Sen. Larry Craig: "I am not Gay"

Sen. Larry Craig R-Idaho, pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges stemming from complaints of lewd conduct in an airport bathroom in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In a public statement the senator said that he did nothing inappropriate and he "overreacted and made a poor decision" in pleading guilty to disorderly conduct. With his wife beside him he claimed that he was the victim of a "witch hunt" conducted by the Idaho Statesman newspaper.

"Let me be clear: I am not gay and never have been," said Craig, who has aligned himself with conservative groups who oppose gay rights.

"In pleading guilty, I overreacted in Minneapolis, because of the stress of the Idaho Statesman's investigation and the rumors it has fueled around Idaho," he said. "Again, that overreaction was a mistake, and I apologize for my misjudgment."

According to the arresting officer, Sgt. Dave Karsnia, Craig peered through a crack in a restroom stall door for two minutes and made gestures suggesting he wanted to engage in "lewd conduct."

Craig's blue eyes were clearly visible through the crack in the door, Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport police Sgt. Dave Karsnia wrote in the report he filed.

"Craig would look down at his hands, 'fidget' with his fingers, and then look through the crack into my stall again," Karsnia wrote in documents accompanying the arrest report.

Karsnia was on a plainclothes detail in the restroom because of citizen complaints and arrests for sexual activity there. In his report he wrote that when the person occupying the stall beside him left, Craig entered it and blocked the door with his rolling suitcase. "My experience has shown that individuals engaging in lewd conduct use their bags to block the view from the front of their stall." The senator then tapped his right foot, "a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct," Karsnia wrote, and Craig ran his left hand several times underneath the partition dividing the stalls. "The presence of others did not seem to deter Craig as he moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot, which was within my stall area," After Craig ran his hand underneath the partition wall three times, Karsnia held his police identification down by the floor so the senator could see it, the report said.

The senator initially resisted the officer's request to go to the police operations center, he said, but finally did. There, he was read his Miranda rights, interviewed, photographed, fingerprinted and released, the report said.

He was charged with two offenses, Interference with Privacy (a gross misdemeanor) and Disorderly Conduct (a misdemeanor). He pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of disorderly conduct "in the hope of making it go away". "I did not seek any counsel, either from an attorney, staff, friends, or family. That was a mistake, and I deeply regret it." the senator said. He paid $575 in fines and fees. A 10-day jail sentence was suspended and Craig received one year's unsupervised probation.

For further details click to see a copy of the arrest report, the charges and the guilty plea
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVxUerc5KBA]

This is not the first time that Craig's sexuality has come under scrutiny. Since his college days in 1967 there have been rumors that he was gay. He denied, in 1982, that he was involved in a sex scandal with congressional male pages. In fact the Idaho Statesman had been investigating claims from various sources that the senator had engaged in homosexual relationships with a number of men when the news of his arrest was made public by Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper.

Hardball with Chris Matthews takes a look at some of the allegations surrounding Sen. Larry Craig

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0uBbEjyDMA]
On Capitol Hill, Craig is under tremendous pressure from his Republican colleagues. He held a prominent role with Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, serving as a Senate liaison for the campaign since February. He resigned from the post. Senate GOP leaders, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Trent Lott of Mississippi, Jon Kyl of Arizona, Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas and John Ensign of Nevada, announced that Craig had complied with their request to temporarily step down from senior posts on Senate committees. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and other leaders have referred the Craig incident to the Senate Ethics Committee. Two Republican senators, John McCain and Norm Coleman, have called for him to resign. Even The White House voiced "disappointment" with the situation, and called on the Senate to resolve the matter as quickly as possible.

It seems as if everyone on the Republican side wants "the problem" to just go away!

Baseball, Gangs & Business

What do baseball, gangs and business have in common? Well for a short while anyway they were all in the cap business. New Era the officially licensed manufacturer of the New York Yankees baseball caps came out with three different cap designs imitating gang colors and logos alongside the familiar interlocked NY of the baseball team. They featured a red and black bandanna design for the Bloods, blue and gray for the Crips and a gold crown for the Latin Kings.

Activists were outraged and said New Era, the Yankees and the MLB are deliberately marketing gang paraphernalia to gang members and wannabes.

