Great news, everyone: America is now .0000000001% less insane and bigoted! Barack Obama signed a final administrative repeal today of the Jesse Helms-authored travel and immigration ban on persons with HIV/AIDS. It only took 22 years for our government to realize that the HIV virus is not the very contagious “gay flu.” MORE »

Tonight through Sunday, August 30: Not that we haven’t already told you 1,000 times, but it’s (still) restaurant week! And it will even be Restaurant Week next week too. Make a reservation, eat a meal for $35.09, plus tax and gratuity and drinks (which some would argue is a rip-off), and feel like a real Washingtonian, because eating prix fixe meals is what we do. [Restaurant Week]
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After a frightening round of campaigning in nearby Virginia, Bill Clinton has been given a long list of weird destinations, in hopes he will “keep busy” for the next eight years, far from polite Washington society. First came word of his appointment as special UN envoy to Haiti, which is known for its lack of TMZ and Politico reporters. Then we got the exciting news about Bill’s weekend trip to Austria, for the big transsexual sex festival, “Vienna Life Ball,” to raise money for the AIDS. Next up? A six-month diplomatic tour of Antarctica’s subterranean lesbian ice-sprite colony. [Gawker/Washington Post]

Ha ha, these people are funny because they named their magazine “Paranoia,” meaning they recognize that they are simply insane people with a printing press. [Reason]

Maybe Senator Elizabeth Dole teaches a community college English class on the side and wants to show her students a cartoonish, real-life example of “irony,” because that’s the only way to explain her current episode of retardation. She has introduced an amendment to the HIV/AIDS/etc. relief bill nearing completion in the Senate that would rename it after dead Senator Jesse Helms, the famous hero who once said, “There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy.” This Senate bill, interestingly enough, will probably contain another amendment — this one from John Kerry and Gordon Smith — to remove the HIV travel and immigration ban for foreigners hoping to enter the United States. This ban, of course, began in 1987 and is called the “Helms Amendment.” So basically, Boo Elizabeth Dole! Elizabeth Dole has gonorrhea! [HuffPo]

ISN’T THAT JUST SOME GAY DISEASE THOUGH?: According to Andrew Sullivan’s gay Congressional ESP, Sen. David Vitter, who likes to have diaper sex with prostitutes left and right, is the “only Senator opposing the removal of the HIV travel and immigration ban” from “The United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief,” a.k.a. PEPFAR. What kind of godforsaken world do we live in where David Vitter is the only guy who doesn’t want Americans getting AIDS from these foreign gays who come here and start coughing everywhere? [Andrew Sullivan]

William F. Buckley Jr., founder of conservative ideas and delightful sailor, died earlier this week. This afternoon, the Nation posted an article challenging Buckley’s legacy. “Buckley’s so-called boldness and playfulness had an ideological flip-side,” Richard Kim writes, “cruelty, pettiness and a tendency to embrace fascistic solutions in the guise of pragmatism.” What the hell is wrong with Richard Kim? Doesn’t he know that it is, objectively, too soon to question Buckley’s ideas? If Kim expects anyone to show up at his funeral after this stunt, he’s kidding himself. MORE »

Grampa Fred Thompson might look like a harmless geriatric with under-eye bags you could smuggle a goat in, but it turns out he’s just another sinister millionaire creep who hates AIDS babies in Africa. “With people dying of cancer, and heart disease, and children dying of leukemia still, I got to tell you — we’ve got a lot of problems here,” he told a reporter who asked him if he supported Bush’s global AIDS initiative. Then he chortled loudly as he picked his teeth with the bones of orphans who died of an easily preventable disease instead of something respectable, like lymphoma. [Washington Post]

Last week, Jacob Zuma beat Thabo Mbeki in a race to run South Africa’s African National Congress, which sorta set him up to take Mbeki out as the President. Mbeki is the President who said that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, pregnant women should stop taking AZT to prevent transmission, the white people spread it through Africa on purpose and HIV could be cured through traditional remedies. Zuma was fired by Mbeki in 2005 when his financial adviser was caught soliciting a bribe and is now facing charges that he took hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from French arms dealers, not that that prosecution is at all politically motivated. Sometimes, even our bad leadership choices can be made to seem better. [Yahoo News]

Hello everyone, and welcome to this week’s edition of The Foreigns: They’re Just Like Us! Our goal as always is to prove that we Americans and those foreign Foreigns have nothing to fear from one another, and that under our variously colored skins, we’re really more alike than different. For instance, did you know that, like you, the Foreigns can’t get enough of the infectious 2002 smash hit single “In da club?” Also like you, they have ludicrously misguided ideas about AIDS, are racists, and are high as fucking kites. Join us for a guided tour of depravity, after the jump! MORE »

White House Press Secretary Dana Perino’s job got a little harder this week, what with the new task of convincing the public that it should consider the peaceful Iran NIE hostile. The lovely deathbot likes to take out her frustration on biased and/or dumb questioners during times like these, and today when some guy asked about AIDS research, she told him to “just stop it, stop it.” MORE »