Best Internship Quote Ever:

Supervisor: Hi(insert new client's name here), this is Eric. He is an intern from Columbia.

Client: Intern? That's impressive. Like Monica Lewinsky?

Good Vs. Bad

Things that I don't like about my life:

1) My crackberry I purchased off ebay, the brand new one...yeah apparently already registered to someone. The seller keeps swearing they already deactivated it. I keep begging them to call verizon.

2) My classes...pretty awful. I have never been so bored in my life. No electives leaves me with classes including evaluation, Advanced Generalist Practice and Programming and Health/Mental Health Policy.

3) Considering that my credit is awful (stepfather had a credit card in my name upon his death), I probably won't get a Gradplus loan next semester which means that I am dependent upon a Columbia loan....again. They jerked me around for a long time in the fall, what if I can't stay next semester?

4) I don't know what I am doing for Christmas.

5) My love life is nonexistant. Haven't had a date since the summer. Wah Wah.


Things I enjoy about my life:

1) Outside of school fees, I am fairly financially secure. I can go out for drinks and never worry that I can't afford it.

2) I got to see my loves this weekend. Socially, I am doing better and people now want to play with me sometimes.

3) Although my classes bite the big one, I am doing very well in them. Got an A on a paper and presentation that I spent an hour total on.

4) My fieldwork is incredible. I get to create programs from scratch and pretty much have full control over everything I do. They have hinted a few times that a job might be in line for me after graduation, and I have access to organic lunches which cost me, on average, a dollar.

5) I rarely get lost in the city anymore and feel less and less like an outsider every day.

Funny Ha Ha

Interesting....

VAWA: I Wrote About This Policy For A Year

Disturbing...

Va. pharmacy follows faith, no birth control sales
By MATTHEW BARAKAT, Associated Press Writer Matthew Barakat, Associated Press Writer Wed Oct 22, 12:28 am ET

CHANTILLY, Va. – A new drug store at a Virginia strip mall is putting its faith in an unconventional business plan: No candy. No sodas. And no birth control. Divine Mercy Care Pharmacy is among at least seven pharmacies across the nation that are refusing as a matter of faith to sell contraceptives of any kind, even if a person has a prescription.

States across the country have been wrestling with the issue of pharmacists who refuse on religious grounds to dispense birth control or morning-after pills, and some have enacted laws requiring drug stores to fill the prescriptions.

In Virginia, though, pharmacists can turn away any prescription for any reason.

"I am grateful to be able to practice," pharmacy manager Robert Semler said, "where my conscience will never be violated and my faith does not have to be checked at the door each morning."

Semler ran a similar pharmacy before opening the new store, which is not far from Dulles International Airport. The store only sells items that are health-related, including vitamins, skin care products and over-the-counter medications.

On Tuesday, the pharmacy celebrated a blessing from Arlington Bishop Paul S. Loverde. While Divine Mercy Care is not affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church, it is guided by church teachings on sexuality, which forbid any form of artificial contraception, including morning-after pills, condoms and birth control pills, a common prescription used by millions of women in the U.S.

"This pharmacy is a vibrant example of our Holy Father's charge to all of us to wear our faith in the public square," said Loverde, who sprinkled holy water on the shelves stocked with painkillers and acne treatments. "It will allow families to shop in an environment where their faith is not compromised."

The drug store is the seventh in the country to be certified as not prescribing birth control by Pharmacists for Life International. The anti-abortion group estimates that perhaps hundreds of other pharmacies have similar policies, though they have not been certified.

Earlier this year in Wisconsin, a state appeals court upheld sanctions against a pharmacist who refused to dispense birth control pills to a woman and wouldn't transfer her prescription elsewhere. Elsewhere, at least seven states require pharmacies or pharmacists to fill contraceptive prescriptions, according to the National Women's Law Center. Four states explicitly give pharmacists the right to turn away any prescriptions, the group said.

The Virginia store's policy has drawn scorn from some abortion rights groups, who have already called for a boycott and collected more than 1,000 signatures protesting the pharmacy.

"If this emboldens other pharmacies in other parts of the state, it could really affect low-income and rural women in terms of access," said Tarina Keene, executive director of the Virginia chapter of the National Abortion Rights Action League.

Robert Laird, executive director of Divine Mercy Care, believes many of the estimated 50,000 Catholics within a few miles of the store will support its mission and make up for the roughly 10 percent of business that contraceptives represent in a typical pharmacy.

Whether Catholics will be drawn to the pharmacy is uncertain. According to a Gallup poll published last year for an extensive study of U.S. Catholicism called American Catholics Today, 75 percent of U.S. Catholics said you can still be a good Catholic even if you don't obey church teachings on birth control.

Catherine Muskett said she plans to shop at the drug store even though she lives more than 20 miles away.

"Obviously it's good to support pro-life causes. Every little bit counts," said Muskett, one of about 75 people who crowded into the tiny shop for Tuesday's ceremony.

___

Umm...

A man on the train kept winking at me...while masturbating. full hand down the sweats masturbating.

As my friend Maddie would say...not so tender.

Military Recruiting Children

Obama Roasts McCain

Powerful

Target Women: Disney Princesses

Demi Lovato - Get Back (live)

LOVE! LOVE! LOVE!....

John McCain Doesn't Care About Women

This is why John McCain can suck it. Woman hater.

Christina Milian - Us Against The World

Some happiness. I think John will like this one.

Some Americans Are Scary

So Fucking Scary

Hayden Panittiere: Important PSA

See more Hayden Panettiere videos at Funny or Die

its kinda funny how circumstances determine when you are an adult.

Laramie Project -10th Anniversary

Has Anything Changed?

The creators of 'The Laramie Project', a play about Matthew Shepard, returned to Wyoming on the 10-year anniversary of his death.
Moisés Kaufman, Leigh Fondakowski, Greg Pierotti, Stephen Belber and Andy Paris
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Oct 9, 2008 | Updated: 9:03 a.m. ET Oct 9, 2008

One month after the brutal murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard in 1998, 10 members of the Tectonic Theater Project , led by playwright and director Moisés Kaufman, went to Laramie, Wyo., to interview residents about the killing. Those interviews served as the basis for "The Laramie Project," a play that chronicles how the community grappled with the slaying. On the 10th anniversary of Shepard's death, which has become a rallying cry for gay rights and hate-crime laws, the theater company returned to Laramie. These are their observations:

In returning to Laramie, Wyo., 10 years after the murder of Matthew Shepard, the pressing question for all of us was: how has the town changed since 1998? But soon a different question arose: how do we measure that change?

On the state level no hate crime legislation has passed; the fence where Matthew Shepard was murdered has been dismantled; the Fireside Bar where Matthew met his killers has been renamed; and the University of Wyoming still has yet to grant domestic partner benefits to its gay and lesbian faculty and staff. And when you ask of the people of Laramie how has the town has changed, many say, "We've moved on."

"Moved on to what?" asks Reggie Fluty, the policewoman who was the first to arrive at the fence where Matthew was tied. "If you don't want to look back, fine. But what are we moving towards?"

Certainly the university has taken several concrete actions to promote inclusiveness: they've added gay and lesbian study classes to the curriculum, created a resource center for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students and permanently renamed the Social Justice Symposium after Matthew Shepard. They've also recently joined Matthew's mom, Judy Shepard, in memorializing Matthew on campus. (Judy is the executive director of the Matthew Shepard Foundation.)

As for the rest of the town, Shepard's former academic adviser Jon Peacock says, "I think when you're so close to an event like this you become more sensitized. You start to pay more attention to those issues." Detective Sergeant Rob Debree, the lead investigator in Shepard's murder, adds, "I think overall, there's just more acceptance." Debree became a forceful national advocate for Federal Hate Crime legislation alongside Officer Dave O'Malley as a result of this murder.

