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We are so happy to hear that at least ONE of the original three judges is sticking around for another season!
With all the rumors and speculation surrounding the American Idol judging panel, we are totally stoked to hear that original judge Randy Jackson is not jumping ship (or being fired) and will be sticking around for a tenth season!

“Randy’s locked in and pumped about it. They’ll officially announce with the other judges,” a source told E! News.

This is awesome news for Idol fans, who have watched the judging table go downhill in recent seasons with the addition of Kara DioGuardi and Ellen Degeneres, as well as the losses of Paula Abdul and Simon Cowell. But now the big question is: who’s going to be joining Randy?

Although rumors that Jennifer Lopez’s offer had been reneged because of diva-like behavior swirled, sources tell TMZ this is untrue. “”It’s been typical negotiating,” the website reports, adding that J.Lo’s contract is almost a done deal.

With Randy at the helm and Jennifer by his side, American Idol is about to get a breath of fresh air it so desperately needs!

Last week, I was surprised (and chagrinned) to learn that despite the widespread, inside-the-beltway knowledge of Senator David Vitter's (R-La.) prostitution scandals, an astonishingly large segment of his statewide electorate had no awareness of his past. As Brian Beutler reported:

Yesterday, PPP unveiled a handful of the toplines of this same poll, suggesting that a great number of voters are still unaware of Vitter's recent travails, including prostitution scandals, and the more recent discovery that he knowingly employed a top aide for two years after the aide attacked his girlfriend with a knife. Only 21 percent say Vitter is a "good model" of Christian living. But 44 percent say he's not a good model, and 35 percent say they don't know.
And so, the Louisiana Democratic party continues with their effort to raise awareness of Vitter's transgressions -- or, as they put it, "Forgotten Crimes." Today, they've released a five-and-a-half minute video, detailing Vitter's history with America's prostitutes. One of the more interesting reminders that the video provides is that Vitter had his standing-next-to-my-wife public confessional long before New York Governor Eliot Spitzer made it famous and got the adjective "disgraced" affixed to his name. And one of the things that we perhaps did not need to know was the lengths to which Vitter went in allegedly tidying up the scenes of his trysts.

But I digress, here is the Louisiana Democratic Party's entry for Best Documentary Short Film!

A Pentagon deal to grant one of America's largest military contractors immunity from harming soldiers and civilians in Iraq was a unique arrangement, according to Army Secretary John McHugh.

As previously reported in Huffington Post and the Oregonian, taxpayers may be on the hook to compensate more than 150 military veterans who claim that a Halliburton subsidiary knowingly exposed them to cancer-causing chemicals in Iraq.

As part of a lawsuit filed by 26 Oregon National Guard soldiers who claim that they suffered health problems through exposure to hexvalent chromium while patrolling a water treatment plant near Basra in Iraq, it was revealed that contractor Kellogg Brown Root demanded and received legal immunity in return for taking over the $7 billion project in 2003.

In the wake of the disclosure in early August, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) demanded some answers about the deal, including whether other military contractors have been granted similar immunity deals.

On Tuesday, McHugh responded to Blumenauer, explaining that KBR has not asserted its claims under the contract's indemnification clause. And he added that no other Army contract with KBR, which most recently was awarded a $2.8 billion deal from the Pentagon, contains such a deal.

McHugh added that "no other Army contracts awarded since 2001 to other companies for services provided in a contingency operation contain indemnification provisions." McHugh explained that the Army considers the use of such provisions "only in extraordinary circumstances involving unusually hazardous risks."

And McHugh explained that "no congressional notification was provided in connection" with the indemnification provision.

Connie Kaplan took a bus from New York City to Washington, D.C. to do some grassroots lobbying for extra weeks of jobless aid. Kaplan is a "99er" -- a person who has exhausted all available weeks of unemployment benefits and still hasn't found a job -- and she wants politicians to acknowledge that the million-plus people in her situation need help.

On Tuesday, Kaplan delivered a letter supporting a bill to provide 20 additional weeks of jobless aid for people living in states with unemployment above 7.5 percent. She brought three copies: one for the White House, one each for the Republican and Democratic national committees.

"It shows my concerted effort," said Kaplan, 52, of her Washington visit. "I want them to know I hand-delivered these letters."

It's lobbying at its most grassroots: So grassroots, in fact, that Kaplan showed up outside the White House and didn't really know what to do with her letter. A police officer advised her that any mail to people in the White House has to go through the Post Office.

"We have been humiliated by some politicians as lazy drug addicts who live on handouts from our government," Kaplan's letter says. It's true: Several members of Congress believe extended benefits discourage the jobless from seeking work, and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) introduced legislation to require drug testing of benefits recipients.

