From The Smoking Gun; As she was attempting to put on a Victoria's Secret thong, a Los Angeles woman claims that a decorative metallic piece flew off the garment and struck her in the eye, causing injuries and a new product liability lawsuit against the underwear giant.
Macrida Patterson, 52, alleges that she was hurt last May by a defective "low-rise v-string" from the Victoria's Secret "Sexy Little Thing" line, according to a lawsuit filed last week in Los Angeles Superior Court. A copy of her June 9 complaint, which does not specify monetary damages, can be found below.
Patterson's lawyer, Jason Buccat, told TSG that a "design problem" caused the decorative piece to come loose and strike Patterson in the eye, causing damage to her cornea. He added that the eye injury, which caused Patterson to miss a few days of work, will be "affecting her the rest of her life."
Patterson is a traffic officer with L.A.'s Department of Transportation. Prior to the lawsuit's filing, Victoria's Secret officials asked to examine the garment and the decorative piece, but that request was rejected by Patterson's counsel. For those unfamiliar with "v-strings," the undergarment is the Victoria's Secret variant on the "g-string," which has long been favored in the battle against visible panty lines. [read more]
From Hot Air; Submitted for your disapproval, in case you were wondering what the opposition had in mind as a counterpoint to McCain’s proposal for 45 new nuclear reactors. It’s Maurice Hinchey, whom longtime HA readers will recall as someone brimming with sound theories. This makes two congressional Democrats on record within the past month as supporting an overtly socialist “solution” to gas prices. How many others agree with a plurality of their base but simply haven’t spoken up yet?
The clip’s up front followed by Cavuto’s interview with an Obama-lovin’ nationalization proponent. Creepiest moment: “Maybe the government’s taking it over because it never should have been private in the first place.”
On the morning after Tim Russert’s tragic death, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos was on the phone talking admiringly about his late colleague and the tough competition among Sunday morning talk-show hosts, when he recalled an old Looney Tunes cartoon about a wolf and a sheep dog.
Although the two were cordial while punching into work and during lunch breaks, the relationship abruptly changed once the whistle blew and the shift began. Russert was “fun and loved trading gossip,” Stephanopoulos said, but when the “clock hits Sunday morning, he's out there trying to beat you.”
And week after week, Russert beat everyone.
So now NBC is faced with the unenviable task of trying to replace someone who — judging from the heartfelt tributes from political and journalistic luminaries — appears irreplaceable. In addition to “Meet the Press” being the highest-rated Sunday public affairs show, Russert could also boast of being the longest-running host for television’s longest-running program.
“I can’t imagine them going outside NBC,” said Andrew Tyndall, an independent television analyst, who added that he considers the network’s news operation the strongest in television.
Tyndall said that if he were NBC News President Steve Capus, a short list for the position would include White House correspondent David Gregory, chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell — both of whom have guest-hosted “Meet the Press” — as well as political director Chuck Todd and “Hardball” host Chris Matthews. Two dark-horse candidates could be “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough or perhaps former “Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw — that is, if he had any interest in returning to such a prominent role. [read more]
From Times Online; The Americans will never elect a black President.
You hear this stated quite confidently and quite often. But how true is it? The Washington Post has a new poll out suggesting that 3 in 10 Americans admit to race bias, though it isn't too clear from the article what this really means.
Michael Barone, the ace US pundit, is unpersuaded.
He proposes a thought experiment. How many people would have been unwilling to vote for Colin Powell in 1995 and are now unwilling to vote for Obama? This is the maximum proportion of the population unwilling to elect a black President full stop.
Barone argues that this proportion is less than 10 per cent. He suggests, say, 6 per cent although this is rather plucking numbers out of the air. [read more]
From American Thinker; It was, of course, inevitable. How could any politician rise so quickly on the legendarily corrupt Chicago political scene and be as pure as Obama's devoted followers were purporting him to be? The question in the minds of skeptics was, "Who sent you?"
