Still trying to clear out all the backlog of tips, chicken soup recipes and suggestions on the most painless methods of suicide from the last 3 or 4 days. (Many thanks to LauraW for the latter)

Item #1: From ABC (again, the Australian one). You want a busty story? Well hereÂ’s one for you: Busty Women Win Bra Battle.

” A British department store has been forced to change the way it prices underwear after almost 13,000 people signed an online protest against its policy of charging customers more for large bras. The Facebook campaign was started by 26-year-old Beckie Williams, who wears a 30G!!!bra, after Marks and Spencer failed to respond to her complaints about the two-pound ($4) extra charge on bras bigger than a DD cup. The group, Busts 4 Justice, condemned the policy as criminally unfair and urged "busty ladies" to "join forces to end this blatant discrimination".

FuckinÂ’ eh sister! HereÂ’s a protest movement I can get behind. Or in front of. (SortaÂ’ depends on which side the clasp is.) Ms. Williams, I salute you in your stand against bustism and will support you (and your rather sizeable orbs) in any way I possibly can. You carry a heavy burden which you shouldnÂ’t have to bear alone.

Item #2: Might as well stick with ABC which also has an article titled Copulating Corpses Spark Outrage in Berlin. Probably more up KrakatoaÂ’s alley since it involves the dead.

“An exhibit showing two corpses having sex has triggered uproar among German politicians. German anatomist Gunther von Hagens is famous for his global Body Worlds shows of preserved human cadavers. He will now be displaying skinless corpses, including a "plastinated" man and woman having sex, from Thursday (local time) in Berlin.”

Item #3: More Popular Mechanics: 100 Skills Every Man Should Know. IÂ’ll just leave it at that and you can decide what should be stricken or added to the list. And IÂ’m sure the female morons (all 1 of you) might have something to add as well.

TonightÂ’s overnight thread is sponsored by the Star-Nosed Mole.

Notice: Posted by permission of AceCorp LLC. Please e-mail overnight open thread tips to xgenghisx@gmail.com. Otherwise send tips to Ace.

Posted by: Open Blog at 06:59 PM | Comments (132)
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First Ted Stevens now this. That remedial disclosure training that Attorney General Eric Holder ordered better begin soon.

A federal court jury on Friday acquitted the big chemical products company W. R. Grace and three of its former executives on all charges that they had knowingly contaminated the small Montana mining town of Libby with asbestos, then conspired to cover up the deed.

...

Prosecutors tried to convince jurors that the memorandums revealed a cover-up and a conspiracy; the defense argued that they instead showed the internal workings of a company grappling in good will over how to make the mine safer.

...

Marshalling the evidence was not the only problem for prosecutors, though. In late April, Judge Molloy denounced the star prosecution witness, Robert H. Locke, in open court, and raised doubts in front of the jurors about the practices of the prosecutors.

Mr. Locke, a former Grace executive, testified that Grace executives knew that asbestos was sickening people and that they actively worked to hide that knowledge. But after his testimony, evidence turned over by the prosecution showed that Mr. Locke had grossly understated on the witness stand how often he had met with prosecutors.

Judge Molloy told the jurors that the government had committed an “inexcusable dereliction of duty” by not providing evidence of that relationship sooner. He ordered the panel not to consider Mr. Locke’s testimony in considering the fate of one defendant, Robert J. Bettacchi, and to use “great skepticism” in evaluating Mr. Locke’s testimony about the case as a whole.

source

Now I don't agree with the peosecution of W.R. Grace based on that facts as I under them, but damn for the amount of money we spend on the Justice Department is it too much to ask for them to hire competent attorneys?

Posted by: Open Blog at 05:01 PM | Comments (49)
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(overnight thread coming in a couple of hours)

As part of our ongoing public service as a Very smart military blog, hereÂ’s a couple of articles regarding that little scrap weÂ’re currently involved with in Afghanistan.

First up is an article/interview at the well-respected military journal JaneÂ’s Defence Weekly MSNBC concerning the following question: Is Afghanistan a War of Choice, not Neccessity? Oddly, itÂ’s actually an interview of the President of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Richard Haass by another member of CFR, Bernard Gwertzman, a consulting editor at their web site.

As we all know from listening to Art Bell and his sidekicks, CFR is a shadowy organization which manipulates the global economic, political and military sytems from, well, the shadows. Also they have a really cool fleet of black helicopters.

A brief tangent: I was going to post this last night and when I went to the Wikipedia entry for CFR and looked under "Mission" I found the following:

"The Council's mission is to spread fear in the world by working closely with state owned news agencies such as Fox News Network and the BBC. To understand fully the information presented on the CFR website one has to adopt a black means white and white means black way of thinking."

It's all fixed now. Probably just their crosstown rivals the Bilderbergers pulling a prank on them. Anyway, the article/interview goes on at length to discuss assertions made in Mr. Haass’ (no that’s not a typo…he really has that many dual letters in his last name) latest tome entitled ”War of Neccessity, War of Choice.” Haass served in both Bush administrations (NSC in Bush ’41 and State Dept. in Bush ’43.) His launching point on the subject is that Gulf War I was “necessary” and the War in Iraq/Gulf War II was not , and presumably resigned over the issue. As for Afghanistan, he considers the initial phases necessary actions but is now worried that Pres. Obama is expanding the engagement there into the “war of choice category.”

LotÂ’s more hot girl-on-girl action below the fold.
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Posted by: Open Blog at 04:22 PM | Comments (71)
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Slow news day.

Posted by: Ace at 02:45 PM | Comments (75)
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Obama will apologize for this in a month or so. He's got a pretty long list already.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 02:38 PM | Comments (19)
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The wheels of the bus go 'round and 'round, 'round and 'round...

