I'm turning 40 this year. Will not be a cougar. That whole thing's pretty stupid, in my worthless opinion.*

The department store said a nationwide analysis of the most popular lingerie styles from October 2009 to April 2010, revealed that women over 40 have given the more seductive side of the lingerie industry a big boost.

"Positive female role models in this age group such as the women in the Sex and the City movies and Courteney Cox in TV's Cougar Town are giving the women confidence to splash out on themselves," Debenhams head lingerie buyer Annette Warburton said in a statement.

The technical term for this phenomenon is 'deranged denial.'

Sex and the City. Egad.

Those four old sluts were positive female role models? Oh my. Bitches, get right with God, put your head back on your shoulders, and kick that man-child out of your bed.**

Role Model.

I mean, CRIKEY, do we have to assemble your whole lifetime of photographs into some kind of cruel time-lapse flipbook so that you can understand just exactly what has happened to you?

Now, there are many many beautiful and sexy older women. But 40 is not, never will be, 'the new 20.' It's only the new 20 for those who never learned not to behave like an alleycat the first time around.

*This is kind of an unusually negative post for me. I fully expect and demand a beating.

**Unless he married you, in which case, Congratulations! You have a son.

Posted by: LauraW at 08:52 AM | Comments (432)
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David Obey (D - WI) is retiring from the US House of Representatives. He has represented Wisconsin's 7th district since 1969.

UPDATE: Drew advised me that this was skull-worthy. And since I'm a giver...here ya go.

Sean Duffy for Congress [ace]: Duffy -- a DA who was once on Real World: Boston, and married kinda-hot Cuban Republican Rachel Campos from Real World: San Francisco, was already doing pretty well but now he's the favorite.

Contribute here!

Posted by: Monty at 08:15 AM | Comments (156)
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Hump hump hump.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:02 AM | Comments (325)
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Good evening all.
Also don't forget about the job bank at the AoSHQ yahoo group.

The 100 Greatest YouTube Hits in 4 Minutes!

From Boxxy to the Star Wars kid to Obama Girl. And you've probably seen quite a few right here on the ONT.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:55 PM | Comments (722)
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Because nothing cures fears about future obligations and drains on what you have today like heaping present obligations upon the future.

That went well, huh?

I'm not an economist, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night (things are ok at home. FOR NOW). But you'd have to be a goof not to just grasp the basics of the thing facing us. We as a nation, that powers the global economy, are doing every god damned thing politically that can be done to stifle and suppress it.

Confusing new financial encumberments with health care. The threat of even higher taxes upon production of energy. A board of "base closers" convened (to give appropriate legislative cover to those who cry for it) whose mission in life is to figure out how to wade out of the national deficit for a nation that refuses to stop spending what it doesn't have.

Sometimes I think being a conservative is like being a Mets fan, except I hate the friggin Mets, so I say Texas Rangers fan. Same same. Without the glorious history and all. You keep coming back to the games. You buy the beer and the dog and the nachos, and settle back and raise your voice in some sort of commitment to a team that's going 79 and 83. And telling yourself you had a good time tonight.

Economies are cyclical and all, except when you keep chasing them with a dagger. And stabbing them repeatedly.

Goose. Threatened.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 05:39 PM | Comments (105)
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Jim Geraghty was tasked by his editors to figure out how many Democratic seats were vulnerable this year.

Over ninety, which he rounds up to 99.

Once you add up the upcoming special elections, the open-seat races, and the races where there’s some indicator of trouble for a Democratic opponent — a particularly strong challenger, favorable district demographics, surprising fundraising numbers, a particularly weak Democratic incumbent, or a combination of these factors — you come up with more than 90 House races. If the GOP wins only half the seats listed below, they win back the House.

Posted by: Ace at 05:28 PM | Comments (56)
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My own diagnosis? Chronic Butterface, but I'd hit it.

Julia Manihuari's chest grew to a gigantic N cup after the birth of her third son seven years ago - leaving her unable to move.

The 29-year-old said: "It was awful. If I tried to get up I would faint because my breasts were so heavy."

The pint-sized farmer's wife, who lives in northern Peru, was finally helped when local media paid for her to take a three-day boat trip to the nearest town for medical help.

...

They had to cut TWO AND HALF STONE of flesh from Julia's boobs fearing they could squash her lungs and kill her. [I think that's 35 pounds. -- ace]

Julia emerged a 34B cup after the six-hour op.

Video at the link, which I'm sure you're not going to watch.

Thanks to runningrn.

Posted by: Ace at 02:42 PM | Comments (358)
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Sometimes it's vitally important that we scold people for using intemperate rhetoric that might create "a climate of fear" and political violence.

Sometimes -- not so much. Not so much.

The FBI will assist in the investigation of a suspicious envelope addressed to Gov. Jan Brewer that an employee at the Capitol opened Tuesday, sending the Executive Tower into one-hour lockdown after a white powder spilled from the envelope onto a computer.

