Iraqi television news features the following public service announcement: “The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians do not comply with the orders of the army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area.”

“Palm Beach County’s elections supervisor has given the right wing’s unofficial mouthpiece 30 days to explain” why she apparently knowingly voted using a false address, a third-degree felony in Florida. If she doesn’t respond, he “could refer the case to State Attorney Barry Krischer for criminal charges.”

In 2004, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said he opposed a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage:

Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona broke forcefully with President Bush and the Senate GOP leadership Tuesday evening over the issue of same-sex marriage, taking to the Senate floor to call a constitutional amendment that would effectively ban the practice unnecessary — and un-Republican. “The constitutional amendment we’re debating today strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans,” McCain said.

But yesterday, ABC reported that McCain confided to Jerry Falwell that he would support such an amendment:

McCain “reconfirmed” to Falwell that he would support a federal constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman if a federal court were to strike down state constitutional bans on gay marriage.

Since aligning himself with Falwell and far right conservatives, gay marriage isn’t the only issue on which the “straight talk express” has backtracked. In 2000, McCain called Falwell one of America’s “agents of intolerance;” now he has agreed to give the commencement address at Falwell’s Liberty University on May 13.

UPDATE: Carpetbagger has more.

During a speech today, President Bush said “First of all, the globe is warming. The fundamental debate — is it manmade or natural?” Actually, that’s no longer a debate, at least among the overwhelming majority of scientists. The Guardian reports:

Natural variation in the Earth’s climate, or changes in solar activity or volcanic eruptions, which have been suggested as alternative explanations for rising temperatures, could not explain the data collected in the real world. Models based on man-made emissions of greenhouse gases matched the observations almost precisely.

“What absolutely nailed it was the greenhouse model,” Dr [Tim] Barnett [of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California] told the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Washington. “Two models, one designed in Britain and one here in the US, got it almost exactly. We were stunned.”

…Only the greenhouse models replicated the changes that have been observed in practice. “All the potential culprits have been ruled out except one,” Dr Barnett said.

It is also the position, curiously enough, of the Bush administration’s EPA since 2002. From the Christian Science Monitor:

In a report to the United Nations, the Environmental Protection Agency says that man-made greenhouse gases in the US will increase 43 percent between 2000 and 2020. And while acknowledging some scientific uncertainties, the EPA says that the recent warming trend “is real and has been particularly strong within the past 20 years … due mostly to human activities.”

How much longer will Bush keep his head in the sand?

“President Bush said Wednesday that Saddam Hussein, not continued U.S. involvement in Iraq, is responsible for ongoing sectarian violence that is threatening the formation of a democratic government.”

to five years, 10 months in prison by a federal judge, the AP reports. “The sentence won’t start immediately so [he and Adam Kidan] can continue cooperating in a Washington corruption investigation and a Florida probe into the murder of former SunCruz owner Konstantinos ‘Gus’ Boulis.” The sentence was the minimum required under his plea agreement in the SunCruz case.

President Bush, 3/10/06 :

One of the keys is going to be to get a unity government up and running, a government that reflects the diversity of the country. … We want the Iraqis to make that selection, of course. They are the ones who got elected by the people. They’re the ones who must form the government.

New York Times, today:

“Mr. Khalilzad said Mr. Bush ‘doesn’t want, doesn’t support, doesn’t accept’ Mr. Jaafari as the next prime minister, according to Mr. Taki, a senior aide to Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Shiite bloc. It was the first ‘clear and direct message’ from the Americans on a specific candidate for prime minister, Mr. Taki said.”