Banker keeps his job after ogling model live on TV (NSFW)

Miranda Kern

This is the pic which caused the fuss.

To me that's art. It isn't porn. But I'm weird that way.

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Iran opens two new missile plants

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Why exactly does Ahmadinejad find it necessary to piss everyone off every week or so? Is it internal PR or what? Is it the fucking banty rooster syndrome? Is he just totally bonkers? For some reason I think he's far too intelligent to not realize he's painting a target on his chest.

Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi opened two new missile production plants on Saturday, just three days after Iran fired a rocket carrying live animals into space, state television reported.

Ya know my problem is I'm relatively sane (sort of). Which means I can't possibly think of all the manipulative reasons for anything political. Who is the audience? Is the audience the US, Iranians, Venezuela, the Supreme Leader, Israel? Is it saber rattling or serious? Is an action that appears military merely a ploy to get a favorable oil sale agreement? Is Ahmadinejad on drugs? Does he have extras? Does Ahmadinejad have a small penis? Is he really trying to provoke a war?

Why hasn't my head exploded?

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NYC student, 12, arrested for doodling

Not the real girl

Back in the day we would have gotten a swat on the ass by the principal or a couple of days suspension. And we doodled on our desks with pocket knives. Not an option these days.

A New York City junior high student was arrested for doodling on her desk with a marker.

Wonder if they frog marched her out the door in handcuffs? Why yes, yes they did.

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Some teachers give judge 'F' for math book ruling

And Spiiderweb™ gives the reporter an 'F' for piss poor proofreading. Something I'm often guilty of as well.

A judge's ruling that the Seattle school system must reconsider a controversial meth curriculum has upset some teachers.

Or maybe they are talking about a meth curriculum in which case they get an 'A'.

Are good math skills required to run a meth lab?

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White House Blasts Shelby Hold on Nominees

Senator Richard Shelby (R-Al)

That's just about enough profanity for this post.

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Words with amorphous meanings to Americans

Bernie Madoff - convict

Americans are such damn funny people... as in strange.

Many people have been in the news lately from the banksters to auto makers to politicians to CEOs. They proclaim they are responsible for this or that (not so much CEOs).

Responsibility: They take it, but what does it mean? It would seem acceptance of responsibility should carry with it some consequences. It doesn't appear that is so. Except for Obama who could lose his job in 3 years, no one appears to suffer in any way for their having claimed responsibility.

Socialism: Americans mostly hate it, but live with it every day. Most firefighters, police, the FBI, are all socialized. Few would find it preferable to have private militias protecting them.

Free trade: There's no such thing unless it's linked to human rights. It's merely a mixture of tariff controls, or lack thereof, which allows exploitation of people so other people can buy stuff cheaply. I think we can all agree NAFTA has certainly improved the lot of thousands of Mexicans, right? Many more after NAFTA are middle class with shiny new cars and big houses, right? Yeah, that worked out pretty well.

Theft: This one depends on your level of masochism. If banksters have fucked you by destroying your 401k or diminished your other retirement accounts and you liked it, then you don't see any theft. If you live in the real world, you realize there are many more Madoff's out there who need free room and board courtesy of the state.

War crimes: They don't apply to American politicians. Nor do they apply to Tony Blair. So they are not really crimes.

There are many other such words, but I'm not out to write a damn dictionary.

TV Stolen at Prison Facility

Fort Des Moines Correctional Facility and Colorado Springs after dark

OMG! The bureaucrats attack.

As I've posted many times. Each level of government should control that which can't be regulated below them and no more. You can't fight vice in your community, but the city can. That's their responsibility. You can't establish safe driving speeds for your state, but your state representatives can. That's their responsibility. You can't close Gitmo, but your federal officials can. That's their responsibility.

The Universities can control the BCS and the US Congress shouldn't stick their motherfucking noses into it, nor the God damn (with all due respect) President. And the NFL and NBA can handle their leagues. No federal involvement is necessary. If you have a son playing in playoffs they might well be injured or worse with multiple "playoff games". Get over it.

