The abstinence-only grants have been controversial from the start.

Supporters say comprehensive sex education sends a mixed message and that abstinence is the only method that is 100 percent effective in preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. Critics say abstinence education simply doesn't stop teens from having sex, and those teens need more information about how to reduce pregnancy and disease.

In April 2007, a federally funded study of four abstinence-only programs by Mathematica Policy Research Inc., found that participants had just as many sexual partners as nonparticipants and had sex at the same median age as nonparticipants. The four programs had taught students about human anatomy and sexually transmitted diseases, helped them improve their communication skills, manage peer pressure, set personal goals and build self-esteem.

For Colorado, the study results sealed the decision to get out of the program. Dr. Ned Calonge, the state's chief medical officer, said Mathematica's methods were the gold standard for scientific studies.

"To show no benefit compared to nothing. That was striking," Calonge said. "These are tax dollars that are going for no useful purpose, and it would not be responsible for us to take those dollars."

Doctors are increasingly worried about the number of girls - and boys - being referred to specialists because of this phenomenon of 'precocious' puberty.

The normal age at which puberty starts in both boys and girls has dropped by about two years since the 19th century, to 14 for boys and 12 for girls. This is largely due to improved nutrition - onset of puberty is believed to be triggered by physical size. Another theory is that the epidemic of obesity is to blame.

But modern social conditions may also be a contributory factor. Research suggests that children from broken homes experience earlier puberty. The stress of family breakdown apparently alters the balance of growth hormones and other chemicals in the body, speeding up a child's physical development.

Absent fathers may be another cause. American researchers have found that biological fathers send out chemical signals that inhibit their daughters' sexual maturity. Girls whose fathers had left home started their periods earlier.

Early puberty has even been linked to watching too much television. A few years ago, Italian scientists found that children who watched three hours a day produced less of the sleep hormone melatonin - low levels of the hormone play an important role in the timing of puberty.

But perhaps more worrying is the theory that it's exposure to environmental chemicals which is causing the drop in the age of puberty. These chemicals mimic the effect of hormones, disrupting the normal timing of sexual maturing.

"A few years ago, the soldiers you have encountered at the checkpoints would have been me. Soldiers like myself who served during the second intifada, got our education on the job. You all have visited more places [the past nine days] than most Israelis ever have. Israeli's have no idea what is happening in the occupied territories. But, so far in 2007 we have given more Israeli's a tour through Hebron than we did in 2005 and 2006 combined. Hebron is a ghost town, the settlers are unbearable and every soldier who is stationed there understands the 600 settlers there are psychotic; insane.

"I became very opinionated while in the army, but I kept it all to myself. Nobody talks about it in the army and I was the commander and did not know until after I got out that one of the other soldiers in my unit was feeling the same way, until he gave his testimony. Israeli society wants you to believe you are a bad apple for speaking out because unless you trust the system, it will fall apart. Most Israelis who get out of the army leave the country and are probably all drugged out. They suffer post traumatic syndrome but we are the victimizers. My age group is getting the hell out of here or walling themselves off from society and are not involved in anything.

"Over 450 former soldiers have now given their testimonies and we don't publish any stories without the corroboration coming from another former soldier and the testimonies are kept anonymous.

On July 15th,
>

the Federal Election Commission announced the 2nd-quarter fundraising
>

totals for each presidential candidate. In the Republican field,
>

Ron Paul's $2.4 million placed him:
>





• 
  
  3rd
  >
  >
  
  in total receipts for the quarter
  >
• 
  4th
  >
  
  in total receipts to date
  >
• 3rd
  
  in total current assets (ahead of former front-runner John McCain,
  >
  
  and just $800,000 behind Mitt Romney)
  >


Thus far,
>
47%
>

of the contributions
>
made to Ron Paul's campaign are donations
>

of under $200 from individuals (John McCain's 17% is the second-highest
>

percentage
).
> This is a telling statistic, as it highlights the fact
>

that most other candidates rely heavily upon donations from corporate
>

interests and political action committees (PACs) (i.e. moneyed, influence-seeking
>

sources who can readily afford to contribute large sums). Since Congressman
>

Paul has always voted against special favors and privileges for
>
anyone
>,

special interests know they have nothing to gain by stuffing Ron Paul's
>

campaign coffers. As one member of my local Meetup group put it on
>

a home-made sign, "Ron Paul is thin because he won't let special interests
>

buy him lunch."
>






Among
>
all
>

candidates, Dr. Paul is now
> first

in total donations from military personnel and veterans. While this
>

may come as a surprise to some, Tom Engelhardt identified the primary
>

reason when he asked rhetorically, "
why
> should (military personnel)
>

want to be endlessly redeployed to a lost war in a lost land?" (see
>
Why

the US Military Loves Ron Paul
>).

America's political
reporters don't like John Edwards, and have tried to destroy him.