In more good news, President Heal the Nation is now using the term teabaggers privately.

Posted by: Ace at 02:29 PM | Comments (77)
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That audio I just posted is not the plane being ordered back to the gate so that Shahad can be arrested.

Supposedly (and I'm not sure who's zoomin' who here) Shahzad was arrested and taken off the plane before it left the gate. Then it was cleared for take-off. Then it was instructed to return to the gate, because some Einstein finally figured out that if there had been a terrorist on-board just minutes before, maybe they ought to screen the plane for thoroughly for a hidden explosive or additional fleeing accomplices.

A senior US official is saying that Napolitano is just "trying to put lipstick on a pig" by pretending, once again, "the system worked."

NBC's Jim Miklaszewski reports that a senior U.S. official familiar with events surrounding the capture of Shahzad says if the security system had worked properly, "He should have never been able to get on that airplane."

According to the official, Shahzad's name was put onto the U.S. "no-fly list" about 11 a.m. Monday, some 12 hours before he was taken into custody aboard that United Arab Emirates flight that pulled away from the gate at JFK, bound for Dubai. As required, once the plane was locked up and started to pull away from the gate, the airline submitted the final manifest to customs. According to one official, "We're extremely fortunate that alert agents caught the name, and ordered the plane to return to the gate."

But the official says Shahzad's name should have set off alarms throughout the ticketing and boarding process before he ever buckled his seat belt. The system should have first been triggered when he purchased the ticket. If he purchased the ticket before his name was placed on the "no-fly list," then the airline and authorities should have been alerted when he got his boarding pass, either from an agent or one of the self-service kiosks. That's especially true on an international flight, because his passport would have been electronically scanned before he was issued a boarding pass. Even at the boarding gate, there are systems that alert TSA and customs officials to someone on the "no-fly list" attempting to board a flight.

Although Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano said even if the plane would have taken off, U.S. officials had the authority to turn the plane around, one official pointed out that since the suspect had allegedly attempted to set off a bomb in Times Square, there's no predicting what may have happened on board the plane in flight.

"She was just attempting to put lipstick on a pig," the official said. "If that plane would have gotten into the air, heads would have rolled. We need to do a better job."

Thanks to DrewM.

Posted by: Ace at 02:03 PM | Comments (99)
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As you probably know, Shazad almost made it out of the country to Dubai because, despite having his name added to the no-fly lists, the US only checks documents as you enter the US, not as you depart.

What? Even if this is generally the case, we don't have some kind high-alert mode we can go into when it comes to fugitives?

I guess that will change... maybe. It seems like the US almost wants to be attacked.

We caught him at JFK, but only because... Oh Good God. Because he was doing the thing that anyone who's ever watched a television show like 24, or even Law & Order, knows you can't do. Instead of ditching his cell phone and picking up a twenty dollar anonymous pay-as-you-go phone at CVS, he... kept using his cellphone.

In the end, it was secret Army intelligence planes that did him in. Armed with his cell phone number, they circled the skies over the New York area, intercepting a call to Emirates Airlines reservations, before scrambling to catch him at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

The charges he'll faces for allegedly planting the explosive-laden SUV in Times Square include an act of terrorism transcending national borders; attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction; use of a destructive device during the commission of another crime; and assorted explosive charges.

There were many developments in the fast-paced investigation, but sources told CBS 2 how the operation went down. Spooked by reports that authorities were looking for a Pakistani-American, Shahzad rushed out of his Bridgeport, Conn. Home and headed for the airport. He made the reservations on the way, paying cash for his ticket.

Yeah, on that last bit: As I said, his near-escape might have been avoided had the Obama Administration not been leaking every damn thing they knew about it as they learned it.

And why did they do that? For politics, to convince people they were "doing something."

Now, if they really wanted to do something, they would have kept silent until his apprehension. So as not to alert the perp.

But they didn't want to really do something so much as they wanted to be perceived as "doing something," and if the latter meant the former might be unachievable, so be it.

Confirmed: The US can stop and even catch the most inept terrorists on earth.

No evidence whatsoever we can stop or catch anyone with even the basic rudiments of cleverness.

Update: Chatter as Shazad's plane is instructed -- just as it throttles for take-off -- to return to the gate:

That's how close this all was.

If this guy had seen a single episode of 24, he would have escaped.

Wrong! Or, wrong?

Vic says that I've got it wrong:

Ace this is contrary to what other reports are saying. Early this morning a phone interview on Fox with an LEO said that they followed him on the plane and that they already had agents on the plane. The intent was to catch any co-conspirators that may have been on the plane or leaving with him. There was never any way he could have "got away".

Also, other reports said he WAS using a throw-away phone.

I don't know if Vic is right because I haven't read the reports he has, but I'm guessing he's right, and that I'm wrong.

Posted by: Ace at 01:38 PM | Comments (106)
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