Editor’s Note: For better or worse, it’s that time of year again. Football time. So today, we resume our regular Friday feature from legendary columnist Knute Bryant on what’s coming up for the weekend, including TV times and stations.

by Knute Bryant

The list of things that could be foremost on the minds of people this weekend is long. Some of them include the Iraq war, global warming, the failing housing market, the failing health care system, and more.

But here in the South, most males – and a goodly number of females – will be thinking (What else?!) football. After all, this is the opening weekend of the 2007 college grid season.

Southeastern Conference fans have been looking forward to this weekend all through the long, hot summer as it looks to be a very interesting season indeed.
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President Bush plans to ask Congress next month for up to $50 billion in additional funding for the war in Iraq, a White House official said in yesterday’s The Washington Post, a move that appears to reflect increasing administration confidence that it can fend off congressional calls for a rapid drawdown of U.S. forces, according to the libertarian Cato Institute.

The request – which would come on top of about $460 billion in the fiscal 2008 defense budget and $147 billion in a pending supplemental bill to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – is expected to be announced after congressional hearings scheduled for mid-September featuring the two top U.S. officials in Iraq. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker will assess the state of the war and the effect of the new strategy the U.S. military has pursued this year.”

“With Iraq War costs approaching $500 billion, President Bush is expected to request at least $50 billion more. He does so while offering only more predictions of an impending breakthrough on security and political reconciliation that will eventually enable us to remove our troops from the country. The American people must be patient, he explains; the surge must be given more time to work,” Christopher Preble, Cato’s director of foreign policy studies, said in a statement released Wednesday.

“No one should be surprised that the president has yet again moved the goalposts, but the extent of this particular change is striking. When he announced the surge in January 2007, the president explained that improved security would be a catalyst for political reconciliation. It now seems certain that the Maliki government will not achieve most of its political benchmarks in the foreseeable future. It has gotten so bad that some U.S. political leaders and commentators are even calling for Maliki’s removal, a process that would only further undermine the prospects for an American withdrawal any time soon,” Preble says.

“But even the president’s claims that security in Iraq has improved are dubious. The Associated Press reports that the death toll from sectarian attacks around the country is running at nearly double the pace from a year ago,” Preble says. “It might be reasonable to expect the American people to be patient if the president’s past promises of progress hadn’t proved so disastrously wrong. As it is, the public sees no end in sight to this ruinous war.”

Cato.Org

Two years ago today, Hurricane Katrina, the costliest disaster in the nation’s history, made landfall. Natural storm defenses – barrier islands, wetlands, and coastal forests – that once existed had suffered at the hand of humans, and their demise left coastal communities exposed.

The storm surge Katrina created destroyed southern Louisiana, obliterated the coast of Mississippi, and toppled levees causing catastrophic flooding in New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish. People drowned in their houses, billions of dollars of property were destroyed, and cracks in American government and society were exposed.

As the recovery continues two years later, an honest federal commitment to effective storm protection that incorporates coastal restoration and conservation, along with the proper levee alignments, is essential to rebuilding a sustainable Gulf Coast.

The Gulf Coast’s natural storm defenses can be rebuilt.

In Louisiana, river diversions can deliver freshwater and sediment to starved marshes. Man-made channels, like the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO) must be closed. Oil and gas companies need to take responsibility for wetlands destruction by filling in old canals and funding large-scale restoration projects.

Help in implementing these changes is the best anniversary gift you can give to the future of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, according to the Gulf Restoration Network.

The non-profit group is asking people to take a moment today to commemorate the second anniversary of Katrina and help them “Flood Washington, Not Our Coast” with emails to Congress and the President urging them to make a strong commitment to the Gulf Coast.

http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/GRN/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=1521

Two years after Katrina, there are still obstacles to overcome, but progress in the revitalization is being made. People and jobs are coming back; defunct political institutions, like fractured levee boards, are being restructured; and lives are being rebuilt.

“Living in New Orleans, I feel a sense of hope breaking through the gloom, but we’re paralyzed as we hold our breaths through another hurricane season. Fear of the next disaster will subside only when our levee system AND our natural storm protections are restored,” says Dan Favre, Campaign Organizer for the group. “The time to act is now.”

The Gulf Restoration Network is a diverse network of local, regional, and national groups and individuals dedicated to protecting and restoring the valuable resources of the Gulf of Mexico. The GRN has members in the five Gulf states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.

For more information, visit the group’s Website at HealthyGulf.Org.

There are interesting and potentially explosive new developments breaking today concerning gay Republican hypocrites in Washington and elsewhere.

We were right in the middle of investigating claims that the real reason Bush’s chief political aide Karl Rove resigned from the White House was that he is the real bisexual lover of the gay male prostitute who was run off from the White House press room back in the spring of 2005, namely James Guckert, a.k.a. Jeff Gannon of Gannongate and JeffGannon.com.

But then Idaho Sen. Larry Craig held a press conference covered live on CNN today in which he denied being gay, in spite of pleading guilty to lewd conduct in a men’s room at the Minneapolis airport.

U.S. Senator Gets Flushed

Senate Republican leaders in Washington called for an ethics committee review into his involvement in a police sting operation this summer in the airport men’s room, after the private group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics filed a complaint with the ethics committee seeking an investigation into whether Craig violated Senate rules by engaging in disorderly conduct.

Sen. Craig: ‘I Am Not Gay’

The controversy errupted earlier today on the media Website at the Poynter Institute.

