PLANET example

I'm not going to lie.

My brain still fuzzy after the 4th's fireworks and libations, I had to rub my eyes and go get my glasses upon reading this morning's headlines.

"Obama: Mental distress can't justify late abortion"

My heart sank.

On this site, Arianna Huffington was the first to warn Barack Obama that he would disappoint a lot of his enthusiastic supporters, and not necessarily gain any new ones, by moving too fast to the center. Apparently, he wasn't listening.

He started out safely enough: renouncing a pledge to take public financing. No big deal. He moved on to more serious matters: letting states decide when to apply the death penalty to child rapists and supporting an individual's right to own a handgun. Issues on which Democrats can honestly disagree. Then he reversed course on providing immunity to phone companies who joined George Bush's wiretapping blitz. Why? Especially when he publicly promised not to?

Still, those were not issues central to the campaign. Obama could shift positions on such secondary issues, most observers agreed, as long as he didn't waffle on the war. Uh-oh. Guess what? He just did.

I love this e-mail, from a dad: I was interested in your 'Good Girl Role Model' discussion. I have no daughters, I am the father of a 12 year old boy, but the topic does concern me. Looking towards the time, in not so many years, when my son will be looking for someone to spend his life with, I read the discussion yesterday with great interest.

As background my son is 5' 10' and 150 pounds, a baseball and a basketball player of some skill; and he has become of great interest to the girls in our neighborhood this summer. I have commented many times to friends recently that little girls are much more aggressive than I remember at 12. My son is still more interested on sports and his PS3, but I am expecting that to change at any moment. God help me :-).

The realization almost always prompts a double take, a moment of inspection, maybe even a debate: Is baby-faced Barack Obama, the symbol of a younger political generation, actually aging in front of us?

By his own admission this week, "the gray is coming quick," so that it now dusts his head like snowflakes. The laugh lines cut a little deeper, and the crow's-feet around his eyes appear slightly more pronounced.

WASHINGTON — John McCain calls himself an underdog. That may be an understatement. The GOP presidential candidate trails Democrat Barack Obama in polls, organization and money while trying to succeed a deeply unpopular fellow Republican in a year that favors Democrats. McCain also doesn't seem to have a coherent message let alone much of a strategy despite securing the nomination three months earlier than Obama.

"This is a tough race. We are behind. We are the underdog. That's what I like to be," the GOP nominee-in-waiting frequently tells donors these days, keenly aware not only of his woes but also his proven comeback ability: He won his party's nomination despite the implosion of his campaign last summer.

One year later, and now in the general election, McCain's troubles are so acute that he recently gave senior adviser Steve Schmidt "full operational control" of the day-to-day campaign and, effectively, scaled back the duties of campaign manager Rick Davis. The shift in responsibilities came after weeks of Republican quibbling that McCain had not adequately made the transition for the fall.

The pool report on Friday from the Obama press corps revealed an interesting tidbit: Davis Guggenheim, the director of An Inconvenient Truth, is making a (seemingly secret) documentary about Barack Obama that will apparently air at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Col. next month.

Here's the report:

After your poolers pulled away from Montana Technical College, home of the Diggers, at around 5:20, the bus made its way up toward old, historic Butte and pulled up to the Clark Chateau Museum, a mansion from Butte's glory days.

e's not president yet, but Barack Obama has already given some thought to White House decor.

Asked at a town hall-style meeting in Fargo, N.D., about any decorating plans for the Lincoln Bedroom, Obama described a visit to the White House after he became a U.S. senator.

"You have all these mementos of Abraham Lincoln, but you have this flat-screen TV in there," Obama told the crowd at the outdoor event.

BUTTE, Mont. — Now that they're allies, Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton will help each other raise money in a series of fundraisers in New York next week.

Obama campaign spokesman Jen Psaki said the Democratic nominee-in-waiting and Clinton will hold three fundraisers. Two events are scheduled for Wednesday night _ one to raise money for his general election campaign and one to help pay off debts from her primary campaign. A third fundraiser, for Obama, is a breakfast Thursday morning with women donors that Clinton, a New York senator, will attend.

The fundraisers will be the first joint appearances by the former foes since their lovefest in Unity, N.H., on June 27.

The Buffalo News reports that former Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards will debate Karl Rove on Sept. 26 on the campus of the University of Buffalo as part of the school's Distinguished Speakers Series. In the midst of the U.S. attorney scandal, Edwards called on President Bush to "fire Karl Rove." When Rove announced he was resigning from the White House, Edwards released a statement that simply read "Goodbye, good riddance."

