side note: Not news worthy….but even though there’s a few depressing parts, it’s still a good read with a few laughs. Well written!

By Peter Kurth
Salon.com
HIV-positive since the ’80s, I never expected to grow old — and I really didn’t expect to end up with a crooked penis.

Sep. 28, 2007 | In 1968, when I was 15, my best friend and I swore to each other that we would never grow old. We even pricked our fingers and exchanged blood in the pact. True to his promise, Jon died at the age of 41.

Yet here I am, still. I jumped about 5 feet in the air the first time I stepped out of the shower, reached for the towel, and — looking in the glass — saw my 83-year-old father’s body staring back at me: the same narrowed face, the same pigeon chest, the same skinny legs.

Aging is a bit more shocking to me than it might be to someone else, because I was never supposed to live this long. I’ve been HIV-positive since the AIDS epidemic “officially” began in 1981 — although those of us who were first hit by it know that it started some time before then. In 1980, already, I was worried about what I’d read in the New York newspapers about “the gay cancer,” which mystified everybody and seemed to have no origin or solution. I remember being alarmed because, in 1981, I burned my fingers on a cigarette, and the burn took forever to heal — weeks and weeks, it seemed. From that time on, I haven’t had a single day that wasn’t lived at some level of trepidation, and, for many years, in a state of acute anxiety and fear.

Suddenly, in 1996 — when my “clinical profile” was sinking swiftly to the grave — medications came along that could, if taken properly, as prescribed, save your life, or at least prolong it. For all the relief I felt to be “saved,” it was still a shock; after all, I had grown used to expecting an early death. Before the miracle of protease inhibitors and the “AIDS cocktail,” I was on my way out. Then, in a split second, I was “Lazarus” (literally — I was “Lazarus” columnist for Poz magazine). (more…)

side note: Most people don’t realize that we have roughly 180,000 contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than the number of U.S. troops in either country. (AP Source). If you haven’t had the unfortunate opportunity to view the contractor “trophy video”, then click here to watch. Disgraceful!

By PAUL KRUGMAN
The New York Times

Sometimes it seems that the only way to make sense of the Bush administration is to imagine that it’s a vast experiment concocted by mad political scientists who want to see what happens if a nation systematically ignores everything we’ve learned over the past few centuries about how to make a modern government work.

Thus, the administration has abandoned the principle of a professional, nonpolitical civil service, stuffing agencies from FEMA to the Justice Department with unqualified cronies. Tax farming — giving individuals the right to collect taxes, in return for a share of the take — went out with the French Revolution; now the tax farmers are back.

And so are mercenaries, whom Machiavelli described as “useless and dangerous” more than four centuries ago.

As far as I can tell, America has never fought a war in which mercenaries made up a large part of the armed force. But in Iraq, they are so central to the effort that, as Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution points out in a new report, “the private military industry has suffered more losses in Iraq than the rest of the coalition of allied nations combined.”

And, yes, the so-called private security contractors are mercenaries. They’re heavily armed. They carry out military missions, but they’re private employees who don’t answer to military discipline. On the other hand, they don’t seem to be accountable to Iraqi or U.S. law, either. And they behave accordingly. (more…)

By Michael Falcone
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/

Four empty lecterns.

They loomed large over tonight’s Republican presidential debate at Morgan State University in Maryland, an historically black college, where four of the leading candidates for their party’s presidential nomination were nowhere to be found.

Tavis Smiley, the talk show host and moderator of the event, drew some sharp responses from the candidates who showed up with his first question: “Please tell me and this audience, in your own words, why you chose to be here tonight and what you say to those who chose not to be here tonight.”

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said he was “embarrassed” for his party and for tonight’s no-shows — Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred D. Thompson and Senator John McCain — and cited his own support among the black community.

“I want to be president of the United States, not just president of the Republican party,” Mr. Huckabee said. “Quite frankly for a lot of people there’s a perception that black Americans don’t vote for Republicans. I proved that wrong in Arkansas with 48 percent of African-Americans voting for me.”