From Hearsay to Headline: Tracking the Larry Craig Coverage

And the D.C. blogger Wonkette has been covering this story and others, related to a triple murder suicide of more gay Republicans in Florida, including one who worked in the attorney general campaign of Troy King of Alabama.

Even the Alabama Associated Press had a story on this today, although they do not mention all the gay Republican connections.

Slain Florida Political Consultant Worked on Alabama Campaigns

To read the most about it, CrimeBlog.US is covering it in great depth.

The original story on Jeff Gannon was broken on Feb. 2, 2005 on America blog in a post called A man called Jeff.

Since the mainstream, corporate press and the broadcast media would not cover this story, and since the Bush royal family has a long history of being able to keep this stuff quiet either by killing people or paying them off, there was no real way to get to the bottom of the story – until now, perhaps.

Now that Craig has gone on national TV and breached the door to this sort of controversy, maybe there are other similar controversies that now may be investigated.

In the Locust Fork Journal archives on Gannongate, some of the links are broken. But a thorough check of back computer files turned up the orginal Secret Service logs that clearly show Gannon spent several nights in the White House. Knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that gay sex was going on in the White House, the only real questions left that remained unanswered were: Who was he having sex with? And in which bedroom?

For anyone interested in making a contribution to this story, including sources who want to talk anonymously, check out the logs below.
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Alberto Gonzales, the nation’s first Hispanic attorney general and perhaps one of the most incompetent and corrupt, announced his resignation Monday in a terse statement, ending a wrenching standoff with congressional critics over his honesty and competence at the helm of the Bush Justice Department.

Republicans and Democrats alike had demanded his resignation over the botched handling of FBI terror investigations and the firings of U.S. attorneys, among other things, but President Bush had defiantly stood by his Texas friend until accepting his resignation last Friday.

Gonzales, whom Bush once considered for appointment to the Supreme Court, is the fourth top-ranking administration official to leave since November 2006.

Donald H. Rumsfeld, an architect of the Iraq war, resigned as defense secretary one day after the November elections.

Paul Wolfowitz agreed in May to step down as president of the World Bank after an ethics inquiry.

Bush’s top political and policy adviser, Karl Rove, announced earlier this month that he was stepping down.

Reacting to Gonzales’ resignation,Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said that the Justice Department had “suffered a severe crisis of leadership that allowed our justice system to be corrupted by political influence.”

As attorney general and earlier as White House counsel, Gonzales pushed for expanded presidential powers, including the eavesdropping authority. He drafted controversial rules for military war tribunals and sought to limit the legal rights of detainees at Guantanamo Bay – prompting lawsuits by civil libertarians who said the government was violating the Constitution in its pursuit of terrorists.

One matter still under investigation is the 2006 dismissal of several federal prosecutors, who serve at the president’s pleasure. Lawmakers said the action appeared to be politically motivated, and some of the fired U.S. attorneys said they felt pressured to investigate Democrats before elections.

“Better late than never,” said Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, summing up the response of many to the resignation, according to the Associated Press.

US Attorney General Gonzales Resigns

Analysis: The Gonzometer Moves to ‘Gone’

Having written several books that span periods of years, Robert Parry is often surprised how patterns emerge that aren’t apparent in day-to-day news coverage. In Neck Deep, his new book about George W. Bush’s presidency, one of those surprises was how often former Vice President Al Gore turned up making tragically prescient comments.

Gore, whose admirers sometimes call him “the Goracle,” comes across more as a Cassandra, warning the nation of looming disasters and finding himself either ignored or mocked by the dominant politicians and media pundits.

Time and again – from Campaign 2000 to the post-9/11 “war on terror” to the invasion of Iraq to Bush’s expansion of presidential powers – Gore pointed to grave dangers when nearly all other national political leaders and media bigwigs were either running with the herd or keeping silent.

In the daily coverage of those political developments at Consortiumnews.com, stories ran citing Gore’s speeches, but it wasn’t until Parry pulled together the book that Gore’s extraordinary role jumped out at him.

“Though there were a few other political leaders who made prophetic comments, such as Sen. Robert Byrd in his pre-Iraq War speeches on the Senate floor, none was as consistently on target as Al Gore,” he says.

To read the whole story on the new book, go to the independent ConsortiumNews.Com.

One in four American adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll. Of those who did read, women and older people were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year.

Of the 27 percent of people who hadn’t read a single book this year, nearly a third of men and a quarter of women fit that category. They tend to be older, less educated, lower income, minorities, from rural areas and less religious.

Those with college degrees read the most, and people aged 50 and up read more than younger people.

The Bible and religious works were read by two-thirds in the survey, more than all other categories. Popular fiction, histories, biographies and mysteries were all cited by about half, while one in five read romance novels. Every other genre – including politics, poetry and classical literature – were named by fewer than five percent of readers.

More women than men read every major category of books except for history and biography. Industry experts say that confirms their observation that men tend to prefer nonfiction.

Those likeliest to read religious books included older and married women, lower earners, minorities, lesser educated people, Southerners, rural residents, Republicans and conservatives.

Gallup Poll asked in 2005 how many books people had at least started, the typical answer was five. That was down from 10 in 1999.

In 2004, a National Endowment for the Arts report titled “Reading at Risk” found only 57 percent of American adults had read a book in 2002, a four percentage point drop in a decade. The study faulted television, movies and the Internet.

Book sales have been flat in recent years and are expected to stay that way indefinitely. Analysts attribute the listlessness to competition from the Internet and other media, the unsteady economy and a well-established industry with limited opportunities for expansion.

AP: One in Four Read No Books Last Year

AP Ipsos Poll