10% increase to me. Well, perhaps the per pupil costs have been slashed.

Sorry. Still a 10% increase. No matter how you slice it or dice it, the voters of the Nacogdoches Independent School District are being asked to raise their tax revenue. Even if you call it a rollback.

The Texas Department of Transportation’s push to privatize existing roads is back in the news.

The Texas Department of Transportation is pushing Congress to pass a federal law allowing the state to “buy back” parts of existing interstate highways and turn them into toll roads.

Yeah, that’s the plan. Take our interstate highway system, a system that is paid for and taxed already for maintenance, and turn it into another revenue stream for the state.

At least one legislator doesn’t like the plan:

“I think it’s a dreadful recommendation on the part of the transportation commissioners here in Texas,” said Senate Transportation and Homeland Security Committee Chairman John Carona, R-Dallas.

“I feel confident that legislators in Austin would overwhelmingly be opposed to such an idea,” he said. “The simple fact is that taxpayers have already paid for those roadways. To ask taxpayers to pay for them twice is untenable.”

Unfortunately, Mr. Carona would have more credibility on this issue if he had done something about it in the last legislative session. He had a draft of the report in his hand back in December of 2006. More hot air from a politician.

But let’s beat up on the senator later. The highlight of the Chronicle’s report is this gem of a line from TxDOT’s spokesman when asked about the wisdom of spending $7-9 million on an ad campaign to promote the Trans Texas Corridor and other toll roads.

“It’s less than 50 cents a Texan,” Transportation Department spokesman Chris Lippincott said in defense of the ad campaign. “We could sit down and buy them a cup of coffee for that kind of money.”

A cup of coffee. What happens to people when they get government jobs? How do they lose all sense of the value of money? A cup of coffee? Heck, why not go all out and waste a hundred million, Mr. Lippincott?

It’s only a latte.

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You can catch it like the flu.
Someone smiled at me today,
And I started smiling too.

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This David v. Goliath thing isn’t going so bad for CLOUT.

Ed Hendee’s organization, which sued the State for violation of legal spending limits, won another round today when The Supreme Court of Texas rejected the Defendants’ efforts to stay - and thus further delay - all attempts by CLOUT to gather information during the State’s appeal on jurisictional grounds.  The upshot is that document discovery - and, more deliciously, sworn depositions - may now go forward in the trial court.

Just three days ago, CLOUT’s lawyers Gary Polland and David Rogers persuaded Austin’s Third Court of Appeals to overrule the trial judge - which had agreed to stay all proceedings as the appeal wore on.  In response to the appeals court’s ruling, the Dewhurst Defendants’ legion of lawyers filed an emergency motion (a “petition for writ of mandamus”) to the Supreme Court, asking it to order the court of appeals to essentially reverse itself.  The Supreme Court issued its one-sentence order that the petition “IS DENIED.”

Trusty LST sources hope that the deposition of Legislative Budget Board  Director O’Brien will proceed in the next few weeks.  CLOUT is anticipating Mssrs Dewhurst and Craddick will move to quash their depositions on the claims of lack of knowledge on how the cap is calculated, and CLOUT is preparing for such motions.  CLOUT also has outstanding document requests, which should be answered in the next 30 days, to a number of contractors involved in the budget estimate process.

 CLOUT may even seek to move forward with a hearing on its request for a temprorary injunction to halt state spending until October.

 MORE TO COME . . . . . .

UPDATE:

As CLOUT pointed out to the Supreme Court, this case has been on file for 400 days without so much as a shred of discovery to date.  Why?  Because of numerous procedural motions and appeals by the State to delay or avoid addressing the case on the merits.

