Madonna dedicates "Like a Virgin" to pope

In response to the Vatican's accusation of putting on satanic shows, Madonna dedicated the song during a concert in Italy to Pope Benedict XVI. Madonna was once a Catholic herself. Madonna's says "I dedicate this song to the pope, because I'm a child of God. All of you are also children of God,"

Scorecard is needed to keep up with Kate Hudson's beaus

As Kate Hudson fans gear up for her latest romantic comedy offering opening Friday, "My Best Friend's Girl," they'll meet the newest man in her movie dating life, comedian Dane Cook. Dane Cook? He's not exactly Matthew McConaughey, but he might do if you're in dire need of your Hudson romcom fix. In fact, Hudson seems to be going through beaus on and off screen pretty thoroughly these days. Since her 2007 divorce from rocker Chris Robinson, Hudson's allegedly dated Owen Wilson, comedian Dax Shepard, Wilson a second time around, Lance Armstrong, and now she's rumored to be living with Robinson again. Here's a recap of her onscreen romances in recent years: 1. "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" (2003). Hudson pairs with Matthew McConaughey for the first time. 2. "Alex and Emma" (2003). Years before she dates his brother, Owen, Hudson romances Luke Wilson on screen. 3. "Raising Helen" (2004). To "Sex and the City" fans, he's Aidan Shaw, but to Hudson's character in this flick, co-star John Corbett is a love interest. 4. "You, Me and Dupree" (2006). On screen she's married to Matt Dillon, but sparks are igniting off screen between Hudson and co-star Owen Wilson.

5. "Fool's Gold" (2008). After a few years off, Hudson is back and reunited with on-screen squeeze McConaughey. 6. "My Best Friend's Girl" (opens Friday). Dane Cook takes Hudson on a date, but there's a catch: She's the ex of his best friend

Sara Paretsky confesses why she supports Barack Obama

I grew up in rural Kansas, with the kind of Norman Rockwell childhood you hear a lot about these days: our two-room school's baseball diamond was carved from a cornfield. My dad, who held Army medals for marksmanship, owned two rifles. I never killed a polar bear, or shot at wolves from a helicopter, but I took care of my share of rats at the garbage dump where we took our trash in those pre-green days. It's been a while since I held a rifle, but I used to be able to clean and fire a .25 pretty well.
Our family was typically American in other ways: we were a Heinz 57 mix of religions and ethnicities. One of my great-grandfathers was a Hasid, an ultra-orthodox Jew in eastern Poland; another studied for the Catholic priesthood before realizing that life wasn't meant for him. Other great-great grandfathers were part of the generation of Puritan preachers who settled New England in the seventeenth century.
In my family, as in so many blended American families, our central holiday was the Fourth of July. On that day, it didn't matter if you spoke to the Divine Presence in Hebrew or Latin or English; it didn't matter if the Divine spoke back to you through tongues or in Isaiah's still small voice, or didn't speak at all. What mattered was that we all came together to celebrate this sweet land of liberty.
On the Fourth of July, my father taught us the history of the country. My mother had my brothers and me memorize sections of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution. We learned:
We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do establish and ordain this Constitution for the United States of America.
We the People. Not, we the billionaires. Not, we the believers in Creationism. Not, we the oil industry lobbyists. Just, we the people.
This is why I support Barack Obama for President of the United States. He understands this mandate, and he has lived it during fourteen years of public service.
