• Today’s comic by Jen Sorensen is The hoodie: Apparel of peril:
  
  
• The Senate will vote tomorrow on whether to consider a bill to end subsidies and tax breaks for Big Oil. The bill raises about $ 24 billion, half of which will be used to provide clean energy tax incentives. Tell your senators to vote “Yes” to end Big Oil subsidies.
• From ABC’s Sam Donaldson, during a lecture at the University of Texas at El Paso:
  

  Asked to comment on the future of former Republican vice presidential contender Sarah Palin of Alaska, Donaldson replied: “I don’t speak ill of the dead.”

• Herman Cain says the bunny and goldfish weren’t real and:
  

  … promised to continue making controversial Web ads to criticize economic issues, despite recent controversy over ads that appeared to depict a goldfish suffocating and a rabbit being shot to death.

  “The liberals are trying to paint it like I’m killing animals,” he said Tuesday night on a conference call with reporters.

• “For good” may be overstating it, but still good news from Idaho:
  

  Idaho’s Senate-passed forced ultrasound bill was killed for good Tuesday, when a House committee chairman said he won’t hold a hearing on the bill and anti-abortion activists said they’re withdrawing it.

• Former Senator Christopher Dodd might want to look into this:
  

  With its unerring instinct for being on the wrong side of every major social and aesthetic issue, the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings board has refused to budge off its R rating for “Bully,” an earnest and moving documentary made for and about tormented preteens and teenagers. There’s almost a perverse, Santorum-style integrity about the MPAA’s staunch resistance. Its ratings board — an anonymous group of Los Angeles-area parents — stands tall for some unspecified and imaginary set of American values, in the face of a viral lobbying campaign that has enlisted Justin Bieber, Johnny Depp, Martha Stewart, Ellen DeGeneres and nearly 500,000 other people, and made an overnight media celebrity out of 17-year-old Katy Butler, a self-described victim of bullying who started the online petition.

  But what’s really perverse, of course — not to mention cruel and repellent — is a ratings decision that ensures that the kids who most need the succor that “Bully” has to offer are now the least likely to see it.

• From the extreme you-can’t-make-this-shit-up files:
  

  In an effort to eliminate potential “unpleasant emotions” among students, the New York Department of Education has placed a ban on mentions of “birthdays,” “dinosaurs,” “Halloween,” and “dancing,” in city-issued tests, the New York Post reports.

  According to the paper, the mandate is meant to curb fear that references to those topics might stir controversy among students. Dinosaurs, officials said, could bring up evolution, Halloween could suggest paganism, and birthdays might create animosity among students who are Jehovah’s witnesses, since they don’t celebrate them.

• And from the lesser known what-in-the-hell-were-you-thinking files:
  

  A lot of advertising these days is about building buzz. And what better way to get people talking about your shampoo than to select one of most infamous mass murderers as your spokesman?

  That’s just what Turkish shampoo company Biomen did when they picked none other than Adolf Hitler to star in their advertising campaign. In one of the biggest advertising controversies in recent memory, the company pairs historical footage of Hitler with copy encouraging men to choose a manly shampoo.

• Because there just isn’t enough bigotry and hate enshrined into law:
  

  A conservative group in Tennessee is pushing the state legislature to pass a xenophobic bill that would place limits on the number of foreigners that the state’s charter schools can hire, in a thinly veiled attack on the Muslim community.

  The Putting Tennessee First Act says that the state’s chartering authority may not approve schools where more than 3.5 percent of their staff is made up of immigrants, even if they are legal residents of the United States.

• No one could have anticipated …
  

  After months of laboratory work, scientists say they can definitively finger oil from BP’s blown-out well as the culprit for the slow death of a once brightly colored deep-sea coral community in the Gulf of Mexico that is now brown and dull.

• The sixth annual peeps show.

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