 A brief refresher as to the case history:

• The suit was filed on June 14, 2006.  Defendants moved to dismiss the case on jurisdictional grounds, and the motion was granted by a visiting judge.
• CLOUT appealed the dismissal, with arguments held in the Third Court of Appeals at Austin on March 7 of this year.
• On April 17, the appeals court reversed the trial court’s dismissal.  The State moved for reconsideration.
• On May 25, the court of appeals again affirmed CLOUT’s right to proceed with the suit.
• The State then moved for review by the state Supreme Court.  That Court denied the petition for review on July 10.
• CLOUT then filed a new petition in the trial court to add a request for injunctive relief.
• The State again filed a plea to the jurisdiction, which was this time denied by a different visiting judge on August 14. 
• Defendants promptly filed their notice of appeal and “Notice of Automatic Stay” purporting to invoke statutory provisions allowing such a stay in certain circumstances.
• On August 21, CLOUT filed an objection to the notice of automatic stay, which was denied by a sitting Travis County Judge.
• CLOUT filed a petition for writ of mandamus, a proceeding which, in essense, requests the appeals court to order the lower court to change its ruling on the stay issue.
• On August 27, the Third Court of Appeals conditionally granted the writ (which, in effect, tells the trial court to change its ruling or a formal order will issue from the appellate court), holding that the statutory stay relied upon by the State did not apply in this case.
• The next day, the State filed their own Petition for Mandamus and Emergency Motion for Temporary Relief.
• On August 30, the Supreme Court denied the State’s petition.

The maneuvering by the State was based on the argument that, since CLOUT amended its petition to seek an injunction, it had raised a new cause of action and, thus, the State was entitled to a stay of proceedings under the Texas Civil Practice & Remedies Code, which provides for such a stay if the State is able to raise certain defenses to the “new cause of action.”

It its briefing before the Supreme Court, the State predicted dire consequences if CLOUT were to prevail in this suit, including claims that “funds to prisons, state hospitals, the courts, schools - every staste program imaginable - would be forced to shut down.”

As CLOUT responded in its own brief:  “They have got to be kidding this honorable court.”  CLOUT pointed out that it was not attempting to tell the state what it may fund, but only asking that the state Constitution be followed in determining how much to spend and how much to tax.  “Surely,” CLOUT wrote, “this Court does not consider such a limited proposition a harbinger of Armageddon.”

As to the stay, CLOUT pointed out that its amended pleading did not raise a new cause of action, but merely sought a new remedy, which was not one of the statutory bases for a stay of all proceedings in the trial court.

This argument prevailed in the Third Court of Appeals, which issued the two-paragraph opinion cited above, and, obviously, in the Supreme Court, which denied the State’s petition without comment.

We hope that we can now be reporting to you on substantive proceedings in the trial court rather than continued procedural wrangling and further delays.  We will keep you posted on significant developments and bring you more detailed discussion of the actual claims and defenses at the heart of the suit.

So says science:

Women who date online are likely to take precautions to protect their personal safety when first meeting a man face-to-face, but often are much less careful about protecting their sexual health once that encounter moves to the next level, a Houston-based study has found.

While the women who were surveyed went to great lengths to screen online acquaintances before meeting them, nearly a third reported having sex on the first date and three-quarters of those said they did not use condoms, according to the study by The University of Texas School of Public Health.

Those odds are better (or, if you will, worse) than the national average:

According to a survey by ABC News in 2004, 17 percent of women report having had sex on a first date, compared with 42 percent of men. Experts say women tend to underestimate those figures and men tend to overestimate.

Good hunting, fellas.

The Duke Boys’ prosecutor was in court today, facing contempt charges for his handling of evidence in the lacrosse rape case.

DURHAM, N.C. — Disgraced former prosecutor Mike Nifong pleaded not guilty Thursday to criminal contempt charges stemming from his failure to turn over complete DNA testing results during the now-discredited Duke lacrosse rape case.

Unfortunately, the possible penalties are rather light.

If found in contempt, Nifong could face up to 30 days in jail and a fine of up to $500.

And of course, Mr. Nifong claims he did nothing wrong.

Nifong’s attorney, Jim Glover, said Nifong never intentionally tried to mislead the court. He believed he was being truthful when he told the judge he had given the defense all the DNA testing results, though he didn’t always know the specifics in every report, Glover said.

If Mike Nifong is telling the truth, then we have little choice but to conclude that he is one of the most grossly incompetent prosecutors ever to pursue a case. The public itself could plainly see the bumbling and inattention to the evidence (or lack thereof) where he apparently could not. But if, however, he knew full well what he was doing, he must be ranked among the most brazenly self-serving individuals ever to receive a dog-chewed law license. Whichever is the case, the legal profession is certainly improved by his absence.

