Students Kicked Off Campus for Wearing American Flag Tees  —  Freedom of expression or cultural disrespect on Cinco de Mayo?  —  TWITTER  —  On any other day at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, Daniel Galli and his four friends would not even be noticed for wearing T-shirts with the American flag.

Documents reveal AT&T, Verizon, others, thought about dropping employer-sponsored benefits  —  (Fortune) — The great mystery surrounding the historic health care bill is how the corporations that provide coverage for most Americans — coverage they know and prize — will react …

Congress, Up In Arms  —  There seems to be a strong sentiment in Congress that the only constitutional right suspected terrorists have is the right to bear arms.  —  “I think you're going too far here,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday.

George Rekers Is a Homosexual, Escort Says  —  Rekers allegedly named his favorite maneuver the “long stroke” — a complicated caress “across his penis, thigh... and his anus over the butt cheeks,” as the escort puts it.  “Rekers liked to be rubbed down there,” he says.

Shahzad's Friends Describe a Growing Seriousness  —  Theirs was an arranged marriage: two well-educated children of prominent Pakistani families set up through a mutual friend.  He was the quiet one; she was the one who laughed at parties.  —  The couple in this Web photo are identified as Faisal Shahzad and Huma Mian.

Let's shake it up in California!  —  I'd like to tell you about a Commonsense Conservative running for office in California this year.  She grew up in a modest home with a school teacher dad, worked her way through several colleges, and then entered an arena where few women had tread.

Exclusive: Rubio Clarifies Critique of Arizona Law  —  Florida GOP Senate candidate Marco Rubio got himself into hot water with conservatives when he argued that Arizona's new illegal immigration law went “too far” and could possibly turn Arizona into a “police state.”

Dems come out swinging against GOP consumer protection measure  —  Democrats came out swinging Thursday against a Republican proposal to change consumer protection rules in the new Wall Street reform bill.  —  President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress loudly criticized an amendment …

Nashville Flood 2010: The Disaster You May Not Have Heard About  —  A great American city is currently buried under a sea of water, but you may not know much about it given all the attention media have given to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the failed car bomb attempt in New York's Times Square.

Rove, GOP plot vast network to reclaim power  —  The Republican Party's best-connected political operatives have quietly built a massive fundraising, organizing and advertising machine based on the model assembled by Democrats early in the decade, and with the same ambitious goal — to recapture Congress and the White House.

Truth is the First Casualty of Kos  —  Last Friday Markos Moulitsas, the Kos in DailyKos, put up a fundraising post titled “AR-Sen: Hell to Pay: Chamber-backed group runs racist ad against Bill Halter.”  After displaying the ad the bulk of the post starts with “The group running this ad is funded by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce...”

They're Calling It the “TEA” Act.  —  Legal experts, including former State Department Legal Adviser John Bellinger, have already slammed Sen. Joe Lieberman's proposal to strip citizenship from American citizens accused of being involved with a foreign terrorist organization.

Comedy Central developing Jesus Christ cartoon  —  Comedy Central might censor every image of the Prophet Muhammad on “South Park,” yet the network is developing a whole animated series around Jesus Christ.  —  As part of the network's upfront presentation to advertisers (full slate here) …

Poison Penn  —  One fact that has grown increasingly clear over the last two years is that the Democratic Party dodged a bullet by not nominating or electing a presidential candidate whose chief political adviser is Mark Penn.  In today's Washington Post op-ed, Penn once again displays …

Dow Falls in High-Speed Drop  —  Stocks plummeted in a flashback to the panicked trading of 2008.  Selling accelerated late in the day due to a wave of automated sell orders that turned an ugly drop into full-blown market washout.  —  At its afternoon low the Dow Jones Industrial Average …

Greek Debt Crisis On Verge Of ‘Going Global’: Pimco's El-Erian  —  Problems with Greek debt are about to spread to other countries and could infect the US unless the nation tackles its own mounting problems, Pimco's Mohamed El-Erian told CNBC.  —  About an hour or so after El-Erian spoke …

Supreme Court Upholds Freedom Of Speech In Obscenity-Filled Ruling  —  WASHINGTON—In a decisive and vulgar 7-2 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court once again upheld the constitution's First Amendment this week, calling the freedom of expression among the most “inalienable and important rights that a motherf**ker can have.”

Dem chair: Sestak win ‘cataclysmic’  —  The chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party issued a severe warning to members of his party this week, declaring that nominating Rep. Joe Sestak over Sen. Arlen Specter could have “cataclysmic” consequences for the Senate campaign this fall.

A people's history of ‘teabag’  —  The Week and Tommy Christopher do the hard and amusing work of figuring out how and when the term “teabag” first surfaced in our political parlance and how and when it became an insult.  (One activist I talked to yesterday compared it to the “n-word.")

Questioning the Conventional Wisdom on a Middle East Nuclear Arms Race  —  Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks in a ceremony marking Iran's National Day of Nuclear Technology in Tehran, Iran on April 9, 2010.  An Iranian bomb may not necessarily unleash a wave of nuclear proliferation in the region …

Ranking Those 99 House Races By Degree of Difficulty for GOP Challengers  —  Here are my 99 races, grouped into five levels of difficulty.  I've used three different measurements of difficulty - the Department of Homeland Security's old color code alert system, a comparable degree of difficulty …

Newly Elected, ‘Joe The Plumber’ Picks Dark Horse In 2012  —  Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, who just won a seat on his Ohio county's Republican committee, told TPMDC that he decided to run for public office to “weed out the liars, cheaters and thieves.”

Long Island Newspaper Gets Only The “Sexist And Racist” Part Of “Making A Sexist And Racist Joke” Right  —  A Smithtown, N.Y., newspaper is under fire for publishing a photo spread comparing Barack and Michelle Obama to Fred Sanford and “Aunt Esther” from the '70s sitcom Sanford & Son.