Jerry Lee Lewis and Neil Young
Baby You Don’t Have to Go

Jerry Lee Lewis has a new CD out, Last Man Standing.

Against all odds, Lewis, who turned 71 in September, outlived every other member of Sun Records- famed “Million Dollar Quartet” — Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash. He also has lived longer than most of his other rock-and-roll contemporaries, (but not his one-time rival Chuck Berry, who turned 80 on Wednesday). Thus, the album title, “Last Man Standing.”

But if Lewis’s age makes him a geezer, you couldn-t tell it by his duets on the album with semi-geezers like Merle Haggard, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Rod Stewart, George Jones, John Fogerty and others.
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Click here to purchase CD.

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - A military officer probing new charges of prisoner abuse here will encounter a pervasive atmosphere of hostility and suspicion between the detainees and U.S. troops who consider themselves at war.

Even on a recent, controlled visit, an Associated Press reporter and photographer found that the prison brims with hatred. Former prisoners say the guards kick and punch them for no reason and treat them as subhuman. Guards say the inmates fling excrement at them, along with racial slurs and death threats.

Guantanamo is under renewed scrutiny after a U.S. Marine working for a detainee’s defense team said she heard guards boast about beating detainees and depriving them of personal items without provocation. The guards described the abuse as commonplace, the Marine said in an affidavit, prompting the Pentagon’s Inspector General to order an investigation.

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Actually, that’s not completely true. Republican politicians are prone to lying in both good times and bad. We’ve certainly been hearing some doozies uttered by the “party of family values” in these final weeks leading up to the November elections. Take, for example, what the biggest liar of all said today…

Bush campaigns on pocketbook issues

By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer

SARASOTA, Fla. - Look around the dinner table and add $500 to your tax bill for each child,
President Bush said Tuesday as he sought to convince voters that Democrats would destroy the economy and the family budget if they took over Congress.

“When you go to the voting booth in two weeks, the lever you pull will determine the taxes you pay for years to come,” Bush said on a fundraising swing through Florida aimed at adding nearly $1.4 million to GOP coffers. “You will feel the results every April 15.”
…

“If you’re sitting around a dinner table and there’s two children, your taxes just went up $1,000 if they take control,” the president said, continuing to do the math for three children, or four.

But he didn’t get it quite right. Bush skimmed past the fact that the child tax credit is not yet $1,000 and doesn’t reach that level until 2010.

He also ignored that many Democrats now say they want to retain that tax cut. In 2001, when it originally passed by a 282-144 vote, most Democrats voted against it because they said it was part of an overall Bush-backed tax package that provided meager tax relief in the early years, was far more costly than GOP estimates and was tilted toward wealthy taxpayers.

“The question is: Why hasn’t the president and his rubber’stamp Republican Congress joined Democrats’ efforts to expand the child tax credit?” said Jennifer Crider, spokeswoman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., referring to Democrats’ wishes to make low-income families eligible for the credit.

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Anyone reading this post, I ask you to ask yourself, what is the federal deficit today as compared to what it was when Bush first bamboozled his way into the White House?

AMERICAN DEATHS HAVE PASSED 2,800…… NOW STANDING AT 2,803 AND 1,283 IRAQI DEATHS JUST THIS MONTH.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have fled the unrelenting violence in their homeland since the U.S. invasion in 2003 - a mass exodus directed primarily to neighboring Arab countries.

But a growing tide of Iraqis is seeking shelter and a new start in Europe, where Sweden is emerging as the destination of choice due to relatively lax immigration laws.

The number of Iraqis applying for asylum in the 25 countries of the European Union rose by nearly 50 percent to 7,300 in the first six months of the year, bucking a downward trend in the total number of asylum’seekers, U.N. statistics show.

Full article here

Here are today’s Battleground Dispatches - a roundup of what is going on right now in the year’s hottest races, based on reports from local and national media, with 14 days remaining until Election Day.

McClatchy-MSNBC Senate polls: Results from the latest McClatchy-MSNBC polls on competitive Senate races, conducted by Mason-Dixon:

Missouri - McCaskill (D) 46%, Talent (R) 43%;
Montana - Tester (D) 46%, Burns (R) 43%;
New Jersey - Menendez (D) 45%, Kean (R) 42%;
Ohio - Brown (D) 48, DeWine (R) 40%;
Pennsylvania - Casey (D) 55%, Santorum (R) 39%;
Rhode Island - Whitehouse (D) 48%, Chafee (R) 43%;
Tennessee - Corker (R) 45%, Ford (D) 43%;
Virginia - Allen (R) 47%, Webb (D) 43%

More here

CNN restricted an on-air discussion about a new book dealing with the Iraq war because peace activist Cindy Sheehan threatened to sue over provocative claims about her in the book, one of its co-authors claims.