A middle aged male photographer gets over three years in prison for trying to extort millions from a sexy actress who posed nude for him years ago:

 Photographer John Rutter was sentenced to 3 years and 8 months in prison Thursday for trying to extort $4 million from actress Cameron Diaz who posed nude for him in 1992 when she was 19 years old. Rutter reportedly approached Diaz with the photos a week before the 2003 premiere of Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, telling her that he had publishers who were interested in buying the photos.

An old female groupie gets probation for trying to extort millions from a football hero to refrain from publicizing an alleged 46-year-old affair:

SAN ANTONIO  — An 82-year-old Texas woman who pleaded guilty to trying to extort $2 million from Hall of Fame quarterback Bart Starr has been sentenced to one year probation.

A federal judge also ordered Ruby Y. Young of Kerrville to not have any contact with Starr or his family or contact the media about an alleged relationship she had with the two-time Super Bowl MVP in 1960.

No one can say we don’t show mercy to our senior citizens.  Besides, who would want to see nude pictures of Bart Starr?

Call in the children and lock the doors. The dreaded Chupacabra has been sighted just a few hours southwest - and the locals are cashing in:

The hoop-la about the mysterious and unidentified beast found in DeWitt County a couple of weeks ago seemed to disappear into the mythical vapors until it was revived by a clever marketing project: A Chupacabra T-shirt.

Phylis Canion, who found the dead beast, apparently killed by some vehicle in the night, was convinced to do a T-shirt by her brother-in-law, David Boyd of Goliad. . . .

Canion began with 75 shirts in her Cuero store. They disappeared. She’s had to reorder. But then, she has been busy appearing on talk shows in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Chicago, Albuquerque and El Paso. To say the least, this beast has captured the imagination of a country.

Ah, the classic American entrepreneurial spirit at work.

The fun is likely to end in a few weeks, when Texas State University and The University of California announce the results of their testing on the remains.

Until then, grab the marshmallows, gather round the campfire, and spin your yarn about the fearsome beast.

Young Comrades at Government Indoctrination Centers will not be permitted to disrupt the People’s Peace by having fun.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) - An elementary school has banned tag on its playground after some children complained they were harassed or chased against their will.

“It causes a lot of conflict on the playground,” said Cindy Fesgen, assistant principal of the Discovery Canyon Campus school.

The Central Committee cannot allow conflict, but does recognize the need for Young Comrades to exercise. Therefore:

Running games are still allowed as long as students don’t chase each other, she said.

The Young Comrades Soccer League will provide peaceful, healthy, non-competitive, and sufficiently pointless exercise, as well as a safe outlet for capitalist rage impulses. The Central Committee is, however, disappointed to learn that some families have not adhered to Committee teachings.

Fesgen said two parents complained to her about the ban but most parents and children didn’t object.

Dissidents have already been contacted about advantageous re-education, and the Central Committee remains vigilant.

In 2005, two elementary schools in the nearby Falcon School District did away with tag and similar games in favor of alternatives with less physical contact. School officials said the move encouraged more students to play games and helped reduce playground squabbles.

This success reveals the positive effects of years of Central Committee efforts. The Central Committee hopes to achieve 100 per cent compliance within the next Five Year Plan. Thank you for your attention and conformity in resolving conflicts.

If all goes according to plan, Texas will execute Kenneth Foster, Jr. today.

Kenneth Foster Jr. did not kill Michael LaHood Jr. But he’s set to die today just as if he had.

Under a state law that allows accomplices to be executed, Foster was sentenced to death for driving the getaway car in a botched robbery that led to a shooting.

Make no mistake, Kenneth Foster, Jr. is not an innocent man, despite the large number of links your Google search will turn up saying that he is or the emotional, well produced video on YouTube. Mr. Foster is a brutal criminal that was given a second chance in society after shooting two people in 1994.

He returned that favor by driving 3 other criminals around on a robbery spree in 1996 that resulted in the murder of Michael LaHood Jr.

But Mr. Foster did not murder Mr. LaHood. He was seated inside an automobile some distance away when Mauriceo Brown murdered Mr. LaHood.