"The fact that cops like DeBree and O'Malley, law officers in positions of real power, are committed to gay and lesbian people and their protection, that should be construed as concrete change," says Beth Loffreda, author of the book, "Losing Matthew Shepard." "You won't find that in a statute or in a public monument to Matt, but that's real and meaningful change."

A real cause for concern, however, is the emergence in Laramie of a narrative that has gained many proponents in recent years: one that states that Shepard's murder by two local residents, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, was only "a robbery gone bad" or "a drug-fueled murder" and not a hate crime. "That's nonsense," says Fluty. "All you have to do is look at the evidence." O'Malley, lead investigator of the Laramie Police Department agrees, "I'm convinced that these guys killed Matt because he was gay."

Debree of the Sheriff's department adds: "We went in depth reviewing [the murderers'] blood for any kind of drugs or anything to that effect. There was nothing." The fact that this was a hate crime was decisively proved at the trial when in excerpts of McKinney's confession, the jury heard him tell DeBree: "[Shepard] put his hand on my leg. ... I told him I'm not a f---ing faggot" before beginning to brutally beat Matthew Shepard.

Catherine Connolly, the first openly gay professor at the university, also takes issue with this willful ignoring of the facts: "This distortion of history, this is what kids 18, 19 years old think now. It's devastating to us. This is our history."

So why has this distortion of the truth become so prevalent? One hypothesis is that because Laramie was portrayed in the media as a backward town where hatred and bigotry were rampant, forcing the citizens to question their identity as an idyllic community, a "good place to raise your children." "And when we have a theory about who we are," says Laramie resident Jeffrey Lockwood, "and the data goes against that theory, we throw out the data rather than adjust the theory. We are hardwired as human beings not to contemplate our own complicity in things."

Yet there are many people who found in this murder an opportunity to reflect deeply about the role that the culture and values of Laramie played in the crime. "This whole thing forced us to look at our warts," says Dr. Don Cantway, the physician who treated Matthew's injuries. "To look at our bigotry, the hatreds, the intolerance that exist here."

These two stances, denial and self-reflection, have divided the town. "This is where I choose to live," insists Jonas Slonaker, a gay man who chose to come out after Shepard's murder, "and this is a state that always votes Republican and is pretty conservative. So there'll be a lot of resistance [to change]. It might be a situation where those rights will come from a federal level down before it comes to the state level."

But nationally, the situation regarding gay rights legislation mirrors Wyoming's. In 2007, the Matthew Shepard Act passed in both the House and the Senate but the legislation never made it out of Congress—because of a Bush veto threat and the bill's attachment to a defense authorization measure.

Still, shifts are occurring: Wyoming's Governor Dave Freudenthal, says, "If you really believe in that Western 'live and let live' [philosophy] then you wouldn't have homophobic violence. So there's a contradiction. We tolerate an awful lot of violence in this state and we have to look at that." In 2005, the neighboring town of Casper elected a gay man as mayor and professor Connolly is running for a State House seat in the coming election. In addition, the faculty at the university continues to fight for same-sex partner benefits.

Measuring change is not an exact science: the markers can be elusive or blurry, yet no less meaningful. Peacock says, "I think it does a great disservice to the power of the story around Matthew's death to measure it by whether there's been definitive or quantifiable change like a law passed. We know that there has been so much qualitative and transformational change. So I think it does a real disservice to the story to measure it that way. I just think that's too thin of a measure."

Selena Gomez - Tell Me Something

I love her so.

McCain Gets Criticized For Racist Rallies

McCain calls comments by Georgia Democrat 'shocking'

* Story Highlights
* Rep. John Lewis compares recent McCain rallies to segregationist ex-governor
* Lewis: George Wallace "created the climate ... that encouraged vicious attacks"
* McCain: Rep. Lewis' comments are "shocking and beyond the pale"
* McCain now calls on the Obama campaign to repudiate the remarks

From Rebecca Sinderbrand
CNN Associate Political Editor

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Sen. John McCain called a statement by a Georgia congressman Saturday, which compared the feeling at recent Republican rallies to those of segregationist George Wallace, "a brazen and baseless attack."

Rep. John Lewis, D-Georgia, who has been praised by McCain in the past, issued his statement after several days of headline-grabbing anger aimed at Democratic nominee Barack Obama from some attendees at campaign rallies of McCain and running mate Gov. Sarah Palin.

"What I am seeing reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history. Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse," Lewis said in a statement.

"George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama," wrote the Democrat. VideoWatch more on the rising rage at McCain-Palin rallies »

McCain has written about Lewis, praising his actions in Selma, Alabama, during the civil rights movement. The Republican nominee even said during a summer faith forum that Lewis was one of three men he would turn to for counsel as president.

But the Arizona senator blasted Lewis' remarks, and called on Obama to repudiate them.

"Congressman John Lewis' comments represent a character attack against Gov. Sarah Palin and me that is shocking and beyond the pale," he said in a Saturday afternoon statement released by his campaign.

"The notion that legitimate criticism of Sen. Obama's record and positions could be compared to Gov. George Wallace, his segregationist policies and the violence he provoked is unacceptable and has no place in this campaign. I am saddened that John Lewis, a man I've always admired, would make such a brazen and baseless attack on my character and the character of the thousands of hardworking Americans who come to our events to cheer for the kind of reform that will put America on the right track. VideoWatch more on the rising rage at McCain-Palin rallies »

"I call on Sen. Obama to immediately and personally repudiate these outrageous and divisive comments that are so clearly designed to shut down debate 24 days before the election. Our country must return to the important debate about the path forward for America."

Also Saturday, Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton released a statement on the Lewis comments.

"Sen. Obama does not believe that John McCain or his policy criticism is in any way comparable to George Wallace or his segregationist policies," Burton said. "But John Lewis was right to condemn some of the hateful rhetoric that John McCain himself personally rebuked just last night, as well as the baseless and profoundly irresponsible charges from his own running mate that the Democratic nominee for president of the United States 'pals around with terrorists.' "

Later Saturday, Lewis issued a statement saying a careful review of his remarks "would reveal that I did not compare Sen. John McCain or Gov. Sarah Palin to George Wallace."

"My statement was a reminder to all Americans that toxic language can lead to destructive behavior," Lewis said. "I am glad that Sen. McCain has taken some steps to correct divisive speech at his rallies. I believe we need to return to civil discourse in this election about the pressing economic issues that are affecting our nation."

Obama Referred To As "N" Word By Teacher

7th-Grade Teacher to Students: Obama is a 'N'-Word
October 8th, 2008

Greg Howard


7th-Grade teacher to students: Obama is a 'N'-word. Angry parents in the northwest Florida community of Marianna want a middle school teacher fired after he put the "N"-word on the board to describe Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama. The Marianna Middle School teacher, Greg Howard, is now serving a 10-day suspension after writing an acronym on the dry-erase board on Sept. 26: "C.H.A.N.G.E. - Come Help A N*gg*r Get Elected." But many parents want the 17-year teacher fired. The seventh-grade social studies teacher's class has 17 White students, six Black students and one Asian student. Initially he was suspended for the day without pay, but that was elevated to the 10-day punishment. He must also write a letter of apology to students. "We feel like the punishment is sufficient," Larry Moore, superintendent of the Jackson County School District, told The Detroit Free Press. "We did not feel he had to be fired." NAACP officials say they will reserve their actions in the case until their investigation is complete. Audrey Wad, who has nieces and nephews at the school, didn't need any more information before expressing her outrage. "To me, it's hurtful," she told the Free Press. "The idea that he would impose his political opinion on the children is wrong to me. That's where he crossed the line."

