Midday open thread

• Today's comic is 2012: A mad lib odyssey by Jen Sorensen:
  
• Great news out of Washington state:

  Gov. Chris Gregoire on Wednesday said she'll put forward legislation to legalize marriage for gay and lesbian couples.

  The proposal will be introduced during the legislative session that starts Monday. If it's approved, Washington would become the seventh state to legalize gay marriage.

  "It's time, it's the right thing to do, and I will introduce a bill to do it," Gregoire said in a statement.

• Condolences to family and friends:

  A Japanese-American who can be considered a civil rights pioneer has died. He resisted the World War II internment camps. Gordon Hirabayashi was 93 years old and ABC7 looks at how this man helped change history. [...]

  "Gordon believed it was wrong to single him and other Japanese-Americans out on the basis of ancestry," said Karen Kai, who was on one of Hirabayashi's defense teams.

  He called it racial discrimination and turned himself into the FBI and was convicted. He appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, but it ruled against him ...

  But in the 1980s, new evidence uncovered blatant government misconduct. Hirabayashi and two others went to court to challenge the original ruling. The case was retried and in 1987 his conviction was overturned.

• Don't miss Mike Huckabee's latest twisted, revisionist history video that is designed to push his right-wing ideology onto children.
• This is the best Obama Derangement Syndrome-induced conspiracy theory ever:

  Forget Kenya. Never mind the secret madrassas. The sinister, shocking truth about Barack Obama’s past lies not in east Africa, but in outer space. As a young man in the early 1980s, Obama was part of a secret CIA project to explore Mars. The future president teleported there, along with the future head of Darpa.

  That’s the assertion, at least, of a pair of self-proclaimed time-traveling, universe-exploring government agents. Andrew D. Basiago and William Stillings insist that they once served as “chrononauts” at Darpa’s behest, traversing the boundaries of time and space. They swear: A youthful Barack Obama was one of them.

• There's right-wing outrage against the Girl Scouts and now they're threatening to boycott the annual cookie sale. Great. More Thin Mints for the rest of us.
• From the you-can't-make-this-shit-up files:

  Mandatory ethics training this year for the 138 members of the Kentucky legislature features a lecture by Jack Abramoff, a convicted felon at the center of Washington’s biggest lobbying corruption scandal.

• Two down, seven to go:

  A stray cat that survived two trips to a Utah animal shelter's gas chamber now has a new home.

  Officials at West Valley City's animal shelter in Utah say the cat named Andrea hadn't been adopted for 30 days when shelter officials tried to put her to death in October. She survived, so they gassed her again.

  Shelter officials detected no vital signs and presumed she was dead after the second try, so they put her in a plastic bag in a cooler. But when they checked the bag, they saw she had vomited on herself and had hypothermia but was alive.

  The shelter then decided to stop trying to kill her.

• It seems that ancient Brits had a stiff upper ... something:

  One of the oldest pieces of British pornographic art has just been discovered beside the river Thames. At first sight, the bronze disc found near Putney Bridge in London looks like an old coin – until you notice that it depicts a sex scene.

  This type of bronze token with its erotic imagery was specially made to spend in ancient Roman brothels. The example found near Putney Bridge and given to the Museum of London is evidence that brothels in Roman Londinium were just as busy as they were in ancient Pompeii, where brothels and their lewd wall paintings are among the well-preserved everyday shops of a Roman town.