"It is a scandal with the work that we do to walk around the corner in our community and find that Corporate America is profiting on the blood of our kids." said Stan Koehler, director of Peace on the Street.

"To have this company actually come out here and produce gang paraphernalia that's going to hurt kids, they don't realize that if you wear the wrong cap on the wrong block you will get opened up, you will get slashed or jumped, so you can die.....they need to be aware that the wrong color combination in our community can be fatal."

"Bandannas represent gang flags," said Brian Martinez, an NYPD detective involved with Peace on the Street. "New Era is making it really convenient for gang members, because now your flag is part of your hat."

At Tom, Dick and Harry's on East 106th Street, manager Isaiah Hill pulled the gang-themed caps from the shelves.

"These guys are right," said Hill. "This is a very dangerous fad that could cause serious violence."

Johnny Rivera, who led the group of protesters, first discovered the caps while shopping with his son for back-to-school gear last week. He offered to buy his son a black New Era baseball cap with a gold Yankee logo and embroidered crown. The 11-year-old explained to his then-clueless father that the hat was "a gang thing," and wearing it would put him in danger. "This is not something I was aware of as a 45-year old father buying a hat for my 11-year old kid," he said.

Both MLB and the Yankees insisted they were unaware of the symbolism in the cap designs, with the New York team noting they were never given a chance to review the new hats until they were already for sale.

The team was “completely unaware that caps with gang-related logos and colors had been manufactured with the New York Yankees logo on them,” said a Yankees statement. “The New York Yankees oppose any garment that may be associated with gangs or gang-related activity.”

New Era ordered the removal of the caps from store shelves after complaints from baseball officials and the public outcry:

“It has been brought to our attention that some combinations of icons and colors on a select number of our caps could be too closely perceived to be in association with gangs,” said Christopher H. Koch, CEO of New Era Cap. “In response, we, along with Major League Baseball, have pulled those caps.”

New Era said it would increase its efforts to ensure it had a better working knowledge of gang symbols, names and locations. All this sounds very good, a company reacting positively to criticism about its business practices, but this is not the first time New Era has been in trouble for manufacturing gang-related caps. Just last June the company recalled 100 of its hats from a Cleveland store after it was alerted it was designing caps with logos representing local gangs.

The logos on the hats represented gangs from "Da Valley" (Garden Valley housing project), "10-5," for the 105th Street gang called Waste-5 and "HVD" for the street gang on Harvard Avenue. In a very familiar sounding tone the company issued the following statement:

"We had no knowledge the logo on our cap was a gang logo," said Gerry Matos, senior vice president of marketing for New Era Cap Co. "Once we were alerted, we immediately contacted the retailer and had the caps recalled."

Mato revealed that the company plans to take steps to ensure that it never happens again.

"We plan to work with police gang suppression units to get the names of gangs across the U.S.," Mato said. " We also have told our sales force to ask 'why' if a logo is obscure."

The New Era company, which has produced hats for Major League Baseball since the 1930s, seems to be in tune with the gangs. First in Cleveland and now in New York, each time withdrawing the merchandise after public protest and promising that it will never happen again. It makes you wonder if New Era is consciously or unconsciously promoting or profiting from the proliferation of gangs in the society. It would be interesting to find out who in the company is responsible for the design and marketing of New Era's merchandise. Have the gangs infiltrated the company or is this just an unfortunate coincidence?

7-Year-Old Afghan Girl Raped

Every once in while a story comes along that makes you think. For me this is one of those stories. It is not so much that a 7-year-old girl was raped. It is not so much that two brothers 18 and 24 raped her. It is not so much that the brothers' sister helped them. It is not so much that nobody outside the girl's family seemed to care. It is not so much that the girl's parents had to flee to seek justice. It is not so much that this is not an isolated incident. It is not so much that this little girl has suffered severe psychological damage. It is not so much that the rape reflects badly on the girl's family. It is all of the above!

Can any society be so morally depraved as to condone such a vile, reprehensible act? This story appeared in a number of online publications. Below is the complete story without any further comments or editing.

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN — The family of a 7-year-old Afghan girl raped by two men has come forward to demand justice, defying social customs that view such attacks as a stain on the victim's honor. Two months after the rape, the girl is still in pain, rarely speaks and looks no one in the eye.

