After the all-male panel on birth control in the House Oversight Committee last week (wait, I’m supposed to be fair and say that the SECOND panel of the day had a couple women on it), plenty of people joked on Twitter about an all-female panel on Viagra. House Democrats aren’t doing that, but they are giving their star witness from the Oversight Committee panel, the one Darrell Issa didn’t allow to testify, a chance to speak.

Catholic Bishops who want the government to do what their own preaching cannot, Lutherans and Episcopalians who disagree with the Catholic bishops, and Virginia Republicans who give new meaning to the term “statutory rape.”

And you thought birth control was a settled issue.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee complained loudly about the Republican majority’s refusal to allow minority witnesses at a hearing on the Administration’s birth control access rules. The panel, which is happening live right now, was announced by Chairman Darrell Issa with the participation of nine panelists, all of whom oppose the new rules, including a member of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.

In their ongoing quest to make themselves look completely retrograde and ridiculous, House Republicans will hold a grandstanding hearing on the Administration’s birth control access rules tomorrow, featuring testimony from a leader of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and other opponents.

Police clad in riot gear from the National Park Service showed up to McPherson Square between 5 and 6 am ET. They arrived to make sure the occupiers were “in compliance” with the “no camping” rule for the park. They conducted an inspection of tents and seized any camping gear or sleeping materials they thought could be or were used to violate the rule.

Pressure on House Republicans may have doomed anti-piracy legislation for the year. Darrell Issa, who along with Ron Wyden has been out in front of the opposition to SOPA and PIPA, the respective bills on this issue, says that he secured a promise from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor that no bill will hit the House floor without “consensus.”

If you like politics as blood sport, this is great stuff. On the other hand, if you worry about people, their lives, their health, how their money is spent and how their government protects their lives, their health and how their money is spent, well, then, this sucks.

If you had been waiting for the three-month follow-up to the Senate Environment and Public Works committee hearing on the Fukushima Near-Term Task Force recommendations–the one Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) promised in August at the last hearing on this issue of vital importance to US nuclear safety–well, that hearing was yesterday, Thursday, December 15. . . and whether you watched them or not, you are still waiting.

Readers of this space know that the pace of safety reforms for America’s nuclear facilities, especially in the aftermath of Japan’s Fukushima disaster, has been alarmingly slow. The recalcitrance–if not active hostility–exhibited by the nuclear operators and their government handmaidens borders on the criminal. So, it might sound more than a little bit shocking to hear that the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory Jaczko, is now under attack. . . for trying to implement new safety standards too quickly.

That’s not how House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) is putting it, of course. In doublespeak that would make Orwell proud, Issa has written to the White House, issued a report, and fallen just shy of calling for Jaczko’s head.

Solyndra executives are being hauled before a GOP House Committee today, the latest props in the conservative right’s war on clean energy. The House Energy and Commerce Committee wants to bat them around a bit and also use them as a way to point out alleged White House corruption. But the executives will plead the fifth instead.

Darrell Issa is a happy man. After flailing around for a while, he finally thinks he has a product to push, an example of Obama corruption, with the Solyndra story. There’s even another piece of it that has popped up in the form of LightSquared, a wireless startup which, according to allegations, was the subject of unfavorable testimony to Congress by Air Force Gen. William Shelton until the White House intimidated him into changing his view. Issa is ready to widen his investigation. Loan guarantee programs for clean energy have actually migrated to the subject of a potential government shutdown, with Republicans trying to cancel a program for hybrid vehicles to pay for disaster relief.

Republicans definitely think they have a winning hand by criticizing corruption in the clean energy realm. It’s a tailor-made Glenn Beck conspiracist rant where the corruption lines up with a philosophical view against climate change and a lucrative view in support of wealthy oil and gas company contributors over the clean energy industry. The government, you see, cannot “pick winners and losers” in the energy space. Can’t do it.

Unless those winners happen to be in Republican districts and states.