A transvestite gang is terrorizing New Orleans retailers.

‚ÄúThey‚Äôre fearless,‚Äù said [Salesman Eric] Ogle. ‚ÄúOnce they see something they like they won‚Äôt stop until they have it…

The transvestites first appeared in March when they raided Magazine Street like a marauding army of kleptomaniacal showgirls, said Davis, using clockwork precision and brute force to satisfy high-end boutique needs…

“They come in groups of three or four. One tries to distract you while the others get the stuff and run out the door. It’s very simple,” Ogle said.

Next door at Winky’s, Bonga heard people screaming inside Vegas, then saw a blur of cheap wigs and masculine legs in designer shoes streak past her door.

Seriously, this is one of the funniest articles I’ve read in a long time. You have to click through and read the whole thing…

This has to be the strangest piece of research I have heard in a long time. According to new research, if you are a male born into a family with older male siblings, your birth order may play a part in your sexual orientation.

The study indicates that the mother’s body may view the male child as “foreign” and with more male children, begin to produce an anti-male antibody that leads to homosexuality.

I’d be curious to see if they restricted the test subjects to gay men with older siblings only, or if they included gay men that were the oldest sibling? In either event, it’s sure to spark discussion among those who like to debate genetics vs. choice.

Mrs. Quip has been busy for the last 2 1/2 3 years (she IM’ed to correct me) working with a company that was trying to become the first major nuclear facility in 30 years to get an operating license. On Friday, their quest was successful. Congrats to her and to the team at her company.

Given the near-hysteria on the left about global warming, you’d think they would embrace clean nuclear power as a way of breaking our reliance on fossil fuels like coal and oil, but they haven’t. Hopefully this license will spur others and a new renaissance in nuclear power will come about.

At a time when Administration officials are being convicted for their relationship with lobbyists, and members of Congress are keeping bribe money in their freezer and printing up “bribery menus” on congressional note cards, you’d think the last thing you want to do is appear to be a little too cozy with lobbyists.

That thought, however, didn’t stop the Bush-appointed Chairman of the FCC, a man known for championing the fight against media indecency, from posing for a photo in Details magazine in a posh DC Hotel room on a rumpled bed, with two prominent lobbyists, one of whom represents the telephone companies.

It’s clear that nobody form the FCC press shop was with him that day. Otherwise they never would let him do that. Would they?

On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal took a look at a recent incident involving Cox customers, Criagslist, and net neutrality.

A recent incident may illuminate the controversy for those wondering what both sides are after. Several weeks ago, users of Cox Communications’ broadband Internet service found that they could no longer access Craigslist.org, the free classifieds site. Some bloggers immediately smelled a rat — Cox’s parent company also owns newspapers, which compete with Craigslist for classified ads.

The article goes on to point out that despite claims by net neutrality proponents regarding blocking and competitive practices, the root cause of the blockage was software. A new application designed to safeguard users inadvertently blocked Craigslist. (While I’m not familiar with the details on this, I suspect this was a software intended to prevent phishing and block sites known to be scams, virus triggers, etc).

Under a net neutrality regime, that distinction would not have mattered. Regardless of the reason for the outage, Cox would be fined, and in some of the more ridiculous legislation, it’s executives would be punishable by time in jail.

Craigslist creator Craig Newmark (who is in favor of net neutrality) even came to Cox’s defense on his blog.

“The whole thing was exacerbated by folks talking about Net neutrality,” adding for good measure: “None of this was deliberate” by Cox.

This is just yet another reason why codifying a concept as vague as net neutrality is a terrible idea. The first reason, as I have railed on repeatedly, is economic. The big content providers don’t want to pay, they want you to. The WSJ piece also took that point and ran.

[Larry Darby, an economist with the American Consumer Institute] cites the newspaper industry — in which the costs of providing news are split between readers and advertisers — as an example of the kind of “multisided market” that can develop when businesses are free to charge whoever is most willing to pay. Mr. Darby’s conclusion is that barring network operators from charging for value-added services would be bad for consumers. “The practice of ‘end users only paying’ evolved in, and was suitable for, the world of . . . voice message only technology,” Mr. Darby writes. “But, Congress should not lock that business model into a market for which it is ill-suited — and certainly should not do so on grounds that consumer welfare is thereby enhanced.”

The Senate takes up the markup of S 2686 tomorrow. Among a host of issues to be considered are a score of net neutrality amendments. If the Senate has more sense than I have ever given them credit for, they’ll bat those back to the Stone Age.