I'm basically a Libertarian when it comes to governing. Do what's necessary for the US/states/counties/cities to function efficiently, care for the people, and not one fucking thing more.

It took some kind of nerve to pull off a recent theft - from the Fort Des Moines Correctional Facility.

A thief absconded with a flat-screen TV after attending a program at the Des Moines facility for former prison inmates.

He nearly got away with the crime by using the cover of budget-induced darkness.
Authorities believe a man took the TV, valued at $400, from a dark conference room at the prison facility.

Two men initially avoided detection because budget cuts have left the prison short-staffed. The conference room surveillance cameras did not spot them because lights had been turned off to save money.

And of course we (I) must mention the poster city.

The headline reads: Colorado Springs cuts into services considered basic by many.

COLORADO SPRINGS — This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric.

More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.

Sometimes those in charge are cutting services in the wrong fucking places. Police? Lighting? Firefighters? Vice police? Its up to you to decide if this is what you want and, if not, to scream your lungs out at the "man*".

Now the pack-out-your-own-litter bit is completely reasonable. It's worked for campers and back country trekkers for years.

Don't give me any shit about the picture. I realize coal black is not happening anywhere. Except in my heart.

*Generic term for men, women, LGBTUs (i.e.) anyone who can serve in government and fuck you up.
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Its not all dire news from Toyota

Toyota Prius

I think we all knew Toyota's engineers couldn't have completely screwed up and we were right.

TOKYO (The Borowitz Report) – Embattled automaker Toyota today said that despite problems with accelerators and brakes, the cup holders on its most popular car models were “perfectly safe to use.”

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The Five Safest Automobiles

Volvo S80

When you own a company which builds 2 of the 5 safest cars in the world, what do you do? Well, if you're a fucking US auto maker, you sell the company.

Ford Motor Co. says it is considering selling Volvo Car Corp. as the struggling U.S. automaker seeks to raise cash and weather the industry crisis.

Ford said today it expects its strategic review of the Swedish luxury automaker will take several months.The Swedish government has said it has been in talks with Volvo and with General Motors Corp.'s Saab unit following reports that the U.S. parent companies were seeking aid for their Swedish carmakers.

It seems safety is not a high priority.
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Wow, that blouse is really transparent

I should have written about this a while ago, but was too lazy. Again my fucking habit of procrastinating has served me well and Mathew Yglesias has picked up the slack.

Transparency is a good thing in many contexts. I don’t think it’s a good thing in the specific context of negotiations. The place to negotiate is behind closed doors. What should be transparent is the decision and its implementation. But I know many disagree.

I think it’s worth thinking about this in other contexts, though. Think about a family negotiation over whose house you spend the holidays at, or who goes to watch Billy’s soccer game on Saturday. At the end of the day, wouldn’t everyone be worse off if the whole extended clan had the right to watch the negotiation on C-SPAN? More to the point, wouldn’t knowledge that the proceedings were going to be seen by others bias the negotiation. If your husband says “you don’t even like your cousin John” then you more or less have to protest and insist that you do too like him and any proposal predicated on the idea that you don’t like him needs to be rejected.

That is exactly why the House closed the doors to cameras while working on HCR (read insurance in place of HC).

Without the ability to negotiate safely, the husband will not even mention John or you'll have to defend yourself. Honest negotiation is impossible. In either case John has tremendous control over the negotiation.
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Haiti in Context Trying to Visualize the Disaster

No pontificating or entreating. The point is to provide some perspective.

Please follow the link.

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Why we need the ACLU

This is a story about a black guy, but his color is irrelevant. I'm pretty sure the police didn't get a whopping $38,330,861 fucking dollars in 2003 from only poor black people. No links, but the state doesn't matter either. I've read similar accounts of this happening in other states.

