Now that he's resigned, Richard Curtis -- the La Center GOP ex-legislator described in Spokane police reports as wearing women's lingerie while he sucked cock in a porn shop -- will probably drift off the news pages and blog posts after a few days. But, until that happens, we've added a special-edition Qticker to the home page here that tracks pretty quickly the posts and stories that have been popping up furiously for the past few days.

You can see the items in a slightly easier to read format here. (Click on the "Posted by" link below the snippet to read the full post from the source site.)

But all of this -- coming on the wide-stance heels of Larry Craig's adventure in Minneapolis -- begs the question: Do we need a special word for the MSM encounters of these (usually) Republican officials? Curtis insisted to The Columbian at the start of all this, "I am not gay." Craig said the same.

And who are we to doubt them? All evidence suggests that they aren't. "Gay" means something other and more than having sex with a person of the same sex. The word has come indicate something about sexual orientation as well as cultural and -- often -- political orientation. It is, broadly, a term that encompasses an "identity."

Health professionals long ago figured out that the word "gay" often didn't work as a term to describe many of the men they serve. "MSM" is the inelegant generic term that health pros use as a catch-all term for men who -- at least occasionally -- have sex with men.

But headline writers, as you can see from the Qticker on the home page, still often use terms like "gay sex scandal" as shorthand for things like Dick's adventure with Cody in Spokane last week. When he interviewed Larry Craig, Matt Lauer went through a series of identity questions. "Are you gay?" "Might you be bisexual?" or something like that.

Some folks who are occasionally into MSM could probably say "No" and be honest with themselves because (we're guessing and projecting here) they doesn't feel any sense of identity with those of us who embrace those terms one or several of the LGBTQ terms.

So I propose that folks out there with actual sway in the blog-cosmos come up with another word that could easily be used in a headline to describe something like the Curtis or Craig incidents.  There must be something.

I like goppy. It has enough alliteration with "sloppy" that it might suggest the often creepy, nasty, and/or santorum-filled elements in so many of these stories. And, then too, it starts off with "gop". And, somehow, that seems appropriate.