Brains, with the dipstick showing a quart low

[elfs]

The Five Kinds of Recession Sex!

The gawker brings us the five different kinds of sex people are having during this recession, including prostitution and the "laid off and have nothing better to do" sex.

15 year old girl takes nude photo of herself, faces 2nd-degree felony and registration as a sex offender.

A 15 year old girl at Licking High School (my gods, that sounds like a porn set, doesn't it?) has been charged with distributing nude photos of a minor-- herself-- to other minors. The judge apparently has the right to decide, since she's a minor and it's a "first offense," to have her not register.

What freaks me out is that the county prosecutor has 20 similar cases in the past years. None of them came to charges, unlike this case, but Osiris, if you've got 20 kids using cell phone cameras and snapping nude pictures of themselves or their peers, and the consquences of doing so are life-long disgrace, don't you think the law is just a little fucked up?

Deninger warns and explains the economic seziure coming

Denninger isn't normally this hysterical. Maybe we should be? Are we deer in the headlights today?

Nouriel Roubini predicts global market meltdown

Although solarbird seems to like Roubini, he always seems more than a little over the top to me. Everything is always "on the verge of the Apocalypse." But as Naked Capitalism points out, he's always been right. And now he's warning that the world is about to end. Again.

McCain pisses off scientists

Is it just me, or is McCain's failure to understand science really palpable? First, there was his attack on grizzly bear preservation projects. It made for a great sound bite until biologist Katherine Kendall's ass-kicking stories of trekking for days in the Montana wilderness and facing down a charging bear with nothing more than a walking stick made him seem weak, and the actual purpose and mandate of the project was described by the press. (It doesn't help McCain that his campaign director for Montana lobbied for that money.)

Now McCain has attacked Obama's support for funding the Adler Planetarium's zeiss projector, one of the oldest and largest planaterium projectors in the country, deriding it on stage as "a $3 million overhead projector." McCain seems to have lost the science vote with this one.

Palin pre-empts state report, clears self in probe.

Under the heading of "You've got to be kidding me," the McCain campaign released a Troopergate campaign of their own making indicating that Sarah Palin was completely innocent of all charges.

David Gergen worries about political violence.

David Gergen is an old, and respected, Republican politico who's worked for Nixon, Ford, Reagan and (oddly) Clinton. Last night he said he was "really worried" about political violence given the kind of rhetoric floating around the McCain campaign.

I was just telling some friends of mine the other day that one of the most remarkable things about the US is that political violence is almost unthinkable. Although we have had assassinations and attacks, and there has been racial and cultural violence, political violence has receded further and further into history as history has marched on. The McCainites are playing with fire with their current line of attack, and we will all be poorer for it if someone picks up their charge and runs with it.

Joe Klein at Time adds, I'm beginning to worry about the level of craziness on the Republican side, adding

[John McCain] no longer has his honor. But we are on the edge of some real serious craziness here and it would be nice if McCain did the right thing and told his more bloodthirsty supporters to go home and take a cold shower. But McCain hasn't done the right thing all year. His campaign is appalling.

Why the attacks on Obama's character matter, even if they fail

Digby nails it:

What we are really seeing is the beginning of a right wing story line about the next president of the United States — he is a drug user, a foreigner, a terrorist and a traitor. And the importance of that is that it gives permission to the right wing machine to do anything and everything to destroy him. He will not really be president, you see. He will be illegitimate — a usurper.

John McCain says, "I am not a coward!"

Obama has been calling McCain out, saying that McCain should "say to my face" what he's been saying on the campaign trail. McCain today, struggling to gain traction, said that he would have brought up the Ayers issue but "it didn't come up in the flow of conversation."

Uh-huh.

Pat Robertson asks American to pray lest "Middle Easterners" nuke us

Pat Robertson says that sometime between the election and inauguration day, Israel is going to start a war with Iran, Iran will respond with help from its nuclear-armed ally, Russia, and "American coastal cities" will be in the line of fire. Now, if this doesn't happen, he'll claim that he and his followers "preyed away" the threat. Lovely, ne? (via Dispatches from the Science Wars)

Comments

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

There's something particularly ironic about the "Laid Off and Want to Get Laid" piece showing up in Gawker.

How many people Nick Denton laid off last week do you know? I know three.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Oddly, I don't know anyone from the Gawker crowd. Heard about Tristan, though. That suxed.