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.

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.

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, Says Escort  —  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.

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 …

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.”

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...”

Phoenix Fans Turn Out For ‘Los Suns’  —  In last night's NBA playoffs game, the Phoenix Suns beat the San Antonio Spurs 110-102.  The team won this Cinco de Mayo game wearing its “Los Suns” jerseys, a move meant to show solidarity with the Latino community and protest Arizona's anti-immigration law.

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.”

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.”

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) …

Kentucky Poll: Paul holds commanding lead; Mongiardo ahead  —  FRANKFORT — A new Kentucky Poll shows novice political candidate Rand Paul with a commanding 12-point lead over Trey Grayson, the Republican Party establishment's choice in the GOP race for U.S. Senate in Kentucky.

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.")

National Day of Prayer to go on despite ruling  —  Washington (CNN) — The 59th annual National Day of Prayer was held Thursday against a backdrop of controversy and growing doubts about the future of the event, which a federal judge recently declared unconstitutional.

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.

Consumer Demand is Structured by Public Policy  —  Dave Roberts writes about the clash people “sustainable transportation” in the sense of less dependence on cars and “sustainable transportation” in the sense of cars that are just cleaner: … Obviously I'm with Roberts.

New Alarm Bells About Chemicals and Cancer  —  The President's Cancer Panel is the Mount Everest of the medical mainstream, so it is astonishing to learn that it is poised to join ranks with the organic food movement and declare: chemicals threaten our bodies.

Trying to shirk responsibility for spill, BP CEO predicts ‘lots of illegitimate’ lawsuits because ‘this is America.’  —  BP is financially responsible for the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, so it is desperately trying the limit the financial and legal fall out.

Lawmakers unveil bill to strip terrorist suspects of citizenship, hoping for broad support  —  A bipartisan group of lawmakers unveiled a bill Thursday to strip U.S. terror suspects of their citizenship, expressing hope that it could win broad support in Congress.