Limiting posts to one category: posts not showing up

I have one particular category of post that I want to exclude from the home page, and show by itself on its own “Daily Specials” page. So I used query_posts to exclude it

<?php global $query_string; // required
	$posts = query_posts($query_string.'&cat=-8'); // exclude category 8
?>

…and that worked just fine. No Daily Specials in the main blog stream. Then I set up a separate page, and on that template I included

<?php global $query_string; // required
	$posts = query_posts($query_string.'&cat=8'); // limit to category 8
?>

The loop is the same used on the home page (except that it excludes permalinks and meta information, since I don’t want separate pages for these posts). The problem is: the posts aren’t showing up. The date is; but the title and content is missing.

This is the full code for the specials page:

<?php global $query_string; // required
	$posts = query_posts($query_string.'&cat=8'); // limit to category 8
?>

	<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

	<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">

			<div class="entry-meta">
				<p class="entry-date"><?php the_time('F')?><br /><span class="date"><?php the_time('j')?></span></p>
			</div><!-- .entry-meta -->

		<h2 class="entry-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h2>

		<div class="entry-content">
			<div class="entry">
				<?php the_content(); ?>
			</div>
		</div>

	</div>

<?php endwhile; ?>

<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/inc/nav.php' ); ?>

<?php else : ?>

	<h2>Not Found</h2>

<?php endif; ?>

<?php wp_reset_query(); // reset the query ?>