Texas secession sympathizer Rick Perry may have warbled the Song of the South a decade earlier than we thought:

A 1998 voting guide published by a leading neo-Confederate group and obtained by Salon not only endorses Perry for lieutenant governor but also describes him as “a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.” Perry’s office did not respond to a request for comment about the governor’s possible membership in the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

However, there’s a catch in the Salon story — we’re talking about two groups, only one of which was openly secessionist in 1998. And Perry didn’t join that group.

But what the heck, let’s see what the secessionist group is about:

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Our guest columnist is the Anti-PowerPoint Party of Switzerland. The incessant asterisks refer to PowerPoint as “representaive of all presentation software”.

The serious problem with PowerPoint* is that speech is forced into a structure, which works against the natural flow of speech. Speech is cut up into small bites.

PowerPoint* leads to substantiation and the formulation of word-monstrosities, which can only be processed by the mind, where your emotions are not triggered. That, which is normally expressed with a verb, becomes a noun in a PowerPoint*. An example: The two freely spoken sentences: “The rain sensor recognizes if it’s raining and turns on the windscreen wipers. The rain sensor senses, how hard it is raining and switches the wipers to faster”, get hacked into noun-slogan sentences with PowerPoint*.

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“Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Friday that Medicare reform must be part of an agreement to raise the debt ceiling, despite indications that changing the entitlement will be politically unpopular.” [The Hill]

“The woman who went on ‘Good Morning America,’ claiming she injected her 8-year-old daughter with Botox, now swears under oath … she made the entire story up for a few hundred bucks.” Sheena Upton, née Kerry Campbell, is now trying to get her daughter back from the child-protection folks. [TMZ]

“I resign out of the firmly held belief that a representation should not be abandoned because the client’s legal position is extremely unpopular in certain quarters. Defending unpopular clients is what lawyers do.”

Former Bush Solicitor General Paul Clement, in his resignation letter to King & Spalding chairman Robert Hays. King & Spalding withdrew this morning from defending DOMA on behalf of House Republicans. Clement will continue representing the case, according to House Speaker John Boehner’s office.

Conservative Lawyer Resigns After Law Firm Drops DOMA Defense [TPM]

We’ve been ignoring Congress lately, because, well, zzzzzz. Let’s see if Eric Cantor can whip up some coffee:

“What this bill says is it reiterates again the deadline, and that the Senate should act before the deadline, and that’s what the American people are expecting,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said Wednesday morning at a news conference with other House Republican leaders. “The bill then says if the Senate does not act, then H.R. 1 [the House-passed bill that cuts $61 billion] will be the law of the land.”

So, if federal funding doesn’t happen by April 8, a House bill — not passed by the Senate, and not signed by the President — becomes law. Must be one of those pages that stuck together back in January when they read the Constitution for everyone’s edification.

House Republicans plan symbolic bill to pressure Senate on shutdown [WaPo, via Political Wire]

Speaking of dogs (arf!), ThinkProgress is treating this memo from Rupert Murdoch’s iPad Editor like a chew toy:

Folks, Egypt is over — time for us to get focused on covering America. We need to get out there and start finding more compelling stories from around the country — not just scraping the web and the wires, but getting out on the ground and reporting.

Find me an amazing human story at a trial the rest of the media is missing. Find me a school district where the battle over reform is being fought and tell the human tales. Find a town that is going to be unincorporated because it’s broke. Find me a story of corruption and malfeasance in a state capitol that no one has found. Find me something new, different, exclusive and awesome. Find me the oldest dog in America, or the richest man in South Dakota. Force the new White House press secretary to download The Daily for the first time because everyone at the gaggle is asking about a story we broke. Get in front of a story and make it ours — force the rest of the media to follow us.

It’s good stories that will keep people coming back to The Daily — we’ve assembled a crack news team, so let’s show the world what we can do.

Singling out the dog story for mockery is something of a stretch — this memo could just as easily have been issued by NPR, or any general-interest publication.

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