Missouri Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin's advisers are making preparations to withdraw from the race Tuesday, GOP operative Richard Grenell and RedState.com editor Erick Erickson report. Grenell cited "GOP sources" in his tweet announcing the withdrawal, which has yet to be confirmed by Akin. Akin has been under fire since saying women have biological defenses to fend off pregnancy after a "legitimate rape.


"http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/reports-akin-advisors-make-preparations-for-withdrawal-tomorrow

In Sweden, WikiLeaks created a problem for that nation’s authorities by revealing a 2008 cable disclosing that its executive branch asked American officials to keep intelligence-gathering “informal” to avoid required Parliamentary scrutiny. That secret was among the 251,000 U.S. cables obtained by WikiLeaks and relayed to the New York Times and four other media partners. They have so far reported about 1,300 of the secret cables after trying for months to vet them through U.S. authorities.

Rove himself says on his Karl Rove and Company website that he has been advising Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt. It’s well-known in Sweden how Rove has helped Reinfeldt lead the nation’s Moderate Party to election success over liberal competitors who previously dominated the nation’s leadership.

Swedish political blogger Martin Moberg reported Nov. 5, for example, that Rove was visiting Sweden for unknown purposes. But Moberg warned his readers, according to a translation by Google’s automatic toolbar, that their country has “been spared the vulgar way” political campaigns are conducted in the U.S. “but the question is for how long?”

Going further, the Swedish web-tabloid daily News 24 published on Dec. 26 an article, “Karl Rove helps Reinfeldt to manage Julian Assange.” News 24, which says it’s the ninth best-read online news site in Sweden, cited as evidence my Huffington Post column and a similar blog by Alabama-based legal commentator Roger Shuler. News 24’s Swedish readers helped flesh out the story in their comments. Shuler today wrote on his Legal Schnauzer blog, Daily Kos and elsewhere, “The Rove/Assange Story Hits the International Press in Sweden.” Shuler provided a translation of the Swedish story and links to other materials.


http://www.swedishwire.com/opinion/8165-karl-rove-key-player-in-swedish-wikileaks-probe

REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN PROPOSES NATIONAL SECURITY ROLE FOR UTERUS
by Andy Borowitz

ST. LOUIS (The Borowitz Report)—Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin doubled down on his controversial remarks about the female body today, proposing a prominent national security role for the uterus.

“From what I understand, there’s nothing that the uterus doesn’t know,” Rep. Akin told a reporter on KTVI-TV. “It’s almost like Spiderman’s spidey sense, if you will, except the tingling goes on down in the lady parts.”

Rep. Akin said that given the uterus’s extraordinary powers of detection, the female reproductive system should be America’s secret weapon in the war on terror.

“If we posted a uterus at every airport and a bunch of them along the border, I would just love to see an evildoer get past defenses like that,” he said. “Not gonna happen, folks. Nothing fools a uterus.”

Rep. Akin closed his interview with what he called “the highest praise and respect” for the female reproductive system.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I was as smart as a uterus,” he said.




Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2012/08/republican-congressman-proposes-national-security-role-for-uterus.html#ixzz2462aaQP6

Medieval individuals believed a woman's seed lingered in the medium of sexual fluid (Riddle, Contraception 96). This notion differs from the contemporary biological understanding that eggs are produced in the ovaries and released during menstruation. If medieval peoples believed that the egg was a product of secretions during intercourse, what, then was menstruation's perceived purpose? Lore reveals that, like intercourse, menstruation served to purge the woman of her dangerous seed, and in the absence of either of these events, masturbation was encouraged as a means of staving off complications--most notably respiratory and mental in nature--that could arise from seed accumulation. Because the female seed was supposedly located within the sexual fluid, female orgasm was believed to be necessary for conception and, thus, pregnancy. Accordingly, rape victims, prostitutes who no longer enjoyed sexual relations, and women with less-than-gifted partners could not conceive children.


Bibliography

Jacquart, Danielle and Claude Thomasset. Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton

UP, 1988.

Riddle, John. Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance. Cambridge: Harvard

UP, 1992.

---. Eve's Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.

Thomasset, Claude. "The Nature of Woman." A History of Women. Ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber.

Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. 43-69.



Representative Akin - sits on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee..."

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Julian Assange makes his first public appearance in two months, ever since he took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The WikiLeaks founder was granted political asylum on Thursday -- a decision that ignited a wave of international responses, with the UK and Sweden opposing the verdict and Latin American countries strongly supporting Ecuador's move.

