The United States is empowering a new group of Sunni leaders, including onetime members of former president Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, intelligence services and army, who are challenging established Sunni politicians for their community's leadership. The phenomenon marks a sharp turnaround in U.S. policy and the fortunes of Iraq's Sunni minority.

Actors without seats at the table means no solutions. Hence, the change.

You can bet one man is behind it. Gates.

He's in charge of Iraq policy. I occasionally get face time with a guy who works directly with him and for him only. He's the one who is getting Iraq right slowly. Currently we are there. I wish we were not. But I want to see successes while we are there. I think we need to get out of Iraq in a military sense far sooner than later. These were the guys we should have been working with from the beginning. Because their world view, although what many would call evil, is something that we can relate to. These are materialists that we knocked out of power in exchange for foriegn-dominated members of the long-supressed majority.That was a mistake.

Nacchio unsuccessfully attempted to defend himself by arguing that he actually expected Qwest's 2001 earnings to be higher because of secret NSA contracts, which, he contends, were denied by the NSA after he declined in a February 27, 2001 meeting to give the NSA customer calling records, court documents released this week show.

Gore advisers all but ruled out a presidential bid for the former Vice-President, saying that

"he definitely has the ambition to use the peace prize as a springboard to run for president.

But he will not run, because he won't take on the political machine assembled by Sen. Hillary Clinton, said the source. If the senator from New York had faltered at all, Gore would take a serious look at entering the race, the source said. But Gore has calculated that Clinton is unstoppable, according to the source."

And why is Hillary unstoppable? Josh Marshall said it best earlier in the week:

Obama isn't so much running for the nomination in the sense of reaching out and taking it. He's trying to show us how marvelous he is (and this isn't snark, he's really pretty marvelous) so that Democratic voters will recognize it and give him the nomination.

But that's not how it works in this country. I don't know if it really works otherwise anywhere else. But you have to really want it, come out and say it, take it.

If this were a different race, Gore would step right in. Its not. I expect him to stay out.

Lawyering up.

Prosecutors want to introduce evidence of Michael's embarrassing "stash," in order to prove that he knew the Cunningham documents were, in their own way, as embarrassing.

Prosecutors are going to bring out the porn stash under which Duke Cunningham's buddy hid documents incriminating Cunningham in his below-market home purchase which turned up in a routine search of home purchase records by reporters.

That's this always-vote-against-Gays Duke Cunningham:

The most recent occasion was a Gay Pride forum on June 3, where a panel of gay rights leaders was addressing whether there was “a gay agenda.” Elizabeth Birch, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, began her presentation, which focused in part on reaching out to gay rights foes, with an example about a private meeting she and an HRC colleague had in 1995 with an unnamed conservative Republican congressman who opposes gay rights.

The congressman startled her, Birch said, when he ushered his staff members out of his Capitol Hill office, closed the door, and asked Birch and Daniel Zingale, then HRC’s political director, just how it was that they came to know that they are gay.

“You know, how do you know you’re that way?” Birch quoted the congressman as asking.

In hushed tones, Birch told the audience that the congressman leaned back against his desk and revealed that he was asking the question because he had “loved men” in his past.

“[T]his guy’s got three tours in Vietnam, and there were a lot of guns on the wall,” Birch told the audience, which laughed in response. “Whips and stuff like that. … I looked at Daniel and I went, ‘Oh my God.'

Leading Republicans in Congress on Thursday declared that troop withdrawal legislation should be scrapped because the United States has made significant progress in the Iraq war, just as Democrats were resuming efforts to bring soldiers home.

We have them despite our own incompetence. The first person to understand that will be President.

Their Presidential candidates are fighting for the last seat on the Titanic:

McCain was ready and eager to stress his muscular position in favor of the "surge" in Iraq, and he had plenty of opportunity to do so. The key moment came after Romney said the surge was "apparently working," and McCain challenged him. "No, not apparently, it's working," McCain responded sharply.

Romney, the ex-governor of Massachusetts, said he wants to wait to hear from General David Petraeus, the American commander in Iraq who will testify before Congress next week, before rendering a less equivocal verdict.

That's the reality. We suck eggs, they suck balls. Apparently that's a huge difference.

p.p.s. God Romney is just a lying machine. Dude's betting on the incredible ability of GOP rank and file to engage in wholesale self-deception. If he gets the nomination, he will be more anti-Iraq War than all but Kucinich.

Gay By Choice? The Science of Sexual Identity
  Posted by Lorianne
On 08/29/2007 9:24:16 PM PDT · 3 replies · 96+ views

Mother Jones ^ | August 27, 2007 | Gary Greenberg
when he leaves his tidy apartment in an ocean-side city somewhere in America, Aaron turns on the radio to a light rock station. "For the cat," he explains, "so she won't get lonely." He's short and balding and dressed mostly in black, and right before I turn on the recorder, he asks me for the dozenth time to guarantee that I won't reveal his name or anything else that might identify him. "I don't want to be a target for gay activists," he says as we head out into the misty day. "Harassment like that I just don't need." Aaron..

Sorry, he's your's, and frankly over the next year I'd prepare myself for the woeful task of having to defend his record over and over and over again.  Suck's to be in the President's Party.