Two brothers — identified only as 18-year-old Ismat and 24-year-old Mohammad — allegedly asked their teenage sister to lure the girl to their home in the Jaghuri district of Ghazni province and raped her until she lost consciousness, according to human rights officials and advocates handling the case.

The suspects were briefly held by police and then freed. Rights officials suspect they used personal contacts or bribes to secure their release.

The girl's family fled north to the capital, leaving home under cover of darkness.

"The district chief went to the uncle and said if they complain any further or go to Kabul, he's going to personally come and kill them," said Manizha Naderi, director of the advocacy organization Women for Afghan Women, which is helping the girl's family.

Jaghuri district chief Khada Dad Erfani denied any threat, and claimed tribal elders and relatives of the girl and the brothers intervened, preferring to handle the case through tribal law instead of potentially embarrassing legal proceedings.

He raised no doubts about the brothers' guilt.

"They didn't want this to be followed up through the justice system of the government because they said this would give a very bad name to their area and the people living there," Erfani said.

The younger brother has been re-arrested, but the elder is at large, he said.

Interviews with officials from Women for Afghan Women and the Afghan human rights commission produced similar accounts of how the girl was invited to the brothers' home.

The two suspects' 15-year-old sister knew the 7-year-old because they grazed sheep together. The sister invited the girl to eat cheese and then left her with Ismat and Mohammad, said Jamila Zafar, a social worker who is counseling the girl and her family.

After attacking the child, the brothers left her unconscious near the family home. When she came to, she went home and complained of stomach pains for a few days, Zafar said. The family then took her to the hospital, where doctors examined the girl and determined she had been raped.

The men were promptly arrested, but Naderi and Zafar said they believed bribes were paid to free them. Human rights commissioner Hangama Anwari said the brothers were released because "there was some relationship" between them and district authorities.

Rape is not uncommon in Afghanistan, but victims rarely come forward because a girl or woman losing her virginity out of wedlock is seen as disgracing her entire family.

Because the crime is seldom reported, there are no reliable statistics on the number of young girls raped, Anwari said. She said it was the second such case in Ghazni this year.

"It's not reported because of family honor. It's very unusual that they're bringing this forward," said Naderi of Women for Afghan Women.

"No one in Afghanistan wants anyone to know their daughter has been raped because a girl's virginity is so highly valued here. If a girl loses her virginity for any reason ... she's not a girl anymore. She's a woman. Unmarriageable."

Families and local elders often take the matter into their own hands and resort to traditional tribal laws, which commonly punish girls for the crimes of their male relatives. Under Afghan law, the sentence for raping a child is life imprisonment.

Zafar said the brothers' relatives offered a 6-year-old girl as a future bride to compensate the victim's family, who rejected the offer.

Erfani said another proposal was that the 7-year-old girl marry a young male relative of the brothers to salvage her honor. The girl's family also turned down this suggestion, he said.

The two men remained free until the victim's uncle and grandmother took the girl to Kabul, where they sought help from the human rights commission and Attorney General Abdul Jabar Sabit.

Sabit ordered an inquiry and said the attackers should be re-arrested, said Ahmad Samir Samimi, his chief of staff.

One of the brothers was detained, Erfani said, adding authorities were "doing our best" to arrest his older brother.

The grandmother, Amir Begum, hopes the 15-year-old sister also will be arrested and punished.

Meanwhile, the young victim — who is not named in this article to protect her identity — is receiving medical treatment and undergoing psychological counseling in Kabul.

Begum described her granddaughter, a second grader, as intelligent and bookish, but said the attack has nearly rendered her mute.

"Now she doesn't want to talk at all, not to anyone, not even me," Begum said.

"The family of these two boys paid money, and they released their sons from police custody," the grandmother said. "We are poor. No one listened to us. Now it's good, the human rights commission is following up this case."

The girl props her skinny frame to one side to alleviate her pain as she plays with dolls and draws in coloring books, writing her name in a neat script — a considerable feat in a country where most of the population is illiterate.

But her play seems mechanical. She does not look people in the eye, and hangs her head, staring at the ground or at the dolls as she sets them gently in a toy cradle and rocks it back and forth.

Only in one fleeting moment was there a glimpse of a little girl's happiness.

Zafar, who has spent days with the 7-year-old, came to say goodbye one evening. The girl perked up at Zafar's voice, and reached out to grab her hand, smiled and kissed it.

