Mission Impossible?

Now on to some other things.

Well, this ought to liven up the Rhode Island primary:

"U.S. Senate candidate Stephen Laffey acknowledged that he wrote humor columns denigrating gays when he was a college student but said he regrets it," reports the Boston Globe .

"The Providence Journal reported on Saturday it received the articles anonymously in the mail earlier in the week. The paper later confirmed with the Republican candidate that he wrote them in 1983 and 1984 while studying at Bowdoin College in Maine. The articles appeared in the Bowdoin Patriot, a paper published by campus Republicans.

"Laffey, the mayor of Cranston, is running a closely watched race against moderate Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee.

"In one column, Laffey said he has never seen a happy homosexual. 'This is not to say there aren't any; I simply haven't seen one in my lifetime. Maybe they are all in the closet,' he wrote. 'All the homosexuals I've seen are sickly and decrepit, their eyes devoid of life.' "

Sickly and decrepit?

"In another column he wrote that pop music was turning the children of America into sissies, and criticized the singer Boy George, referring to him as 'it.' 'It wears girl's clothes and puts on makeup,' he wrote. 'When I hear it sing, 'Do you really want to hurt me, do you really want to make me cry,' I say to myself, YES, I want to punch your lights out, pal, and break your ribs.'

"Laffey called the writings 'sophomoric political satire' and said they do not represent his views. 'Not now, nor then, or ever,' he said. 'Do I regret some of these things? Sure. But at the time, we were just having fun. We thought it was funny.'"

Yeah, a real stitch.

Since I've been off, you've missed my fulminating over the JonBenet coverage (though I suspect I'll have more opportunities). Here's a noteworthy LAT column by Meghan Daum :

"We may or may not have found JonBenet Ramsey's killer in John Mark Karr, the former schoolteacher who publicly stated last week that he'd been with the child when she died in the basement of her Boulder, Colo., home in 1996. Some suspect that he's simply a wannabe, and it's not your average American pedophile who answers media questions as Karr did when he was arrested Aug. 16 in Thailand. But no matter what the new investigation turns up, many Americans will never reverse the conviction of the suspect they nabbed long ago, Patsy Ramsey . . .