Kansas Senator Sam Brownback said the absence of the leading Republican candidates was a “disgrace.”

“I think it’s a disgrace for our country, I think it’s bad for our party and I don’t think it’s good for our future,” he said. “You grow political parties by expanding your base … what they’re doing is sending a message of narrowing the base.” (more…)

Bill Maher
Huffingtonpost.com

Iraq is Enron, and President Bush is Ken Lay. He’s fighting a war with phony accounting tricks. The Bush administration fudged the numbers to get us into Iraq, and cooked the books to keep us there. “The surge” is simply another in a long series of inflated stock quotes. This past weekend Marcel Marceau passed away at age 84. Doctors say he went quietly. Thus proving that evil thrives when good men stay silent. And just like with Enron, the good men and women who are blowing the whistle on Iraq contractor fraud are being vilified, fired, demoted, and those are the lucky ones.

Last Friday morning the Senate Democratic Policy Committee held a hearing entitled “The Mistreatment of Iraq Contracting Whistleblowers,” just in time to make the Friday news dump. According to the committee more than $10 billion dollars in Iraq reconstruction and military support contracts is unaccounted for. In other words, for every six dollars spent in Iraq one dollar is in question. And folks, it’s a war-zone, you’re dealing with a culture known for its haggling skills, so you’ve got factor in a little skimming, but this is ridiculous. If you stole that much money from the Mafia you’d be dead.

Vicente Fox may have called President Bush a “windshield cowboy,” but Bush has certainly turned Iraq into a wild, wild, west. And here’s another one from the War in Iraq’s this-is going-to-make-you-vomit file. Some Iraq contract whistleblowers have been vilified and fired, others have been detained by the US military and subjected to harsh interrogation techniques. (more…)

By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer
yahoo.com

The Army, stretched thin by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, wants to spend nearly $3 billion extra to accelerate its expansion of the active-duty force, Army Secretary Pete Geren said Thursday.

Geren said he has discussed the proposal with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and expects a decision soon.

Speeding up the expansion would mean recruiting faster and increasing the number of soldiers who re-enlist, he said. (more…)

By Jeannine Aversa, AP Economics Writer
http://biz.yahoo.com

New-homes sales tumbled in August to the lowest level in seven years, a stark sign that the credit crunch is aggravating an already painful housing slump.

Sales of new homes dropped by 8.3 percent in August from July, the Commerce Department reported Thursday, driving down sales to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 795,000 units. That was the lowest level since June 2000, when sales clocked in at a pace of 793,000.

The home sales report came on the same day that the government reported a relatively brisk business growth rate in revised figures for the second quarter. But the 3.8 percent GDP figure was less than first estimated and it occurred before the credit crisis and its repercussions across the broad spectrum of the economy had taken hold.
see original

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer

As a candidate, George W. Bush once asked, “Is our children learning?”

Now he has an answer.

“Childrens do learn,” he said Wednesday.

The setting was, yes, an education event where the president was taking credit for rising test scores and promoting congressional renewal of his signature education law. To create the right image, the White House summoned the city’s chancellor of schools, a principal, some teachers and about 20 eager students from P.S. 76.

The visual worked fine. The oral? Not so much. For Bush, it was a classic malapropism, the sort of verbal miscue that occasionally bedevils him in public speaking and provides critics and the media easy fodder for ridicule. Subject-verb agreement actually is taught at Andover, Yale and Harvard, the president’s alma maters, but in an unforgiving job that requires him to speak hundreds of thousands of words with cameras rolling, the tongue sometimes veers off in mysterious ways — and someone always seems to notice. (more…)

side note: Another blow to the bushies! It appears both the Executive and Legislative branches of our government have let us down. They have allowed the administration to trounce the Constitution and what past generations had fought and died for. The only check we seem to have left is the Judicial branch. Will it be enough?

