The age of consent for groin-stomping is 16 in England. So.

A KINKY driving instructor took schoolgirls into woods and paid them to kick him in the groin as he crouched on all fours with his trousers down, a court heard.

David Aston, 32, would lay a towel down to keep his clothes clean then make the youngsters boot him until he could not bear the pain.

The court heard of two occasions when married Aston drove girls aged 13 to 15 to woods near Bicester, Oxon, after contacting one online in 2006.

He had oral sex with the 15-year-old both times before two, then three girls kicked him.

Get your boot on, yo.

More British Perverts: Sorta funny British comedy rap, with Moderate Content Warning for frequent mentions of sex and some racy pictures. Not bad.

Man Attempts Suicide... By Diving Into a Wood-Chipper. He failed.

A man tried to kill himself with a wood chipper in Roseville Thursday afternoon.

The crew of a tree repair service company was clearing trees in a public area when the man appeared and jumped head-first into the industrial-sized wood chipper.

The workers immediately turned off the machines and called 911.

The man was rushed to Regions Hospital in St. Paul where he remains in the intensive care unit. Officials say he suffered severe, life-threatening injuries to his head and torso.

Roseville Police said the incident was likely a suicide attempt, noting that the man did not leave a note or any indication of his intentions.

Maybe he thought he saw a quarter.

Thanks to dri for those last two.

Posted by: Ace at 08:41 AM | Comments (40)
Post contains 287 words, total size 2 kb.

And they'll drop, as the kids say, sometime in the fall.

This is Larry Johnson talking, who's not only a Hillary zealot but is generally unreliable. "21 indictments" against Karl Rove and all that.

File it under "doubtful." I remember all the Magic Bullet scandals that were claimed to be just about to break and take down Clinton. As a rule, rumors about such stuff are just flat-out false. If someone has such a tape, they release it. No one keeps secrets like that.

On the other hand, here's a vid making the rounds of Obama's very own Bosnian Sniper Incident. Not nearly as good as Hilary's, though, and it will have zero impact on the campaign.

Background here, though the vid is pretty self-explanatory.

Thanks to TopSecretK9 and Manuel.

Posted by: Ace at 07:30 AM | Comments (42)
Post contains 148 words, total size 1 kb.

Jamie Rubin, a former Clinton administration State Department Official and now a reporter in the UK has an unpleasant reminder for McCain from a 2006 interview.

I asked: "Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?"

McCain answered: "They're the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so . . . but it's a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that."

The video is apparently posted at the Huffington Post. Expect to see a lot of it soon.

I don't think the President had McCain in mind when he said, "Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," but you can bet Obama and the Democrats are going to get mileage out of it.

UPDATE:
Hot Air has more on the context of this and it may not be as bad as the version in the Washington Post. I only say 'may not' because I haven't read it all yet.

The Hot Air link points to other comments McCain made at the time where he clearly states he thinks Hamas needs to change its ways and become a responsible political party. It's a layer of nuance that's not in the clip below that Rubin wrote about.

In the context of that clip, where he was asked about how American diplomats should act, I don't think 'deal with' really means bomb the hell out of but it doesn't necessarily mean sit down for tea either.

Here's the clip.

*I changed the headline from "Talk To" to "Deal With" since that's the wording McCain actually used.

Posted by: DrewM at 06:21 AM | Comments (34)
Post contains 375 words, total size 3 kb.

Or grave.

Another OBL tape. This one is a hoot; get this, he blames it all on the Jooooos.

Bin Laden has placed growing emphasis on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in recent pronouncements.

He said it was at the heart of the Muslim battle with the West and an inspiration to the 19 bombers who carried out the attacks on U.S. cities on Sept. 11, 2001. "We will continue, God permitting, the fight against the Israelis and their allies ... and will not give up a single inch of Palestine as long as there is one true Muslim on earth," the leader of al Qaeda said in the latest message, posted on an Islamist website on Friday (May 16).

That's not the funny part though. This is:

He also said Western media had over the years painted Israelis as victims, and the Palestinians who had been displaced from their land as terrorists.