Once again, to be very clear, Mr. Foster is not an innocent man. He has demonstrated that he is a continuing threat to society. The question is, should he be executed for killing a man that he did not kill?

Texas law says that yes, in extreme circumstances, he should be.

What do you say?

UPDATE: Texas Gov. Rick Perry has commuted Mr. Foster’s death sentence.

Governor Rick Perry says he’ll spare Kenneth Foster from his scheduled execution tonight and commute his sentence to life.

In doing so, Perry accepts a recommendation from the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, which voted 6-1 today to urge the commutation.

Yes, dear friends, it is Thursday.

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Applicant has a B.A. in Communication Arts and has a wide range of experiences from graphic design and ad building to preflight and prepress service. Project experience is also widely diverse including packaging, multi-page layout and trading cards. Interested parties should contact candidate with resume request via email at “cchd AT houston DOT rr DOT com”.

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Everyone’s favorite state senator will be on Glenn Beck’s TV show tonight. It airs at 6:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m., central time.

Dan will be talking about Fidel Castro’s prediction that a Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama presidential ticket would be unbeatable.

I don’t want to drop any spoilers, but I doubt Dan will align himself with el Comandante on this one.

UPDATED– Uh oh.

It appears we are in for yet another vicious election campaign. In the “old days” deadlocked campaigns would lead to a brokered convention and compromise candidate. Where is such a candidate when you need him? One decade too late.

Among his many platform planks we never got to see enacted:

Repeal of Amendment XXVI
The President recognizes the right to censure those of unbearable ignorance, shown by their insipid use of improper English grammar “ya know, ya know”. Therefore, the right to vote shall be denied to those under the age of thirty.

Amendment to Amendment 1
Understanding the roll of the press and its invidious and pernicious writings, and knowing its bias against most sitting Presidents, freedom of speech is hereby abolished. The inevitable protests to this action by newspapers, television and all forms of media expressions shall be looked upon as treason and rebellion. Those who continue to protest will have their businesses confiscated and will be brought to justice and could be hung by their necks until they are dead.

What genius, unrecognized in his own time.

With Bush in New Orleans for the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the left are up in arms attempting to blame the federal government for the slow recovery. While I personally think there’s plenty of blame to go around (including on the federal side) I don’t think it’s valid to blame Bush for simply allocating funds and then leaving the reconstruction to state and local officials.

However, New Orleans City councilwoman Shelly Midura felt the need to rile up her liberal base by dispatching an open letter to Bush, arguing that he hasn’t allocated enough money to reconstruction or had the federal government take a prominent enough role. One liberal weblog, “Ashley Morris: the Blog,” published Midura’s letter approvingly. I had this response:

Midura’s argument isn’t really that compelling. She cites that most of the recovery dollars haven’t been spent, but doesn’t explain why that ought to be a federal concern. I would expect that local officials would be better placed to spend the money than pencil-pushers in Washington. Besides, if local officials aren’t spending the money, how is that Bush’s fault?

Moreover, Ed Blakely has expressed the view that he couldn’t spend all the money to which New Orleans is entitled even if he had the funds. Apparently at the city-level, the planning isn’t complete yet.

Finally, comparing New Orleans to Iraq is downright childish. Iraq has a population of approximately 27 million. Baghdad alone has a larger population than New York. The per capita dollars dedicated to New Orleans dramatically exceed those committed to Iraq. In any case, you’re dealing with distinct policy issues, and comparing the two may make for nice political theater, but it isn’t convincing.

Posted by: Courreges | 28 August 2007 at 08:11 PM

I thought I was pretty civil, and kept my comments brief without ranting. The purveyor the weblog thought differently:

Courreges, do me a solid on this solemn day, will ya? Go back to Houston and STFU. Comparing Iraq to an American city is childish? F*** off and die. You’re gone.

