Virginia

President-elect Barack Obama has tremendously more on his plate than reinventing government and restoring some semblance of accountability to Americans.

Ensuring that the world does not enter into a second depression, halting a war or two, saving the environment, formulating an industrial policy on alternative energy, one can go on; all are problems of a massive scale.

Update: Shinseki Slated to Head VA, Obama Confirms

Over 100,000 American troops in the 1990-1991 Gulf War came back and suffered an array of debilitating ailments known collectively as "Gulf War illness."

Amputations, brain and central nervous damage are among the results.

Gulf War veterans are in a word: Pissed.

A report released last month, 17 years after the first Iraq war (published under a Congressional mandate), entitled "Gulf War Illness and the Health of Gulf War Veterans," was researched in response to the U.S. Dept of Veterans Affairs' (VA) inaction as 10,000s of veterans sought treatment and benefits.

Has Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Cindy S. Lederman been getting too much sun or is she seeing the light?

Judge Lederman ruled on a case challenging a Florida law that bans lesbians and gays from adopting, ruling the statute unconstitutional.

The case raises the big question Republicans are pondering as they decide which way forward for their battered Party: Embracing ignorance and authoritarianism or some manner of qualified libertarianism.

[Pictured above is Martin Gill with the two brothers he hopes to adopt in Florida.] From the ACLU:

Judge Lederman "struck down a Florida law that bars lesbians and gay men from adopting. The court granted adoptions to a gay man, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, who has been raising two foster children since 2004," reads a ACLU press release.