Uganda is looking at criminalizing homosexuality. Until recently, the penalty included sanctions up to and including death.

Once again, I’m compelled to tip my cap to Rachel Maddow. She’s been all over this story and inspired me to ask the Senators if they’d consider signing on to a Sense of the Senate resolution condemning the law being considered. Senator Ensign is most clear – he thinks a resolution may be desirable. Senator Inhofe is somewhere in the middle; he says we “could” do that. Senator Brownback? Well, he’s a bit more reticent. Without seeing the legislation, he wouldn’t want to pre-judge…

(For brevity’s sake, I edited down the Brownback video a little bit. I didn’t change the context at all; the full video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjdKHi1Sqlg)

Jay Bybee is notorious for being an author of “torture-memos”; documents that offered (questionable, at best) legal rationales for the Bush administration’s torture regime.

During his Senate confirmation hearings, he concealed his key role in the establishment of Bush and Cheney’s torture program from the Senate.

Leahy says he should “do the honorable thing and resign.”

In an earlier conversation I had with the Senator, he told me, “Of all the things the previous administration did, this was one of the worst.”

Senator Feingold can be pretty interesting sometimes. As the Chamber of Commerce’s event wound down, reporters filtered out into the lobby and found the Senator hanging out a willing to take questions. I’m not entirely positive that his presence there as a counter-weight to the Chamber’s event was planned, but generally speaking, I don’t think these things happen by accident. Progressives should probably give more credit to senators that innovate in this way.

Anyway, at the Chamber’s presser, much of the discussion revolved around their contention that the health care bill being debated in the Senate doesn’t go far enough to contain costs.

I asked Senator Feingold if he agreed; his answer was that the Chamber’s criticism is legitimate. Of course, Feingold has a solution at the ready that the Chamber won’t like very much: a robust public option.

This was a health care press conference led by Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, Lamar Alexander and Bruce Josten, EVP of Gov’t Affairs for the Chamber of Commerce. They were joined by seventy Chamber members from across the country that had converged on the Hill to ask the Senate to kill health care reform. I was wondering how many of those members were Democrats. I also wanted to know if it was fair for the American people to think of the Chamber as an appendage of the Republican Party.

For some reason, Bruce Josten found the questions very funny.

Odd that. I don’t think rape victims that saw the Chamber spend $300,000/day on lobbying to ask Republican Senators to oppose giving these women their day in court found any of my questions very funny at all.

By the way, the next day, Senator’s Reid, Schumer, Murray and Durbin held a presser with a bunch of doctors that were (of course) supportive of the health care bill. I asked if any of the doctors were Republican. Dr. Tu stepped up for an interview:

This is a question David Gregory, Wolf Blitzer, Brian Williams, Andrea Mitchell and the rest of the high society media would never think to ask… So I asked it.

I’ve been wondering… We’re about to commit $100 billion/yr to an ill-defined and little understood war in Afghanistan… We spent hundreds of billions to save the skins of Wall Street bankers and other paperwork pirates… But ask our government to spend a relative pittance to reduce a lot more suffering and save a lot more lives, and what happens? It turns out pulling the teeth of an unanesthetized lion may be easier…

What does that say about the health of our Democracy? I asked a few Senators…

There is a lot of talk about the possibility that procedural rules may be exercised that would allow (or force) the House to vote on the Senate’s version of the health care bill without the chance to negotiate its contents in conference. I started asking about that around the Hill today.

Representative Grijalva told me that the Progressive Caucus doesn’t always find it simple to reach consensus, but at their meeting last night, they agreed that at a minimum, they want to see conference.

I talked to Dick Durbin (see video later); he said that so far as he knows, nobody in the Senate is insisting that conference should be avoided.

I also wondered what Republicans in the House thought of the idea. When I saw Congressman (and Doctor) Boozman of Arkansas, I asked him what he thought. Video below, along with a few words from Congressman Rush Holt.

I’m still trying to figure out who will place a hold on Bernanke’s nomination for the Fed’s decision to delay enforcement of an internet gambling law. I still haven’t found out, but both Tom Coburn and John Ensign have told me that they heard another hold is coming from another Senator. Unfortunately, it’s a big secret – nobody wants to step on their colleagues press, I guess.