Kaplan herself was singled out by Fox News host Glenn Beck for joining other 99ers at a New York protest. "Connie, here's an idea," Beck said on his show last week. "Don't spend your remaining money on travel to get to a protest. Go out and get a job. You may not want the job. Work at McDonald's. Work two jobs."

Kaplan told HuffPost she had worked two jobs -- before she lost 'em, that is. She said a friend in D.C. paid her $40 bus fare and that she is helping that person recover from hip surgery.

Congress has given the unemployed extra weeks of benefits as a matter of routine during every recession since the 1950s, but never before have as many as 99 weeks been made available. Democrats struggled to overcome GOP filibusters three times this year just to reauthorize the 99 weeks (which are not available in every state). But there's not much appetite for providing additional weeks.

"The government's turned its back," said Kaplan, annoyed that President Obama has pushed Congress to preserve existing unemployment benefits but has not advocated additional weeks of benefits. "He hasn't said one word."

The results have not even been finalized in the quirky Alaska Republican Senate primary and already the political world is bracing itself for another instance in which an out-of-nowhere Tea Party candidate derails the highly-favored establishment contender.

On Monday, Democratic and Republican operatives alike expressed interest and consternation (respectively) over the possibility that Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) could be the next victim of the purity purge inside the GOP tent.

Christine O'Donnell has, by and large, campaigned outside the media and political spotlight so far this election. But on Monday her efforts to take out Castle in the mid-September primary got a major boost when the Tea Party Express, which spent roughly $600,000 on Alaska Republican Joe Miller's challenge to Sen. Lisa Murkowski, pledged to do the same on her behalf.

The announcement was just the latest in a wave of Tea party momentum to build around O'Donnell's candidacy. The right-wing blogosphere has, likewise, either trumpeted or expressed intrigue in her campaign, disturbed, primarily, by Castle's moderate voting record. O'Donnell herself has pushed the meme, going so far as to pursue the endorsement of Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) -- the Tea Party validator in the U.S. Senate -- and to include a picture of herself alongside the poster boy of Tea Party-ism: Florida Republican candidate Marco Rubio. This past weekend, in fact, O'Donnell shot footage at Glenn Beck's Lincoln Memorial rally for future use in her campaign ads.

Still, it remains a long shot effort but one that -- considering the current climate -- has Republicans spooked. While Castle leads Democratic nominee New Castle County Executive Chris Coons in the few public opinion polls out there; O'Donnell trails the Democratic nominee by ten percentage points.

"If I were in his shoes, I wouldn't debate her. She has no credibility." Delaware GOP party chair Tom Ross told Politico. "In the last quarter, she received a total of five donations from the state of Delaware, and she has a problem of the truth. The truth of the matter is she spends 90 percent of the time in Washington or elsewhere trying to raise money."

Perhaps the strongest indication that O'Donnell has people wary if not worried was an e-mail late on Monday sent by a Republican operative to the Huffington Post with a quizzical bit of background research on the Tea Party candidate. O'Donnell, it appears, has no discernible steady form of income.

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The Emmy Awards are almost here! Get ready for the red carpet by taking a look at some of the most glam gals from last year!
If you’re anything like me, you can’t wait to see the gorgeous gowns on the red carpet for the 2010 Emmy Awards on Aug. 29! What better way to gear up for the big night than by taking a look at some of my fave frocks from last year? From the sexy chic, (like Blake Lively’s plunging red Versace), to the whimsical, (like Drew Barrymore’s pale pink Monique Lhuillier), there were an array of dresses that blew me away. Take a look at these lovely ladies and tell us who you think was best dressed last year!

Just 1,200 people have been approved so far for a new program to provide insurance coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.

The program, known as the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan, launched in July as one of the immediate benefits of the new health care reform law, offering coverage to the uninsurable until 2014 when people should be able to choose from affordable policies available on an "exchange."

There are roughly four million people uninsured because of pre-existing conditions, and Democrats touted the new program as one of the best immediate provisions of health care reform. But the PCIP's administrators have said they expect it to reach only 350,000 over the next three years. The program is run by the federal government in 22 states and by the state government in the rest.

Kaiser Health News reported that 3,600 people have applied and about 1,200 have been approved for the PCIP. An obstacle is the program's steep premiums, which range from $140 to $900 depending on an applicant's age and location, and its requirement that people be uninsured for six months before applying (though the PCIP is still less expensive and more generous than existing high-risk pools operating in 35 states.)

"As of August 1, over 2,400 people applied for coverage in the 22 States in which the Federal government is running PCIP," said a Health Department spokeswoman in a statement to HuffPost. "About 750 applications had been approved that we were waiting for premium payments from. Over 140 people were enrolled and set to receive coverage."

