1. Sex Isn't Over Until She Comes

2. Pathetic Liberals Pick on Sarah Palin

3. The Democrats: Capitalist Mercenaries

4. Ahmadinejad Accepts Israel's Right to Exist

5. From Wall Street to Harlem

6. The Sarah Palin Freak Show

Sex Isn't Over Until the Woman Reaches Orgasm [Source]

Sex isn't over until we've had an orgasm,

say Melinda Gallagher and Emily Kramer,

founders of the outrageous Cake sex empire for women

Having Your Cake & Eating It

It is 2pm on a weekday in a crowded New York restaurant, and we are discussing women's consumption of pornography, their predilection for fantasy and their quest for hot sex beyond the missionary position.

While the waitress nearly drops our plates catching snippets of the discussion, the people seated to our right raise eyebrows that signal a cross between embarrassment and intrigue.

Yet Melinda Gallagher and Emily Kramer, founders of the women's sexuality movement Cake (American slang for female genitalia), aren't in the least rattled.

If your mission in life is to bang the drum about women's sexuality to the general population, well, here they are, having lunch.

"Look, there's still a double standard about sex beyond heterosexual coupling," says Gallagher, 33, of why there is even a need for a group that encourages women to get in touch with their X-rated sides.

"When you get into fantasy or experimentation or multiple partners, the idea that a woman is pursuing that suggests there must be something deviant about her. No matter how far it seems we've come, the whore/slut idea is still out there."

"We want to encourage women to engage in their sexuality without judgment," adds Kramer, 28. "Seventy per cent of women in a survey we conducted online told us they had faked orgasm at one time in their lives.

"Our attitude is, the myth of in-and-out-in-and-out-guy-comes-end-of-story, we want it to end. Women have the right to an orgasm."

"We started Cake because we felt there was still this notion that women don't really like sex, women aren't visual," says Gallagher who, like Kramer, was raised by liberal-minded parents.

"Yes, Sex and the City had just started and that got some discussion going, but we still thought our generation hadn't stepped up to really express their needs about sex. We wanted to start a community for women who wanted to talk and explore outside the bedroom."

And thus was born the Cake Girl mantra, which leaves absolutely no room for ambiguity.

It is: 1) Women like to initiate sex.

2) We get turned on every day of the week.

3) We are visual.

4) We fantasise.

5) We know how to get ourselves off.

6) We like sex.

7) We know how our bodies work.

8) Sex isn't over until we orgasm.

Pathetic Liberals Pick on Sarah Palin

For a time, the Obama campaign thought it could win Alaska’s electoral votes. But when Palin was nominated, party operatives snapped up Ben Stevens’ Valley Trash campaign in all but name only, projecting Palin’s private life and her small town conservatism onto her would-be Vice Presidency.

Bloggers and journalists went to work on Alaska and Palin, defining it as out of the mainstream and Palin as a Far Right Religious Zealot.

Palin was ridiculed as a country rube among rubes, a possible witch whose family might have flirted with incest. Her Alaska became Dog Patch, Wasilla, Lower Slobbovia.

JWhen you are on the receiving end of this abuse, that’s hard to understand because it feels so personal.

Millions of Americans envy the Palins and aspire to their Alaskan lives as their own personal dream of security.

Their piece of the corporate rock, peddled by Wall Street, sank like a stone. NYT writer, Timothy Egan, usually the smartest Alaska analyst, asked readers whether American voters could relate to an Alaska where, “Every home seems to have a freezer in the garage stuffed with moose meat and 10 pounds of alder-smoked chinook? Owning a small amount of marijuana is protected by the privacy clause of the Alaska constitution, the courts have ruled.”

Are you kidding, Timothy? The answer is HELL, YES! A place where you make great money on the North Slope, do some commercial fishing or gold mining like Todd Palin and have time to compete and win Iron Man cross country snow machine races?

All of this and three thousand plus dollars each from Alaska, your yearly share in the oil wealth? How many folks would like to live like the Palins on Lake Lucille in the half million dollar house that Todd designed and built?

Sarah Palin is selling the Alaskan dream as a remaining fragment of the American dream, not her foreign policy or economic claptrap drawn from Republican handlers.

If her husband spends time helping her at work, or if she confuses her personal internet with the one the state provided, well, she is still Citizen Palin not Professional Politician Palin, like Senators Obama, Biden or McCain with their legions of reliable staffers.

Her supporters understand and want to forgive her because she has the life they want.

Level-headed Obama supporters need to develop a quick antidote to their own Valley Trash strategy. It’s not going to be Joe Biden, declared champion of the credit card industry and asset forfeiture for drug offenders.

If people can’t relate to a United States Senator and his world, dumping on Sarah won’t rein them in.

If James Carville thinks he can herd this crowd, the way he cowed progressives into voting for corporate candidates,instead of Ralph Nader, he has –once again- blown it for the Democrats.

The Democrats: Capitalist Mercenaries

In their role as mercenaries in service of finance capital, three-fifths of Democrats joined one-third of Republicans in a (temporarily) failed heist of $700 billion of the people's funds - a nest-egg the public needs to hold onto to weather the unfolding collapse of the Lords of Capital.

In the aftermath of Monday's bloody siege, it was difficult to tell who Wall Street guns-for-hire John McCain and Barack Obama hated most: each other, or the citizens who despite their outraged confusion had the presence of mind to bar the doors to the national treasury.

