By Kristin Maun 

State Senator Gary George (R-Oregon) has one thing to say to gay people – shut up.

In a March  issue of Just Out magazine, the senator spoke about co-sponsoring an initiative to repeal the Oregon Equality Act. The Oregon Equality Act bans discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Passed in April 2007, the bill amends existing laws to protect the gay community from being discriminated against in housing and employment.
But that has not stopped Senator George and State Representative Kim Thatcher from trying to turn back the clock on civil rights.

Senator George told Just Out, “My advice to the gay community is shut up, just don’t talk about it. If you walk around talking about what you do in the bedroom, you should be on the pervert channel.”

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You knew it was coming. After letting Barack Obama twist in the wind over some of the sermons of his pastor Jeremiah A. Wright, Hillary Clinton decided to add her two cents. Sitting down with reporters from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, she was asked to comment on the whole scene and Clinton noted the embattled minister would not have been her spiritual guide.

“You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend,” she said.

Team Obama predictably pounced—whatever happened to the perfect phrase “no comment—- accusing Clinton of playing politics with the Wright mess. Yes you read it right. A spokesperson for the Obama campaign accused Clinton of playing politics. It gets better though. After bemoaning her use of politics, this same spokesperson, a guy named Bill Burton, goes for the game himself and gives Clinton grief for creating the sniper fire in Bosnia tale.

Is there a political operative more deserving of a dope slap today than Burton?

And by the way: Clinton’s excuse for her sniper tale is pure howler.

The Washington Post awards Hillary Clinton four Pinocchios for her tall tale of coming under sniper fire in Bosnia.

Hillary Clinton has a problem: her little Bosnia story has boomeranged. Instead of proving that she acquired real foreign affairs experience as First Lady, her tale of coming under enemy fire in March 1996 as she landed in Tuzla has now itself drawn fire from the Obama campaign and threatens to seriously undermine whatever advantage she might have gained from the Jeremiah Wright affair.

As my esteemed colleague James Withers first noted on this site yesterday, Sinbad Got It Right. The comedian called the senator on her tall tale of coming under fire as they landed to entertain U.S. troops engaged in peacekeeping in the wartorn province of the former Yugoslavia. Hillary immediately dismissed Sinbad as “a comedian,” but the joke seems to be on her, as the exaggeration of the danger in which the First Lady found herself upon landing in Tuzla has raised serious questions about the possibility of other exaggerations of her record.

“As has now been conclusively established by video film and news photographs, Hillary Clinton did NOT come under sniper fire in Bosnia in March 1996 when she made a morale-boosting visit to U.S. troops enforcing the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement,” declared The Fact Checker in the Washington Post. “But she is taking plenty of bullets for her over-dramatic accounts of the trip,” Fact Checker continues. Read more…

No, former Presidential hopeful Bill Richardson didn’t guest star on the big L Word season finale. That might have been weird. But Kate Clinton’s still ready to talk about the fact that the New Mexico governor has grown a beard and endorsed Obama all in the same week.

Meanwhile, did all of the women on The L Word turn schizo? How else to explain their completely out-of-character behavior this week?

C’mon Kate! Help us make sense of it all! To get started, watch below…

Remember back when MTV asked Bill Clinton such frivolous questions like “boxers or briefs”? Well, that was then and this is now.

As Bill Clinton campaigns on behalf of Hillary, young audiences are still challenging the former President, but on more weighty matters, such as the Clinton political legacy. The students over at MTVU sat down with Bill to talk about this current campaign, the Clinton Global Initiative and that comment Melissa Etheridge made about the Clintons “throwing the gay community under a bus.” Yep, they’re not playing.

Watch the exchange, and go to MTVU for more. Bill gets fired up! And the MTVU crew stays on him. It’s good stuff.

And after the jump, watch the original exchange between Melissa Etheridge and Hillary Clinton (from last summer’s Visible Vote Presidential Forum on Logo) to see how this conversation all began.

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The United States reached a sad milestone over the weekend with four more deaths bringing the total of U.S. casualties in Iraq to 4,000. The new casualty total nearly coincides with another important milestone — the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, which came last week.

Unfortunately, coverage of the war in Iraq has declined precipitously, to about one-fifth of what it was last summer, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism. “Five years later, the United States remains at war in Iraq, but there are days when it would be hard to tell from a quick look at television news, newspapers and the Internet,” Richard Perez-Pena writes in today’s New York Times. “Iraq accounted for 18 percent of [broadcast television networks] prominent news coverage in the first nine months of 2007, but only 9 percent in the following three months, and 3 percent so far this year,” Perez-Pena notes, citing figures from PEJ.

Iraq also seems to have disappeared from coverage of the presidential campaign, which these days is filled with talk of Barack Obama’s relationship with his pastor and the typical ‘horse race’ coverage, focused on whether Hillary Clinton can catch up in pledged delegates or the popular vote.

But last week, the senator from New York gave what her handlers called “a major policy address on the war in Iraq.” In Hillary’s March 17 speech on Iraq, she denounced “the decision to rush to war without allowing the weapons inspectors to finish their work or waiting for diplomacy to run its course,” but there is absolutely no admission that her vote endorsed that rush to war. Read more…