NEW YORK — The furor over how close is too close to ground zero for a planned Islamic center and mosque has raised a simple question nine years after Sept. 11: Where exactly is ground zero?

The lines marking the site of the 2001 terror attacks change depending on which New Yorker, 9/11 family member and American you talk to. Even those who know it best can't agree on its boundaries. Tourists who come to snap pictures outside of a busy construction site often aren't sure that they're there.

Andrew Slawsky, 22, stood outside the proposed mosque and Islamic center two blocks north of the World Trade Center site. He said ground zero isn't here.

"To me, ground zero is any site that was destroyed or damaged on 9/11 – mostly the hole in the ground," Slawsky said, referring to the ruins of the trade center towers.

But Maureen Santora, whose firefighter son was killed at the trade center, says ground zero extends far beyond the fenced-off construction site where cranes, skyscrapers and a Sept. 11 memorial are rising. It goes through a wide swath of lower Manhattan, where debris was littered on rooftops and body parts were found years later, she says.

"It will always be a place where my son was murdered. I don't care what they call this place," Santora said. "It will be a cemetery."

The evolving boundaries of ground zero have informed – or misinformed – the debate about its proximity to the planned Park51 community center. The farther away from the place, the bigger it seems.

"It's constructed as hallowed ground when people don't actually have a clear boundary for it or a clear sense of what's within the boundary," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a University of Pennsylvania communications professor who studies political rhetoric. "What you have is a classic instance of people responding to a symbol whose meaning is physically divorced from the actual space."

Ground zero for decades had conjured up images of the atomic bomb blasts in 1945. After Sept. 11, it became a journalistic shorthand that evoked war and devastation, with an Associated Press report on the day of the attacks referring to the ruins of the towers as ground zero.

Here's any easy bet to win today in Washington (or anywhere else where true political junkies gather): Where did polling miss the mark most yesterday, in Florida's Republican primary for Governor or Florida's Democratic primary for Senate?

Judging by the tweets I've seen (and my own snap judgment), most of you may be thinking the polls were most off in the Governor's race, where most of the final polls showed Bill McCollum leading. If so, you'd be wrong. The three polls fielded in the last week on the Democratic Senate contest understated Kendrick Meek's margin by an average of 11 percentage points. The three final week polls on the Republican Governor's underestimated Rick Scott's margin by an average of just 5 points (the absolute value of the errors was 7.7; all of these numbers are based on the unofficial count with all precincts reporting).

Thus, we have another example of the pre-election pollster's paradox: The errors that get noticed are those that are just wrong enough to give everyone the wrong impression about the likely winner.

But let's focus on the Republican primary for Governor, for now, since theories are flying about why some polls missed Scott's looming victory. I asked our Pollster.com colleague, University of Wisconsin Professor Charles Franklin, to run one of his patented "bullseye" polling error charts. The chart below displays each poll as a dot, with the vertical axis representing Scott's percentage, the horizontal axis representing McCollum's percentage, and the center of the bullseye representing the actual result.

HOUSTON (AP) -- Federal investigators seeking the cause of the rig explosion that led to BP's massive Gulf oil spill focused Monday on communication and chain of command, wondering at times whether the key players knew enough to handle an emergency.

They also questioned whether a piece of failed equipment designed to prevent the disaster was inspected on schedule. Details about the so-called blowout preventer, which was supposed to lock in place to prevent a spill in the case of an explosion, will be important as investigators pull it from the seabed to analyze.

Testimony about the frantic moments after the spill, when a distraught worker told the rig manager "she just blew, she just blew," will also be key to understanding what happened April 20. That's when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, killing 11 workers and subsequently spewing 206 million gallons of oil into the Gulf.

Two men who testified Monday were key to the successful operation of the complex deepwater rig. But Neil Cramond, who oversees BP's marine operations in the Gulf, acknowledged he rarely had contact with Paul Johnson, who managed the rig for owner Transocean Ltd., which leased it to BP.

Cramond also testified that captains of rigs like the Deepwater Horizon are ultimately responsible for crew safety and environmental matters, but are not always involved in decisions about how to deal with drilling operations and potential risks.

Members of the joint U.S. Coast Guard-Bureau of Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement investigative panel are trying to figure out what caused the explosion and how regulation, safety and oversight can be improved to prevent another such catastrophe.

Investigators asked Johnson about whether maintenance of the blowout preventer had been up to code. Johnson testified that a September 2009 safety audit did not include a complete inspection of the device, and so "I don't think it's a complete audit."

Driver from www.huffingtonpost.com