The CEO of Victoria’s Secret says the company has become “too sexy” for its own good.

Weirdest thing: the CEO is a female. I never would have guessed.

Guys, what do you think? Because this blog does not put up cheesecake photos just for fun, I note for the record that the picture accompanying the L.A. Times article is set forth as an aid to help you evaluate the claim made by this top business executive.

Click more for the picture.

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It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. But there’s a phone in the White House and it’s ringing. Something’s happening in the world. Your vote will decide who answers that call, whether it’s someone who already knows the world’s leaders, knows the military, someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world.

Source: television advertisement for John McCain Hillary Clinton.

Via Ed Morrissey at Hot Air we learn that AG Michael Mukasey is refusing to prosecute contempt citations for Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten:

U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey refused on Friday to pursue contempt citations issued by the House of Representatives against a current and a former White House aide for not cooperating in a probe of the firing of U.S. attorneys.

Saying no crime was committed, Mukasey rejected a request by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to refer the citations to a federal grand jury investigation of current White House chief of staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers.

“The Department has determined that the non-compliance by Mr. Bolten and Ms. Miers with the Judiciary Committee subpoenas did not constitute a crime, and therefore the Department will not bring the congressional contempt citations before a grand jury or take any other action to prosecute Mr. Bolten or Ms. Miers,” Mukasey said in a letter to Pelosi.

Good for him. Ed says it’s not over yet:

The next step will be for the House to file a lawsuit against the DoJ to force them into prosecuting the citations. That gets into some sticky areas of the law. The concepts of executive privilege have not fully been tested in the courts, and until now both elective branches have done their best to avoid an all-out legal confrontation.

But I think it is over. As I explained here [Yeah, at great length. — Ed. Hey, go back to Kaus’s blog!], I think it would violate the separation of powers for Congress to order DoJ to pursue a prosecution that DoJ thinks is untenable. I even debated the issue with a law professor in an e-mail exchange reproduced here; I leave it to the reader to determine who had the better of the argument.

I think we’re done here. If DoJ says there’s no case, there’s no case. End of story.

Next!

He has a post about it with a clever title: The New 7 1/2. Cute.

[posted by Justin Levine]

Called in for jury duty today in a criminal case.

I am not one who advocates making up excuses so that you don’t have to serve on jury duty. Patterico’s job would be rather difficult if everyone did that.

I’d be happy to serve and honestly feel that I could be fair and objective. However, I do advocate truthfulness as a prospective when you are questioned by the judge and attorneys.  One of the questions that all prospective jurors were asked was “Are you close with members of  any law enforcement agency, or do you come in contact with them at work?” (Not the exact wording here – but that was the gist.)

I suppose I could have pulled a Clinton and parsed the words of the question enough to forget about mentioning the fact that I blog for a site that is operated by an Assistant D.A., but I thought that would be a form of deception in terms of what it was really trying to ask me.

As it turns out, blogging for a site such as this happens to encourage defense attorneys to use one of their peremptory challenges.  Go figure! I got the impression that my writings on this site were more of an issue than the fact that I produce and AM radio talk show and worked with LAPD Chief Bill Bratton’s wife when she was a fill-in host for a short stint.

Oh well. I hope and trust that justice will be done in the case – whatever result that might ultimately turn out to be.

Linda Greenhouse’s buyout is worth about $300,000. According to her, she was planning to retire in three years, and they gave her two years’ salary to go now. She says that it was too attractive an option to pass up.

I believe that, but I also suspect that Ed Whelan’s dogged questioning about her undisclosed conflicts of interest may have played a role as well . . . but not in the way you probably think I mean.

I don’t believe for a second that the New York Times pushed Greenhouse out the door, as some of you suggested upon hearing the news of her buyout. Think about it. Bill Keller refused to require her to take even the laughably ineffective step of adding a line to her online bio about her husband, because it could be considered a “rebuke” in the face of criticism from a conservative. This is not an organization that was going to push Greenhouse out.

But I can easily imagine Greenhouse feeling like she wasn’t sufficiently backed up by her newspaper. After all, the public editor said in his column about Whelan’s criticism that Whelan had a point — there should have been more disclosure.

This isn’t the first time Greenhouse’s open expression of leftist viewpoints received quiet expressions of discomfort from the Gray Lady. When Greenhouse laid out a plethora of liberal views at Harvard University, then-public editor Byron Calame said: “It seems clear to me that Ms. Greenhouse stepped across that line during her speech,” and revealed that Bill Keller had spoken with Greenhouse privately about the remarks. And in 1989, Times editors rebuked Greenhouse for participating in an abortion rights rally, in a year when she reported on several abortion-related decisions.

I rather suspect that Dahlia Lithwick — who works with Greenhouse at the Supreme Court, shares her liberal ideology, and admires her enormously — was expressing Greenhouse’s own thoughts for her when Lithwick co-wrote a Slate article titled “Why Doesn’t the New York Times Stand Up for Linda Greenhouse?”

It’s not hard to imagine Greenhouse thinking: I’ve worked for this newspaper for three decades and this is the treatment I get? You’re not going to have Linda Greenhouse to kick around anymore!

Bazelon and Lithwick called Greenhouse a “sought-after scratching post for right-wing kitty cats.” Upon hearing the news of the buyout, commenter assistant devil’s advocate said: “right-wing kitty cats call for new litter!”

Well, we’ll always have Dahlia Lithwick.

[Guest post by Jack Dunphy]

Back in December, I wrote this column for Pajamas Media on the financial disclosure policy soon to be imposed on the Los Angeles Police Department. Briefly, officers assigned to gang and narcotics units will be required to disclose detailed financial records to LAPD auditors so as to comply with the federal consent decree under which the department now operates. Many of the affected officers have said they will accept reassignment to other duties rather than comply with the disclosure requirement. (I also addressed the issue here, and Patterico did so here.)

And so what? one might ask. Consider Wednesday’s shooting in South-Central Los Angeles. Gang members confronted each other on an MTA bus, and when they left the bus, one of them opened fire on his rivals, missing them but wounding eight others, including children walking home from a nearby school.

The suspect was arrested Thursday by two officers working the gang unit at the LAPD’s Newton Division, in whose jurisdiction the shooting occurred. The officers were well informed on both of the involved gangs, and they knew where and how to look for the suspect. They spotted him walking down the street and, when he tried to run, chased him down. Thus was a horrible crime solved within 24 hours thanks to the expertise and dedication of two police officers, both of whom, thanks to the consent decree, may soon be working other assignments.

If the financial disclosure policy results in the expected exodus of officers from LAPD gang units, arrests such as this one may soon be a thing of the past, and the streets of Los Angeles may be that much more dangerous.

But at least the LAPD will be in compliance with the consent decree.

–Jack Dunphy