Posted by: ashley | 28 August 2007 at 08:13 PM

Solemn day? The day before Katrina stuck? Ok…

As to the substance, this kind of nonsense *is* childish. Iraq is a complex foreign policy issue; New Orleans is a domestic disaster recovery issue. Dramatically disparate concerns govern these issues. Iraq, as I noted, is a large country, while New Orleans is a medium-sized city. Comparing numbers without so much as explaining the basis for comparison is clearly a cheap shot designed to elicit oohs and ahhs from the liberal peanut gallery. It’s just preaching to the choir; there’s no attempt to convince anyone but existing, die-hard adherents.

What’s really frustrating to me is the attempt by some to wholly politicize the recovery effort. Now, this can’t be avoided to some degree — it is a political issue. However, behaving as if anybody who doesn’t buy the liberal line should just leave the city isn’t going to improve matters. If anything, it will simply ensure that many are turned off to the idea of dedicating additional funds when they are needed.

In any event, as Chuck Kuffner can attest, I become very perturbed when a blogger bans me without clear cause. I’ve tried never to do that, and I know that LST has a policy of letting opposing views be heard. Woe be to the liberal echo chambers that don’t follow suit.

(h/t LST member Fasternu426)

Observers of the national media understand that a certain amount of liberal bias will be in every article that they publish. In recent years, the bias exhibited by the media has been extended to include mocking religion of all sorts as nothing more than rantings of the uneducated masses.

Thus it comes as somewhat of a surprise that one of the nations premier newspapers, the Washington Post, has censored a comic strip because it contained a humorous reference to Islam.

The Washington Post and several other newspapers around the country did not run Sunday’s installment of Berkeley Breathed’s “Opus,” in which the spiritual fad-seeking character Lola Granola appears in a headscarf and explains to her boyfriend, Steve, why she wants to become a radical Islamist.

This is the same newspaper that just last week ran the same strip making fun of the recently deceased Jerry Falwell. The same newspaper that infamously featured shock cartoonist Ted Rall before being forced to cancel him after he depicted America as a retarded fool.

The most revealing element of this affair is how the Washington Post made it’s decision to censor this lame cartoon.

Sources told FOXNews.com that the strips were shown to Muslim staffers at The Washington Post to gauge their reaction, and they responded “emotionally” to the depiction of a woman dressed in traditional Muslim garb and espousing conservative Islamic views.

Since when did newspapers decide what to publish based upon the emotions of their staffers? Or is this how they have been operating all along? Is this the reason we are constantly bombarded with negative stories about Iraq and Afghanistan? Because their employees respond “emotionally” to the war?

How far are we willing to allow our country to go down the road of political correctness before we say enough already!?

Or is this simply a reaction by the Post’s editors out of fear? Have they seen too many heads lopped off by Muslims? Do they fear that CAIR will have one of the terrorist organizations that they support target them?

Most of the Ron Paul supporters (or, more accurately, defenders) who drive by here strike me as, well, a little over the top. However, I received a brief, polite, cheerful email from a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, SGT. Kyle Sanders, Helicopter Crew Chief, C 7-158 Medevac. I wanted to share Sgt. Sanders’ YouTube endorsement of Ron Paul. Politics aside, there are some striking images in this presentation.

My name is SGT Kyle Sanders. I endorse, support and believe in Ron Paul and his message. I encourage other service members to voice their support as well. We swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies. It is our duty as armed service members to keep that oath.

Ron Paul is succeeding because he tells the truth, even when people don’t want to hear it. He leads an exemplary life of humility and hard work. He is consistent and very bright. He solves problems by learning about their origin, which usually are found to contradict the Constitution and by providing a solution which always obeys or legally amends it.

Ron Paul is from a strong community of devoted families who care for each other and understand what it takes to keep that community strong: volunteerism combined with free markets in a moral society where people respect each others’ privacy and diversity without subsidizing it.

Veterans! Let your voice be heard. If you believe in Ron Paul’s message, share your thoughts and ideas on Youtube. Help build the momentum of his campaign. The public respects the opinions of service members, especially when they are reasonable and in defense of civil liberty.

One voice can spread hope. A few voices lead to confidence. Many voices lead to action. Action leads to change.

SHARE YOUR VOICE. BE COURAGEOUS. DO IT WITH INTEGRITY.

SGT. Sanders, rest assured that, regardless of our differences over candidates, the LST family humbly thanks you for your service.