New York Times: McCain/Palin Ticket Should Be Ashamed

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October 8, 2008
Editorial
Politics of Attack

It is a sorry fact of American political life that campaigns get ugly, often in their final weeks. But Senator John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin have been running one of the most appalling campaigns we can remember.

They have gone far beyond the usual fare of quotes taken out of context and distortions of an opponent’s record — into the dark territory of race-baiting and xenophobia. Senator Barack Obama has taken some cheap shots at Mr. McCain, but there is no comparison.

Despite the occasional slip (referring to Mr. Obama’s “cronies” and calling him “that one”), Mr. McCain tried to take a higher road in Tuesday night’s presidential debate. It was hard to keep track of the number of times he referred to his audience as “my friends.” But apart from promising to buy up troubled mortgages as president, he offered no real answers for how he plans to solve the country’s deep economic crisis. He is unable or unwilling to admit that the Republican assault on regulation was to blame.

Ninety minutes of forced cordiality did not erase the dismal ugliness of his campaign in recent weeks, nor did it leave us with much hope that he would not just return to the same dismal ugliness on Wednesday.

Ms. Palin, in particular, revels in the attack. Her campaign rallies have become spectacles of anger and insult. “This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America,” Ms. Palin has taken to saying.

That line follows passages in Ms. Palin’s new stump speech in which she twists Mr. Obama’s ill-advised but fleeting and long-past association with William Ayers, founder of the Weather Underground and confessed bomber. By the time she’s done, she implies that Mr. Obama is right now a close friend of Mr. Ayers — and sympathetic to the violent overthrow of the government. The Democrat, she says, “sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

Her demagoguery has elicited some frightening, intolerable responses. A recent Washington Post report said at a rally in Florida this week a man yelled “kill him!” as Ms. Palin delivered that line and others shouted epithets at an African-American member of a TV crew.

Mr. McCain’s aides haven’t even tried to hide their cynical tactics, saying they were “going negative” in hopes of shifting attention away from the financial crisis — and by implication Mr. McCain’s stumbling response.

We certainly expected better from Mr. McCain, who once showed withering contempt for win-at-any-cost politics. He was driven out of the 2000 Republican primaries by this sort of smear, orchestrated by some of the same people who are now running his campaign.

And the tactic of guilt by association is perplexing, since Mr. McCain has his own list of political associates he would rather forget. We were disappointed to see the Obama campaign air an ad (held for just this occasion) reminding voters of Mr. McCain’s involvement in the Keating Five savings-and-loan debacle, for which he was reprimanded by the Senate. That episode at least bears on Mr. McCain’s claims to be the morally pure candidate and his argument that he alone is capable of doing away with greed, fraud and abuse.

In a way, we should not be surprised that Mr. McCain has stooped so low, since the debate showed once again that he has little else to talk about. He long ago abandoned his signature issues of immigration reform and global warming; his talk of “victory” in Iraq has little to offer a war-weary nation; and his Reagan-inspired ideology of starving government and shredding regulation lies in tatters on Wall Street.

But surely, Mr. McCain and his team can come up with a better answer to that problem than inciting more division, anger and hatred.

Paris Hilton Running For President...Gets Campaign Advice

See more Paris Hilton videos at Funny or Die

Sarah Palin Hates GLBTQ - No Duh

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfL2l1dk8nA&eurl=http://feministing.com/

Kanye West Is A Genius: Love Lockdown

McCain/Palin Health Care Disaster

The New York Times
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October 6, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Health Care Destruction
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Sarah Palin ended her debate performance last Thursday with a slightly garbled quote from Ronald Reagan about how, if we aren’t vigilant, we’ll end up “telling our children and our children’s children” about the days when America was free. It was a revealing choice.

You see, when Reagan said this he wasn’t warning about Soviet aggression. He was warning against legislation that would guarantee health care for older Americans — the program now known as Medicare.

Conservative Republicans still hate Medicare, and would kill it if they could — in fact, they tried to gut it during the Clinton years (that’s what the 1995 shutdown of the government was all about). But so far they haven’t been able to pull that off.

So John McCain wants to destroy the health insurance of nonelderly Americans instead.

Most Americans under 65 currently get health insurance through their employers. That’s largely because the tax code favors such insurance: your employer’s contribution to insurance premiums isn’t considered taxable income, as long as the employer’s health plan follows certain rules. In particular, the same plan has to be available to all employees, regardless of the size of their paycheck or the state of their health.

This system does a fairly effective job of protecting those it reaches, but it leaves many Americans out in the cold. Workers whose employers don’t offer coverage are forced to seek individual health insurance, often in vain. For one thing, insurance companies offering “nongroup” coverage generally refuse to cover anyone with a pre-existing medical condition. And individual insurance is very expensive, because insurers spend large sums weeding out “high-risk” applicants — that is, anyone who seems likely to actually need the insurance.

So what should be done? Barack Obama offers incremental reform: regulation of insurers to prevent discrimination against the less healthy, subsidies to help lower-income families buy insurance, and public insurance plans that compete with the private sector. His plan falls short of universal coverage, but it would sharply reduce the number of uninsured.

Mr. McCain, on the other hand, wants to blow up the current system, by eliminating the tax break for employer-provided insurance. And he doesn’t offer a workable alternative.

Without the tax break, many employers would drop their current health plans. Several recent nonpartisan studies estimate that under the McCain plan around 20 million Americans currently covered by their employers would lose their health insurance.

As compensation, the McCain plan would give people a tax credit — $2,500 for an individual, $5,000 for a family — that could be used to buy health insurance in the individual market. At the same time, Mr. McCain would deregulate insurance, leaving insurance companies free to deny coverage to those with health problems — and his proposal for a “high-risk pool” for hard cases would provide little help.

So what would happen?

The good news, such as it is, is that more people would buy individual insurance. Indeed, the total number of uninsured Americans might decline marginally under the McCain plan — although many more Americans would be without insurance than under the Obama plan.

But the people gaining insurance would be those who need it least: relatively healthy Americans with high incomes. Why? Because insurance companies want to cover only healthy people, and even among the healthy only those able to pay a lot in addition to their tax credit would be able to afford coverage (remember, it’s a $5,000 credit, but the average family policy actually costs more than $12,000).

Meanwhile, the people losing insurance would be those who need it most: lower-income workers who wouldn’t be able to afford individual insurance even with the tax credit, and Americans with health problems whom insurance companies won’t cover.

And in the process of comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted, the McCain plan would also lead to a huge, expensive increase in bureaucracy: insurers selling individual health plans spend 29 percent of the premiums they receive on administration, largely because they employ so many people to screen applicants. This compares with costs of 12 percent for group plans and just 3 percent for Medicare.

In short, the McCain plan makes no sense at all, unless you have faith that the magic of the marketplace can solve all problems. And Mr. McCain does: a much-quoted article published under his name declares that “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”

I agree: the McCain plan would do for health care what deregulation has done for banking. And I’m terrified.

Voter Registration: Democrats Win

Drug Companies Lie: Pfizer Manipulated Studies.

The New York Times
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October 8, 2008
Experts Conclude Pfizer Manipulated Studies
By STEPHANIE SAUL

The drug maker Pfizer earlier this decade manipulated the publication of scientific studies to bolster the use of its epilepsy drug Neurontin for other disorders, while suppressing research that did not support those uses, according to experts who reviewed thousands of company documents for plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the company.

