The quest for the "perfect vagina" — the growing trend of labial surgery — is fraught with peril, according to a new report in a British medical journal.
But the increasingly popular surgery (the 2008 video above has been viewed 3 million times), which clips flesh for a neater (and critics say "more pubescent") look down there, is yet another boon to the $30 billion cosmetic-surgery industry.
• Lusting after cheapo Fannie Mae housing tax credits so it can offset its taxes and perform its required community-reinvestment duties without creating new affordable housing.
Polls are usually bullshit, but people pay attention to them. The public is the last group of people to know what kind of health-care bill will emerge from Congress and the White House. Fact is that some kind of change will be made, has to be made. Whether it turns out to be "reform" is another matter. Intensive lobbying for the insurance industry and Big Pharma make that an almost impossible task, as this story doesn't note.
Ken Feinberg might actually be planning a crackdown. Instead of cash, execs would have to take stock that they couldn't fuck with for several years. "Most intrusive [move] yet into corporate compensation."
Cracking down on the shilling of products "for fun and profit." Bloggers supposedly have to reveal freebies or money they get for writing product reviews. Also cracking down on celebrity endorsements.
Last night on TV, 60 minutes (well, not the full hour) of self-serving bullshit. Commenter OrneryBabe on Gawker provides the best review of the post-game show: "The only explanation I can think of for his exploits is that he probably has a very small penis."
Smart, shrewd story: "The Web can be a mean-spirited place. But when it comes to online reviews, the Internet is a village where the books are strong, YouTube clips are good-looking and the dog food is above average."
Good piece, once you get past a typical New Yorker lede sentence: "In early August, Lawrence H. Summers, President Barack Obama's top economic adviser, accompanied Vice-President Joseph Biden aboard Air Force Two on a trip to Detroit."
About 13,000 workers will be shit out of luck, but impact on nation's unemployment rate will be miniscule. Meanwhile, bad news in New York for jobless: "Mayor Bloomberg vows to snuff out smoking in parks, beaches." No job, no hope, and now no cigarettes. Stop, you're killing us.
Bubble news: "Many of the riskiest stocks" led the charge. What happens when the Fed starts to dismantle its supports propping up the whole thing? You think this is a real bull market? Story doesn't judge that, but it does paint the most rosy picture of the turbulent market: "Corporate profits have come in above reduced expectations, in large part due to cost cutting." So what happens to profits after the cost-cutting slows down, which it inevitably has to?
"A new wave of financial alchemy" to "make soured securities look better." A test for regulators. Matthew Goldstein of Reuters warns, "Beware the bull market in derivatives."
Highly misleading propaganda piece against the "public option." Switzerland offers strong, immediate public subsidies of health care to its citizenry, and that could have been the story's spin just as easily as this one conjured up by the Times.
"Dealing a blow to liberals," says MarketWatch of the 15-8 Senate Finance vote against Jay Rockefeller's amendment. Chuck Schumer's got an amendment of his own coming up.
For now, though, happy days are here again for the private managed-care companies. Humana and other stocks got a good boost on Wall Street this afternoon.
Putting it mildly, Herszenhorn points out that a big-shit NYT/CBS News poll found that fully 65 percent of Americans favor a public option for all Americans. That's not new; it's a consistent result. That's a real public option, whether it's "socialism" or not. And Congress is debating a "public option" that really doesn't even come close to what most of the public apparently wants.
G-20 roundup from Pittsburgh. Click on the above video for Russian TV footage of black-clad cops rousting black-clad protesters, as a robotic-sounding voice emanates from a police loudspeaker: "No matter what your purpose is, you must leave." NYT story here.
Thanks to all of you who get paid nothing by Twitter despite your being its only product/asset, the company that hasn't yet generated any significant revenue is about to get $100 million in new funding. In August 2008, Twitter had 4.3 million unique visitors; this August it had 54.7 million. Now hooked, users are, like it or not, about to be bombarded by advertisers and marketers. Too bad most of you are either out of work or otherwise can't afford to buy all the shit you'll be told to buy. (See next item.)
Typically excellent human-interest WSJ story, this one focuses on jobless Americans. Introducing an array of hard-luck yarns: "Nearly 15 million Americans are jobless, and the number is widely expected to remain high even as the economy slowly begins to recover. Part of the problem many of the unemployed face: the very fact that they have been out of work a long time."
CFO at France's biggest telecom warns that, as story says, "the barrage of emails from smartphones and personal computers was stressing out employees."
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