The Founders of this country could not have imagined our health care system when they wrote that they wished to "promote the general welfare." But they surely did not confuse "the general welfare" with the wealth and health of the few. In America today, we taxpayers give the Republican president and his would-be successor free health care of the highest quality in the world. When Mr. Bush returns to Crawford, and Senator McCain to Sedona, we taxpayers will continue to provide them this gold-plated health care. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain have told us taxpayers to go to the emergency room when we're sick.
Barack Obama, from the day he entered public life, has understood that we all share the blessings of liberty, and that we all share the costs and the benefits of those blessings. As a state legislator in one of America's largest states--with almost twenty times the population of Alaska--he worked with Republicans and Democrats to create affordable health care for Illinois children, so that when they were sick, or born with disabilities, their mothers didn't have to line up in an emergency room. He worked for the welfare of our oldest citizens, who had given a life of service to this country, and did not need to spend their final years in poverty and indignity. As a United States Senator, Barack Obama has continued that important, bi-partisan work.
When the Founders of our country talked about "establishing justice," they wanted justice for all Americans without fear or favor. We've lived in a poisonous atmosphere for the last eight years, where if you paid lip service to religion, you could buy and sell our natural resources while having cocaine and sex parties. You could fire federal prosecutors for not supporting the president. You could threaten to put librarians in prison for the crime of consulting a lawyer when the Department of Justice came calling at their libraries.
This is also why I support Barack Obama for President of the United States. He believes that justice means observing the law impartially for all, not just for the wealthy, not just for people who pay lip service to religious beliefs.
I have spent the last forty years working for women's rights to be treated as full and equal citizens under the law. And this is the final reason that I support Barack Obama.
I have a fourteen-year-old granddaughter, and like all grandmothers, my beloved granddaughter is dearer to me than anything else on this earth. I want her to grow up in a world where she can make the most important decisions about her life in the privacy of her home or doctor's office: her decisions about whether to become pregnant, whether to be a mother. She doesn't need a government telling her what to do.
Governor Palin has demanded privacy for her teen daughter's pregnancy, and for the Palin family's decisions about sex education and contraception, but the governor, and Senator McCain, both want my granddaughter's decisions to be the government's business.
If Barack Obama is elected president, he will keep the government out of our bedrooms. He will return our nation to the serious work the Republicans have abandoned for far too many years: providing for the common defence, promoting the general welfare, securing the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
Sara Paretsky is a writer whose most recent books are the essays Writing in an Age of Silence and the novel, Bleeding Kansas.
Barack Obama
I grew up in rural Kansas, with the kind of Norman Rockwell childhood you hear a lot about these days: our two-room school's baseball diamond was carved from a cornfield. My dad, who held Army medals ...
I grew up in rural Kansas, with the kind of Norman Rockwell childhood you hear a lot about these days: our two-room school's baseball diamond was carved from a cornfield. My dad, who held Army medals ...