Pfizer’s tactics included delaying the publication of studies that had found no evidence the drug worked for some other disorders, “spinning” negative data to place it in a more positive light, and bundling negative findings with positive studies to neutralize the results, according to written reports by the experts, who analyzed the documents at the request of the plaintiffs’ lawyers.

One of the experts who reviewed the documents, Dr. Kay Dickersin of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, concluded that the Pfizer documents spell out “a publication strategy meant to convince physicians of Neurontin’s effectiveness and misrepresent or suppress negative findings.”

Pfizer issued a statement Tuesday denying that it had manipulated Neurontin data, saying “study results are reported by Pfizer in an objective, accurate, balanced and complete manner, with a discussion of the strengths and limitations of the study, and are reported regardless of the outcome of the study or the country in which the study was conducted.”

The expert reports, unsealed Monday in a federal court in Boston, add to accusations that the pharmaceutical industry has controlled the flow of clinical research data, blurring the lines between science and marketing.

In April, for example, a group of academic doctors questioned the validity of drug industry research after finding that Merck had hired ghostwriters to produce scientific articles about Vioxx, then recruited prestigious doctors to serve as their official authors. Vioxx, a painkiller, was withdrawn from the market in 2004 after research indicated it could cause strokes and heart attacks.

Last winter, Merck and Schering-Plough were criticized for delaying the release of a study on their best-selling cholesterol medication Vytorin that showed the drug did not slow the growth of plaque in arteries. In the case of Pfizer’s Neurontin, the negative studies would have increased doubts about the drug’s value for several unapproved uses — treating bipolar disorder, controlling certain types of pain and preventing migraine headaches, according to the expert opinions.

So-called off-label use of Neurontin for those conditions helped propel its sales to nearly $3 billion a year before it lost patent protection in 2004.

In one example, the experts concluded that Pfizer had deliberately delayed release of a study that showed the drug had little effect against pain that is a complication of long-term diabetes, even as the outside researcher who was a lead investigator for the study, Dr. John Reckless of Bath, England, pushed to publish the unflattering findings on his own. Dr. Reckless’s office said Tuesday that he could not be reached for comment.

According to one September 2000 e-mail message by a Neurontin team leader at Pfizer, “The main investigator in the U.K. (Dr. Reckless) is keen to publish but this will have several ramifications.” The team leader later wrote, “I think we can limit the potential downside of the 224 study by delaying publication for as long as possible.”

Pfizer said Tuesday that it had submitted the Reckless study to two journals which declined to publish it. The results were not published until 2003 and, according to plaintiffs’ experts, when they did appear they were combined with two other studies and together the findings concluded Neurontin was effective for treating neuropathic pain.

Another series of e-mail messages had the subject line “Spinning Serpell,” a reference to an investigator on the study, Dr. Michael Serpell of Glasgow, Scotland. In the e-mail exchange a senior marketing manager for Pfizer and a professional medical writer discussed how to cast the results in a more favorable light for a poster presentation at a medical conference, the experts concluded.

“If Pfizer wants to use, present and publish this comparative data analysis in which two of the five studies compared make the overall picture look bad, how do we make it sound better than it looks on the graphs?” the medical writer asked.

Pfizer discontinued its marketing program for Neurontin in 2004 after the drug became available as a generic. That same year, the company paid $430 million to settle federal criminal and civil claims that Warner-Lambert, which Pfizer acquired in 2000, promoted Neurontin for unapproved uses during the 1990s.

At the time, Pfizer said the illegal marketing had occurred before Pfizer acquired the company or drug. On Tuesday, Pfizer repeated that it had instituted procedures when it acquired Warner-Lambert to make sure there was no off-label promotion of Neurontin.

Despite that settlement, separate legal action involving the drug is still pending in Boston, where consumers and third-party payers including insurance companies and trade unions want Pfizer to repay them billions of dollars for Neurontin prescriptions. The plaintiffs accuse Pfizer of fraudulently misrepresenting the drug’s benefits.

Thomas Greene, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the documents in the case revealed that even after the Neurontin settlement.

“Pfizer continued with the medical marketing firms and planted marketing messages in journal articles that Neurontin was effective while they knew that their own clinical trials had failed to demonstrate it was effective,” Mr. Greene said.

Dr. Dickersin, the Johns Hopkins expert, said that of 21 studies she reviewed, five were positive and 16 negative, meaning they did not prove the drug was effective. Of the five positive studies, four were published in full journal articles, yet only six of the negative studies were published and, of those, two were published in abbreviated form.

Giant Turtles Are Fierce

The New York Times
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October 8, 2008
Future of Giant Turtle Still Uncertain
By JIM YARDLEY

BEIJING — Wait until next year.

Scientists trying to save one of the world’s most endangered species of freshwater turtles say waiting is their only recourse after a complicated attempt to mate two elderly turtles during this year’s breeding season ended without producing any offspring.

The fate of the Yangtze giant soft-shell turtle seems especially uncertain because only one female is known to exist — an 80-year-old turtle with a leathery shell that lived without notice for a half century inside a zoo in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, in southern China. Only when scientists discovered her existence last year did it become clear that a chance remained to save her species.

In May, scientists drove her more than 600 miles to a zoo in the city of Suzhou. There, a male turtle estimated to be 100 years old awaited her. He had been the last known male of the species, though in recent months scientists discovered two more males in Vietnam.

Gerald Kuchling, a prominent herpetologist helping to oversee the mating program, said the male and female turtles were introduced to each other on May 7.

It was a meeting that carried some risk; males can be territorial and have been known to attack other, unfamiliar, turtles. On top of that, neither turtle had seen a member of the opposite sex in decades. But scientists say the pairing was a success.

“It worked very well,” Mr. Kuchling said by telephone.

June seemed to bring good news: The female produced roughly 100 eggs and about half appeared to be fertilized. But scientists now say the embryos apparently died in early development. A recent posting on the Web site of Turtle Survival Alliance, a global network focused on protecting endangered turtles, said “a number of the eggs had very thin or cracked eggshells, suggesting that the diet of the animals prior to breeding was not optimal.”

Mr. Kuchling said the female had been fed raw beef and pork, rather than a more desirable diet of fish and crayfish.

“If the nutrition of the female is not right, then the eggs usually die,” he said.

Males of the species can reach 220 pounds, while females are usually about half that size. The female from the Changsha zoo weighs about 90 pounds, while the male from the Suzhou zoo weighs more than twice as much.

Xie Yan, the China program director for the Wildlife Conservation Society, said she remained hopeful.

She said that the diet for the female had already been changed and that her general health was considered good. The discovery of two more males is also good news, she added. “The male and the female didn’t spend enough time together this year,” she said. “This was the first time they mated. Next time will be better.”

The Yangtze giant soft-shell turtle is one of the largest freshwater species in the world, though its population has been decimated by hunting and pollution. Last year, scientists struggled to persuade either the Suzhou or the Changsha zoo to allow its turtle to be moved.

Scientists had considered artificial insemination but decided the procedure would be too risky. It became unnecessary when the Changsha zoo agreed to move the female to Suzhou.

Now, the two turtles live in adjacent ponds at the Suzhou zoo. The ponds are connected through a small channel, which is blocked by an underwater door. That door will open again next May, during breeding season, and the two old turtles will try once again.

Financial Crisis: The Worst Of The Worst

knbc.com
Police: Porter Ranch Gunman's Letters Cite 'Financial Problems'
'Suicide' Letters Found In Residence

POSTED: 10:57 am PDT October 6, 2008
UPDATED: 9:44 am PDT October 7, 2008
LOS ANGELES --
Crisis counselors were sent Tuesday to the schools attended by three children killed by their father in a murder-suicide that also took the lives of their mother and their maternal grandmother.

