Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle

...we have one Senator whose big idea is to tax da pimps:

Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa is hoping to stamp out the sex trade by taxing pimps and prostitutes, then jailing them when they don't pay.

The Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday morning approved a bill sponsored by committee chairman Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, authorizing at least $2 million toward the establishment of an office in the IRS criminal investigation unit to prosecute unlawful sex workers for violations of tax laws.

This is noble, I guess, but also the most unworkable law since the "Taxing Unicorns Act" of 1966. Pimps don't keep receipts. Also, big pimpin's a crime already. How can you tax something that's illegal? Can you tax murder?

...next up, The Senate Majority Leader, stand-up guy that he is, now blames the 2nd-place cable news channel, watched by not even a million people in the country on a nightly basis, for his party's low poll numbers:

CNN host Miles O'Brien asked Frist why recent polls show that show 54% of Americans will vote for Democrats in the upcoming elections while only 38% planned to vote for Republicans. Frist explained that the people's concerns were being addressed by the Republican Senate but told O'Brein those were the sort of issues "you may not cover and others may not cover."

O'Brien defended CNN, "We are covering but I think there is -- a lot of what you say there -- Americans are not hearing that particular message. As the majority leader, isn't that part of your job?"

Frist replied, "Well, you know, it's part of my job and your job and your whole coming into this was, again, saying [from] Harry Reid that we are spending all of our time on marriage -- which is important. That we're spending all of the time on flag without mentioning what we've done of the floor for six weeks. Iraq, the war on terror, making you safer... where's your coverage of that? What you do is concentrate on things that are spun to you from the other side of the aisle and that's why that message doesn't get out."

What a stand-up guy. Nothing's his fault, it's the second-rate cable channel that's bringing down the whole government. I guess Paula Zahn sets the legislative agenda. Wolf Blitzer alloted four days for debate on the flag burning amendment. Anderson Cooper put out that press release on the American Values agenda that has bills like "protecting the Pledge of Allegiance" and banning gay marriage. After all, that link is from CNN! Conspiracy!

Ahh, the persecuted majority.

But taking the cake for the wackiest guy in the GOP is Curt Weldon, who wanted to go on a secret trip to Iraq, without telling the military, to dig for WMD:

[Dave] Gaubatz, who lives in Dallas, is a former Air Force special investigator who served as a civilian employee in Iraq for a number of months in 2003.

While in Iraq, he acquired what he considered reliable information on the existence of WMD caches in four locations - not old stuff dating from the pre-Gulf War days, but recently produced gas and chemical weapons.

He never could get U.S. military officials to look into the matter. They apparently viewed it as too speculative and too much of a drain on personnel who were, after all, engaged in combat [...]

Gaubatz said he first contacted Weldon and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R., Mich.), head of the House Intelligence Committee, to share his info and get them to prod the Defense Department and intelligence agencies to do the WMD searches in the locales.

Instead, Gaubatz said, Weldon latched onto the idea as a "personal political venture" and discussed a Hoekstra-Weldon trip to Iraq, under the guise of visiting the troops, that would detour to Nasiriyah.

Once there, Gaubatz said, the congressmen planned to persuade the U.S. military commander to lend them the equipment and men to go digging by the Euphrates for the cache Gaubatz believed to be there.

He said that Weldon made it clear he didn't want word leaked to the Pentagon, to intelligence officials, or to Democratic congressmen.

As Gaubatz told me: "They even worked out how it would go. If there was nothing there, nothing would be said. If the site had been [scavenged], nothing would be said. But, if it was still there, they would bring the press corps out."

Curt Weldon: one-man Army. A guy so paranoid he doesn't trust the military, and would rather take a shovel himself and start digging in the middle of Iraq.

Jon Stewart was right, "The House of Representatives is filled with insane jackasses."