By Susan Jo Keller
The New York Times

Washington – A federal judge in Oregon ruled Wednesday that crucial parts of the USA Patriot Act were not constitutional because they allowed federal surveillance and searches of Americans without demonstrating probable cause.

The ruling by Judge Anne L. Aiken of Federal District Court in Portland was in the case of Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer in Portland who was arrested and jailed after the Federal Bureau of Investigation mistakenly linked him to the Madrid train bombings in March 2004.

“For over 200 years, this nation has adhered to the rule of law – with unparalleled success,” Judge Aiken’s opinion said in finding violations of the Fourth Amendment prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure. “A shift to a nation based on extraconstitutional authority is prohibited, as well as ill advised.”

The ruling is a new chapter in a legal battle that began after the Spanish police found a plastic bag with detonator caps in a van near the bombings, which killed 191 people and left 2,000 injured in the deadliest terrorist attack in Europe since World War II.

Initially, the F.B.I. found no match for the fingerprints. But after reviewing a digitally enhanced set of the prints, the agency identified 20 possible matches, including Mr. Mayfield.

Though Spanish officials had doubts about the match, federal agents began surveillance on him and his family, using expanded powers under the Patriot Act. Mr. Mayfield was jailed for two weeks before a federal judge threw out the case. (more…)

ANNE FLAHERTY | AP
Huffingtonpost.com

The Senate passed a resolution Wednesday suggesting Baghdad limit the power of its federal government and give more control to Iraq’s ethnically divided regions.

The 75-23 vote marked the first agreement on Iraq among lawmakers in months, although it would have little practical effect. Republicans agreed to swing behind the nonbinding measure after it was amended to make clear that Bush should press for a new federalized system only if the Iraqis want it.

Still, the resolution underscores a bipartisan longing in Congress for a fresh diplomatic approach in Iraq. It also was a victory for presidential hopeful Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., a primary sponsor of the resolution along with Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan.

Biden advocates establishing a power-sharing agreement among ethnic factions similar to the one established in Bosnia in the 1990s. The U.S. has focused too much on trying to prop up a strong, central unified government in Baghdad, he said.

“My view for over three years has been that will not happen in the lifetime of anyone in this room,” Biden told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference. (more…)

side note: I know it’s difficult for some people to control their eating….but don’t let your animals suffer the same fate. Control their portions….it’ll be much better for them when they hit senior status.

By Joan Shim
CNN

“We are seeing so many overweight dogs and cats, and it’s sad because their weight levels are completely manageable with diet changes,” says Dr. Kristine Yee, a veterinarian at California Animal Hospital in Los Angeles.

But pet owners are often slow to admit that their animals need to shed pounds.

A 2005 study from pet-food maker Purina found that 60 percent of pets in the U.S. were overweight.

But almost half of the owners of overweight pets rated their cats and dogs as having the “ideal” body condition.

Pet obesity can be a sensitive issue, says Susan Davis, a pet nutritionist based in Lake Forest, California, who has helped many pets trim down. Because some owners treat their pets like their children, people can take it personally when you tell them they have an overweight animal. (more…)

side note: Great…more wasted money! Hopefully Congress will actually add some tough talk when they give the money that the Pentagon requests. At this point, I think it’s foolish thinking to believe they won’t get the money….

Yahoo News

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates is seeking nearly 190 billion dollars to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008, the largest war funding request ever in the six-year-old “war on terror,” the Pentagon said Wednesday.

Gates was scheduled to testify later before a Senate committee on the request, which was 42.3 billion dollars greater than the administration’s estimate when it presented its 2008 budget request in February.

“This additional 42.3 billion dollars puts us at just under 190 billion dollars for the global war on terror supplemental request for 2008 — 189.3 billion dollars,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary.