Of course he means the media "treats" them as victims and they're "not". But criminy, very loose shit. It's pretty apparent he ain't gettin much CNN in cave seventy six.

Via Gateway Pundit.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 05:29 AM | Comments (8)
Post contains 194 words, total size 1 kb.

More than twelve Hillary staffers, we're told. from low-level grunts to money men to high-ranking senior staff, answered a questionnaire with full anonymity guaranteed. (Supposedly -- this is TNR, I should note.)

So-- what went wrong? Short answer: Everything.

Apart from the obvious answer that she was a poor candidate running against a good one (or, rather, an exciting one), here are some of the more interesting answers:

"Clearly [Obama] was a phenomenon. He was tapping something really different than anyone had ever seen before. ... Months and months before Iowa, he was getting record crowds. I just think they should have really gone after him back in the summer and in the fall. I know it would have been a difficult decision to make back then. She's the leader of the party, the standard bearer, the big dog. Everyone thinks she's gonna win and walk away with it. Why go picking on Barack Obama? But that's just something the campaign should have done sooner."

..

"Devastating vulnerabilities such as Obama's associations with Wright and Ayers were not unearthed by the campaign's vaunted research team in time to be fully taken advantage of--despite being readily available in the public domain."

...

"Harold Ickes's encyclopedic understanding of the proportional delegate system was never operationalized into a field plan. The campaign inexplicably wrote off many states entirely, allowing Obama to create the lead of 100+ delegates that he has today. Most notably, we claimed the race would be over by February 5, but didn't devote any resources to the smaller states that day and in the weeks that followed, allowing Obama to easily run up margins and delegate counts on the cheap--the delegate margin he will win by."

Mark Penn gets blamed a lot. This seems important:

"Probably our second biggest mistake was much more operational: Making our chief strategist our one and only pollster. It is impossible to disagree and have a counter view on message when the person creating the message is also the person testing the message."

Even I'd realize that was a bad mistake, and I'm a moron.

Although Patty Solis Doyle gets blamed a lot, Mark Penn gets more specific criticisms, because no one seemed to understand what the hell Patty Solis Doyle was doing besides sitting on her ass all day. Well played, Ms. Doyle.

So back to Mark Penn:

"She never embraced the mantle from the beginning of being a different kind of candidate. Why did the campaign not do that? Because Mark Penn wanted to do it a different way. Read his book. He thought that you have a list of policy prescriptions. Voters are into that, and that's how you win. This came at the expense of--and it's a decision he really pushed for--saying to folks, 'Yes, she's a pretty inspiring figure herself.' ... There's no reason why she's not a change agent also. But once the CW is set, it just doesn't change."

Yes. Wonkery and small-bore policy prescriptions. Everyone knows that's the battlefield presidential contests are fought upon. Certainly not likability and character and biography and vision.

Which are frankly bullshit, but then so are policy prescriptions.

And then there's this:

"There was financial mismanagement bordering on fraud. A candidate who raised more than a quarter of a billion dollars over the years had to pump in millions more of her own money to stave off bankruptcy."

More at the link.

Posted by: Ace at 09:09 PM | Comments (36)
Post contains 583 words, total size 4 kb.

A site which transposes babies' and adults' heads, apparently because psychic horror helps build loving families.

"I don't get it but it is weird," dri writes. That's pretty much 90% of the internet to me.

Posted by: Ace at 06:09 PM | Comments (21)
Post contains 37 words, total size 1 kb.

Seriously. It's actually a straightforward ruling on what constitutes "private parts" in an indecency statute, but it's still kind of funny.

Only women's breasts can be regarded as "private parts", whereas the male chest – even if the male in question has man breasts, or "moobs" as they are known – cannot, the judges say.

The distinction between the sexual status of the female and male chest area was made during the quashing of a conviction for voyeurism at a public swimming pool.

Kevin Bassett, of Spalding, Lincs, was found guilty last year of the charge after he secretly filmed a man as he showered in his trunks.

