• The "celebrity stock indices" for famous females like Gisele Bundchen and Angelina Jolie outperform the Dow. • According to one Russian woman's English-language wholly unscientific Google search, post-Communist women from Russia and Ukraine all want foreign husbands. • The science behind common food-related aphrodisiacs reveals there is some truth behind the myths. • A baby whale who lost its mother off the coast of Sydney, Australia faces judgment today to asses if it should be put down by the National Parks authorities. • Don't read this account of tortures inflicted on Tennessee walking horses if you have a weak stomach. • The alleged 14-year-old wife of FLDS leader Warren Jeffs has been sent to foster care after a Judge order on Tuesday. • Today in history: Soviet pups made a safe landing after going on a journey in Space in 1960! • No, Olympic gold medalist Nastia Liukin did not get to meet Michael Phelps. But she will get a parade!

If you'll recall, Jeffs is already serving a jail sentence for being an accomplice to rape, and since his incarceration in Utah, there have been rumblings of a new prophet being anointed. Merrill Jessop, the former husband of Carolyn Jessop, who wrote the anti-FLDS memoir Escape about her awful experiences as Merrill's umpteenth wife and the tyranny of Jeffs' reign. A change in leadership could definitely be a positive, as Carolyn Jessop wrote in her book that things in the sect were much more reasonable before the power-hungry Jeffs came to lead the FLDS.

Texas Grand Jury Indicts Polygamist Sect Members [AP]
Sect Leader Jeffs Charged With Child Sex Assault [CNN]
A New Prophet for the Polygamists? [Time]

Earlier: Big Love
Please Do Not Cry For Those Poor Polygamist Wives, Fox News

In the email, Teresa claimed that Malonis is "trying to restrict me from every person in my life that I want to talk to or have anything to do with," adding, "The most help you will be to me now is for you to step aside and let me get a different lawyer that I feel like can help me….Natalie, quit all your lying about everything."

For her part, Malonis isn't backing down. She tells the AP that she will not fight her client in the media, though she said to the Salt Lake Tribune, "There is no question I am absolutely looking out for [Teresa]. What's happening is really a shame because people who purport to care about her are really doing her a disservice." Malonis believes that Teresa was spiritually married to a sect member at the age of 15, though Teresa now denies it. Teresa was slated to speak before a Texas grand jury in the FLDS hearings today, though the prospect of that actually happening seems unlikely.

Polygamous Sect Leader's Daughter Wants To Ditch Her Attorney [Salt Lake Tribune]
Key Teen Witness In Sect Case Denies Abuse [CBS News]
Texas Judge Bars Contact From FLDS Spokesman[Salt Lake Tribune]

While Kinkade's egalitarian, Marxist, hippied-out community, Twin Oaks, was "as far from fundamentalist Mormonism as it could be without being lunar," she still felt a kinship with the FLDS children because "I grew up in a place where my 'normal' was far enough from the average American childhood to make Dick and Jane books read like cultural anthropology."

She also identified with the FLDS's unconventional kinship structure. While Kinkade didn't live with her biological mother, there was a woman who she considers her mother emotionally; a woman who was her "purveyor of mac and cheese, warmth, and safety." And though she thinks that marrying off 13-year-olds to gross old men is "indefensible," she does fear that the media is painting the FLDS with the freak brush a little too often for her liking. "I wonder what degree of empathy is possible in a social structure that persists in defining the lives of the children it is trying to help as bizarre," she muses.

Look, I'm no fan of the FLDS. I don't have evidence that every family within the church is sexually abusive or cruel to children — though clearly the structure of the religion makes it easy for abuse to happen. But Kinkade's plea for tolerance and compassion is something we should all consider. Though really, Warren Jeffs — what a sick fuck, right????

We Are (All) Family [Slate]
Judge's Orders Aimed To Protect Jeffs' Daughter From Sect Member [Dallas Morning News via Newser]

Earlier: Please Do Not Cry For Those Poor Polygamist Wives, Fox News

• Hillary suffered a coughing fit in South Dakota today and might give up altogether tomorrow. I have been suffering coughing fits all weekend and I haven't even managed to give up smoking, so I'm not placing any bets, but apparently there's a deal in the works for the Obama campaign to Bernanke her Bear Stearns. [Huff Po]
• Speaking! Krugman defends Bernanke on the grounds that there are no unions in America sending inflation spiraling of control with their wage demands like there were in the seventies. But hello Paul, you know what the Chinese were making in the seventies? [NYT]
• Also, I bet Americans had slightly less than a trillion dollars in credit card debt in the seventies. [WSJ]
• Stuff we did have in the seventies besides unions: regulations and trade barriers. Without those things to eradicate economic growth may be so hard to achieve that Barack Obama can call himself the "growth candidate" with his proposals to focus on preschool. [Wash Post]

