Just when you thought life couldn't get any stranger, along comes a competitor to NAMBLA: The Christian Boy Love Forum.

Today on his blog, Juan Cole proposes a Covenant with America for the Democratic Party. This is similar to the infamous Contract with America that the GOP pulled out in 1994, only Juan's will build up America for the benefit of her people, not tear America apart for the benefit of the GOP's special interests. Excerpts below...

Among other things mentioned during the State of the Union address was this gem:

Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research, human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling or patenting human embryos.

Sounds semi-reasonable, right? But, I'm willing to bet you didn't know that human-animal hybrids are actually an up-and-coming method of understanding genetic diseases.

How? More on the flip.

A law that will make democracy all but moot in Ohio is about to  pass the state legislature and to be signed by its Republican  governor. Despite massive corruption scandals besieging the Ohio GOP,  any hope that the Democratic party could win this most crucial swing  state in future presidential elections, or carry its pivotal US  Senate seat in 2006, are about to end.

House Bill 3's most publicized provision will require positive  identification before casting a vote. But it also opens voter  registration activists to partisan prosecution, exempts electronic  voting machines from public scrutiny, quintuples the cost of citizen- requested statewide recounts and makes it illegal to challenge a  presidential vote count or, indeed, any federal election result in  Ohio. When added to the recently passed HB1, which allows campaign  financing to be dominated by the wealthy and by corporations, and  along with a Rovian wish list of GOP attacks on the ballot box,  democracy in Ohio could be all but over.

Dobson says he'll be spilling his guts tomorrow.

According to This Rocky Mountain News story, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson will use his radio show this Wednesday and Thursday, October 12 and 13, to tell his flock what he got from the White House on Harriet Miers. This would be that "confidential" stuff that Dobson was talking about last week when he said "When you know some of the things I know - that I probably shouldn't know...".

I won't be in a position to listen, and I can't stand his show anyhow. So, anybody with cast-iron guts want to listen and summarize?