I could be wrong, but I don’t think your queries are the problem here. Seeing the result “36 queries in 8.291 seconds” is scary, but that only measures the time in between the start of the first query and the completion of the last query. There are a lot of other things in there slowing your page loads down. If you want to see how much time your queries are actually taking up, try this:
Add this line to your wp-config.php:
define( "SAVEQUERIES", true );
And output the actual query history in your footer:
echo "<!--- \r\n";
global $wpdb;
var_dump( $wpdb->queries );
echo "\r\n--->";
Then you can view the source of your page and see if any of the queries are actually taking an inordinate amount of time.
Looking at your page with Yslow enabled, it looks to me like the biggest time-consumer is the image resizing that’s being done on all of the post images. On my load of the site, it looks like each of those images is taking between .3 and 1.25 seconds to load, and you have 6 of them on your home page.
Plus, it looks like they’re being generated dynamically in your theme files, with the query string argument ?&w=300, which will prevent them from being cached. And – on top of that – they’re being resized again in the browser to 115×80, adding a further slowdown.
My advice is: start by tweaking the image display functions of your theme. Add an additional image size to your theme, so that the image is being resized when its initially uploaded, instead of being resized on every pageview. If that doesn’t help, install Yslow and go through the prompts it gives you. Tweaking the headers and etags on images (through htaccess) can allow images to be cached that are otherwise force-loaded on every page view.
UPDATE
Also – you’re loading several different versions of jquery – the one bundled with WordPress (probably called by one of your plugins), one from google API, and one bundled with your theme. You’ll have to untangle all of that mess and make sure all your various components use proper procedure for enqueueing scripts etc… I don’t envy you