• Ahmadinejad said something about how Jesus will come back and kill all the Jews this time. [Breitbart]
• Sadr City: 110 degrees, lacking potable water or a decent sewage system, but — your boss will be so stoked! — there's totally decent BlackBerry service! [WSJ]
• "I used to watch this mooncalf blunder his way through press conferences and think, Exactly where do we find such men? For the job of swabbing out the White House stables, yes. But for any task involving the weighing of words?" Hitch suggests you forego Scott McClellan's tell-all in favor of Doug Feith's epic defense of Don Rumsfeld, on account of a bunch of bullshit retorts to straw arguments no one seriously makes — "that there was no consideration given to postwar planning," for instance; oh please — and also, Feith's superior prose style. Natch. [Slate]
• Can "parenting classes" save the next generation of inbred underage incest victims from the clutches of Fundamentalist Mormon mind control? Well… [AP]
• Ted Kennedy's brain surgery was successful. Now comes the fun part: radiation and chemo. Good luck.[WSJ]
• Matt Drudge as microcosm for the nation's ideological shift. [Politico]
• Henry Louis Gates talks to James Watson and finds him to not be a racist but a "racialist"; Gates explores his own love-hate relationship with DNA; generally depressing story reveals James Watson has a low IQ. [TheRoot]

MOE: The Douche-oisie?
MEGAN: You gotta thank T-Rex for that one. "I have a new term for all those nebbishy young men in DC/NY with their unsold novels and their delusions of literary lionization. The Douche-oisie."

MOE: Um there are dudes in DC like that? Nevermind, I don't want to know. Don't spoil it for me. I was very content assuming everyone in DC liked to peddle their fictions "nonfiction." Insufferable, in a way I've always been slightly more inclined to suffer. But it's reminding me of the Marxist critique of the Sex & The City movie my sister just sent me…

MEGAN: I am sitting here trying to reconcile the mental picture of a Marxist paying $10 (or sucking up to PR people) to see a movie (let alone actually watching it) that, at a minimum, glorifies conspicuous consumption. Also, I will admit I sorta don't care to see it, even if I have to give up my girl card. I never thought she should end up with Big, I always thought he sorta sucked and I thought the finale was a disappointing cop-out and so I don't care anymore.
8:30 AM
MOE: Yeah, I basically thought Big was the only good thing in a sea of really fucking boring people. Miranda's husband I also liked. Aidan gave me the vapors.Peggy Noonan on McClellan. She defends him, says he should be defended as a contributor to the historical record, finds the triteness of his insights and the obviousness of his argument "all too believable" — not to mention the fact that he has no defenders. "I want to quote his defenders, but he doesn't have any." OH PEGGY. You might have checked this little blog we know… It only quotes you every Friday…

MEGAN: Did we really defend him? I mean, I guess I do believe him because he doesn't say anything that isn't playing into Bush's shitty approval ratings.
MOE: ARGHHHHH SO WHAT.
MEGAN: Also, I give a hells yeah to Steve (Miranda's husband) and Aidan. Yum.
MOE: He's not running for anything!
MEGAN: Bush? Yes, thankfully.
MEGAN: I mean, I hate to find myself agreeing with Peggy here, but it's like, wow, Scott McClellan felt out-of-the-loop and lied to? I'm actually only surprised that he noticed and said something about it.
MOE: McClellan. That's the thing. Dude writes a book. No discernible agenda of self-servingness. About the excesses and evils of the "constant campaign." And everyone's like, "What's the campaign?" and "I don't see how this is going to affect the campaign," and "Why didn't he tell us this when it could have impacted a campaign?"
MOE: In any case he's got a crush on Obama
MEGAN: Oh, well, he didn't say it when it could affect a campaign because he was still working there. Duh. Also, would it have changed anyone's mind in 2004? Doubtful. Kerry lost by a bunch.
MEGAN: I love how it's him and Jenna against the world on that one.
MEGAN: Whoa, wait. Maybe it's not Obama on whom he has a crush?
MOE: Milbank mockery
MEGAN:

He's a bit thinner around the middle, and the sideburns are comically longer

MEGAN: Damn, dude, mocking a man's facial hair?
MOE: Dude do you remember Robbie in My Three Sons? Those were some comical sideburns, especially when it switched to color.
MEGAN: I have seen comical sideburns, sir, and I pronounce McClellan's wispy and a bit sparse, possibly in need of a good shaving, but I wouldn't call them "comical"
MOE: Oh shit some dude is aping your steez but …so much more cringetacularly!

Soup to nuts? Campbell's and Planters are here for the looking. I can't think of a single sector of the American economy that directly or indirectly doesn't have some sort of Washington representation.

