It’s no secret that Americans are fighting an obesity epidemic these days, and it’s also no secret that pregnancy plays a big role in this for women. Read weight-loss stories in women’s magazines, and almost all start with “I gained 50lbs during my first pregnancy, didn’t lose all of it, then gained more during my next one…” These extra pounds aren’t just a cosmetic issue. Women who gain 20lbs between age 18 and mid-life double their risk of breast cancer. Being 20lbs overweight can also double your risk of diabetes.

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So I am sitting in my Washington, DC hotel room enjoying life…despite the fact that the hotel does not have HBO or Showtime (even though it proudly advertises that it does) and the air conditioning was completely broken for a day and a half (while temperatures were around 90).

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I am currently in Washington, DC for a special broadcasting event called Hold Their Feet To The Fire. It revolves around the problem of the illegal alien invasion. One of things that critics of this event have mentioned is that there are no national talk show hosts, just local ones. Where’s Rush? Boortz? Hannity? How come they didn’t come to this? It is an interesting question and an important one, but not for the reason that the critics have tried to imply. It would certainly be nice to see these three great talkers here, but it would conflict with the real message that this event is trying to advance. The real message here is that the illegal alien invasion is happening in your community. It is not one of those, “well California of course is a lost cause, but (insert name of local town here) is just fine.” 

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Reuters reports that the May 24 issue of New England Journal of Medicine will include a group of commentaries about the effect that last week’s Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act has on “the practice of medicine”:

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The story of France today is like a bad French movie, full of posturing, absurd camera angles and over-the-top performances. Few objective viewers doubt whether France will dwindle into total irrelevance. The only question is when.

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Edible Nutritional Facts stamped in a cookie’s icing.  What purpose does this serve?  You still have to put it in some packaging to SELL it, just leave the Nutritional Facts on the wrapper people.

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Russell Simmons and Ben Chavis’ declaration of their intent to clean up rap is fine as far as it goes in the post-Imus world:

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With this week’s kick off of the presidential campaign season, it’s worth asking: Do debates this early matter?

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Perhaps I’m biased. Perhaps it’s just the case of one guy standing up for another.But if I had to weigh Alec Baldwin’s already infamous foaming over-the-phone tirade at his 11-year-old daughter against his ex-wife Kim Basinger, injecting it into the vast media cyber stream, I’d say mom showed far more malice, and risked far more damage to the girl than dad.

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Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin died this week at age 76, on the heels of two decades of both extraordinary health problems and political achievements.

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OK — it’s very, very rare that I get misty-eyed when writing my own column. But it’s rare that you come across stories this amazing. Especially when you’re subsequently faced with Alec Baldwin calling his 11, 12, whatever-year-old daughter a little pig and Rosie acting like a … well, you know. Rest assured that the brave, selfless, valiant side of humanity is alive and well. Read on about my heroes in my Los Angeles Daily News Column today– a man who gave his life for others, and a man who gave his freedom for others.

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Many Americans had the misfortune of being introduced to Nikki Giovanni in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre.

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Sheryl Crow is funkier than The Stiletto thought – if she limits herself to a single square of toilet paper “in any one sitting,” as she advocates in a blog post published by The Huffington Post last week (an April 24 post on Crow’s own Web site claims the “the toilet paper thing was a JOKE!!”) Was it? Or did her cheeks flush after she realized that not one sane person thinks her eco-friendly ideas “in the earliest stages of development are … worth investigating.”

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid must go. He has crossed a rhetorical line that must not be crossed in public discourse. He has gone beyond sensible discussion among elected officials about strategy and tactics and into an area in which his judgment as a leader is now in doubt.

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No, I am not kidding. According to the Iranian newspaper Etemad prosecutor Saeed Motrazavi said:

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Curious about how your candidate if faring on MySpace?  YouTube?  Technorati tracks?  Check out techPresident, a site that tracks how candidates, and voters are using new Web 2.0 platforms like social networking and video sharing sites.

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(First published in the Vallejo Times-Herald) 

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It’s been far too long since Whac-a-mole made a White House appearance.Fortunately, just like that dastardly gopher in ”Caddyshack,” the mole popped out of the hole yesterday. And for Dana Perino at Monday’s White House press briefing, it was a Cinderella Story:

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Today is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. The Stiletto has been championing passage of H.Res.106/S.Res.106, which would bring the U.S. in line with other Western governments in recognizing the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915-1917 by Ottoman Turks as a genocide. Some even believe that the genocidal campaign against Christian Armenians should be consdered the first Muslim jihad against a Christian population in modern history – a point of view that has gained currency in the wake of last week’s murder of three Christians by Turkish nationalists in Malatya.