Well now we're beginning to find out and it ain't pretty. In a lengthy, and amazingly frank, Boston Globe article depicting the dismal results of Chicago's attempt to develop and manage low income housing through private developers, we see that the candidate of change is nothing more than another Chicago machine-generated pol with his feet firmly mired in the muck of corruption of the city he chose to make his political base.
From the Globe article we learn that Tony Rezko, FOB, (Friend of Barack's) whom we have known up to now only as a corrupt developer, was and is, in fact, a slum lord, although on a much grander scale than what we usually associate with that term. Using government subsidies which Obama helped them obtain, Rezko and other FOB's, some now actively associated with his campaign, developed low income housing with fancy sounding names and substandard construction within Obama's state senatorial district. [read more]
From NY Post; Tim Russert, NBC journalist and political heavyweight host of "Meet the Press," has died after collapsing at NBC's Washington news bureau. He was 58 years old.
Television sources said Russert was recording a voice-over when he collapsed in the studio today.
An ambulance rushed to the studio and a source at the network said Russert was briefly revived. But, the broadcasting lion apparently passed away either on the way or at a local Washington D.C. hospital.
Former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw announced news of Russert's death at 3:39 p.m. [read more]
From AP; Barack Obama is abandoning public financing for his presidential campaign, reversing his earlier stance in bold certainty he can raise millions more on his own as the first major-party candidate to bypass the tax-checkoff system that was hurried into place after the Watergate scandal.
Obama has shattered fundraising records during the primary season, and he promptly showed off his financial muscle Thursday with his first commercial of the general election campaign. The ad, a 60-second biographical spot, will begin airing Friday in 18 states, including historically Republican strongholds.
Though it opens him to charges of hypocrisy, Obama's fundraising decision was hardly a surprise, given his record in raising money from private sources. Some $85 million in public money is available to each major party nominee during the fall campaign if they agree to forgo other contributions.
McCain told reporters in Minnesota on Thursday, "We will take public financing." [read more]
From American Thinker; Conservatives were, rightly, thrilled by the recent Supreme Court decision that affirmed our constitutional right to keep and bear arms. Not so fast. Of the four important decisions the court has rendered in this term, three of them have gone the wrong way.
Let's first take a brief look at each of these four cases. Then let us examine Justice Anthony Kennedy's thinking in these cases. Kennedy was either the deciding "swing vote" or the determining factor in each one.
The only case correctly decided was (1) District of Columbia v. Heller. Justice Scalia wrote the Heller decision, which holds that an individual right to keep and bear arms is guaranteed by the Second Amendment. He is one of four conservative justices on the court.[i] Justice Kennedy joined in this opinion.
But the four liberal judges[ii] all dissented -- and dissented vehemently. They claimed, in effect, that the Second Amendment applied only to state militias. Justice Stevens said in his dissent:
The Second Amendment was adopted to protect the right of the people of each of the several States to maintain a well-regulated militia.
Your personal right to firearms was one vote away from being thrown on the ash heap of history. [read more]
This BBC article does a pretty good job of setting the scene. The pull quote from that story is "However, the following day a self-styled local journalist and human-rights activist, Taher Thabet al-Hadithi, got his video camera out and filmed scenes..."
A military judge on Tuesday dismissed the case against the highest-ranking U.S. Marine charged in the killing of 24 Iraqi civilians at Haditha, whittling down the list of those who must still face justice for the 2005 incident to just the accused ringleader.
Military Judge Col. Steven Folsom dropped all charges against Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, who was accused of violating a lawful order and dereliction of duty, at a hearing at the Camp Pendleton Marine base in Southern California.
Folsom's decision means that, out of eight Marines originally charged in December 2006, six have won dismissals of their charges and one has been cleared at court martial. [read more]
I work for the online wing of McClatchy newspapers and I have to say this is the best article I've read on this subject...
And then somebody brought a chicken into the newsroom.
A sign affixed to the bird -- a statue of a rooster in full crow -- said: ``Brought in by a Santeria priest . . . to help save our jobs. Make an offering.''
