A KINKY businessman couldn’t bear it when his girlfriend dumped him – so he paid £15,000 to recreate her as a life-sized sex doll.

The 50-year-old man took a collection of snapshots of his ex and told adult toy maker Diego Bortolin: “I want it just like her but with bigger boobs.”

Diego – who refuses to name the punter – creates super realistic sex dolls at the factory behind his shop Tentazioni, or Temptations, in Treviso, Italy.

He explained: “She was a smiling blonde girl but he wanted bigger boobs and a curvier backside.”

“Our normal dolls are very realistic and everything works just like the real thing.

“This one was more expensive because we had to replicate everything, right down to the shape of her nails and teeth.

Diego defended his actions saying: “Some people say it is kinky but she is now the perfect girlfriend as far as I can see.”

The Glenn Beck rally is confusing people.

Why?

He is aiming far beyond what most people consider to be the goalposts.

Using Boyd’s continuum for war: Material, Intellectual, Moral.

Analogously for political change: Elections, Institutions, Culture.

Beck sees correctly that the Conservative movement had only limited success because it was good at level 1, for a while, weak on level 2, and barely touched level 3. Talk Radio and the Tea Party are level 3 phenomena, popular outbreaks, which are blowing back into politics.

Someone who asks what the rally has to do with the 2010 election is missing the point.

Beck is building solidarity and cultural confidence in America, its Constitution, its military heritage, its freedom. This is a vision that is despised by the people who have long held the commanding heights of the culture. But is obviously alive and kicking.

Beck is creating positive themes of unity and patriotism and freedom and independence which are above mere political or policy choices, but not irrelevant to them. Political and policy choices rest on a foundation of philosophy, culture, self-image, ideals, religion. Change the foundation, and the rest will flow from that. Defeat the enemy on that plane, and any merely tactical defeat will always be reversible.

Beck is unabashed that God can be invoked in public places by citizens, who vote and assemble and speak and freely exercise their religion. They are supposed to be too browbeaten to do this. Gathering hundreds of thousands of them to peaceably assemble shows they are not. But showing that the people who believe in God and practice their religion are fellow-citizens who share political and economic values with majorities of Americans is a critical step. The idea that these people are an American Taliban is laughable, but showing that fact to the world — and to potential political allies who are not religious — is critical.

Beck is attacking the enemy at the foundations of their power, their claim to race as a permanent trump card, their claim to the Civil Rights movement as a permanent model to constantly be transforming a perpetually unjust society…

OBAMA:“Unfortunately, over the last decade, we have not done what is necessary to shore up the foundation of our own prosperity. We have spent over a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas. This, in turn, has shortchanged investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits.”

THE FACTS: This is partly true. For sure, the costly Iraq and Afghanistan wars have contributed to the nation’s budget deficit — but not by as much as Obama suggests. The current annual deficit is now an estimated $1.5 trillion. But as recently as 2007, the budget deficit was just $161.5 billion. And that was years after war expenses were in place for both the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts.

Most of the current deficit is due to the longest recession since the 1930s. It has seriously depressed tax revenues while increasing costs to the government — including social safety-net programs such as unemployment insurance and spending by both the outgoing Bush and incoming Obama administrations on stimulus programs and on bailouts of banks and automakers.

The AP doesn’t question Obama’s notion of “investing in our own people” –lib-speak for tax (take money from those who earned it) and spend (on someone Obama, et al, feel is more deserving.)

So U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan invited every Education Department employee to attend Rev. Al Sharpton’s Glenn Beck counter-rally. As David Boaz explained in the Examiner, it was a ”highly inappropriate” thing to do, pushing people who are supposed to serve all Americans to support one side of a “political debate.” But that’s just the most obvious problem with Duncan’s weekend doings.

Perhaps just as troubling as his rally-prodding is that Duncan declared education “the civil rights issue of our generation” at Sharpton’s event. This only about a year after helping to kill an education program widely supported by many of the people he and Sharpton insist they want to empower. I’m talking, of course, about Washington, DC’s, Opportunity Scholarship Program, a voucher program that was proven effective. But the heck with success — Duncan and President Obama let the union-hated program die.