The increase was needed in part to cover the cost of maintaining the so-called surge in US forces at least through July 2008, as well as to buy mine-resistant armored vehicles known as MRAPs. (more…)

SAM SEDAEI
Huffington Post

Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia University has been getting an incredible amount of attention in the media, political and activist circles around the country. As someone who was born in Iran and lived in Tehran for 17 years, I want to give you my assessment of how I believe Ahmadinejad’s visit will be viewed elsewhere in the world with the main conclusion that as he said his goodbyes to the audience in the university’s hostile environment, one thing became clear: regardless of what you may think of his values (or lack thereof), he proved to be the savviest person in the room.

Let’s begin with the massive protests. It was no surprise that there were thousands of people in the streets of New York protesting unconditional freedom of speech and his right to speak his mind. He knew that the city was home to over two million Jews, and that he would face massive protests. But that is precisely the martyr-like image that he was intending to create. Standing on that stage after a hostile introduction by the Columbia University president and in the face of thousands of protesters may have made him look lonely and illegitimate in the West. But to the eyes of many around the world, he looked like a hero and someone who was speaking what they are likely to consider “the truth” in the face of a bully. On August 31, this blogger wrote that one of the main reasons why the United States has not effectively addressed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and vetoed 47 UN Security Council Resolutions against Israel (14 under Bush II, 7 under Clinton, 7 under Bush I, and 19 under Reagan) is the strength of Jewish lobby in America and “the willingness of millions of Jews in America, including many liberal ones who normally support sensible foreign policies, to roll over, make an exception, keep silent and even vocally cheerlead America’s support for the Israeli occupation.” Massive protests in New York very much reinforced that assertion as almost all of the signs related to Iran’s nuclear program and none relating to its actual human rights violations. I would have had a lot more admiration for the protesters if they focused more on Iran’s primary crimes on women, youth, homosexuals, Baha’is and political dissenters instead of a predicted imaginary military attack against Israel that has not happened. Iranians will watch the protests and see that the main concern of the American people is not the oppression of Iranians, but Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israel rhetoric. (more…)

side note: to me, this right here pretty much sums of the republican party: In 1981, during the first year of Mr. Reagan’s presidency, the late Lee Atwater gave an interview to a political science professor at Case Western Reserve University, explaining the evolution of the Southern strategy: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’ ” said Atwater. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

I applaud the thousands of people, many of them poor, who traveled from around the country to protest in Jena, La., last week. But what I’d really like to see is a million angry protesters marching on the headquarters of the National Republican Party in Washington.

Enough is enough. Last week the Republicans showed once again just how anti-black their party really is.

The G.O.P. has spent the last 40 years insulting, disenfranchising and otherwise stomping on the interests of black Americans. Last week, the residents of Washington, D.C., with its majority black population, came remarkably close to realizing a goal they have sought for decades – a voting member of Congress to represent them.

A majority in Congress favored the move, and the House had already approved it. But the Republican minority in the Senate – with the enthusiastic support of President Bush – rose up on Tuesday and said: “No way, baby.”

At least 57 senators favored the bill, a solid majority. But the Republicans prevented a key motion on the measure from receiving the 60 votes necessary to move it forward in the Senate. The bill died.

At the same time that the Republicans were killing Congressional representation for D.C. residents, the major G.O.P. candidates for president were offering a collective slap in the face to black voters nationally by refusing to participate in a long-scheduled, nationally televised debate focusing on issues important to minorities. (more…)

By David Whitney
McClatchy Newspapers

The White House approved a Transportation Department campaign to lobby against California’s application for a waiver to combat global warming through auto emissions limits tougher than federal standards, a lawmaker charged Monday.

In a letter to James L. Connaughton, the head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, called the campaign an “inappropriate use of taxpayer money” and asked Connaughton to repudiate it.

Waxman said the campaign “sends an unmistakable message: The administration is trying to stack the deck against California’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles.” (more…)

side note: I love it when ignorant, lying, scumbag Congressional folks have the truth thrown back in their face on live TV….they have no choice but to BS their way through it……sorry Marsha…you can’t talk about the state on Iraq without going there….and don’t fucking tell us you work with the troops when you don’t even know the name of the last soldier to die in your district!! David Shuster deserves his own show!