But don't take my word
for it.

Marc Ambinder was one
of the founders of ABC's The Note and is a contributing editor to the
National
Journal's Hotline
newsletter. The Note and the Hotline consist
largely of links to and excerpts of political news and commentary by other
reporters with ample doses of snark and Rove-worship thrown in. Whatever they
may lack in insight and judgment, The Note and the Hotline are at the center of
the D.C. political media establishment.

Ambinder, in other
words, is a political reporter whose job has largely been to understand the
political media.

This week, Marc
Ambinder explained why the media has covered John
Edwards' grooming
regimen so much and Mitt Romney's so little:

There is a
difference in the political reality: fairly or unfairly, a healthy chunk of the
national political press corps doesn't like John Edwards.

Fairly or unfairly, there's also a
difference in narrative timing: when the first quarter ended, the press was
trying to bury Edwards. It's not so much interested in burying Romney right now
-- many reporters think he's the Republican frontrunner.

Now, if reporters
dislike a candidate, that's their business. But when they wage a relentless and
petty campaign to "bury" that candidate, that's our business. All of
us.

And we've been through
this before.

The 2000 election was
close enough that any number of things can fairly be described as having made
the difference. But what Bob Somerby describes as the media's "War Against Gore"
was undoubtedly one of the biggest factors in Bush's "victory." The contempt
many political reporters felt for Gore is clear, as is the inaccurate, unfair,
and grossly distorted coverage of Gore that decided the campaign. And, again, you needn't
take my word for it: Bob
Somerby, Eric Alterman, Eric Boehlert, and others
have chronicled the acknowledgements by working journalists of their
colleagues' hate for
Gore. Jake Tapper described reporters "hissing" -- actually
hissing -- Gore.
Time's Eric Pooley described an
incident in which a roomful of reporters "erupted in a collective jeer" of Gore
"like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless
nerd."

And Joe Scarborough
-- conservative television host Joe
Scarborough; former Republican
Congressman Joe Scarborough -- has said
that during the 2000 election, the media "were fairly brutal to Al Gore. ... [I]f
they had done that to a Republican candidate, I'd be going on your show saying,
you know, that they were being biased."

Somerby has long argued
that one of the reasons the media's hatred for Gore was able to define the 2000
campaign so completely is that too few people talked about it
-- and
demanded that it stop -- at the
time. Indeed, as he writes today, too many of those who should be combating
these nonsensical but damaging storylines repeat
them instead:

But then, inside
Washington,
establishment liberals and Democrats often seem congenitally unable to
understand the shape of the past fifteen years. Haircuts -- and earth
tones -- have
destroyed the known world! But so what? Dems and libs keep reciting these trivia! We keep inviting the public to draw conclusions
from these idiot tales.

One recent example
occurred during Wednesday's Lou Dobbs
Tonight, when Air America Radio host Laura Flanders
said that Barack Obama has "kind of
become the female on this race. ... He's seen as the weaker -- cute, attractive. ...
Hillary is the one with the balls." In just a few moments, Flanders managed to
suggest that a male progressive is feminine and that a female is masculine
-- one of the
conservatives' favorite tactics for marginalizing progressives -- and to
equate being "female" with being "weak." With progressives like Laura Flanders,
who needs Ann Coulter?

For anyone who would
rather fight these absurd media storylines than repeat them, coverage of
Edwards' haircut presents a valuable opportunity to do
so.

A recent New York Times article postulates that one thing men and women have in common is that we both get crushes on women. This interests me greatly because I just went through a bad "girl breakup" that was the result of a "girl crush."

If you ever try to discuss the topic of girl crushes with a man, his eyes instantly glaze over and you automatically know it's because he is hearing the "do-wacka-wacka" of cheesy porn music in his head. Sometimes you have to clap your hands together really loudly right in front of his face just to pull him out of his catatonic state.

No, it's not that kind of "girl-on-girl action." A girl crush is where you meet a woman whose sense of style or brilliant achievements or personal charisma makes you kind of adore and worship her.

“Libby is in trouble for being part of a team – part of a team whose purpose it was to sell the case for war and to perhaps make sure that someone who was out to debunk the case -- Ambassador Joseph Wilson --  wasn’t credible. So everything he’s been accused of and found guilty of were efforts that were very much a part of the administration’s political purpose.”

“The irony in this case is that the president said he would 'deal with anyone who leaked,' and now his way of dealing with Scooter Libby is to pardon him.”

“For him to say that the penalty is 'excessive' may well be true, but it was the same crime that President Bill Clinton was impeached for by a Republican House of Representatives and in which 50 U.S. senators, Republicans, voted to remove him from office. So Republicans as a party thought perjury and obstruction of justice were sufficient to remove a twice-elected president from office. And now the president is saying that 30 months in prison is an excessive penalty for the same exact crime. It’s inconsistent.”

politicians are not supposed to have power over us – we're
supposed to be free. We seem to have forgotten that freedom means
the absence of government coercion. So when politicians and the
media celebrate political power, they really are celebrating the
power of certain individuals to use coercive state force.