The cause for concern, though, doesn’t end there. According to the Examiner, an Education Department spokeswoman tried to gloss over the boss’s out-of-bounds play by suggesting that Sharpton’s rally was but a mere “back-to-school event.” Sound familiar?

That’s right! As I just blogged about, last year the Obama administration scared parents and taxpayers across the country by sending politically charged material to all public schools to prepare them for the president’s planned address to the nation’s children. Only after it took serious heat for that did the administration have the most alarming material changed. And then what did it do? Declared that the address would obviously be but a simple back-to-school speech, and tried to make everyone who knew what had actually transpired seem like a partisan attack dog.

As long as politicians run education, education will be hopelessly politicized. Unfortunately, that’s the simple back-to-school lesson for today.

Few recall the leftwing masses who believed that 9/11 was an inside job, that Bush conspired with the Saudis, that it was all about an oil pipeline they wanted to build through Afghanistan, etc.

Except it wasn’t just a few ignorant cranks. Howard Dean, then a leader in the Democrat party and serious candidate for president said this:

“I don’t know. There are many theories about it. The most interesting theory that I’ve heard so far, which is nothing more than a theory, I can’t—think it can’t be proved, is that he was warned ahead of time by the Saudis.

Now, who knows what the real situation is, but the trouble is that by suppressing that kind of information, you lead to those kinds of theories, whether they have any truth to them or not, and then eventually they get repeated as fact.

So I think the president is taking a great risk by suppressing the clear, the key information that needs to go to the Kean commission.”

But this milestone should serve as a reminder to all Americans that the future is ours to shape if we move forward with confidence and commitment.  It should also serve as a message to the world that the United States of America intends to sustain and strengthen our leadership in this young century.

This is the very opposite of what the Democrats preached during Bush’s term.

Only Sen. Joe Lieberman stood strong, and for that the Democrats purged him.

From this desk, seven and a half years ago, President Bush announced the beginning of military operations in Iraq. Much has changed since that night. A war to disarm a state became a fight against an insurgency. Terrorism and sectarian warfare threatened to tear Iraq apart. Thousands of Americans gave their lives; tens of thousands have been wounded. Our relations abroad were strained. Our unity at home was tested.

Our unity was tested because Democrats decided there was no political upside to backing Bush’s policy, despite having voted for the liberation of Iraq.

To explain away the change, they cynically concocted a Big Lie, with full support of the mainstream media: the notion that Bush tricked them.

Thus we endured years of ugly politics brought to us by Michael Moore,  Joe Wilson/ Valerie Plame, assorted Hollywood nitwits, Jimmy Carter, John Kerry, Cindy Sheehan, and Barack Obama himself.

Yeah, our unity was tested.

Incoherent: The president argued that the war had represented a worthwhile cause, asserting that “We have persevered…because of a belief…that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization.” Moments later, however, the president insisted that the war had instead been mistaken: “We have spent a trillion dollars at war…This, in turn, has short-changed investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits.” The president wants to have it both ways, associating himself with the victory we achieved in Iraq while distancing himself from the costs. As argument, this is incoherent. But of course it isn’t argument. It’s cheap manipulation.

Grudging: “The Americans who have served in Iraq,” the president accurately stated, “completed every mission they were given…They shifted tactics to protect the Iraqi people; trained Iraqi Security Forces; and took out terrorist leaders….Iraq has the opportunity to embrace a new destiny….” In other words, we won. Why? Because in 2007, when many, including then senators Obama and Clinton, insisted that the United States should simply withdraw from Iraq, leaving behind a nation reduced to chaos, George W. Bush instead insisted on a new strategy, the surge. Let me repeat that. We won because President Bush insisted on the surge.

Did President Obama extend the courtesy to his predecessor of saying as much? He most certainly did not.