At least that’s what I thought. Maybe the institutional prohibition isn’t as as iron-clad as I thought though.

Earlier this evening, I ran into Senator Bunning and asked if he had heard who this mystery anti-gambling Senator is. He said he had no idea, but he knew of five Senators that would be holding Bernanke’s nomination. I already knew of Bunning, Demint, Vitter and Sanders, but, obvously, that’s only four. I asked him who the fifth was. He told me Jon Kyl will also be executing a hold.

I asked if Kyl’s hold would be regarding the gambling issue. Bunning told me that so far as he knew, the only issue Kyl’s concerned about is the “illegal” misuse of TARP funds. With that said, a quick googling reveals that Kyl is an outspoken internet gambling opponent.

So if everything I’m hearing is correct, there will be at least 5 holds placed on Bernanke’s nomination, and possibly a sixth. I’m still trying to find out who the 6th may be.

I’ve been talking to a lot of Senators off-camera. Senator Casey was willing to say a few things on camera about the problems we face.

If you are looking for the nugget of news here, it comes a little past half-way in when Senator Casey talks about how disappointed he’s been in Karzai’s lack of urgency.

With that said, I’m trying to get more folks on the record re:

1) We ask for increased accountability? Well, can we make that request credibly when the CIA is paying Hamad Karzai’s brother, Ahmed, knowing full well that he is involved up to his ears in the narco-trade?

2) We can’t leave because Pakistan has nukes? If that is a consideration, why aren’t we more concerned about finding out what A.Q. Khan did in terms of proliferation? Khan is the “father of the muslim bomb”; he developed Pakistan’s nuke program. More importantly, Khan was central to what is probably the most evil crime of all time: he sold the technology and parts needed to manufacture nuclear weapons to untold numbers of clients. “Untold” is the operative word. For all the billions of dollars we’ve dumped into Pakistan, they have not allowed the FBI (or anyone else that we know of) to interview Khan to find out who got what. Moreover, after a short sentence of house arrest at his beach villa, Khan was set free by the Pakistani government. He’s a national hero.

3) We talk about bypassing the corrupt central government of Afghanistan to work with more reliable partners in the provinces. That’s fine, but in the next breath we talk about needing a strong central government as a condition to be fulfilled before we can leave Afghanistan. Aren’t these policies contradictory?

Count Senator Inhofe as a “solid no” when it comes to the question of Bernanke’s confirmation. From his tone, it should be safe to assume that he’s a no on the cloture vote that will be required to move Bernanke to the floor (given the holds on his nomination), but I’ll follow up on that to be absolutely certain the next time I see the Senator.

Senator Bennett think his constituents believe the financial crisis is one of liquidity. For whatever reason, Senators are unwilling to say what virtually everyone knows is true: our “too big to fail” institutions are insolvent. Their liabilities exceed their assets. They jumped in with both feet and fueled the real estate bubble; now that it has burst, they are left with a whole lotta devalued paper on their hands. The Fed, Treasury and banks (with the tacit endorsement of the House, Senate and White House) are moving every way they can to recapitalize banks as quickly as possible. Of course, their emergency triage comes at the expense of poor suckers like you, me and the rest of Main Street. And ultimately, the choices being made today are likely to increase the long-term pain for all of us.

But shhh… don’t say anything. The entire scheme rests on the assumption that not too many people will point their fingers and say, “Hey – teh emperor wears no clothes!”

And that’s why Senator Bennett pretends this is all about liquidity.

There’s a picture of a fat guy on a plane. The cover story is that a flight attendant took it to raise some safety concerns.

I’m not buying it. There’s a mean streak running through this country (and the rest of the world?); in some respects, junior high is a really good avatar for American culture.

Anyway, all I could think about (especially after seeing the poll that ran with the pic that showed that only 13% of the respondents didn’t believe a fat person should have to buy an extra plane ticket) was about the mean streak that defines this country.

When you look at the picture closely (after getting over your initial shock), you see that the guy towers over everyone else on the plane – he’s simply a giant of a man.

It’s really easy to hate on outliers. But if every one of us were forced to wear our deepest shames on the outside, very few of us would have any friends.