The 44-year-old care home worker was given an 18-month supervision order, but appealed on the grounds that the alleged offence did not fall into any category in the 2003 Sexual Offences Act under which he was charged.

Lawyers for Mr Bassett said the Act stated that private parts – such as breasts – must be "exposed" during an act of voyeurism.

Posted by: Ace at 05:17 PM | Comments (22)
Post contains 197 words, total size 1 kb.

Heh.

Am I stupid for never even having wondered about the improbability of a tropical parrot being named the Norwegian blue?

Adding to the absurdity was the fact that parrots - being tropical birds - don't come from Scandinavia.

Or do they? For now, in a development putting the sketch in a completely different light, it turns out that the Norwegian Blue did exist.

Dr David Waterhouse, a fossil expert and Python fan, has found that parrots not only lived in Scandinavia 55million years ago, but probably evolved there before spreading into the southern hemisphere.

His discovery was based on a preserved wing bone of a previously unknown species, given the scientific name Mopsitta Tanta - and now nicknamed the Norwegian Blue.

...

A fossil expert has discovered that parrots not only lived in the region 55million years ago but probably evolved there before spreading to the Southern Hemisphere

Dr Waterhouse, 29, said of Mopsitta Tanta: "Obviously, we were dealing with a bird that is bereft of life, but the tricky bit was establishing it was a parrot."

...

However, the Pythons were wrong about one thing...the Blue could hardly have pined for the fjords.

"This parrot shuffled off its mortal coil around 55million years ago, but the fjords in Norway were formed during the last Ice Age and are less than a million years old," said Dr Waterhouse.

Told yesterday about the Blue's discovery, Michael Palin chuckled, saying: "It just shows that nothing is original."

In related news, the mysterious Sphinx has been positively identified by archaeologists as a proprietor of a cheese shop uncontaminated by cheese.

Thanks to Jack M.

Posted by: Ace at 04:07 PM | Comments (26)
Post contains 304 words, total size 2 kb.

Ring.
Ring.

Pollster: Is this the residence of Mr. OregonMuse?

OregonMuse: Yes it is:

P: And who are you going to vote for in November, Mr., uh, Muse?

O: John McClane.

P: Excuse me, did you say John McCain?

O: No, I said John McClane.

P: Now, why would you vote for John McClane?

O: he is the candidate whose views on no-nonsense views on foreign policy, domestic terrorist threats, and oily bad guys are closest to my own.

P: But McClane is a fictional character.

O: And yet, he would be the best candidate. Sad, isn't it?

Click.

Yippie Kay Yay America!

(Hat tip to Jonah Goldberg at the Corner )

Posted by: Open Blog at 02:50 PM | Comments (17)
Post contains 130 words, total size 1 kb.

Aggravated bitchcraft isn't a crime, so they had to go looking for another theory of the case.

A federal grand jury on Thursday indicted a Missouri woman for her alleged role in perpetrating a hoax on the online social network MySpace against a 13-year-old neighbor who committed suicide.

Lori Drew of suburban St. Louis allegedly helped create a false-identity MySpace account to contact Megan Meier, who thought she was chatting with a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans. Josh didn't exist.

Megan hanged herself at home in October 2006 after receiving cruel messages, including one stating the world would be better off without her.

...

Drew was charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress on the girl.

...

Each of the four counts carries a maximum possible penalty of five years in prison.

Drew will be arraigned in St. Louis and then moved to Los Angeles for trial.

The indictment says MySpace members agree to abide by terms of service that include, among other things, not promoting information they know to be false or misleading; soliciting personal information from anyone under age 18 and not using information gathered from the Web site to "harass, abuse or harm other people."

...

Grills [another coconspirator] also said she wrote the message to Megan about the world being a better place without her. The message was supposed to end the online relationship with "Josh" because Grills felt the joke had gone too far.

"I was trying to get her angry so she would leave him alone and I could get rid of the whole MySpace," Grills told the morning show.

Seems kinda thin. Still I hope they can get them on something.

Thanks to dri.

Posted by: Ace at 12:27 PM | Comments (43)
Post contains 307 words, total size 2 kb.