"I've hit a plateau," Cannon told Mallory Bateman of BYU NewsNet. "I'm now trying to figure out the next way to lose the additional 30 pounds."

We have a few suggestions: the all-butter diet, the Chuck-a-Rama-thon or the intravenous bacon diet.

Mmmm É bacon.

Porn vs. torture

Here is a brief (and slightly exaggerated) summary of the Senate hearings on the attorney general nomination of Michael Mukasey:

Torture, torture, waterboarding, torture, porn, waterboarding, waterboarding, WATERBOARDING!!!!

Did you catch it?

Yeah, that porn question came from Utah's Sen. Orrin Hatch.

While the rest of the judiciary committee was worried about the constitutionality of interrogation tactics, Hatch wanted to push the Justice Department to beef up its obscenity prosecutions.

And he doesn't want FBI agents to focus just on the really freaky porn either.

"The cases that are brought focus narrowly on the most extreme material, rather than on the more mainstream obscenity," Hatch said during a hearing in mid-October. If the Senate confirms Mukasey, he will have a little more than a year to figure out what "mainstream obscenity" means and how to prosecute it.

Iraq, Utah-style

Undoubtedly, there's always an argument in Utah that if everyone were armed, we'd be a safer society. It happened after the shootings at Virginia Tech and after the melee at Trolley Square.

So it's interesting how Cannon dismissed the idea of arming diplomats during a discussion with Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice about the embattled contractor Blackwater.

"I'm sort of wondering how - if we armed our diplomats, how many innocent people might be killed by their inaccurate aim?" Cannon said, taking a different strategy than his fellow party members in Utah.

Condi thought better of even going there.

"I think that's not where we would want to go," she said.

Cannon's response: "I think that you're right, and I support you."

Take that, Utah.

'The other body'

Cannon on his congressional blog the other day wrote about a report card from the conservative Club for Growth on how each senator voted on 15 anti-pork measures this year (Hatch 47 percent, Bennett 40 percent). But, interestingly, Cannon didn't note that the same group looked at the House and how members there voted on 50 separate anti-pork amendments.

The congressman fared pretty well, but apparently not well enough to highlight his own accomplishment: Cannon voted for 48 of the 50 and got a 96 percent.

Sci-fi spending

Tucked into the defense appropriations bill is this gem: Rep. Jim Matheson's request for $1 million for a Utah company to create an interface directly between a human brain and a computer.

What do the masterminds at the Department of Defense have in store for this sci-fi creation? Will the next generation of jets no longer need a pilot to tag along? Will they develop a bunch of cyborgs controlled by U.S. Special Forces?

We had to know. Turns out, the idea is to help members of the military who lost limbs in combat. The computer chip implanted in the brain is supposed to allow these men and women to move prosthetic limbs just by thinking about it.

Hmmm . . . Not what we expected, but if it works, that's still pretty cool.

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* BURR and CANHAM report for The Tribune from Washington. They can be reached at tburr@sltrib.com or mcanham@sltrib.com. For more political

tidbits, visit blogs.sltrib.com/utahpolitics.