The Los Angeles Police Department said the violence occurred sometime between Saturday evening and Monday morning. Officials said 45-year-old Karthik Rajaram killed his 39-year-old wife Subasari, her 69-year-old mother and his three sons -- 19-year-old Krishna, 12-year-old Ganesha and 7-year-old Arjuna.

Rajaram was a one-time millionaire who lost his job and apparently his money, as well, as a result of stock market losses.

Video: Tues. AM Report | Images
Raw Video: News Conference

Rajaram was found dead with a gun in hand by police officers who followed a trail of carnage from bedroom to bedroom through the big, two-story house the family rented in the Porter Ranch area of the San Fernando Valley.

Investigators quickly found two suicide letters and a will, and determined that the man once worked for a major accounting firm and was at least the part-owner of a financial holding company, Deputy Chief Michel Moore said.

"We believe that he has become despondent recently over financial dealings and the financial situation of his household, and that this murder-suicide event is a direct result of that," Moore said.

The man wrote in his suicide letter that he felt he had two options -- to just kill himself or to kill himself and his family -- and decided the second option was more honorable, Moore said.

The bodies were found when officers were sent to make a check on the home Monday morning after the wife failed to show up at a neighbor's home to go to work as a pharmacy bookkeeper, Moore said.

Officers found the mother-in-law, Indra Ramasesham, 69, dead in bed on the first floor. Upstairs, they found a 19-year-old son, Krishna Rajaram, dead in bed in the master bedroom.

The gunman's 39-year-old wife, Subasari, was found in another room, also apparently shot while sleeping, Moore said.

In an adjoining room, a 12-year-old son was dead on the floor, and his 7-year-old brother was dead in bed. Their father's body also was found there with a handgun "in his grasp," Moore said.

"The handgun that was discovered here on scene was recently purchased, only on the 16th of September," by the father, Moore said.

Authorities withheld the names of the wife and two youngest children because their wounds made official identification difficult, said coroner's assistant chief Ed Winter.

"Some received multiple gunshot wounds," he said.

The killings occurred some time between midnight Saturday and early Monday morning, Winter said.

The gated community, called Sorrento Pointe, is among several developments along curving lanes and cul-de-sacs set on the foothills of the Santa Susana Mountains in Porter Ranch, about 23 miles northwest of downtown.

"It's very quiet here," said Ryan Ransdell, who lives across the street. "That's what's so shocking about this. ... You'd think someone would have heard it. You can hear a car door shut at night."

Ransdell said the family kept to themselves.

The father had a master's of business administration in finance, formerly worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers and Sony Pictures, but had been unemployed for several months, Moore said. The deputy chief did not identify the financial holding company, though Nevada records show an incorporation there.

Moore did not specify what financial trouble the man had been in. He noted that the family did not own the home.

One of the suicide letters was addressed to police and the other to friends and relatives.

In the suicide letters, "he attests to some financial difficulties, takes responsibility for the taking of the lives of his family members and himself as a result of those financial difficulties," Moore said. "We believe that he has become despondent recently over financial dealings and the financial situation of his household."

The man had no record of mental disabilities or contacts with mental health professionals in Los Angeles County, Moore said.

PricewaterhouseCoopers spokesman Steven Silber said Karthik Rajaram last worked for the company in 1999, but declined to offer any further information about him.

"This is obviously a terrible tragedy, about which we are very saddened. However, Mr. Rajaram has not worked for PWC for nearly a decade, so it would be inappropriate for us to comment any further," Silber said.

Sony Pictures Entertainment spokesman Steve Elzer did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Karthik Rajaram is listed as a co-manager of a corporation called SKGL LLC, which is incorporated in Nevada, according to state records. He formed the corporation for his family's assets and used his family members' initials to form the name, said Las Vegas attorney Christopher R. Grobl.

SKGL was incorporated in 1999 and renewed its annual business license in December 2007.

Grobl did not know what sort of business SKGL was or why Rajaram incoporated in Nevada.

Krishna Rajaram was enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, as a junior majoring in business economics, spokesman Phil Hampton said.

The LAPD was working with the Los Angeles Unified School District to arrange for crisis response teams to be dispatched to the two local schools that the 7- and 12-year-old victims attended, Moore said.

A crisis response team from the mayor's office also responded to assist the family's friends and neighbors.

Superintendent David Brewer issued a statement saying the "entire Los Angeles Unified School District family is saddened to hear" about the deaths and would " provide support and assistance to the school staff and students following this unfortunate tragedy as long as needed."

MTA = Shady

Trial Looms Over MTA's Negligence in Platform Rape

A lawsuit against the MTA is about to go to trial surrounding the rape of a woman on a G train platform in Queens three years ago. And the victim, now 25, told the Daily News this weekend that she forgives her attacker ("I know he was sick in the head"), but not the token booth clerk at the 21st Street station, "I can't forgive those five seconds when I stared into his eyes, screaming for help, imploring him with my tears and all I got back was a cold stare."

The victim's suit, filed two years ago, claims the MTA is negligent for not properly training its subway workers as well as lacking the proper communication tools between a booth and the platform below. As the woman was being attacked, she says not only did the token booth clerk see her yet stay in his booth, but another conductor whose train entered during the attack saw her being assaulted and allowed his train to leave the station. The only action taken by both the clerk and the conductor respectively was to call into their command center for further help.

For his part, the clerk claims he wasn't supposed to leave his booth, according to MTA rules, saying the victim "is very wrong" to blame him, adding, "She doesn't remember a lot of things." When asked in a pre-trial deposition why he didn't try to at least scare away the attacker by informing him that police were on their way, he said, "I did not even think about it." He says that when the woman was taken out of his view to the platform for the ten minutes that followed, he did "nothing really. I was just waiting for the police."

The only positive update to comes since we first reported the attack back in 2005 is that Right Rides, the volunteer organization that offers women, transpeople and gender queer individuals safe rides home late on Saturday nights now serves 35 neighborhoods in four boroughs (as opposed to a small section of Brooklyn and the LES back then). They are always looking for volunteers and sponsors for the Zipcars they send out.

Palin On SNL: VP Debate

American GLBT Are Fortunate

October 6, 2008
Persecuted in Senegal, Finding Refuge in New York
By KIRK SEMPLE and LYDIA POLGREEN

Pape Mbaye gets a lot of attention. Even in jaded New York, people watch the way he walks (his style defines the word sashay) and scrutinize his outfits, which on a recent afternoon featured white, low-slung capris, a black purse, eyeliner and diamond-studded jewelry.

And he likes it.

“I’m fabulous,” he said. “I feel good.”

Mr. Mbaye, 24, is an entertainer from Dakar, Senegal, known there for his dancing, singing and storytelling. But while his flamboyance may be celebrated in New York, he attracted the wrong kind of attention in West Africa this year, nearly costing him his life.

In February, a Senegalese magazine published photographs of what was reported to be an underground gay marriage and said that Mr. Mbaye, who appeared in the photos and is gay himself, had organized the event. In the ensuing six months, Mr. Mbaye said, he was harassed by the police, attacked by armed mobs, driven from his home, maligned in the national media and forced to live on the run across West Africa.

In July, the United States government gave him refugee status, one of the rare instances when such protection has been granted to a foreigner facing persecution based on sexual orientation. A month later, Mr. Mbaye arrived in New York, eventually moving into a small furnished room in the Bronx that rents for $150 per week. It has a bed, air-conditioner, television, cat and pink walls,.

“There’s security, there’s independence, there’s peace,” he said of his new country.

But even as he has begun looking for work, with the help of a few Senegalese immigrants he knows from Dakar, Mr. Mbaye is largely avoiding the mainstream Senegalese community, fearing that the same prejudices that drove him out of Africa may dog him here.