On Friday, President Barack Obama accepted the resignation of Louis Caldera, director of the White House Military Office.

The president was said to have been furious about the incident and had ordered an internal review. The mission had been approved by Caldera, who had apologized.

As Nancy Pelosi might say, I don't want the low-level operators; I want the high-level planners.

Let's set up a Truth Commission.

The One Pic:

All that for this?

Posted by: Ace at 11:43 AM | Comments (127)
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Not a joke.

I'm starting to suspect Obama doesn't like Jews.

[H]e will be aware of the sensibilities of his German hosts before the D-Day commemoration and by traveling to Dresden — a city destroyed by ferocious Allied bombing in February 1945 — Mr Obama will also acknowledge how Germany suffered during the Second World War.

There's no doubt the Germans have increasingly cast themselves as victims in WWII (and "victim" is a but a stone's throw from "hero"). This sort of idea plays with the German public. They want their suffering acknowledged too.

But should this be done?

It should be noted that Reagan blundered into something like this, and it caused a firestorm of criticism. (Um... no Dresden joke intended with "firestorm.")

Posted by: Ace at 11:28 AM | Comments (394)
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Joke-wise, you can't go wrong with racism and bears.

Another Funny One: Could latest school shooting have been foreseen? School shooter was "loner," "troubled," and several previous incidents of deadly school shootings.
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Posted by: Ace at 11:21 AM | Comments (12)
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Really?

Note how the media is suddenly doing its patriotic job in trying to improve economic optimism:

An influential Democrat who was also one of the worldÂ’s top-ten, highest-paid hedge fund managers last year thinks he knows which book is at the top of the White House reading list this spring: Animal Spirits, the powerful new blast of behavioural economics from Nobel prize-winner George Akerlof and Yale economist Robert Shiller.

Judging by the upbeat economic message we have been hearing from the White House, the Treasury and even the Federal Reserve over the past six weeks, that is a shrewd guess. The authors argue that “we will never really understand important economic events unless we confront the fact that their causes are largely mental in nature”. Our “ideas and feelings” about the economy are not purely a rational reaction to data and experience; they themselves are an important driver of economic growth – and decline.

Since mid-March President Barack Obama and his team have mounted a sophisticated effort to brighten those “ideas and feelings”, reassuring the nation with “glimmers of hope across the economy” and the assertion that “we’re starting to see progress”. The much bally-hooed stress tests – whose comprehensively leaked results were fully unveiled after the markets closed on Thursday – are both an important example of this confidence-building campaign and its toughest challenge.

The sunnier rhetoric of recent weeks marked a sharp shift both from the bleak mood of the fin de regime administration of George W. Bush and from the first weeks of the Obama White House....

But once the stimulus bill was passed, the White House calculated that, as Mr Obama told the Financial Times, lawmakers and US voters had reached their limits. No new money to rev up the economy or revive the banks would be forthcoming until the president and his team could demonstrate concrete results from the first instalment.

Since then Americans have been hearing a decidedly more optimistic vibe from Washington. It has seemed to work. A Google search for the term “economic recovery” turned up 6,991 references to the term in January and 7,831 in February. In the first week of May the phrase occurred 24,443 times.

More traditional yardsticks show the same result. According to a recent ABC/Washington Post poll, Americans’ belief that their country is heading in the right direction has soared from 19 per cent, just before Mr Obama’s inauguration, to 50 per cent, the highest in six years. In what could be a textbook example of behavioural economics, the stock market has followed the same curve, recovering from what rightwing commentators were calling “the Obama bear market” at the beginning of the year to a healthy rally.

This is all obvious -- but why is the media suddenly willing to stop the drumbeat of negativity and (as Slu notes below) actually try to put a positive spin on the worst unemployment in 25 years?

The answer is obvious; they want to help Obama, and they wanted to hurt Bush. Note that while the same phenomenon applies to both Democrats and Republicans -- talking up the economy actually has tangible effects on growth, and talking it down has real effects on contraction -- Republicans aren't allowed to talk up the economy. The media won't let them. The minute they say something nice about the economy, the media says they're "out of touch" and then runs a package showing all the bad or worrisome indicators, pushing out the word that the economy is on the edge of a cliff (or actually falling into the cliff). Thus undoing the good that was intended.

A long time ago I came up with the idea of a "Republican tax" the media imposes on this country's economy when a president they don't like (a Republican, naturally, or Bill Clinton before he perjured himself). By constantly pushing a message of fear and uncertainty, the media actually restrains the economy under Republican rule. By how much? I don't know. At least a half percent of GDP growth, I figure, and maybe even 1 or 2 points.

Obama now presides over an economy showing the worst numbers since the Great Depression, and yet the media wants to push the idea of "economic recovery." No shooting down Obama as "out of touch" when he suggests we're coming out of this, no endless repetition of all the downward-pointing indicators. Instead, a very high unemployment rate is spun as surprisingly good, and indicative, if anything, of our emergence from the recession.

For the media, there's always a light at the end of the tunnel when their boy is in charge.

There's no problem with the media accentuating the positive. I just wish they'd do it when a someone they didn't vote for is running the country. Economic problems impose real consequences on people in those times, too.

Posted by: Ace at 10:41 AM | Comments (63)
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Oh dear. The truth is actually coming out?

Well who asked for that?

We wanted a "managed truth" that claimed, like Nazis, Ve knew nossing.

Captain Ed: "now Obama knows how Bush felt when the CIA decided to leak damaging information to the press."

Posted by: Ace at 09:55 AM | Comments (135)
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