Remember that
one's relationship with the state is never voluntary. Every government
edict, policy, regulation, court decision, and law ultimately is
backed up by force, in the form of police, guns, and jails. That
is why political power must be fiercely constrained by the American
people.

The desire
for power over other human beings is not something to celebrate,
but something to condemn! The 20th century's worst tyrants were
political figures, men who fanatically sought power over others
through the apparatus of the state. They wielded that power absolutely,
without regard for the rule of law.

“They attack us because we’ve been over there,” he declared unblinkingly.
“We’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We’ve been in the Middle East [for
years]. I think [Ronald] Reagan was right. We don’t understand the
irrationality of Middle Eastern politics.

“Right now, we’re building an embassy in Iraq that is bigger than the Vatican.
We’re building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing
this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting.”

The crowd in South Carolina started to applaud Paul’s derision of a distant
war until they were cut off by the Fox News questioner, and then by Rudy
Giuliani, who accused Paul of saying that the US deserved the September 11
attacks.

Paul rejoindered later that he said no such thing (and the transcript proves
him right). He also cited the 9/11 Commission report that cites the issue of
“blowback” in exacerbating the rise of Islamism in the Middle East.

Perhaps most enduringly, his very presence reminded Americans of what the
Republicans used to be. They were once the fiscally prudent, freedom-loving
isolationists of the United States.

The idea that the party of Eisenhower or Goldwater would have suspended habeas
corpus indefinitely, as Bush has done for “enemy combatants”, would be
unthinkable. The idea that they would have tried to occupy and rebuild an
entire country in the Middle East is unimaginable. They were ferociously
anticommunist, but also wary of direct engagement in foreign countries and
deeply suspicious of all wars.

This kind of prudence and caution was once the hallmark of the middle of the
country and its Midwestern American values. Paul reminded Americans of this
past. He told them that the Republicans opposed the second world war, ended
the Korean war and ended the Vietnam war. Why not the Iraq war? Why not
indeed.

It was Cheney's insistence on easing air pollution controls, not the personal reasons she cited at the time, that led Christine Todd Whitman to resign as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, she said in an interview that provides the most detailed account so far of her departure.

The vice president also pushed to make Nevada's Yucca Mountain the nation's repository for nuclear and radioactive waste, aides said, a victory for the nuclear power industry over those with long-standing safety concerns. And his office was a powerful force behind the White House's decision to rewrite a Clinton-era land-protection measure that put nearly a third of the national forests off limits to logging, mining and most development, former Cheney staff members said.

Sitting through Cheney's task force meetings, Whitman had been stunned by what she viewed as an unquestioned belief that EPA's regulations were primarily to blame for keeping companies from building new power plants. "I was upset, mad, offended that there seemed to be so much head-nodding around the table," she said.

Whitman said she had to fight "tooth and nail" to prevent Cheney's task force from handing over the job of reforming the New Source Review to the Energy Department, a battle she said she won only after appealing to White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. This was an environmental issue with major implications for air quality and health, she believed, and it shouldn't be driven by a task force primarily concerned with increasing production.

Whitman agreed that the exception for routine maintenance and repair needed to be clarified, but not in a way that undercut the ongoing Clinton-era lawsuits -- many of which had merit, she said.

At Any Time and in Any Place'

David S. Addington, Cheney's general counsel, set the new legal agenda in a blunt memorandum shortly after the CIA delegation returned to Langley. Geneva's "strict limits on questioning of enemy prisoners," he wrote on Jan. 25, 2002, hobbled efforts "to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists."

No longer was the vice president focused on procedural rights, such as access to lawyers and courts. The subject now was more elemental: How much suffering could U.S. personnel inflict on an enemy to make him talk? Cheney's lawyer feared that future prosecutors, with motives "difficult to predict," might bring criminal charges against interrogators or Bush administration officials.

The agro-fuels transition is not inevitable. There is no inherent reason to sacrifice sustainable, equitable food and fuel systems to industry. Many successful, locally focused, energyefficient and people-centered alternatives are presently producing food and fuel in ways that do not threaten food systems, the environment or livelihoods.

The question is not whether ethanol and biodiesel have a place in our future, but whether or not we allow a handful of global corporations to impoverish the planet and the majority of its people. To avoid this trap we must promote a steady-state agrarian transition built on re-distributive land reform that re-populates and stabilizes the world's struggling rural communities. This includes rebuilding and strengthening our local food systems and creating conditions for the local re-investment of rural wealth. Putting people and environment -- instead of corporate megaprofits -- at the center of rural development requires food sovereignty: the right of people to determine their own food systems.