Asset forfeiture laws create huge incentives for law enforcement officers to police for profit. In 2003, the total amount forfeited to Georgia law enforcement was $38,330,861.

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Alien manipulation of blog entries or some sort of gremlins?

There are extra words.

… Tuesday with with entering …

Get get in touch with them …

...trading will be either be dropped or …

..that I'd be eager to to see her or one of her defenders...

Or there's just complete nonsense.

… I told Axelrod it was not think it was possible …

...to obsess about fucked up how Republicans are these days.

… before I'd even had a chance to thin, I'd the reply button and said …

Mathew Yglesias comes to Jimmie Carter's defense

It really matters one hell of a lot who is mentioning apartheid.

Please read the story. Its a short story, with a picture, and doesn't lend itself well to excerpting.
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Haiti holds Americans accused of smuggling children

I won't go too deeply on this story except to comment on the stupidity of the "smugglers". You'll note in the story they arrived on US passports. When interviewed on CNN, Laura Silsby (the leader), said, "We didn't realize we needed any papers for the children." (ed- paraphrased)

What the fuck is that? She got into Haiti with a US passport and needed none for the children or any other paperwork? Hell, you can't walk out of a store with a toaster without a receipt. Why did she think she could walk out of a country with children with no paperwork?

Police seized five men and five women with US passports, as well as two Haitians, as they tried to cross into the neighboring Dominican Republic with 33 children two months to 14 years late Friday, Haitian authorities said.

Border police "saw a bus with a lot of children. Thirty-three children. When asked about the children's documents, they had no documents," Haitian Culture and Communications Minister Marie Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue said.

Speaking in her detention cell near Port-au-Prince airport, Laura Silsby, head of the Idaho-based New Life Children's Refuge charity, said the group's aims were entirely altruistic.

“We came here literally to just help the children. Our intentions were good," Silsby told AFP. "We wanted to help those who lost parents in the quake or were abandoned."

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Republican, Democrat hopefuls target Obama's Senate seat

Here ya have positive proof headline writers don't really read the fucking story.

The story gets it right:

Republican and Democratic hopefuls slugged it out in a primary election on Tuesday for the chance to win a potent symbolic prize - President Barack Obama's former US Senate seat.

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Who do you trust?

At first this sounds pretty tempting, but when you check out the details it isn't quite so attractive.

At the major international conference on Afghanistan in London last Thursday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai called on the Taliban to take part in a loya jirga (assembly of elders) - as a start to peace talks.

The Taliban are widely reported as having responded that first they want all of the more than 110,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan to leave the country by 2011.

Asia Times Online, however, has learned from well-connected sources in Afghanistan who have been directly involved in backchannel negotiations with the Taliban that there is an important nuance to the Taliban demand. That is, the United States must put an immediate halt to its plans to send a further 30,000 troops to Afghanistan before withdrawal begins in 2011.

In return, the Taliban would be prepared to open up a channel of dialogue with the Americans, through Saudi Arabia, while at the same time taking measures to reduce the level of hostilities in the country.

[snip]

The key issue boils down to one of trust, that is, whether the US would be prepared to only send in replacements for previously deployed troops, given that the surge in forces was meant to be a cornerstone of its counter-insurgency plan as a means of softening up the Taliban before talks could begin in earnest. Asia Times Online contacts claim that in an effort to get the dialogue process back on track, the US is considering the Taliban's demand on stopping the troop surge in Afghanistan, with the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan lined up to work out an arrangement that would keep the Taliban and al-Qaeda under control in any US exit plan.

Should the US agree to the Taliban demands, there is no guarantee that the Taliban would stick to their word. This is the US's dilemma.

"Washington has to focus on out-of-box thinking to resolve this conflict in Afghanistan," a Kabul-based contact told Asia Times Online on the condition of anonymity. "The Americans desperately want an exit strategy but they cannot announce it outright because if they did so, the Taliban would overrun any government they left behind. The Americans aim to invite the Taliban to join the political process, but the bitter fact is that the Taliban do not believe in elections at all. They want the reinstatement of their Islamic Emirate that was dissolved by the Americans in 2001.