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In late March Mullah Nazir, a tribal leader in South Waziristan who is aligned with the Taliban, launched attacks on foreign militants from Uzbekistan who were in the region. Predictably, the Pakistani government tried to portray this development as a victory for the failed Waziristan Accords: Pakistani interior minister Aftab Sherpao said the bloodshed was “the result of the agreements the government made with tribal people in which they pledged to expel foreigners and now they are doing it.” Just as predictably, many Western journalists echoed Islamabad’s spin, reporting that the tribes were trying to eject foreign militants from Pakistani soil.

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Israel is 59. But despite of the fact that the Jewish state like the Jews who created her knew very few years of peace, she refuses to stop singing and believes that HAKOL PATUACH - EVERY THING IS STILL OPEN:

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Every time you start to hope we’re putting superstition behind us, a story like this pops up to remind you we’re no more than a few steps out of the mire. Here’s a paranoiac afraid WiFi is going to poison all the little chilldren. Mmmkay. When I was a kid, I remember that a family acquaintance didn’t like to cook her food in (what were then new) microwave ovens. “I can taste the microwaves,” she said. I wonder if this sterling intellect over in the UK can “hear the WiFi”?

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Since last week, D.G. Hall (née Joe Tobacco) of Cadillac Tight has been trying to nail down the identities of a couple of interesting commenters on his blog, who abruptly appeared this past week, then just as abruptly left. And you probably already know exactly who one of them is.

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Despite endless rounds of shadowboxing with the dodgy Sudanese government over the ongoing nightmare in Darfur, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon is asking us to give appeasement, er, diplomacy, one more chance.That’s not going to help: It’s going to take some highly credible threats to get Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir to end what many call the 21st century’s first genocide.

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Read here Sheryl Crow and Laurie David’s quite serious proposals for saving the earth. Note how these planetary saviors are so concerned about global warming that one of them jets off mid-tour from Tennessee to New York to put on a li’l rock-n-roll show, and the other runs “warm water over my hands” (no energy wasted there, huh) because global warming has made it so cold outside.  It’s a race between the ridiculous and the oblivious, appearing to end in a tie.

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“Man’s basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think - not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know.”

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We knew that nothing soured people on Communism faster than living in a Communist country. Apparently, the same is true on Islamism. Times Online reports on How a British jihadi saw the light Ed Hussain, once a proponent of radical Islam in London, tells how his time as a teacher in Saudi Arabia led him to turn against extremism

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A simple statement made by a national legislative leader in Washington this week indicates that a war is being lost, but it is not the war in Iraq. It is the defeat of the War of Ideas taking place nowadays in the US Congress.

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Talk about unfortunate timing: Just as European Union diplomats were bending over backwards (or were they just bending over?) to reassure Turkey that a proposal requiring member states to criminalize “publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes” will not include the Armenian Genocide, a group of young Turkish nationalists savagely murdered three Christian employees of a bible publishing company in the name of Islam. One of the victims, German citizen Tilman Ekkehart Geske, who was 46, was buried April 20^th at an Armenian cemetery in the town of Malatya, a hotbed of nationalism and the hometown of Mehmet Ali Agca, who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981.

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Laurie David and Sheryl Crow behave like jackasses. Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts - At This Dinner, A Dollop of Vitriol - washingtonpost.com

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In 1977’s Looking For Mr. Goodbar, Diane Keaton tries to save her pathetic, tawdry life.  In 2008, Republicans seek a Mr.Goodbar to save their inchoate, desperate party. 

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Below is an exclusive report from Tuesday’s open hearing of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs:

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News reports have suggested that the Virginia Tech shooter was autistic.  Reporters should be cautious about such speculation. 

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{Cross-posted from PoliBlog]:

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“Congratulations” to the mainstream media, led by NBC, for broadcasting the video ravings of Virginia Tech mass murderer Seung-Hui Cho. The stampede to give a homicidal maniac his 15 minutes of fame absent a shred of newsworthiness is a testament to a collective–and appalling–lack of judgment.

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