MOE: Um I love how Condi Rice is recovering from being so pilloried by McClellan.
MEGAN: That's a week late and a dollar short, dude. Also, Mr. Korologos is a former Bush appointee, and is now a "strategic adviser" which means he does everything up to the point of official lobbying in order to avoid registration. So, um, what a great defender. Someone who uses his former position to almost lobby but stay under the radar.
MEGAN: Ugh, I seriously, seriously cannot see Gene Simmons anymore without flashing back to the demoralizing experience of seeing his sex tape. That was cringetastic and unimpressive. Spits on his finger to be able to finger the fake-titted chick. Small penis. Never removes his shirt. That line from Bridget Jones never seemed so apt: "Coitus is brief and perfunctory."
MOE: Ah! I often use the word "perfunctory" to describe sex sessions. I didn't realize Bridget Jones — well, that and distinctly shitty taste in dudes — was to blame. That is so depressing. Let's talk about something else!! Victory on Al Qaeda perhaps? That epic Bear Stearns series? The Fundamentalist Pedophiles being awarded their inbred children? It's all so heartening.

MEGAN: Oh, don't forget Obama's new clergy problem. This time, he's white!

MEGAN: Oh, by the way, you can go watch it right here. Why in the world would they not have stopped taping the sermons, anyway?
MEGAN: Oh, by the way, speaking of bombshells, 111 countries formally adopted a treaty to eliminate cluster bombs yesterday. Just guess who the big hold outs were? Us, Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan. We're always in such great company on these things.
MOE: Hahahaha China and Pakistan! They're just like US!
MEGAN: On this and the death penalty and torture! Hoorah!
9:20 AM
MEGAN: Oh, great, the Burmese junta has decided that it doesn't need any stinkin' refugee camps.
MOE: CIA director Michael Hayden:

"The fact that we have kept [Americans] safe for pushing seven years now has got them back into the state of mind where 'safe' is normal," he said. "Our view is: Safe is hard-won, every 24 hours."

Inspiring! Me to throw up!!
MOE: So what's the deal with the polygamists? Why do they get their kids back? How did that happen? Etc. etc.

MEGAN: They get their kids back as soon as they can, I guess. It seems that the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the state had failed to prove immediate danger to all the kids, since that's the standard.
MOE: Oh god and more.
MEGAN: Like, obviously, infants weren't about to be married off and shit. The state tried to argue that just being raised in the community was turning the boys into cousin-marrying pedos, but the courts didn't buy it.
MOE: BUT WHY?
MEGAN: Because they couldn't prove it.
MEGAN: I mean, let's just all admit that our legal system is pretty fucked, but it's less fucked than a lot of others.
MOE: Here's the dissenting opinion though it also concedes:

On this record, however, I agree that there was no evidence of imminent “danger to the physical health or safety” of boys and pre-pubescent
girls to justify their removal from the YFZ Ranch, and to this extent I join the Court’s opinion. Id. § 262.201(b)(1).

Maybe we should just redefine "imminent."

MEGAN: I guess it's just, like, parents have the right to fuck their kids up, home school them and teach them that humans co-existed with dinosaurs in the garden of Eden and that a woman should aspire to no more than to be a good wife to whomever she's told to marry.
MEGAN: They just don't have to right to physically abuse them or force them to have sex.
MOE: NO THEY FUCKING DON'T
MEGAN: Well, legally they do. Whether they ought to is a different question.
MEGAN: Should the state decide which religious views are valid, short of one that requires or encourages physical or sexual abuse?
MEGAN: Should the state decide by which moral values you should raise your kids?
MOE: What's on the books w/r/t cults? This is fucking mind control. They created their own totalitarian parasite state within a state, which is the only reason it's managed to survive for more than a century, and it has nothing to do with values!

MEGAN: I mean, I guess I feel like, great, if they choose my moral values, that could be totally cool but do I trust the government to choose my values? And I sure as hell fucking don't. I don't trust that they won't decide that some ignorant fucking Christian piece of shit females-aren't-as-good pastor gets to decide.
MEGAN: There isn't anything on the books about cults. As long as there's no physical or sexual coercion, they're legal. You're allowed to brainwash your followers as long as you don't stockpile weapons, try to kill everyone or fuck children.
MEGAN: Luckily for law enforcement, the really scary ones rely on physical coercion, stockpiling weapons, killing people and fucking underage girls. I mean, that's obviously unlucky for the people involved.
MOE: You know about Germany. Don't they have some decent laws on this matter?

MEGAN: Sort of. I mean, Germany's basically a two-religion state (Lutherism and Catholicism) with some provisions made for Jews. In fact, your tax dollars support the Church to which you belong, interestingly. They don't recognize Scientology as a religion, I'm given to understand but will no doubt be corrected, in no small part because to advance within the religion costs you money. They view Scientology (and, in my opinion, rightly so) as a money-making enterprise. They do allow regular LDS (i.e., Mormons) despite the tithing "requirements" of that Church.

