U.S. Reps Barney Frank, D-Mass., and Texas' own Liberpublican Ron Paul, R-Surfside, joined forces last week to file legislation aimed at taming the federal law enforcement war on pot. On April 18, Frank introduced H.R. 5843, the first pot decriminalization measure introduced in Congress in 24 years, which would remove from federal law the possibility of arrest, prosecution and jail for "responsible" adult tokers, and would eliminate penalties for possession of up to 3 1/2 ounces. The bill would also make legal between adults the "not-for-profit" transfer of up to one ounce of pot, and would create a $100 fine for smoking in public.

Simply The Best.

Naked Musicians, eat your heart out.

(Note the Tim Robbins crack a few comments in and see if you don't agree.)

U.S. Congressman Lloyd Doggett was injured and hospitalized after crashing his bike Sunday while riding in Austin with his wife Libby. Surgery was performed to repair a broken leg the same day, according to a statement issued by his office Monday, which added that Doggett was wearing a helmet and that he commended the excellent care he received from Austin EMS and Seton Hospital. “With spring in full swing, we decided to hit the trail, I just hit it a little harder than I had planned,” Doggett said in the statement. He'll be recovering in Austin, and will be on crutches for some time after that. A member of the Bike Caucus, Doggett said he looks forward to returning to work in Washington, even though it will be on crutches. Demonstrating that his wit wasn't damaged in the crash, Doggett concluded with this zinger: “With one good leg left to stand on, that’s still one more than this lame duck President.”

Here are two perky ways to help Austin's Breast Cancer Resource Center. First, head out to Graphic II, an "Art and Art Bra Event," live auction, and runway show at the Design Center at Penn Field, 3601 S. Congress, Bldg. C this Sat., Apr. 26, 6-9pm, where Natalie Zoe and CandiLand will keep you in your cups. Then mark your calendars for the Fri., May 2, 10am-9pm Grand Opening of the new Sephora store in the Wolf Ranch Town Center, 1015 W. University, in Georgetown. The beauty behemoth will be promoting their new, free client-loyalty program, Beauty Insider, as well as donating a percentage of the proceeds of the day's sales to our very own BCRC!

Anyone with an interest in the politics of development should probably try to catch The Unforeseen, the documentary screening at Alamo South Lamar that uses the struggle over Barton Springs as a example of development run amok. In it, The Nation correspondent William Greider says American economists have set construction as the great, and possibly only, metric of success and worth. The movie looks at other non-financial impacts of planning, most especially the environmental: but runaway development, pushing up per-square-foot values, can have a more direct and cash-measurable effect on schools. Because Austin ISD is counted as property rich, it has to pay a 30% surcharge on its regular maintenance and operations budget back to the state as recapture. As Superintendent Pat Forgione has said, this ignores completely the fact that roughly 60% of all kids in AISD schools are living at or under the poverty line, or that the hunt for affordable rental properties means some children are regularly switching schools (as outgoing AISD trustee Johna Edwards put it recently, "It's a tap-dance around to different schools.") With predictions of an economic crunch and budgetary concerns high, a quick historical note: City staff freely talk about greenlighting the high-end and toney The Domain, the biggest development within city limits in years, in 2003 because they wanted to shore up dipping sales tax revenue. Now it's renting out one bed, one bath apartments for $1,275 a month. Good for sales tax, maybe, but how good for AISD?

While going to sleep Sunday night, I started worrying about those two stars tattooed on Daisy de la Hoya’s neck. For those of you who weren’t hooked on VH1's Rock of Love 2, Daisy was one of the last two Rockettes standing in the reality show allegedly designed to find love for Poison vocalist Bret Michaels. Daisy didn’t make the cut (“The tour ends here,” he tells the losers) and last night Bret reunited with her and all the season's contenders, including his No. 1 choice who, coincidentally, was also my pick for him. This is the problem with getting a DVR in the bedroom: recording marginalia. Not an HBO series like John Adams or reruns of The Sopranos. No, it’s those damn-fool reality shows that hook me. Like my vet explained when I told him my dog wasn’t eating her Beneful after I’d fed her steak, “Who’s gonna choose broccoli when there’s Bluebell?” Bret and I got very close while Rock of Love 2 aired. Though he didn’t return my calls or respond to the reams of advice I had for him in choosing from the gaggle of wannabe rock star arm-candy strippers, in the end he did the right thing. Which meant there was a lot of greasy, sleazy, skankifying behavior leading up to it.

It had been a long season. After spending time in Albuquerque and now Austin, Darvin Ham decided that he'd had enough. Enough of the Sioux Falls Skyforce and their bid to upset the No. 2 seed Austin Toros in the D-League semifinals, that is.

Ham scored 22 points, including 10 in the fourth quarter to help the Austin Toros to a 99-93 win and Austin's first trip to the D-League finals which begin Monday in Austin. At 34 years old, Ham is trying for one more shot at the NBA, and after a productive training camp with the Mavericks, coach Avery Johnson told Ham to get back into shape in the D-League and come back strong next year. Ham is certainly strong.

After leading by as many as 17 in the third, the Skyforce had crawled their way back within single digits when Spurs prospect Ian Mahinmi went down with a re-aggravated back injury. Ham then proceeded to shake off his first-half frustrations when he picked up three early fouls and played with both a veteran's savvy and a young man's burst of energy.

According to Colorado Drug Enforcement Agent Jeffrey Sweetin, state laws that have lessened penalties associated with marijuana possession for adults have increased organized crime activities in the state. Really. No joke. He swears it's true: "We're sending a message to organized crime that, you know what, Colorado is a great place to be distributors of marijuana," Sweetin told Denver's CBS station. "People here think they're so far from the border, they're insulated from it" -- we assume he's talking about the Mexican border, and that "it" means Mexican pot. (Forget that Mex pot isn't exactly the most popular in the Rocky Mountains, where they hardly need to do much importing, if you get my drift.) The Colorado Conundrum, it seems -- at least according to Sweetin and the DEA -- stems from two initiatives passed by Denver voters: In 2005, city voters approved a measure that legalizes adult possession of up to one ounce of pot; in 2007, voters passed an ordinance to make pot-law enforcement the lowest priority for city cops. A statewide ballot measure, similar to the 2005 Denver initiative, failed to pass in 2006. But it is the success of the Denver measures that appear to be sticking in Sweetin's craw: "I think they" -- that is, the organized crime types -- "believe it's a good market [for pot] and I think the case could be made that it is a good market."

I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I'll never see a tree at all.
- Ogden Nash While no-one seems to like downtown billboards, no-one seems to know what to do with them. Council member Mike Martinez had got his billboard ordinance on this week's agenda, but now has agenda-setter's regret. The ordinance aims to move billboards out of town while protecting scenic areas: to get the billboard industry on-board (no pun), they would be able to relocate to other sites, the boards could be higher for elevated roadways, and they could be twice as big. On top of that, mobile billboards would be illegal within city limits. But Scenic Austin thinks "cap and trade" doesn't work: the billboard companies oppose extra restrictions; the mobile billboard industry says the ban would only put them out of business and do nothing to stop people vinyling their car with a banner: the Design Commission opposes relocation and any softening of size restrictions or Scenic Roadway protections: and the Planning Commission seems no more receptive. So now Martinez is proposing a new, slim-line ordinance, but wants the council to push the discussion back to May 8 – two days before the election. Will he really have the time or the votes to get to a third reading before then?