The bird, placed last week on a bank of file cabinets in the newsroom of The Miami Herald, drew flowers, wine, pennies, peppermint, dolls, candles and other oblations. A few days later, The McClatchy Company, which owns The Herald, announced it was cutting 10 percent of its workforce. At The Herald, that means 190 jobs throughout the newspaper's various departments.
So if Santeria -- it's a combination of Catholicism and the West African Yoruba religion -- has any miracles to work, it had better get busy.
Not that The Herald is alone. Virtually every newspaper is going through the same thing: shrinking profit margins, declining circulation, staff cutbacks and morale at subterranean levels as journalists struggle to figure out how we can save the American newspaper.
But I have come -- reluctantly -- to believe we can't. We must blow it up instead. [read more]
From Politico; For most voters, Barack Obama’s shift away from public financing is not as big a deal as the mounting death toll in Iraq, surging gas prices — or even what they’re going to make for dinner tonight.
But Obama’s announcement Thursday that he would become the first candidate to opt out of the public financing program for the general election was a big deal for some of the nation’s most influential newspaper editorial boards, which have long been ardent champions of campaign finance reform and which had thought they’d found a kindred spirit on the issue.
Friday morning, scathing editorials in many top broadsheets characterized Obama’s move as a self-interested flip-flop, dismissed his efforts to cast it as a principled stand and charged that Obama wasn’t living up to the reformer image around which he has crafted his political identity.
The scolding could mark a turning point in what has been, on balance, fawning treatment of Obama, an Illinois Senator and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, on editorial pages. [read more]
From The Independent; The novelist Ian McEwan has launched an astonishingly strong attack on Islamism, saying that he "despises" it and accusing it of "wanting to create a society that I detest". His words, in an interview with an Italian newspaper, could, in today's febrile legalistic climate, lay him open to being investigated for a "hate crime".
In an interview with Guido Santevecchi, a London correspondent for Corriere della Sera, the Booker-winning novelist said he rarely grants interviews on controversial issues "because I have to be careful to protect my privacy". But he said that he was glad to leap to the defence of his old friend Martin Amis when the latter's attacks on Muslims brought down charges of racism on his head. He made an exception of the Islamic issue out of friendship to Amis, and because he shares the latter's strong opinions.
"A dear friend had been called a racist," he said. "As soon as a writer expresses an opinion against Islamism, immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark-skinned, he who criticises it is racist.
"This is logically absurd and morally unacceptable. Martin is not a racist. And I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on – we know it well."
McEwan – author of On Chesil Beach and the acclaimed Atonement and Enduring Love – has spoken on the issue of Islamism before, telling The New York Times last December: "All religions make very big claims about the world, and it should be possible in an open society to dispute them. It should be possible to say, 'I find some ideas in Islam questionable' without being called a racist." [read more]
From Toronto Sun; Let's examine an important question.
Are the major schemes created by global politicians to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, ostensibly to combat global warming, effective?
The answer is no, because they aren't about addressing global warming.
They're about making more money for governments and large corporations.
Let's start with the Kyoto accord.
Will it be effective in lowering global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions? No. It wasn't meant to be.
Kyoto, a United Nations treaty, exempts the developing world -- 143 of 180 nations which ratified it -- from lowering emissions.
Since the developing world will account for most future emissions as it undergoes the industrial revolution we began a century ago, emissions will keep rising.
China, exempt from Kyoto, has already surpassed the U.S. (which hasn't ratified Kyoto dating back to when GHG guru Al Gore was vice-president) as the world's largest carbon emitter. [read more]
From Boortz.com; I talked about this a bit yesterday, but now I have the exact quote before me, so I want to cover it again. On the night that Barack Obama clinched the Democrat nomination he was in St. Paul, Minnesota – there to deliver this absolute gem of a quote:
"I am absolutely certain that generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick. This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."