One recent evening, while visiting close family friends from Dakar who live in Harlem, he recalled a shopping trip to 116th Street, where many Senegalese work and live. There, he said, he was harassed by a Senegalese man on the sidewalk who ridiculed Mr. Mbaye’s outfit and threatened him.

“He said, ‘If you were in Senegal, I would kill you,’ ” Mr. Mbaye said, gesturing enthusiastically with his arms, his voice rising. “I have my freedom now, and that man wanted to take it.”

The United States does not track how often it grants refuge to people fleeing anti-gay persecution. But Christopher Nugent, an immigration lawyer with Holland & Knight, a Washington law firm where he is a senior pro bono counsel specializing in refugee and asylum cases, said that in the past decade he has only heard of a handful.

The government also does not track the number of persecuted gay men and lesbians who are granted asylum, but experts in the field say the number is higher than those granted refugee status. (Asylum is granted to people already in the United States, while people outside the country must seek refugee status.)

Mr. Mbaye’s case was exceptional because his fame made his situation particularly perilous, said Mr. Nugent, who represented Mr. Mbaye in his petition. “He was vilified in the Senegalese media as being the face of the sinful homosexual, and he had scars to show,” he said.

For the past few years, anti-gay hysteria has been sweeping across swaths of Africa, fueled by sensationalist media reports of open homosexuality among public figures and sustained by deep and abiding taboos that have made even the most hateful speech about gays not just acceptable but almost required. Gay men and women have recently been arrested in Cameroon, Nigeria, Uganda and Ghana, among other countries.

“In most countries there is poverty and instability, and usually homosexuality is used as a way of shifting the attention from the actual problem to this thing that is not really the problem but can distract the public,” said Joel Nana, who is from Cameroon and who works for the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.

Pape Mbaye (pronounced POP mm-BYE) had been living the Senegalese version of the high life for some time. He had worked principally as a griot, a singer and storyteller invited to weddings, birthday parties and other events to perform traditional songs, dance and tell stories.

By West African standards, it earned him a good living. He had performed at parties for wealthy and famous Senegalese, had two cars and a driver, an overflowing wardrobe and an apartment in a fashionable neighborhood decked out with rococo gold-leaf-encrusted furniture.

Mr. Mbaye, who said he had known he was gay from a young age, never made much of an effort to hide his sexuality, often wearing makeup and jewelry in public.

Though Senegal passed an anti-sodomy law in 1965 that forbids “an improper or unnatural act with a person of the same sex,” homosexuality has traditionally been quietly tolerated in Senegal, particularly among the creative class of musicians and artists that is so central to Senegalese culture.

But the publication of the gay wedding photos on Feb. 1 dovetailed with a recent surge in anti-gay sentiment, a trend partly fueled by some conservative Islamic leaders, launching Mr. Mbaye on his harrowing odyssey.

On the morning after the article’s publication, Mr. Mbaye and several gay friends were arrested by the police, who held them for four days. During his detention, Mr. Mbaye said, he was questioned about his participation in the marriage ceremony, which he asserted was a party, not a wedding. Under diplomatic pressure from the Netherlands and Denmark, the Senegalese authorities released Mr. Mbaye and his friends.

The singer said police officials told him and his friends that they should go into hiding. “The police cannot guarantee your security because the entire society will be out to get you,” a police official said, according to testimony that Mr. Mbaye would later give to Human Rights Watch.

While he was in detention, his apartment was looted and anti-gay graffiti was scrawled on the wall of the building, he said. He and several gay friends fled to Ziguinchor in south Senegal, but in mid-February, a mob wielding broken bottles, forks and other weapons stormed the house and beat them, Mr. Mbaye said.

Mr. Mbaye spent the next several weeks moving from one safe house to another before fleeing to Gambia on May 11. Several days later, President Yahya Jammeh of Gambia vowed to behead all homosexuals in his country. Mr. Mbaye immediately returned to Dakar.

But he was discovered and chased by a crowd, as local newspapers and radio stations reported his return. He sought sanctuary at the offices of Raddho, a human rights organization based in Dakar, which put him in the care of Human Rights Watch.

“I am like a hunted animal,” Mr. Mbaye said during an interview while he hid out in a Dakar hotel.

Human Rights Watch helped Mr. Mbaye assemble his refugee application and get to Ghana, where he sought help from the American Embassy in Accra, the country’s capital.

While in Ghana, Mr. Mbaye said, he was attacked again, this time by knife-wielding Senegalese expatriates who had discovered he was there. The assault, which left him with wounds, likely accelerated the review process for his application, Mr. Nugent said. (Confidentiality regulations forbid United States immigration officials from discussing the case.)

Mr. Mbaye received his refugee status on July 31, and he arrived at Kennedy Airport on Aug. 18 carrying several suitcases and a Chanel handbag. A few weeks later, he received his Social Security card and work authorization permit. He hopes to resume his entertainment career, though he acknowledges that until he improves his English, he will have to perform in French and Wolof, an African language. He also dreams of getting a modeling contract.

In the meantime, he said, he will do just about anything.

“I would like a job in a restaurant or a hotel or a club or in perfume or in makeup,” he said. “But no bricklaying.”

Mr. Nugent has been posting notices on Internet mailing lists serving the gay community in search of sponsors to help Mr. Mbaye find work, including in gay nightclubs.

Mr. Mbaye seems undaunted by the challenges facing him. At his friends’ home in Harlem, he celebrated his newfound freedom.

“I want to live with the gays!” he said as his hosts laughed. “Pape Mbaye is American!”

Mr. Semple reported from New York and Ms. Polgreen from Dakar, Senegal.

Newsweek: The Palin Problem

The Palin Problem

Yes, she won the debate by not imploding. But governing requires knowledge, and mindless populism is just that—mindless.
Jon Meacham
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Oct 13, 2008

The question, the McCain campaign later acknowledged, was a fair one. In one of her sit-downs with Katie Couric of CBS News, Sarah Palin was asked to discuss a Supreme Court decision with which she disagreed. "Well, let's see," Palin replied, pausing. "There's, of course in the great history of America there have been rulings, that's never going to be absolute consensus by every American. And there are those issues, again, like Roe v. Wade, where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So you know, going through the history of America, there would be others but …" Couric followed up: "Can you think of any?" Palin, still pondering, said: "Well, I could think of … any again, that could be best dealt with on a more local level. Maybe I would take issue with. But, you know, as mayor, and then as governor and even as a vice president, if I'm so privileged to serve, wouldn't be in a position of changing those things but in supporting the law of the land as it reads today." Asked about the exchange afterward, a McCain adviser who didn't want to be named talking about a sensitive matter said the question was fair, but added: "I wonder how many Americans would be able to name decisions they disagree with. The court is very important, but Palin is on the ticket because she connects with everyday Americans."

Palin is on the ticket because she connects with everyday Americans. It is not shocking to learn that politics played a big role in the making of a presidential team (ticket-balancing to attract different constituencies has been with us at least since Andrew Jackson ran with John C. Calhoun, a man he later said he would like to kill). But that honest explanation of the rationale for her candidacy—not her preparedness for office, but her personality and nascent maverickism in Alaska—raises an important question, not only about this election but about democratic leadership. Do we want leaders who are everyday folks, or do we want leaders who understand everyday folks? Therein lies an enormous difference, one that could decide the presidential election and, if McCain and Palin were to win, shape the governance of the nation.

In an interview before her debate with Sen. Joseph R. Biden, Palin offered a revealing answer to radio host Hugh Hewitt. "Governor, your candidacy has ignited extreme hostility, even some hatred on the left and in some parts of the media," Hewitt said. "Are you surprised? And what do you attribute this reaction to?"