And just why might the Taliban not keep their word? Hell, that would be up to Obama. Its all there in the passages snipped.
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DNC runs $500,000 in ads for Ben Nelson, days after healthcare reform vote

After all ya gotta reward him for his stunning participation on the HCR bill. Don't ya?
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I'll show you mine if you show me yours

Sarah Palin Uses PAC to Buy Her Own Book

Isn't this essentially vote buying on the cheap?

God damn. I intended to give this woman no more free PR.

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Can't we just be friends?

2 Koreas to discuss economic cooperation reads the headline.

Maybe they'll just write cute little notes on the shells.

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Hey, we have canaries

This is your chance to get ahead of the curve. Pseudo insider stuff for the masses. Click on the link above. Its a short post and sort of a damn blow to the solar plexus.

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Huh?

From my inbox. Does this make any sense at all?

Problems at Toyota, JAL taint Japan Inc.’s image

Jesus H Christ in a Corolla, I wish I had money.

This isn't an official recommendation to buy stock. I'm no fucking stock analyst.

These stocks will do just fine. I'd buy them by the bushel had I a few shekels to my name. I'd become the new Rockefeller.
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The press is fighting to scoop the rescue stories. Racing to get the news out first. Global competition for the story. AP vs Reuters vs AFP

Ah, the God damned Day of the Jackal. Life imitates art. N'est-ce pas?

Yeah, I fucking know French. Just diddling with ya. Hahaha.

With the intertubes I know all kinds of shit.

To my credit, I do have to have some inkling of languages other than my own (English)

So you're still feeling hungry?

Would ya like some more chicken wings? Well, do you, punk?

Same old shit

You do realize Shrub had put all the necessary tools in place to allow him to become a dictator in the US and abroad, didn't you?

Well, Obama has them all now and has eliminated none.

Are ya feeling kinda secure?
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What you see is not always what you get.

Too fucking much is going on right now and I can't ignore it. So I'll explain my situation. I am alive. To those of you who know part or all of this shit, sorry for the regurgitation.

About 2 years ago I fell and broke my leg in 4 places. I have no insurance and have had no physical rehabilitation. As a result I'm confined to bed and can't walk Which my stunning doctor suggested. For quite a while I could support myself on my left leg, but it's atrophied to where its a wet noodle.

A laptop is beyond by means. I can't move to get to my desktop which is currently defunct anyway.

Right now I'm borrowing a laptop from a friend and feel anxious in using it because I don't think my friend is happy to relinquish her machine. She's gracious, but still...

Back to the God damned leg. The same doctor who fucked up by broken wrist (see earlier posts) handled my broken leg. I was in such pain I didn't even recognize him. And he screwed up my leg even worse than said wrist. He chose to implant a stainless steel part which was about one and a half inches too short (14” when it should have been 155.”. Then the asshole glued it to the remaining part of my femur at a forty five degree angle to my existing bone. So my leg points off to the right. I anticipate really exciting times at airports. Perhaps the patdown searches will be exciting.

At this point my sole diversion is TV. At some hours I've seen every fucking thing on all channels (I should be able,when I can stand, to cook like a fucking champ). I really miss blogging and the world is, of course, deprived of my unique perspective on each day's news.

That last is a God damned joke, people.

I've not blogged because it made no sense to blog one day and not be able to for weeks thereafter, but some shit just can't be ignored. Please be patient for subsequent postings. I'll do what I can.

To my visitors who've inquired about where I am and how I am. Thank you so very much for your concern.

To those who've emailed me, sorry if I didn't reply. When I first logged on I had hundreds of emails, mostly spam, and deleted them All.

I may or may not start out slowly in posting, but I do have a backlog, so...

By the way, please ignore the fucking spammers on the site while I was absent. They come out of the woodwork. A pox on them all.

Envision a pox here.