John Cussack says Mccain/palin worse than Bush

We all know McCain has sold his soul to win. Big mistake: the Democrats are taking the GOP bait, especially on Palin. She is the ultimate distraction. If we're not careful she'll be the final distraction. The perfect new celebrity -- Sarah Barracuda -- to capture the message in the 24-hour spin orgy, all the while attacking Obama as an elite celebrity. Any narrative that focuses on her -- any -- is a win for Republicans, carrying an undercurrent of race wars, gender wars, class wars. All ending with a debate on God and a return visit to Rev. Wright.
Palin is a gateway drug to a back-alley brawl Obama can't win. A Joseph Conrad-produced reality show/sitcom with Palin replacing Roseanne Barr fighting for the little guy with sass and sex. Wonderful.
Watch McCain repeat "maverick" 300 times a day, like a mantra, 'til Election Day. Republicans and hockey moms against corruption and Lear jets. Orwell for second graders: distraction and chaos, phony scandals and bullshit patriotics from the crew that would install an inexperienced neophyte -- not even put through the crucible of the national stage -- a heartbeat away from the greatest nuclear arsenal the world has ever known, and not blink. Darkest reptilian politics that speak to the ultimate calcified cynicism of Republicans.
Democrats need to ignore her -- unless she speaks about policy -- maybe she can explain and solve the collapsing world markets -- and keep the focus relentlessly on the disastrous results of Bush/McCain/Republican rule. They need to remind voters of the disasters of the last seven-plus years. Specifically. And as people have been saying, we need to be mad as well as inspired.
John McCain is the Republican Party as much as Bush -- we need to be constantly reminded of the policies (and, yes, the crimes) that are threatening this country from within.
Obama must hit Republicans ten times harder. Let's hear about war profiteering, taxpayer-funded mercenary armies and privatizing core functions of state, habeas corpus and warrantless wiretapping and presidential signing statements, and Katrina and justice department politicization, and phony intel and Abu Ghraib, rendition and torture.
If the Democratic leadership wants to disregard its base and continue to disregard the rule of law, they deserve to lose...and will. Let's hope the Obama campaign doesn't come to this conclusion 10 days out. He needs to articulate his vision of the future, but he also needs to articulate a version of reality. The fiercest urgency is needed now.
But some other fundamentals seem to be lost in the frenzy. McCain is no maverick, but it is worth understanding why the rabid right wing is cheering his call for government "reform" and to change "how government works at every level."
McCain won't just be more of the same -- it will be worse than Bush-Cheney -- using the disasters of the past eight years and the actual crises we face to double down on the American Enterprise/Heritage Foundation vision of government that desires, as Grover Norquist said, to shrink government until "we can drown it in a bathtub."
I would recommend a return visit to the groundbreaking Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.
McCain, who said he knows nothing about economics, will surely hand over the reins to the Friedmanites and neoconservatives who have sent the country on a path to ruin. Anyone looking at his team could tell you that. Palin and the interests she represents are even further to the right.
Now, no one in their right mind -- including reasonable independents and Republicans -- wants to double down on neocon ideology, but here comes the "maverick" and his economic advisers to use the crises we face to implement more "change" and "reform" to the system by privatizing everything in sight. Is this what the American people want? When they are aware of it, the answer is always no. It's the same bullshit re-branded.
It may happen in a shock therapy in the first 100 days, or financial chaos may force them to wait until things stabilize, but sooner or later they will follow their fundamentalist creed. Ruin the government you are purporting to run and turn it over to privatization frenzy, creating a shadow government of private corporate rule. That's the whole idea.
So let's brand bust this maverick gibberish but understand the coded language that belies their true mission... we should take them at the true meaning of their words.
Not just more of the same -- worse than the same. Times of crisis are great opportunities to implement the radical agendas we usually reject.
That's also the idea.
McCain and the neocon ideologues won't "reform" government, they will gut government and privatize everything in sight in the name of responding to the crises they helped engineer through Bush and Cheney. Their view of government is the reverse of the Hippocratic Oath: do harm and then when the patient is sick, give the wrong medicine, watch him die, and sell off the body parts.
They will destroy the Department of Energy, HUD and anything else they can get their hands on. With this crew, all you need to do is destroy government, privatize it and get out of the way, and then a magic utopia appears. Well, actually it doesn't, but a lot of connected people get rich, and in the privatized war business, blood money flows and a fuck of a lot of innocent people die. The numbers and the misery are staggering. The legacy of Bush/McCain is a legacy of shame. Any man that stood with this criminal administration should be forced to answer for it.
The Republicans have been ruinous and most of it stems from an ideology that leaves the government in ruins. McCain has been on board hook, line and sinker. He voted with Bush over 90% of the time. End of story.
It is fundamentally corrupt and dishonest to call it reform when leaders want to cripple government, then hand it over to private industry, usually subsidized by taxpayers, but for other people's profits. More like contempt for government.
Red meat for dummies... a horror show for the rest of us.
Obama needs to explain to the country what this will cost us in real terms -- however many billions a day in Iraq and what that could buy, repair, fix, and allow in human terms -- ask us if can we afford it, and Obama must -- to use imagery the neocons can understand -- knock them down, put his boots on their throats, and never let up.
John McCain
Sarah Palin
We all know McCain has sold his soul to win. Big mistake: the Democrats are taking the GOP bait, especially on Palin. She is the ultimate distraction. If we're not careful she'll be the final distract...
We all know McCain has sold his soul to win. Big mistake: the Democrats are taking the GOP bait, especially on Palin. She is the ultimate distraction. If we're not careful she'll be the final distract...