On the phone from McCain's retreat in Sedona, Palin replied: "I think they're just not used to someone coming in from the outside saying, 'You know what? It's time that normal Joe Six-Pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency.' I think that that's kind of taken some people off guard, and they're out of sorts, and they're ticked off about it, but it's motivation for John McCain and I to work that much harder to make sure that our ticket is victorious, and we put government back on the side of the people of Joe Six-Pack like me, and we start doing those things that are expected of our government, and we get rid of corruption, and we commit to the reform that is not only desired, but is deserved by Americans." This is, presumably, good politics: it makes a strength out of a weakness, always a shrewd tactic.

A key argument for Palin, in essence, is this: Washington and Wall Street are serving their own interests rather than those of the broad whole of the country, and the moment requires a vice president who will, Cincinnatus-like, help a new president come to the rescue. The problem with the argument is that Cincinnatus knew things. Palin sometimes seems an odd combination of Chauncey Gardiner from "Being There" and Marge from "Fargo."

Is this an elitist point of view? Perhaps, though it seems only reasonable and patriotic to hold candidates for high office to high standards. Elitism in this sense is not about educational or class credentials, not about where you went to school or whether you use "summer" as a verb. It is, rather, about the pursuit of excellence no matter where you started out in life. Jackson, Lincoln, Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Clinton were born to ordinary families, but they spent their lives doing extraordinary things, demonstrating an interest in, and a curiosity about, the world around them. This is much less evident in Palin's case.

John McCain is a man of accomplishment and curiosity, of wide and deep reading, travel and experience. He is smart without being a snob. He has authored legislation and books. He is a man of parts—the kind of figure whom one could effortlessly imagine being president. Are there many politically attuned people in America now who can honestly say the same thing of Sarah Palin? That they can effortlessly envision President Palin in the Oval Office, ready on day one to manage a market meltdown or a terror attack? Whether one agrees or disagrees with his politics, there is no arguing that McCain is qualified to be president of the United States. But there is plenty of argument about Palin's qualifications. Why should we apply a different standard to the vice president who would stand to succeed him?

Even devoted Republicans doubt whether the Sarah Six-Pack case is the best one to make. After the vice presidential debate, a senior figure in the party, who asked not to be named because he was telling the truth, told me that Palin should talk less about being "just-folks" and more about being governor of a large state.

We have been here before. In 1970 a Nebraska senator, Roman L. Hruska, was defending Richard Nixon's nomination of U.S. circuit Judge G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court. An underwhelming figure, Carswell was facing criticism that he was too "mediocre" for elevation. Hruska tried an interesting counterargument: "Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos." Fair enough, but it still seems sensible to aspire to surpass mediocrity rather than embrace it.

The capacity of the common man (and now woman) to serve in government is the subject of ancient debate. The philosophers Robert Dale Owen and Jeremy Bentham believed in the principle of rotation in office—the idea that citizens could do the work of government for a time, then return to private life—and Andrew Jackson, in the beginning of the modern democratic era, spoke in similar terms about the federal government: "The duties of all public officers are, or at least admit to being made, so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance." But Jackson was thinking about postmasters, not presidents.

We have had terrific presidents and vice presidents from humble backgrounds, and we have had terrible presidents and vice presidents from privileged ones. The unease with Palin is not class-based. It is empirically based. She is a rising political star, a young woman—she is only 44—who has done extraordinary things. It takes guts to offer oneself for election, and to serve. It is far easier to throw spitballs from the stands than it is to seek and hold office. She is a governor, and she has the courage to go into the arena. For that she should be honored and respected. If she were seeking a Senate seat, or being nominated for a cabinet post—secretary of energy, say, or interior—the conversation about her would be totally different.

But she is not seeking a Senate seat, nor is she being nominated for a cabinet post, and so it is only prudent to ask whether she is in fact someone who should be president of the United States in the event of disaster. She may be ready in a year or two, but disaster does not coordinate its calendar with ours. Would we muddle through if Palin were to become president? Yes, we would, but it is worth asking whether we should have to.

What do we know about Palin after, as she put it with a wink, "like, five weeks"? That she can be a superb political performer (she held her own against Biden, projecting an image of warmth and toughness) and she can be a poor one (too many questions in the debate went completely unanswered, and the Couric interview is full of moments no candidate would like to have out there). But that is only human. Everyone has good days and bad days. Her syntax is sometimes a world unto itself. But George H.W. Bush occasionally sounded as though English were more foe than friend, and he was an astute president who managed complexity with skill and balance. The arsenal of folksy phrases—"doggone it," "you betcha"—grates on some, but seems just great to others.

The story of Palin's brief national career helps explain her uneven performances. She had virtually no time to prepare, and has had virtually no time since. Her star turn began quickly, and mysteriously. When Nicolle Wallace and Matthew Scully, two former Bush aides who now work for McCain, showed up at a dingy Ohio hotel in late August to meet the new running mate, they had no idea who might be waiting for them. Just a day before, Wallace had been in a dentist's chair in New York, getting a root canal, when Steve Schmidt, McCain's top strategist, summoned her to Ohio. She tried to say no, but her dentist, a McCain fan, insisted she could make it, giving her a prescription for Vicodin to numb the pain. The next morning, dazed by the meds, Wallace arrived in Cincinnati and drove with Scully to Middletown, Ohio, where McCain's VP was holed up until the big announcement the following day.

As Wallace and Scully drove up, they were met outside by Schmidt and Mark Salter, McCain's longtime aide and speechwriter. Schmidt escorted the two upstairs, where he dramatically paused before a closed door. "You're No. 7 and 8," Schmidt said, referring to the number of people who were privy to McCain's choice. As the door opened, a woman rose to greet them, shaking their hands enthusiastically. Scully and Wallace, still numb from her procedure, smiled and introduced themselves. The woman, Sarah Palin, looked very familiar, but, as both later recounted to other McCain aides, they did not immediately know who she was. (McCain loves this story, relishing the success of his bid to keep the selection process secret.)

When she shook their hands, the governor of Alaska was already in the surreal bubble of a modern presidential campaign, an odd ethos in which one is rarely alone and yet often lonely. Remembering how John Edwards had brought his own staff to the ticket with John Kerry in 2004, creating immediate and lasting tensions, the McCain camp wanted to exert complete control over their running mate. Schmidt and others assembled a team of well-known Republican hands for the veep squad. The campaign pointedly did not hire anyone from Palinworld.

The governor, meanwhile, is only a recent visitor to McCainworld. After the announcement in Dayton, the Friday before the convention in St. Paul, aides gave her thick binders full of policies and arranged sit-downs with some of McCain's top advisers, including Randy Scheunemann, Doug Holtz-Eakin and Sens. Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham. On the day she was nominated, Palin, joining McCain on a bus tour, was given reading material: every policy speech McCain has given in this campaign.

Some who know her from Alaska suggest that Palin is a deft crammer, and her performance against Biden supports that. Larry Persily, a former Anchorage Daily News editorial-page editor, left the newspaper in May 2007 and worked as an associate director in Palin's Washington, D.C., office until June 2008. He says he left on good terms—Palin offered him another job when he resigned—but he believes she is not qualified to be vice president and is speaking out for that reason. He describes Palin as an easily distracted manager. "Her preppings [briefings] were accentuated by the brevity of them. She's not going to pore over briefing books and charts and white papers and reports for hours and hours. She knows how to connect with people, and it's like, 'Give me bullet points and I'll run with it' … I don't think she had trouble focusing. She didn't have an interest in focusing."

