via the Washington Post/ President Obama just signed it into law.

President Obama is expected to announce regulations formally ending the 22-year ban on travel and immigration by HIV-positive individuals, according to the group pushing for an end to the ban for the past decade.

The president is scheduled to sign the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Extension Act of 2009 at 11:50 Friday and is also expected today to reveal the new rules, which have been under development more more than a year.

The regulations are the final procedural step in ending the ban, and will be followed by the standard 60-day waiting period after being published in the Federal Register prior to implementation.

A ban on travel and immigration to the U.S. by individuals with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, was first established by the Reagan-era U.S. Public Health Service and then given further support when Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) added HIV to the travel-exclusion list in a move that was ultimately passed unanimously by the Senate in 1987

A 1990-1991 effort to overturn the regulatory ban failed in the face of outcry and lobbying from conservative groups and bureaucratic turf disputes. The ban was upheld in 1993 when Congress added it to U.S. immigration laws.

The Senate finally voted to overturn the ban as part of approving legislation reauthorizing funding for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, in 2008, and President Bush signed it into law on July 30 of that year. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and then-Sen. Gordon H. Smith (R-Ore.) led the process in the Senate...

White House to announce end to HIV travel ban | 44 | washingtonpost.com

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By Garance Franke-Ruta President Obama is expected to announce regulations formally ending the 22-year ban on travel and immigration by HIV-positive individuals, according to the group pushing for an end to the ban for the past decade.

So the House unveiled the new Healthcare Reform they are voting on, it will insure 36 Million more Americans but we still will have Americans without health insurance.  NOT GOOD ENOUGH.  I had started liking Pelosi but it seems she was just throwing out tough talk BS the past couple of weeks.  I hope the real Progressives in Congress tell them NAY.

Update: Pentagon gives 3,500 Iowa troops orders to Afghanistan

About 3,500 Iowa National Guard soldiers from 31 communities are scheduled to be sent to Afghanistan later next year for a deployment that will touch families, employers and many other people statewide, military officials said today.

The entire 2nd Brigade of the 34th Infantry Division has been alerted for a mobilization in the fall of 2010 in what is projected to be the largest single call-up of an Iowa National Guard unit since World War II, said Brig. Gen. Tim Orr, the Iowa National Guard’s adjutant general...

...Besides the Iowa brigade, about 7,700 U.S. Army troops were notified for duty in Afghanistan, including the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division of Fort Campbell, Ky., and the 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment of Vilseck, Germany...

(Total 11,200)

If your city is listed as a tour date, make the call and get the show canceled!!! Success has been had at many venues, lets keep the pressure on the ones who book the tours.

Buju Banton (born Mark Anthony Myrie 1973) is a Jamaican dancehall, ragga, and reggae singer. In 1988, at age 15, he recorded, “Boom Bye Bye” [re-released in 1992] with anti-gay lyrics celebrating the brutal execution of gay men and women by shooting them in the head with an uzi, pouring acid on their skin and burning them like tires. Banton continues to profit from and perform this song in 2009.

On June 24, 2004, six men where driven from their home on Carlisle Avenue in Kingston and beaten by armed assailants calling the victims “battymen” (slang for gays). Buju Banton was one of the alleged attackers as documented by human rights groups and verified by Amnesty International. The case was dismissed in 2006, however, because homosexuality is a crime in Jamaica, the police fail to protect LGBT people from hate crimes and fully prosecute those who commit them.

In 2007, Buju Banton signed the Reggae Compassionate Act (RCA), to refrain from performing homophobic songs, but later denied doing so and continued to perform Boom Bye Bye.

2009 - Buju is back on tour in the US.
Live Nation/House of Blues and Goldenvoice/AEG canceled venues in Philadelphia, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, San Francisco and Los Angeles after an outcry from LGBT community activists. Banton’s ‘Rasta Got Soul’ tour will kick off in Philly despite the AEG Live cancellation. Local activists are now working on getting 30 shows canceled or are preparing protests and boycotts for venues supporting Banton’s Murder Music.

