The Advocate and the Pulse have recently become ex-gay publications, as revealed by the Philadephia Gay News.  The paper, published by Hillary supporter Mark Segal, recently published a front-page headline article on Obama's refusal to speak to the gay press. Readers of several publications that have recently interviewed Obama, including the Advocate and PULSE were shocked to discover they were no longer part of the gay press.

Democratic Senator and Presidential Candidate Joe Biden today announced a new initiative to defend the rights of Clueless-Americans. Details on the flip.

A blogger from Iraq reports on the Rashomon-like stew of different conflicting stories from this weekend's incident in Najaf. The "insurgents" are variously Baathists, Salafists, and splinter Shites. All these stories are rather wild, to put things mildly, and contradict each other aggressively on numerous easy-to-determine factual points, and come from sources with axes to grind.

However, he emphasizes one internet rumour. While not yet sourced, the rumour is by far the most plausible. In a nutshell, SCIRI (the main Iranian-affiliated faction) attacked a group of pilgrims, from a tribe politically opposed to SCIRI, at a checkpoint. The pilgrims fought back and SCIRI called in American airstrikes. A cult leader was indeed there but he was just going to Najaf for the annual mourning of Iman Hussein's death.

If true, we have reached the (predicatable) denoument of Bush's Iraq misadventure. Our troops are being used to kill Iraqi civilians whose only "crime" is political oppposition to the Iranian-affiliated government Bush is propping up. There's nothing for us to do and it's time to go home.

Even as the American public has turned firmly against a continuation of the undeclared war in Iraq, George W. Bush continues blindly on a course to mire us even deeper into that pointless quagmire. Yet, it seems there’s no unified strategy among Democrat to end it.  Even if the Democrats were unified, the relatively narrow margins in Congress in combination with Bush’s veto power and willingness to blatantly ignore settled law in pursuit of his ends would make striaghtforward resolutions to withdraw likely unsuccessful or ineffectual. I propose, therefore, that the Democratic Congress should explicitly link withdrawal from Iraq to a cause with overwhelming support – the hunt for Osama Bin Laden and the extinction of Al-Qaida.

Dennis Hastert's weight, whether choice or biology, has nothing to do with his fitness as Speaker. He's an evil man, yes. He still supports the War in Iraq. He supports torture. He undercuts our Constitution. He protects sexual predators and encourages them to run for Congress. Attack him for that. Don't attack him for an irrelevant physical characteristic shared by tens of millions of Americans.

"But wait!" you say. The Military Commisions bill passed by 85 votes ! How could 17 more Dems help us?

Simple.  Thats' the WRONG VOTE.

Hot from our political espionage department comes this in-depth look at the internal workings of the Connecticut for Lieberman campaign. Sate your curiosity about who are the important players in Lieberman's groundbreaking (as in political burial) bid! This will help us all understand what has motivated Joe Lieberman in this remarkable move and who might benefit if he actually could win.

But  what else has he done?  He is the 8th least Democratic Democrat according to Vote View and is the absolutely least liberal Democrat according to the Patrick Henry club.  Why is this?  I took a look at some - just some! of his votes this year - just this year!  - and I was shocked.  Even libertarian-leaning centrist me!   More after the flip.

BATON ROUGE, La. (CNN) -- A spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Thursday that, after a day's experience handing out debit cards to evacuees, it has decided to go back to the old methods.

"At this time, we believe our better delivery mechanism will be checks or electronic funds transfer," David Passey told reporters.

(snip)

Asked how long it would take for checks to arrive, he said only, "I would anticipate that money will begin making it to applicants in the coming days." (Posted 4:38 p.m.)"

I think the reason is that he knows we are about to accuse the Bush administration of similar things accurately and with evidence.  So he's throwing those accusations at us first hoping that the public will just see accusations going back and forth and not look at the evidence underneath.