Her isolation in recent weeks has taken a toll, and she has been hungry for company. It has been difficult for Palin to be isolated from her friends not only by distance, but also electronically. Palin's Yahoo account was hacked into in mid-September and messages between her and friends were posted online. (In one such message, a colleague tells Palin not to let the negative press get to her.) Wasilla friend Kristan Cole says that in the initial days after Palin was picked she regularly communicated with Palin via e-mail. That stopped after the hacking incident. The women have always talked electronically. "You can do it on the go and respond at 2 o'clock in the morning, and with all the time changes that was the best way to communicate." Since Palin's account was hacked into, Cole has not sent her a single e-mail or received one from her. "I'm more gun-shy, because when you've had the relationship we have had—my son was in a critical car accident, and working through all that and her family and Trig—it's made me hesitant to say anything very personal [via e-mail], and that's sad."

A turning point came last week, when Kris Perry returned to Palin's immediate orbit. Perry, who worked as her scheduler, was stuck in Anchorage for the past month, waiting to see if she would be deposed in the ongoing "Troopergate" investigation. Only on the Friday before the Thursday debate, after a delay in the investigation, did Perry feel able to leave town and fly south. (Troopergate could make headlines again this Friday, when a special counsel is due to issue his report on the matter.) It was Perry who helped Palin relax and regain her footing prior to last Thursday night's debate.

Sealing Palin off from Perry, whom she met when both were in the hospital giving birth to their children six years ago (in Palin's case it was her fourth, daughter Piper), was a mistake, say those in Palinworld. Next to Todd, says one former aide who did not want to be named discussing sensitive personnel matters, Perry was the person most responsible for "creating a sense of peace around Sarah." Despite recent media reports of a wild temper, those who know Palin say she is more prone to anxiety and frantic overdrive than tantrums. "She's the world's worst multitasker," says the aide. "She'll have a cell phone in one hand, the BlackBerry in the other while she is reading two position papers. You have to tell her prior to the debate, 'Put that down, breathe deep.' They [the McCain staff] are not going to know that."

What Palin knows, and what the country knows about her, is an issue for the next few weeks. Barack Obama is not the Messiah, and Biden is no Simon Peter, but it stretches credulity to say that Obama is no more qualified to be president than Palin is. Though you may prefer McCain-Palin to Obama-Biden, there is not the same threshold question about the Democrats that is now being asked about Palin.

Sitting with her for part of the Couric interview, McCain implicitly compared Palin to Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, saying that they, too, had been caricatured and dismissed by mainstream voices. The linkages are untenable. For all of his manifold sins, Clinton was a longtime governor, and George H.W. Bush's attacks on his qualifications failed for a reason: people may not have respected Clinton's character, but they did not doubt the quality of his mind. A successful two-term governor of California, Reagan had spent decades immersed in politics (of both the left and the right) before running for president. He did like to call himself a citizen-politician, and Lord knows he had an occasionally ambiguous relationship with facts, but he was a serious man who had spent a great deal of time thinking about the central issues of the age. To put it kindly, Palin, however promising a governor she is, has not done similar work.

I could be wrong. Perhaps Sarah Palin will somehow emerge from the hurly-burly of history as a transformative figure who was underestimated in her time by journalists who could not see, or refused to acknowledge, her virtues. But do I think I am right in saying that Palin's populist view of high office—hey, Vice President Six-Pack, what should we do about Pakistan?—is dangerous? You betcha.

With Holly Bailey, Karen Breslau, Suzanne Smalley, Michael Isikoff and Sarah Kliff
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/162396

Palin Quotes Reagan: Freedom.....From Medicare?

This Is Why I Voted For Joe Biden In The Primary

No, Lou Dobbs is a man, not a newspaper

http://thenationalprotrusion.com/couric-palin-were-recording/1224/

“In one part of the interview, I asked her what newspapers and magazines she read before being asked to be John McCain’s running mate,” Couric said. “And she couldn’t name any. So again, I turned to the crew and I said, ‘Hold it, guys,’ and I went to the Governor privately and said, ‘Governor Palin, did you not understand the question? I’m asking you to name some newspapers or magazines you read. You can’t come up with any? I’m just trying to make sure you’re clear and to give you a fair shake here.’ And she said, ‘Okay. Nightline? Is that a magazine?’ I said, ‘No, that’s a television show.’ She said, ‘What about Lou Dobbs? Isn’t that a newspaper?’ And I said, ‘No, that’s a man. Lou Dobbs is a man.’ And there wasn’t much more I could do. I’m not a miracle worker.” -Katie Couric (on Sarah Palin)

Scientists trace AIDS virus origin to 100 years ago

* Story Highlights
* Study: AIDS virus origin decades earlier than scientists previously thought
* Genetic analysis pushes estimated origin of HIV to between 1884 and 1924
* "Virus was circulating under our radar even longer than we knew," author says
* Infections usually take years to produce obvious symptoms, experts say

NEW YORK (AP) -- The AIDS virus has been circulating among people for about 100 years, decades longer than scientists had thought, a new study suggests.

Genetic analysis pushes the estimated origin of HIV back to between 1884 and 1924, with a more focused estimate at 1908.

Previously, scientists had estimated the origin at around 1930. AIDS wasn't recognized formally until 1981 when it got the attention of public health officials in the United States.

The new result is "not a monumental shift, but it means the virus was circulating under our radar even longer than we knew," says Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, an author of the new work.

The results appear in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. Researchers note that the newly calculated dates fall during the rise of cities in Africa, and they suggest urban development may have promoted HIV's initial establishment and early spread.

Scientists say HIV descended from a chimpanzee virus that jumped to humans in Africa, probably when people butchered chimps. Many individuals were probably infected that way, but so few other people caught the virus that it failed to get a lasting foothold, researchers say.

But the growth of African cities may have changed that by putting lots of people close together and promoting prostitution, Worobey suggested. "Cities are kind of ideal for a virus like HIV," providing more chances for infected people to pass the virus to others, he said.

Perhaps a person infected with the AIDS virus in a rural area went to what is now Kinshasa, Congo, "and now you've got the spark arriving in the tinderbox," Worobey said.

Key to the new work was the discovery of an HIV sample that had been taken from a woman in Kinshasa in 1960. It was only the second such sample to be found from before 1976; the other was from 1959, also from Kinshasa.

Researchers took advantage of the fact that HIV mutates rapidly. So two strains from a common ancestor quickly become less and less alike in their genetic material over time. That allows scientists to "run the clock backward" by calculating how long it would take for various strains to become as different as they are observed to be. That would indicate when they both sprang from their most recent common ancestor.

The new work used genetic data from the two old HIV samples plus more than 100 modern samples to create a family tree going back to these samples' last common ancestor. Researchers got various answers under various approaches for when that ancestor virus appeared, but the 1884-to-1924 bracket is probably the most reliable, Worobey said.

The new work is "clearly an improvement" over the previous estimate of around 1930, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland. His institute helped pay for the work.

Fauci described the advance as "a fine-tuning."

Experts say it's no surprise that HIV circulated in humans for about 70 years before being recognized. An infection usually takes years to produce obvious symptoms, a lag that can mask the role of the virus, and it would have infected relatively few Africans early in its spread, they said.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

US Displays Its Atrocious Foregin Policy

Pakistan said Thursday it was not warned about a suspected U.S. missile strike in its northwest that came the same day a top American official assured Pakistani leaders of U.S. respect for the Muslim nation’s sovereignty. The reported attack will likely fuel anger in Pakistan over a surge in cross-border operations by U.S. forces — including a Sept. 3 ground assault — that has strained the countries’ seven-year anti-terror alliance.” (09/18/08)

SOURCE: National Review