“It’s well known,” President Obama said, “that [President Bush]…and I disagreed about the war from its outset. Yet no one could doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security.” Support, love, commitment. President Obama could bring himself to credit President Bush with nothing more than mere well-intentioned haplessness. How shabby. How tawdry.

Disgraceful: After having added $1 trillion to the deficit since taking office, President Obama suggested that somehow the $1 trillion the nation has spent in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade “short-changed investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits.” Take just a moment to do the math—something of which our chief executive apparently believes most Americans incapable. The cost of the war against radical Islam has averaged $100 billion a year—which comes to one-eighth the size of the President’s stimulus bill, or one-thirtieth of the average federal budget over the same ten years. I have my reservations about the president’s economic advisors, but they know—he knows—that the war in Iraq has nothing to do with our economic woes. He was intentionally attempting to mislead us…

There’s plenty of UAVs out there capable of dropping things, but comparatively fewer that are able to pick things up. Some researchers at Yale University doing their part to change that, however, and have recently shown off their so-called Yale Aerial Manipulator; a UAV with a robotic hand. While that may not exactly sound like much, the four-fingered hand is able to “autonomously” grab objects that weigh up to two kilograms while the UAV is in flight, and the helicopter itself is able to reach a top speed of 120 kilometers per hour. That, the researchers say, could let the UAV pick up bombs or packages in difficult to reach areas, or even simply be used to make deliveries in urban areas — like that can of Guinness you’ve been craving, for instance. Head on past the break to check it out in action.

One of the cleverest tricks of the cultural Left is demonizing perfectly reasonable actions and opinions by giving them sinister names. It is the logical go-to technique for those whose ideas have failed in every practical application but who nonetheless still dominate the media by which ideas are spread.

A favorite example of mine is the old feminist declaration that men “objectify” women when they respond to female beauty as nature decrees. This particular reframing was not successful over the long term for the same reason that health scares involving coffee have never caught on: no one was willing to give up the stimulant. A more tenacious variation of the same approach is the accusation that law enforcement officers practice “racial profiling,” which sounds as though police center their suspicions on one race over another out of simple bigotry or meanness. In fact, if criminals of a certain type or in a certain neighborhood tend to be of a specific race, then the proper term for “racial profiling” would be “good police work.” And though, fortunately for liberals and conservatives alike, police continue to do that good work, the evil-sounding sobriquet has forced them to waste a lot of time, effort, and money pretending they don’t.

Recently, in defending an imam’s proposal to build a triumphalist “Muslim Cultural Center” near Manhattan’s Ground Zero—where, we may remember, so many innocents were slaughtered in the name of Allah—the Left has outdone itself. Rather than engage in serious debate with the vast majority of New Yorkers and Americans who oppose the project, the mosque’s defenders have simply dubbed the opposing viewpoint “Islamophobia.” As ever when this naming device is used, the left-wing media seem to rally as one. Within the space of a single week, Time put the word on its cover, Maureen Dowd accused the entire nation of it in her column, and CBS News trotted out the charge in reporting on mosque opposition.

For anyone born with the gift of laughter, the term is absurd to the point of hilarity. A phobia, after all, is an irrational fear. Given that Islam is cancerous with violence in virtually every corner of the globe, given the oppressive and exclusionary nature of many Islamic governments, given the insidious Islamist inroads against long-held freedoms in western Europe, and given those aspects of sharia that seem, to an outsider at least, to prohibit democracy, free speech, and the fair treatment of the female half of our species, those who love peace and liberty would, in fact, be irrational not to harbor at least a measure of concern.

A religion is only a system of beliefs, and to say that all beliefs deserve equal respect or acceptance is to say that ideas have no moral weight, a patent absurdity. Because the human soul thirsts so for God, the sacred principle of individual liberty demands that religion be given wide latitude when it comes to internal mind-states, modes of worship, and the description of the metaphysical. But when it comes to the practical affairs of humankind, humankind may judge—and Islam, as the world stands now, has a lot to answer for…