Cancel Buju Banton "Rasta Got Hate" Home - Cancel Buju Banton "Rasta Got Hate"

http://cancelbujubanton.wetpaint.com/

Brian wears sunglasses to hide his gray and lifeless left eye—damaged, he says, by kicks and blows with a board from Jamaican reggae star Buju Banton. Brian, 44, is gay, and Banton, 32, is an avowed homophobe whose song Boom Bye-Bye decrees that gays "haffi dead" ("have to die"). In June 2004, Brian claims, Banton and some toughs burst into his house near Banton's Kingston recording studio and viciously beat him and five other men. After complaints from international human-rights groups, Banton was finally charged last fall, but in January a judge dismissed the case for lack of evidence. It was a bitter decision for Brian, who lost his landscaping business after the attack and is fearful of giving his last name. "I still go to church," he says as he sips a Red Stripe beer. "Every Sunday I ask why this happened to me."Though familiar to Americans primarily as a laid-back beach destination, Jamaica is hardly idyllic. The country has the world's highest murder rate. And its rampant violence against gays and lesbians has prompted human-rights groups to confer another ugly distinction: the most homophobic place on earth.In the past two years, two of the island's most prominent gay activists, Brian Williamson and Steve Harvey, have been murdered — and a crowd even celebrated over Williamson's mutilated body. Perhaps most disturbing, many anti-gay assaults have been acts of mob violence. In 2004, a teen was almost killed when his father learned his son was gay and invited a group to lynch the boy at his school. Months later, witnesses say, police egged on another mob that stabbed and stoned a gay man to death in Montego Bay. And this year a Kingston man, Nokia Cowan, drowned after a crowd shouting "batty boy" (a Jamaican epithet for homosexual) chased him off a pier. "Jamaica is the worst any of us has ever seen," says Rebecca Schleifer of the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch and author of a scathing report on the island's anti-gay hostility.Jamaica may be the worst offend...

Today I'm watching football and the WNBA Finals, drinking coffee, inconvenienced because it's raining, wondering what I should make for dinner or better yet what restaurant to eat it and bummed out because the entire state of Tennessee lost almost every football game yesterday and the Titans lost today also... Sigh... life is so very tough.  Meanwhile in place far away from my little world...

Eight American soldiers and two Afghan troops have been killed in the deadliest attack on coalition troops for more than a year, officials say.

The battle happened in Nuristan province in the remote east of the country when military outposts were attacked, a Nato statement said.

The Taliban said it carried out the attack. Reports say local officials including a police chief were captured.

Violence has escalated in the east as insurgents relocate from the south.

In a statement, Nato's International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) said that tribal militia launched attacks on the foreign and Afghan military outposts from a mosque and a nearby village.

US jets carried out air strikes in response.

"Coalition forces effectively repelled the attack and inflicted heavy enemy casualties while eight Isaf and two ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] members were killed," the Nato statement said.

It was the worst loss coalition troops have suffered since August 2008, when 10 French troops were killed in an ambush in Kabul province.

A Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said the movement was behind the attack.

According to AP news agency, Mr Mujahid also said some 35 Afghan police officers had been taken into Taliban custody, and their fate would be decided by a council.

Provincial governor Jamaluddin Badar confirmed that some officials including a local police chief had been captured.

Follow the link for a full list:

The most challenged and banned book in America, the story of two gay penguins.

From the Wiki page:

And Tango Makes Three is a 2005 children's book written by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson and illustrated by Henry Cole. The book is based on the true story of Roy and Silo, two male Chinstrap Penguins in New York's Central Park Zoo. For six years they formed a couple and were given an egg to raise. The book follows part of this time in the penguins' lives, but not subsequent events.

The book has won many awards but also been at the center of numerous censorship and culture war debates on same-sex marriage, adoption and homosexuality in animals. The American Library Association reports that And Tango Makes Three was the most challenged book of 2006, 2007, and 2008.[1]
“     We wrote the book to help parents teach children about same-sex parent families. It's no more an argument in favor of human gay relationships than it is a call for children to swallow their fish whole or sleep on rocks.     ”

—co-author Justin Richardson,
New York Times (2005)[