Understandably disoriented from having had to charge backwards - pretending to lead the people while simultaneously assaulting them - Obama peered across the field at the hastily-erected barricades that had broken Hank Paulson's Charge.

"I'm confident we're going to get there," said the frustrated thief-enabler, "but it's going to be rocky."

To paraphrase Oscar Brown, Jr., "What you mean WE, Obama-man?"

The Illinois senator and his pretend-opponents in the other business party just had their colluding asses kicked by the most motley, disorganized crew imaginable: the American public, who bombarded their legislators with threats of retaliation in November if they bowed to Wall Street's extortionist demands.

Never has Republican-Democratic co-subservience to finance capital been on such naked display. But then, "We the People" have never before been witness to the terminal unraveling of late-stage global finance capital.

When the New York Times features no less than three articles declaring the nation's investment bankers ready for burial, as did last Sunday's paper, it is time for the Democrats, especially, to find another paymaster.

Ahmadinejad Accepts Israel's Right to Exist

Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made a remarkable announcement. He's admitted that Iran might agree to the existence of the state of Israel.

Ahmadinejad was asked: "If the Palestinian leaders agree to a two-state solution, could Iran live with an Israeli state?"

This was his astonishing reply:

"If they [the Palestinians] want to keep the Zionists, they can stay ... Whatever the people decide, we will respect it. I mean, it's very much in correspondence with our proposal to allow Palestinian people to decide through free referendums.'

Since most Palestinians are willing to accept a two-state solution, the Iranian president is, in effect, agreeing to Israel's right to exist and opening the door to a peace deal that Iran will endorse.

Ahmadinejad made this apparently extraordinary shift in policy during an
interview last week when he was in New York to address the UN general assembly.

He was interviewed on September 24 by reporters Juan Gonzalez, writing for the New York Daily News, and Amy Goodman for the current affairs TV programme, Democracy Now.

You can watch the full interview and read the full text on the Democracy Now website.

Surprisingly, Ahmadinejad's sensational softening of his long-standing, point-blank anti-Israeli stance was not even headlined by the two reporters. Perhaps this was a decision by their editors? Did they not want to admit that Ahmadinejad may have, for once, said something vaguely progressive?

Equally odd, the story wasn't picked up by the world's media. For many years, the Iranian president has been vilified, usually justifiably. Now, when he says something positive and helpful, the media ignores it. Is this because of some anti-Iran or pro-Israel agenda?

From Wall Street to Harlem

Financial hardship is nothing new in Harlem, but the Wall Street crisis is affecting some residents more than others.

Another key Harlem demographic fearing the worst and actively bracing for the fallout is the Buppies, the suited and booted, Blackberry browsing, New York Times perusing black professionals who have been moving into the neighbourhood since the mid-1990s.

With a foreboding omniscience to accompany their MBAs and undergraduate degrees from HBCUs, they are now crying havoc and running for cover.

But what of the new breed of Harlemites, those who have recently arrived in droves on the crest of a wave of contentious gentrification?

This new breed, with their penchant for organic food, fair trade coffee and reusable shopping bags, are an increasingly frequent sight in the neighbourhood.

They stroll imperiously down Lenox Avenue and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard showing little sign of being affected by the impending fiscal doom.

Ensconced in their newly converted brownstones, they seem content to live out their dangerously urban, faux feral idylls.

One woman I spoke to was far more concerned about finding a local bakery where she would be able to purchase freshly made, organic bread than the plummeting Dow Jones and the incipient economic meltdown.

Conversely, one longtime Harlem resident, speaking for the majority, was dismayed at the changes in his community being brought about by gentrification.

He was hopeful that the financial crisis would bring New York's house prices back down to Earth, thereby enabling Harlem residents to stay in the neighbourhood, at the expense of those newcomers who he believed were "diluting the historic essence of the place".

The Sarah Palin Freak Show

Palin is a cultural oddity that many Americans value little except as an object -- one that absorbs every projection of the national imagination.

There is something about Sarah Palin that gnaws at me, and it isn't that the Republican vice presidential nominee has wilted under the soft light shined upon her by CBS' Katie Couric.

It isn't that I disagree with Palin on just about every single substantive issue I can think of, and probably some I haven't thought about.

What's bothering me about Palin isn't even Palin. It is that she's been made into the novelty act -- even the freak show -- of the presidential campaign.Her mark in history may well turn out to be like that of the Pet Rock, one of those artifacts that has little value except as an object that is dissected for its cultural significance.

During the brief but happy life of the Pet Rock in the 1970s, millions of Americans shelled out $3.95 to purchase an ordinary gray stone, packaged in a small cardboard box complete with an official Pet Rock training manual.

The fad petered out in six months, but not before the promoter got rich and thousands of backyards became Pet Rock graveyards.

Now we prepare to watch Palin in today's vice presidential debate, compelled more by a cult-like curiosity than a call to civic duty.Certainly some undecided voters may watch because they want to be convinced that the Alaska governor is qualified to be vice president or to determine, once and for all, that she is not.

Republicans already attracted to her social conservatism and her family story will be cheering her on and will defend her against any slip or slight, real or imagined.

Just as surely, some liberals will be itching to see what material Palin manages to serve up as fodder for Tina Fey and the writers at "Saturday Night Live."