Three of the Texas Supreme court members wrote in a dissenting opinion that while the Department of Family and Protective Services was wrong to take all the children, there was proper evidence given in order to remove adolescent girls from "a pattern or practice of sexual abuse."

While the Department of Family and Protective Services clearly abused power, some of the evidence presented by the Department was incredibly damning. According to the Texas Supreme Court decision, "the Department presented 'Bishop’s Records'— documents seized from the Ranch — indicating the presence of several extremely young mothers or pregnant 'wives' on the Ranch: a sixteen-year-old 'wife' with a child, a sixteen-year-old pregnant 'wife,' two pregnant fifteen-year-old “wives,” and a thirteen-year-old who had conceived a child." The expert witness from the FLDS themselves "confirmed that the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints accepts the age of 'physical development' (that is, first menstruation) as the age of eligibility for 'marriage.'"

Texas Court Upholds Polygamist Removals Ruling [Reuters]
FLDS Ruling Upheld By Texas Supreme Court [Los Angeles Times]
FLDS Ruling [Texas Supreme Court]

Whether the state of Texas violated the rights of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints when it removed 400 some-odd children from the Yearning For Zion ranch is up for debate. What's not is the creepiness of these photos of former FLDS honcho Warren Jeffs sucking face with his child-brides. The Smoking Gun got a hold of images of Jeffs with two of his spiritual wives, Loretta and Merrianne. Merrianne, pictured here with Jeffs, was 12 when this photo was taken. These photos were used as evidence in the ongoing FLDS custody trials. Jeffs is currently in jail for coercing a 14-year-old girl to marry a 19-year-old. [The Smoking Gun]

Louisa Bradshaw Jessop gave birth to a son — her third child — in Austin, Texas. Jessop says that she is 22, though state authorities believe her to be 17. Jessop's husband, Rulan Danial Jessop, 24, "filed a habeas corpus petition in Austin last Wednesday that argues his wife is being improperly detained by the state," according to the Salt Lake Tribune. For now, a Texas judge has allowed a temporary restraining order against the Department of Family and Protective services to prevent them from moving Louisa and her baby to San Antonio.

We don't know how big Louisa's baby is, but if it is a super wee one, the boy has a greater chance of growing into an angry young man. According to research from the University of Helsinki, low birth rate and slow growth in childhood lead to "increased levels of hostility in adults," and this hostility is a harbinger of health troubles like heart issues and type 2 diabetes. Maybe that woman who's still breastfeeding her eight-year-old is just doing it to prevent her child's ire!

28 Million Women At Risk Of Unwanted Pregnancy [Reuters]
Second FLDS Mother Gives Birth While In Texas Custody [Salt Lake Tribune]
Smaller Babies Become Hostile Adults: Study [Newser]

Earlier: At What Age Is A Kid Too Old To Breastfeed?

Jeffs closed businesses and nickel-and-dimed members so severely they actually ended up buying most things with big Tupperware containers of nickels and dimes, and eventually funneled millions into the Texas ranch that got raided earlier this year. When he was finally caught the place was impoverished and in shambles and now Wisan has to try to preach the gospel of personal property and the free market. A story that may shake your faith in Marxism, folks!

Satan's Accountant [Portfolio]
Related: FLDS Elder Decries "Terrorist Acts" In Letter To Bush [CNN]
Earlier: Please Do Not Cry For Those Poor Polygamist Wives, Fox News

• Barack Obama rejected/denounced his old friend Jeremiah Wright on television today on the advice of certain wise commenters and also prominent columnists and locking in a critical majority of my family members. Watching it was less fun than watching him shake the dirt off his shoulder but as Jigga would say "so necessary." [Wonkette]
  
• So the question remains: why the fuck did Jeremiah Wright give all those damaging, yammering unyielding undermining speeches? Newt Gingrich thinks he's just jealous. [ABC News]
  
• Though maybe he was just testing God? [Chicago Tribune]
  
• And Barack Obama finally de-friended him...only after consulting some cynical pollsters? Take it from a Republican. [JohnLocke.org]
  
• An African-American studies professor from a long line of Mormons wishes Mitt Romney was around so everyone else could be reminded how tame black liberation theology is next to some of the fun ideas Joseph Smith had. [TheRoot]

• There are a ton of conflicting poll numbers I could treat you with today but I'm going with the one discussed in this story because I'm sick of clicking on new windows and it concerns Indiana and because I'm biased, so kill me. [Indy Star]
• And here, anyone offended by my bias... [SayNoToCrack]
• Awkward segue alert! A teen FLDS member just gave birth to another inbred child of what was probably at the very least statutory rape, if the mother had any idea of her actual age. [AP]
• WHICH five IMF members did not vote in favor of giving more voting rights to developing countries? No really, which? [WSJ]