From Feministe's Jill Filipovic:

If this story doesn’t disgust you, I don’t know what will:

It was a nightmare captured on surveillance video. A woman who had waited nearly 24 hours to be seen in a Brooklyn public hospital collapsed, fell face-down on the floor, convulsed and for nearly an hour — while several hospital staff members looked at her and one staff member even prodded her with her foot — received no aid. At some point during that time, she died.

The New York Civil Liberties Union has been sounding the alarm about New York City hospitals for some time now, calling the emergency room and inpatient units at Kings County Hospital “a chamber of filth, decay, indifference and danger.” It’s disgusting that someone had to die before the city bothered doing anything about it.

And this is just the one that we know about because the video was released on YouTube. The callous disregard that the hospital employees showed to Esmin Green is not possibly a one-time occurrence. Ms. Green was a poor, mentally ill woman of color. She apparently didn’t matter one bit to the employees at the hospital who were supposed to be giving her care. I would bet everything I own that she is not the first “unimportant” patient to receive that kind of treatment — she is just the first to have her death broadcast on YouTube, and so she is the first that the city cannot turn a blind eye towards.

Go to www.mediamatters.org/billophobia to learn more and take action today!

"I think everybody's got to relax on all this gay stuff."
-- Bill O'Reilly, The O'Reilly Factor, August 15, 2007

From his suggestion that the "secular progressive movement" would like to have "poly-amorphous" marriage ("you can marry 18 people, you can marry a duck") to his statement that it would be "insane" and "inappropriate" to "cluster" gays near children, Bill O' Reilly has never been one to "relax on all this gay stuff."

When O'Reilly isn't dishing the homophobia himself, he's giving others a platform on his show to bash the LGBT community -- featuring guests like Marc Rudov, who recently advanced the bogus notion that "promoting a homosexual lifestyle" of gays and lesbians would cause "long-term consequences for children," that like a brain tumor, may take years to diagnose:

RUDOV: If there's going to be a brain tumor, it might not be discovered for 10 years -- and I kind of look at this in the same way, because children do form their sexual identities from their same-sex parents. And what's going on here is basically teaching children that there's no difference between a heterosexual marriage and a homosexual marriage.

Fox News and O'Reilly use the topic of same-sex couples and their families to promote his show and incite fear of the LGBT community. Never was this practice more clear than when Fox used footage from Rosie O'Donnell's cruise for gay and lesbian couples and their families to promote an upcoming edition of the Factor. The promo raised the question: "Is the media celebrating gay culture?" You can probably guess what the answer was.

Of course, we all know this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to O'Reilly and his attacks on the LGBT community.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen said he can't send more troops into Afghanistan UNTIL he has made further troop reductions in Iraq.  Why then does the Bush administration continue to focus our military efforts on Iraq? 

Not only was June the deadliest month in Afghanistan for our troops, but it was the second straight month that the death toll was higher there than in Iraq.

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/07/02/mullen-cant-have-more-troops-in-afghanistan-until-i-have-a-reduced-requirement-in-iraq/

More at therealnews.com

Hersh: VP Cheney believes he is going to save the world...by attacking Iran.  See part 2 of this interview here.

More at therealnews.com
Seymour Hersh says Democratic Party leaders signed on to secret war against Iran

From C&L's SilentPatriot:

In order to determine whether or not “water boarding” is indeed torture, Vanity Fair’s Christopher Hitchens decided to do the most logical thing: experience it first hand.

“If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.”

Vanity Fair:

Arms already lost to me, I wasn’t able to flail as I was pushed onto a sloping board and positioned with my head lower than my heart. (That’s the main point: the angle can be slight or steep.) Then my legs were lashed together so that the board and I were one single and trussed unit. Not to bore you with my phobias, but if I don’t have at least two pillows I wake up with acid reflux and mild sleep apnea, so even a merely supine position makes me uneasy. And, to tell you something I had been keeping from myself as well as from my new experimental friends, I do have a fear of drowning that comes from a bad childhood moment on the Isle of Wight, when I got out of my depth. As a boy reading the climactic torture scene of 1984, where what is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world, I realize that somewhere in my version of that hideous chamber comes the moment when the wave washes over me. Not that that makes me special: I don’t know anyone who likes the idea of drowning. As mammals we may have originated in the ocean, but water has many ways of reminding us that when we are in it we are out of our element. In brief, when it comes to breathing, give me good old air every time.

Unless Americans turn to alternative sources of entertainment, the 'Hannah Montana' star will soon be completely tapped out.

This hilarious video was part of The Colbert Report's Green Screen Challenge: Make McCain Interesting.  The Vogue Edition was created by Wayne Simbro.

JoeFelice has a created a fantastic way of using YouTube to amplify his message about voter registration.  In Joe's Voter Vlog Project, he registers someone to vote, then makes a video in which he "tags" other YouTube users, calling them out to do the same.

CitizenTube has more on some of those who have already responded to Joe's challenge.