Isn't that amazing? Not until Barack "The Messiah" Obama signed up that last delegate did this country do anything to care for sick people. Medicare and Medicaid have existed on paper only ... certainly not in reality. What's more ... a signal has now been sent to the oceans to recede and a great glob of Neosporin has now been spread across our planet. Does this man believe his own bullshit? We can only hope not. [read more]
From Moonbattery; Unfortunately Maria Isabel — the Obama campaigner worker fond of displaying flags that feature communist executioner Che Guevara — is not unique.
The moonbat above is Lorain County, Ohio Judge James Burge. The picture accompanies a USA Today story describing Burge's opposition to Ohio's lethal injection procedure, on the grounds that it isn't quick and painless enough for murderers.
As a fan of Che Guevara, he no doubt feels that a bullet to the head is plenty quick and painless enough for counterrevolutionaries.
Guevara was Fidel Castro's personal executioner. Every socialist dictatorship needs one. The Nazis had Heinrich Himmler, the Soviets had Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Khmer Rouge had Honcho Nuon Chea. For some reason progressives chose Guevara as the personification of the evil they embrace. [read more]
From NBA.com; For the 17th time in franchise history, the Boston Celtics are NBA Champions.
The 2008 Celtics brought an end to their storied franchise's 21-year championship drought with the most lopsided closeout win in NBA Finals history on Tuesday night, blowing out the Lakers, 131-92. Leading just 32-29 midway through the second quarter, the Celtics scored 11 straight points and finished the half on on a 26-6 run.
In the second half, Boston's 58-35 halftime lead only grew. Clearly, the Celtics had had enough close games. [read more]
From Howie Carr in the Boston Herald; This is John Forbes Kerry’s worst nightmare: He’s going to have to spend the summer campaigning . . . on the mainland.
Fall River, Chicopee, Haverhill, Lynn, Fitchburg - not a single one of those sweaty cities has any windsurfing worth a damn, not to mention a Ducati motorcycle dealer, damn, but Liveshot is going to spend the next three months pressing the flesh in those wretched burgs, searching in vain for a proper nouvelle cuisine brassiere while enduring the foul breath of the plebeians . . .
Stand by, Sen. Kerry, for an endless schedule of kielbasa festivals, parades, motorcycle rallies, town concerts, fireworks displays, questionnaires from special-interest groups and maybe even, gulp, a televised debate or two. Kerry’s already had to endure a Celtics playoff game. Instead of the Inn at Wauwinet, this summer Kerry will be dining at Coney Island Hot Dog in Worcester. Next thing you know, some beer-guzzling peasant in a No. 12 Patriots [team stats] jersey is going to be asking him about . . . baseball.
Lovey, does “Manny Ortiz” still play for the Red Sox?
And Liveshot knows who is responsible for this living hell that he now must endure all the way to the primary Sept. 16. It is Ed O’Reilly. The Gloucester lawyer will be on the ballot against him in the Democratic primary. [read more]
From The Post Chronicle; The handling of Barack Obama calls to mind a movie called The Harder They Fall, in which Humphrey Bogart played a boxing promoter whose client was a heavyweight named Toro Moreno. Bogey learned early on that Toro couldn't fight his way out of a wet paper bag, but that didn't stop him from guiding the palooka to a shot at the world title.
Likewise, the Democrats, and therefore the news media, declared Obama to be a future presidential nominee at the 2004 convention, despite the fact that he was only a state senator at the time. Like the chiseled Toro, Obama is superficially impressive, but he simply doesn't have the tools to back up his image.
Lately, the presumptive Democrat candidate has demonstrated his unfitness for high office on a daily basis, through statements that betray his failure to think seriously about serious matters. One of the more egregious examples came in praise of the Supreme Court's decision, in Boumediene v. Bush, to extend habeas corpus rights to enemy combatants captured on foreign soil.
From The Smoking Gun; As she was attempting to put on a Victoria's Secret thong, a Los Angeles woman claims that a decorative metallic piece flew off the garment and struck her in the eye, causing injuries and a new product liability lawsuit against the underwear giant. 
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