After women have toned themselves with countless trips to the Stairmaster at the gym, Pilates classes, yoga classes, and broiling hot yoga classes, there is really only one final frontier of fitness to be addressed: their vaginas. That's why a physician in Manhattan has opened a gyno-spa called "Phitness," that is essentially a room down the hall from her medical practice. Per the New York Times, "At the spa, the signature treatment will be a $150 gynecological exam — in which a client contracts her pelvic muscles around Dr. Romanzi’s fingers — to determine by feel whether muscle tone is weak, moderate or strong." A workout regimen is then prescribed to promote pelvic fitness and health.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Scientists have developed stereo mammograms -- breast X-rays taken with special cameras and at multiple angles -- that they say can help them increase detection of breast cancer by 23-percent while decreasing false alarms by 46-percent. By overlaying images taken at different angles or using 3D glasses, Researchers at the Mayo clining say they can now see behind dense tissue that would normally block potential problem areas. Since early detection is a key factor in beating breast cancer, this is an exciting new development.

BEND, Ore. — A man has taken flight in a lawn chair hoisted by more than 150 large helium-filled party balloons in a bid to ride the wind from the central Oregon town of Bend all the way to Idaho.

Kent Couch was wearing a parachute Saturday morning as he kissed his wife and kids goodbye, patted his dog and took off at sunrise from his gas station.

This is Couch's third lawn chair flight in as many years.

Image from ESA There is still no light at the end of the tunnel for fire-besieged Northern California. According to some reports, there are still over 1,000 wildfires burning in the region with little hope for improvement in the near future. Over 1,400 square kilometers of land have already been burnt, and there are more than 19,000 firefighters on hand, many from around the country, helping to put out the blazes. The image was captured by the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite on June 2...

From one standpoint, Minnesota's senior Senator Norm Coleman is certainly a lucky man. He has a lovely wife, Laurie Coleman, who has succeeded at several walks of life: she is a former runway model and actress, and currently an inventor and entrepreneur (and mother of the Colemans' two children).

Laurie Coleman's latest endeavor is absolutely priceless, although it retails for $29.99.

Seems that Ms. Coleman grew frustrated with accompanying her husband on the campaign trail and on junkets abroad: one would wake up early in the morning in hotel rooms, with no way to properly take care of one's hair in such a brief period of time.

Tom Bolton discovered the first black hole using the 75 inch reflector at the David Dunlap Observatory just north of Toronto; how sad to see him sitting on the steps, crying, as the University of Toronto kicks him out and shuts it down, as they sell this green oasis to developers. The university says you can't do good work there anymore because of light pollution; they will take the hundred million or so dollars and invest it in the astronomy program. Bolton disagrees, telling the National Post: “If [the university] had talked to me, I would have told them how we could be doing world-class research,” he said. With a modest investment, the university could have...

Excerpt:

We pan to a beautiful woman: platinum blonde with a huge rack. She is the hottest woman in the world, but she wears glasses because she is also the smartest woman in the world.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are set to do a round of big-money fundraisers this coming week for Obama's campaign and the DNC. That and other political news in today's Election Central Saturday Roundup.

If you thought the Republican primary field was a bit of a joke, wait until you get a closer look at the front runners for the vice presidential slot: the names most mentioned include a failed VP candidate from another party, a "business leader" who was fired for poor performance, a closet case who just found the love of his life (a woman), a man half John McCain's age who doesn't believe in evolution, a governor who publicly complains about his sex life, and of course the dredges of the primary itself.

Carly Fiorina, former Chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard, was recently included among columnist Stu Rothenberg's top three choices for John McCain's running mate. And, in fact, she has been spending a lot of time running around the country with and for him, probably much to the despair of Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay, who picked the wrong horse in the primary, Mitt Romney. As opposed to Whitman, though, Fiorina woefully mismanaged the company she was running, underperforming every single one of her competitors. The day she was fired, HP's stock went up 7%. For all this, Fiorina was paid $220 million, making her even wealthier than McCain's heiress wife. This discrepancy between rewards and results is of course not unusual among large corporations, but that does not make it any more palatable to voters, especially in the middle of a recession. That she so prominently figures in his campaign is more evidence that McCain really wasn't kidding when he said that economic issues were not "something [he] understood."

Perhaps Fiorina's main asset as a potential VP is that she could make the McCain brand go from "stodgy, white man" to "leading edge, relevant," from "laggard" to "leader," as she described her own greatest achievement at HP. If white men are in fact irrelevant, though, would it not be easier to just vote for the candidate in the race who is not a white man?

WeGame link

Chuck Norris is the baddest video game character ever! And he has the weapons to prove it. I’m surprised this wasn’t created years ago. (via Unique Daily)

Image from petrr Given all the recent backlash, it seemed inevitable that the EU would be forced to revise its misguided biofuel targets. The final push may very well have been provided by a World Bank report concluding that biofuels may have caused global food prices to rise by up to 75 percent. Four percent from renewable sources by 2015 In light of this, Claude Turme...