Barack Obama raises the funding roof for u.s elections

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama raised a record $66 million in August, his highest monthly figure and almost $20 million more than Republican rival John McCain.Obama's total since entering the race in early 2007 is now more than $450 million -- a figure that confirms his standing as the most successful fundraiser in U.S. political history.Obama has surpassed President Bush as history's most prolific political fundraiser. Bush raised $270 million for his reelection campaign four years ago, and $95 million in 2000, for a total of $365 million.Additionally, the Democratic National Committee and other committees established by the DNC and the candidate raised $17.3 million in August.The Obama campaign also said $10 million came in during the days after Aug. 29, when McCain selected Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee.The Republican National Committee took in $23 million in August. With McCain's $47 million, the two sides will have entered the final two months with combined bank accounts of about the same size.Anthony Corrado, a campaign finance expert at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, predicted that Obama, McCain and their political parties would spend $220 million to $240 million each between now and Nov. 4."They have built an infrastructure like we've never seen," Corrado said of the Obama campaign, pointing to the $20 million Obama has poured into a Latino voter registration drive and field operations in the battleground states.Obama's latest receipts counter talk that his fundraising had tailed off. Corrado said such talk reflected a lack understanding of how Obama had built his fundraising operation.Obama relies on high-end donors to give the maximum $2,300 directly to his campaign account, but has more than 2 million donors overall, many of whom give small amounts regularly over the Internet.Obama has several large-dollar fundraisers in the coming days, including one Tuesday at Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. Donors are expected to give $28,500 to the Democratic National Committee.Barbra Streisand will headline a separate event at the Regency Wilshire in Beverly Hills that same evening.Additionally, former President Clinton has promised to campaign for Obama and is sure to raise millions more.Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton campaigned for Obama on Sunday in the key battleground state of Ohio, urging supporters in Elyria and Akron to work as hard for Obama and Joe Biden as they had for her, the Associated Press reported. She revised her Democratic convention admonition to: "No way, no how, no McCain and no Palin!"Meanwhile, organized labor and others launched multimillion-dollar ad campaigns in battleground states.The two-million member Service Employees International Union announced Sunday that it was spending $2.1 million on pro-Obama advertising. The union already has spent $21 million on the presidential campaign, including $9.7 million since June, when Obama locked up the nomination, Federal Election Commission disclosures show.The latest ad is airing in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Iowa. It depicts a mother discussing the strain placed on her family by the tough economic times.The announcer then says: "John McCain said, 'I know a lot less about economics . . . I still need to be educated.' . . . No wonder he said we're better off than we were eight years ago."Also Sunday, the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund announced it would run the first ad to specifically target Palin. The ad, to run in Ohio, focuses on her support for aerial hunting of wolves and shows gruesome footage of a hunt and a mortally wounded wolf."Sarah Palin not only condones the aerial hunting of wolves and bears, she actively promotes it," the organization said in a statement. "She has even gone so far as to propose a bounty of $150 for every severed left foreleg of a wolf the hunters can produce."McCain's campaign did not respond to a request for comment about the ad and Palin's stand on wolf hunting.Independent groups have spent $52 million on the presidential race since last year.A new nonprofit group, the American Issues Project, spent $2.8 million last month on ads attacking Obama over his relationship with former Weather Underground activist William Ayers.The group is preparing a new round of ads attacking Obama. The National Rifle Assn. has spent $230,000 to defeat Obama.On Sunday, McCain campaigned under overcast skies in New Hampshire, where he and his wife, Cindy, visited the state's largest motor speedway before the Sylvania 300 NASCAR race.McCain dropped in on racing crews in the company of racing legend Richard Petty and Red Sox pitching ace Curt Schilling, and helped welcome the drivers at the starting line.McCain later told a local television station that he was a huge NASCAR fan, though he did not stay for the race. (McCain headed back to the airport Sunday afternoon to fly to Jacksonville, Fla., for a campaign rally this morning.)McCain, who has been under increasing fire for misleading advertising attacking Obama, did not talk about the campaign at the racetrack. But elsewhere, he drew criticism from an unexpected source.Former Bush strategist Karl Rove told "Fox News Sunday" that he believed some of McCain's ads had "gone one step too far in sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the 100% truth test."After campaigning in the key battleground of Florida today and Tuesday, McCain plans to meet up with Palin for a rally Tuesday afternoon in Youngstown, Ohio.