Sex on the Net VII

Have you ever embellished a story about your sex life and added in a little extra for time, frequency or number of partners? Maybe you "stretched" the truth just a little about physical attributes in order to look good. Have you ever perpetuated a myth based on hearsay about the opposite sex? Well research is out that exposes some of the fallacies about men's sexual health.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg63-dXrMn0]

Sex researchers are peculiar beasts. Armed with their tape measures, clipboards, surveys, and hidden cameras, they seek to provide a peephole from which to scrutinize that most private of spheres, human sexuality. What's most surprising is that we let them in—we're more than happy to unzip our pants and bare our private lives. Now, sex researchers have stepped out from behind the curtain to share the real numbers on five areas of men's sexual health. The findings were published in Psychology Today. The answers may surprise you.

• 
  

  Sex on the Brain

  
  

The idea that men think about sex every seven seconds, like the claim that we only use 10 percent of our brains, is often repeated but rarely sourced. The number doesn't bear up against scrutiny. According to the Kinsey Report (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male):

54 percent of men think about sex every day or several times a day,

43 percent a few times a week or a few times a month, and

4 percent less than once a month.

Even though the Kinsey Report relies on men to self-report on how often they think about sex, it's still eye opening to find that just under half of men aren't even thinking about sex once a day. Clearly, the seven-second rule may be a tad hyperbolic.

• 
  

  Not Tonight, Honey

  
  

The stereotype about the sex-starved man and the disinterested woman may be more than just a cliche. As it turns out, the instant a woman enters a secure relationship, her sex drive begins to plummet. Four years in, a German study found, fewer than half of women wanted regular sex. And after 20 years, only 20 percent did.

Among men, libido held steady no matter how long they'd been in the relationship. Researchers provide an evolutionary explanation—women's sex drive is initially high to facilitate pair bonding. Meanwhile, desire for tenderness showed the opposite trend. Ninety percent of women craved tenderness, but of men who'd been in relationships for ten years, only 25 percent said they hoped for the same from their partner.

• 
  

  Measuring Up

  
  

For as long as there's been such thing as a ruler, men have been putting wood to, um, wood and wondering how they measure up. "There's nothing wrong with you. You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened," Hemingway reassured a panicking F. Scott Fizgerald. "It is basically not a question of the size in repose. It is the size that it becomes. It is also a question of angle." The trouble is that most of the actual surveys of penis size are unscientific and unreliable. The Kinsey survey relied on men to report their own numbers honestly and accurately—never a good idea.

But the most rigorous studies to date found similar results—the Journal of Urology put the average penis size at 5.08 inches, and the International Journal of Impotence Research put it at 5.35 inches.

• 
  

  In Three Minutes Flat

  
  

Judging from the average porn flick, romance novel, or locker room conversation, a Martian landing on Earth would probably assume that intercourse would last somewhere in the vicinity of 40 minutes. But if that Martian were to actually enter into a relationship, he might be in for a big disappointment. Such marathon sessions are the exception to the rule; surveys find that the average sex session lasts from three to ten minutes. Not that any of this should be so surprising—the average hotel porn viewer watches for just 12 minutes.

• 
  

  The Spread of HIV

  
  

In Africa alone, AIDS kills some 6,000 people every day. While treatment must be made available for all who need it, some elements of the AIDS epidemic are likely exaggerated. It seemed as if no one was safe, not even non-drug users, straight men, or housewives.

But the truth is that HIV isn't nearly as easy to spread through heterosexual sex as many people think. According to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, men almost never get HIV from women. A healthy man who has unprotected sex with a non drug-using woman has a one in 5 million chance of getting HIV. If he wears a condom, the odds drop to one in 50 million. And though it's easier for men to infect women, the odds that an HIV-positive man will transmit the virus to a woman through sex are less than one in 1,000.

So remember next time before you tell that story to check with the facts first!!

Had a Bad Day?

If you think you have had a bad day, check out this baby buffalo. Attacked by lions and bitten by a crocodile! until the "family" comes to rescue him.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8DDYz68kM]

He was luckier than the one below. Be warned this is a little gruesome!!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8ZHJZFIAAg]

Now do you feel better! At least you weren't chewed on by a pride of hungry lions!