Curiosity is firing its vaporizing laser on mars for the first time today. Will this be seen as an act of war against the martians?







NASA's Mars rover Curiosity is slated to fire its rock-vaporizing laser for the first time this weekend, shortly before the 1-ton robot's maiden drive on the Red Planet.

Scientists plan to blast a Martian rock called N165 with Curiosity's laser, which is part of the rover's remote-sampling ChemCam instrument. The 3-inch-wide (7.6 centimeters) stone sits just 9 feet (2.7 meters) from Curiosity, well within ChemCam's 25-foot (7.6 m) range, scientists said.

"Our team has waited eight long years to get to this date, and we're happy that everything is looking good so far," ChemCam principal investigator Roger Wiens, of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, told reporters today (Aug. 17). "Hopefully we'll be back early next week and be able to talk about how Curiosity's first laser shots went."


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Photo of the helpless martian, itss almost dead center and looks like a pyramid.

http://www.livescience.com/22507-mars-rover-curiosity-laser-big-drive.html

Julian Assange & Wikileaks: Timeline of Events


December 2006: Julian Assange, a former Australian computer hacker, founds Wikileaks.org. The website aims to provide a platform for whistleblowers to post sensitive and secret political documents while keeping their identity anonymous.

February 2008: Wikileaks exposes Swiss Bank, Julius Baer, for involvement in money laundering. It publishes internal documents to show that the bank was helping clients launder funds via the Cayman Islands. This leads to the first of many legal charges against Wikileaks.

November 2009: Wikileaks releases a comprehensive archive of text pager messages recorded in the US on September 11,2001, the day when hijacked airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.


April 2010: Wikileaks releases a video of a 2007 US military helicopter strike on Baghdad, Iraq, and the casualties that resulted from this. Bradley Manning, an American soldier, is charged and arrested for leaking the information.

July 2010: Wikileaks releases classified US military documents on the war in Afghanistan revealing details of civilian victims and alleged links between Pakistan and the Taliban.

August 2010: A Swedish court issues an arrest warrant for Assange on charges of rape made by two Swedish women, who were also former employees of Wikileaks but then decides to postpone the warrant until November.

October 2010: Wikileaks releases some 400,000 accounts written by American soldiers from 2004 to 2009 revealing that the US decided to ignore cases of torture by Iraqi authorities on civilians.

November 2010: Swedish prosecutor re-issues European arrest warrant for Assange. Ten days later, Wikileaks releases classified US diplomatic cables, revealing assessments of American officials on a range of issues together with views of other governments.


More:

http://www.euronews.com/2012/08/16/julian-assange-and-wikileaks-timeline-of-events/

Some may not like this toon but at least Obama doesn't seemed pleased like Romney.

Astonishing news out of North Korea was recently announced. Kim Jong-Un has loosened up policies in the country to create more civil liberties. The North Korean leader has announced that pizza, women’s pants, and cell phones are now legal. Now all they have to work on are those pesky human rights issues, crippling poverty levels, and nationwide famine outbreaks. One step at a time, though…

Before Kim Jong-Un took power, his father Kim Jong-Il was in control of the nation. Jong-Il was very much a status quo leader, rarely instituting any reform or granting any civil liberties. His son, wants to create a nation centered around the younger generation. So, I guess he is starting with passing legislation on pizza, cell phones, and pants. A true visionary leads North Korea further into the new millennium.


http://wgrd.com/north-korea-allows-new-civil-liberties-kim-jong-un-legalizes-pizza-and-pants/

President Obama's campaign is offering Mitt Romney a deal: Release five years of tax returns, and we'll stop demanding more.

"Governor Romney apparently fears that the more he offers, the more our campaign will demand that he provide," wrote Obama campaign manager Jim Messina in a letter today Romney counterpart Matt Rhoades.

"So," Messina added, "I am prepared to provide assurances on just that point: if the Governor will release five years of returns, I commit in turn that we will not criticize him for not releasing more -- neither in ads nor in other public communications or commentary for the rest of the campaign."

The offer comes a day after Romney said he has paid a tax rate of at 13% per year over the past decade, as reported by Catalina Camia on our OnPolitics blog.

In his letter, Messina wrote that other candidates have released more that five years of returns. He said a Romney release would "help answer outstanding questions raised by the one return he has released to date, such as the range in the effective rates paid, the foreign accounts maintained, the foreign investments made, and the types of tax shelters used."


http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2012/08/obama-offers-romney-a-deal-on-tax-releases/1#.UC44JI7v3bw


Good move on team obama.