• Paul Stanley

There's only one juicy bit of gossip in Stanley's part — where he seems to confirm rumors that he couldn't keep it in his pants, and that he slipped up more than once: "My affairs were purely sexual. There was no emotion in them." Note the plurals.

Otherwise, it's an interesting read just from a philosophical perspective. Stanley has a lot of advice on how to get forgiven:

You need to be honest with yourself. You know what you’ve done. You know what happened. Go to the ones you love… and tell the truth. When you do that, tell the entire truth. Don’t parcel it out, just tell it and ask for their forgiveness. When it becomes public, you’ve got to repent to God first. And then you need to genuinely say you’re sorry. Let me emphasize the word genuine. People will smoke you out in a heartbeat if your apology is superficial. They’re probably going to be disappointed in you, which they should, but the vast majority of them will forgive you.

And yet, his own words undermine him.

• When two states love each other very much...

In an interview with TNReport, Gov. Bill Haslam says he has signed the state's $31.5 billion budget, which spends about $400 million more than his original proposal.

Included in the spending plan is the budget-item-heard-round-the-state(s). That is, $500,000 for the Birthplace of Country Music Museum in Bristol, Va., which is quite literally across the street from Bristol, Tenn., hometown of Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey. Democrats elongated this year's legislative session by feigning outrage over the item, but Haslam says he's OK with it.

“It’s kind of an easy target to say, oh that’s in Virginia. Why are we funding it when it’s yards from Tennessee?” the governor told TNReport. “It’s not like we funded something that’s in northwest Virginia.”

Frankly, chipping in a bit of Tennessee cash for the museum doesn't really bother us. Contributing to the preservation of cultural history is generally a good thing, and it's not like we're giving money to a state in the North (gasp!).

Internet dude Philip DeFranco has some thoughts, starting at 2:47 in the above video, about Tennessee's infamous "gateway sexual activity" law. He points out that Tennessee has the seventh highest teen birth rate in the nation and the 11th highest rate of HIV infection, "which, hey, those things aren't the best things to be good at."

Over at the Maddow blog, Steve Benen points out that the correlation between high teen birth rates and abstinence-only education are impossible to miss. "According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly all of the states with the highest rates for teen pregnancies are in the Deep South (a.k.a., the 'Bible Belt'), where abstinence-only policies are the norm." In other words, along with abstinence, we should be teaching kids how to correctly use condoms and various other forms of birth control, and not attaching any kind of stigma to it.

Gov. Haslam is claiming that the law doesn't really change Tennessee's sex ed curriculum, but, if that's so, why would he sign the law? I mean, really. If a law doesn't do anything, then it's not necessary, and the governor should veto it. I mean, it's not unheard of for a governor to say something like, "I understand the sentiment behind this bill, but it needs some work, so I'm sending it back to the legislature." Or he could outright say, "This bill doesn't do anything, so I'm vetoing it." So, why wouldn't he?

After President Obama yesterday became the first sitting president to come out in support of marriage rights for same-sex couples, top state Republicans were quick to respond. Not so for state Democrats, who have been largely silent on the matter, except for a Twitter post from the state party's account, linking to this photo and Obama's historic quote.

Just after ABC aired the president's comments, state GOP chairman Chris Devaney issued a brief statement.

"After playing politics for years with the issue of same-sex marriage, President Obama has finally made his true position known," Devaney said. "The majority of Tennesseans do not support the president on this issue and I'm curious if Tennessee Democrats will stand by their president on this one."

At the moment Devaney's statement was issued, Gov. Bill Haslam and Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey were wrapping up an event together. At separate media avails afterword, they chimed in, surprising no one by expressing their own disagreement with Obama's statement.

“I’ve said before, that’s not my view on the issue,” Haslam said. “I think it seems like the president has changed over a period of time. It’s his right to do so, but that’s not a position I’m in favor of.”

Ramsey, typically the more quotable of the two, was relatively brief as well.

"It was a statement I disagree with," he said. "I remember one time sitting on the Senate floor when we argued that in the Senate and another state senator said, ‘you know, a circle is a circle, a square is a square and no matter what you do, you can’t make a circle a square.’ Marriage is between one man and one woman period. You can call it something else, it’s not marriage."

So just like I can hear about a book, search for it in the library's catalog, find it in any branch, and have it shipped to the Bordeaux library for me to pick up, a Nashville teenager can hear about a book, search for it in the library's catalog, find it in any branch, and have it shipped to their school library for them to pick up.

They go from having the resources of their school library at their fingertips to having the resources of our wonderful public library at their fingertips. This program is awesome.

The Tennessean asked a question that stopped me cold:

The legislature has said the only approved approach to sex is that only married men and women should have it; so, what to do about these books in school libraries?

Schools are banned from encouraging, offering access to materials or discussing anything that can be considered as promoting a “gateway” sexual activity. It would seem logical that Tennessee must now cull its libraries of such offending material.

In what may be the only case in which a Biden Gaffe yielded a positive outcome (well, maybe the second case), President Barack Obama today announced his newly evolved support of same-sex marriage:

(Tennessee legislators taste blood in the water in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...)

From the folks at Funny or Die.

Best line: "My right to choose? What about my right to choose to not have a choice?"

In a letter to the governor, ACLU-TN executive director Hedy Weinberg urges Haslam to veto SB2580/HB2725, which would require drug-testing for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) applicants, if they raise suspicion on a screening. Initially, the bill, sponsored by Republicans Sen. Stacey Campfield and Rep. Julia Hurley, would have required drug-testing for all TANF applicants, as well as some already receiving benefits. After two unfavorable opinions from the state's attorney general, and in light of the troubles faced by other states with similar programs, the bill was rewritten.

In the letter — here in PDF form — Weinberg says the bill "raises a number of serious constitutional concerns and risks wasting precious taxpayer dollars in a time of economic turmoil to address a nonexistent problem."

Asked by Pith if Haslam's signature would result in a lawsuit from the ACLU, Weinberg declined to be specify how they would respond.

"We remain hopeful that the governor will choose not to target the poor and will instead uphold due process and veto the bill," she wrote in an email. "If the bill does become law, ACLU will consider a range of options."