“American Mourning” examines how the death of two U.S. soldiers in Iraq affected their families. One of the two is the Sheehan family.

Co-author Melanie Morgan told Cybercast News Service she was slated to appear on CNN’s Headline News’ “Glenn Beck” program last week and that a producer told her it would be a short segment, focusing on passing claims in the book regarding Sheehan’s personal life.

Morgan said she replied: “OK, fine, whatever,” and continued on the promotional tour for the book, which deals with the families of Casey Sheehan of Vacaville, Calif., and Justin Johnson of Rome, Ga., friends who were killed within five days of each other in separate ambushes in Sadr City, Iraq, during April 2004.

While en route to CNN studios to tape the interview, however, Morgan received another call from the producer telling her that the segment would now deal with “everything but the sex issues.”

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Melanie Morgan gained national notoriety in the summer of 2006 when she suggested that Bill Keller, an editor of the New York Times, be killed in a “gaschamber” for the crime of “treason” after the Times’ reporting on US government spying on Americans…for which she earned an Olbermann Worst Person.

ISLAMIC scholars and clerics in Indian Kashmir are learning English in what they say is a bid to propagate Islam’s “true message” and remove misconceptions in the West about their faith.

The one-year intensive course is being taught at the new Islamic University of Science and Technology just south of Srinagar, summer capital of Indian Kashmir.

“English is a global language and once we speak it, we-ll be able to easily convey Islam’s true message through this language to people of other faiths,” said student Irshad Ahmed who heads a seminary in Awantipora town, where the university is situated.

The long-bearded students believe Islam has been wrongly portrayed as a religion of violence since the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US.

“We want to clear that perception. Islam is for peace and brotherhood, justice and friendship,” says another student Tanveer Wani…

…”We want to remove misconceptions about Islam, especially in the West. We`ll be able to put our points across by learning English,” says Elahi, a soft’spoken man from northern Kashmir.

“We also want to study other religions, their history, culture and beliefs and try to explore what is common between major religions,” adds Ahmed.

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Congress yesterday sent the bill to build 700 miles of fencing on the U.S.-Mexico border to President Bush, who will sign it in a ceremony Thursday morning in the White House Roosevelt Room.

The decision to have a public ceremony is a reversal for the Bush administration, which had appeared reluctant to tie itself so publicly to the enforcement-only measure. Although Mr. Bush had committed to signing the bill, aides had said consistently over the past few weeks there would not be a signing ceremony.

But Republicans in Congress had demanded a public signing, with leaders saying the bill is a major accomplishment that will help their re-election prospects.

“The American people demand a secure border, and this Republican Congress has responded to the American people’s demand for a secure border by increasing the physical barriers and infrastructure along the border and by providing state of the art monitoring technology,” House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Illinois Republican, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, said in a joint statement trumpeting the bill’s official transmission yesterday morning.

They had held onto the bill in order to guarantee Mr. Bush’s signature closer to the election, when it would have the biggest impact. Aides said they were also holding out for a signing ceremony, to use the presidential pulpit for maximum attention…

…”Democrat leader [Nancy] Pelosi voted against the Secure Fence Act because she has never been to the border to understand that it is a national security emergency. The Democrat leadership must think that border security is about adding more security guards at Borders Book Stores,” said Ron Bonjean, spokesman for Mr. Hastert.

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ISRAELI Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has reached a deal to broaden his shaky coalition by adding a far-right party that seeks to annex parts of the West Bank and reduce Israel’s Arab population.

The move is seen as an attempt to stabilise the faltering coalition Government, which has been struggling for months. But the new partner - Israel Beiteinu, or Israel Is Our Home - strongly opposes concessions to the Palestinians.

The deal signals that Mr Olmert is now more concerned with internal Israeli politics than with initiatives to deal with the Palestinians.

The agreement changes the complexion of the Government, which previously presented itself as centrist. The shift has been caused largely by the two military crises in Gaza and Lebanon. Polls suggest Mr Olmert would be heavily defeated in an election now by more traditional, right-wing parties.

The Prime Minister has already indicated that the central theme of his election campaign, a withdrawal from some Jewish settlements in the West Bank, has been put on indefinite hold. The latest development reinforces that notion…

…Mr Olmert overrode opposition from some liberal members of his coalition to bring in the party led by Avigdor Lieberman, a Soviet immigrant who advocates annexing Jewish settlements in the West Bank and transferring most Arab citizens of Israel to a future Palestinian state.

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