TWO REPUBLICAN TOILET TRAWLERS, SHUNNED BY THEIR ANTI-GAY PARTY, PREPARE FOR COURT BATTLES: BOB ALLEN AND LARRY CRAIG

ostracized, shunned, rejected by the GOP, Bob Allen & Larry Craig will soon look for new vistas-- a hair salon perhaps?

You remember Florida Rep. Bob Allen, right? He's the homophobic Republican zealot who was chairing John McCain's presidential campaign in the Sunshine state part time and cruising public toilets offering men crisp twenty dollar bills if they let him perform fellatio on them the rest of the time. He asked that his trial be postponed until November 5 so they could find more suburban white people for the jury pool-- feeling a little uncomfortable after having made some racist remarks about people of color after being apprehended and charged.

Yesterday's Orlando Sentinel reported that he's back in Tallahassee making believe everything is back to normal. It isn't

"I suspect it will be extremely difficult and uncomfortable for him during the special session," said Aubrey Jewett, a political science professor at the University of Central Florida. "The leadership has made it clear they want him gone."

...House Speaker Marco Rubio has said that as a member of the House, Allen "is entitled to come" to the 10-day session.

"He's got some issues he's trying to face. And we'll do what's best for the institution," Rubio said.

Allen's fellow Republicans decided what was best for the institution would be to strip him of his committee chairmanship, shun him and banish him to a far corner of the House chamber where the freshmen Democrats sit. If Allen feels ostracized... that's the idea. And they have more unpleasantness in store for him in the hope of getting him to just go away. Florida's party of fake Christianity is doing there pretty much what Republican hypocrites in the U.S. Senate are threatening to do to Larry Craig if he doesn't resign and stop embarrassing them with his presence, reminding people how much hypocrisy is entailed in being a member of the GOP these days. But legal experts and rabid right extremists, ex-allies of Craig's, are now concluding that nothing is going to get Craig out of the Senate until his term expires, regardless of what Mitch McConnell and the GOP leadership wants.

His farcical appeals won't end until the fall of 2008 "thus the senator will be able to stay in office while claiming that he is simply waiting for the legal process to work itself out. This strategy will enable him to postpone a retirement decision until it will be too late to matter, even though he quite likely expects to lose at every step," writes right-wing kook Bryan Fischer of the Idaho Values Alliance, a hate group.

The last thing the senator wants is for a court to allow him to withdraw his appeal, since this would force him into the nightmare of an actual courtroom trial.

A trial would expose the "Tearoom Trade," as the widespread practice of gay sex in public bathrooms is called, and expose the senator's likely participation in it for all the nation to see.

The prosecution would explain in detail that the police were only in that particular restroom because it so frequently was the site of illicit homosexual encounters that families were insisting that something be done.

They would remind the nation that this particular restroom was posted on homosexual websites as an inviting location for seedy hookups.

Further, the prosecution would go into detail about the well-established protocol followed by those seeking anonymous homosexual encounters, and how the senator's own conduct followed that pattern in detail.

The arresting officer, a decorated officer with an impeccable reputation in law enforcement, would explain that the 40 arrests made over the summer were made because the suspects all followed this same protocol. This will make it virtually impossible to believe that the senator was not acting deliberately and with the specific purpose of soliciting anonymous sex.

The prosecution likely would point to research that indicates this particular protocol-- the foot-tapping, the foot-touching, the hand under the divider-- has been in use for decades by those looking for discreet ways to arrange restroom escapades.

The prosecution would likely go on to explain in disturbingly graphic detail the kind of sexual encounters which take place beneath these restroom dividers once two men agree to engage in anonymous sex.

This is way, way more information than the senator wants anybody to know. There is virtually no chance that he will take the risk of a public trial.