D.R. Tucker writes an obituary.

It was fun while it lasted.

The guaranteed election of a non-conservative President on November 4th represents the end of the conservative movement in America. Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain stands for Reagan principles in any way, shape, manner or form—and after twenty years of non-conservative Presidents, it’s obvious that the Reagan era will never, ever return.

The conservative movement has been in the hospital for nearly two decades. Once George H. W. Bush—a good, moral man, but not a true conservative—entered the White House, conservative principles slowly but surely began to leave. Yes, he gave us a victory in the Gulf War and Clarence Thomas, but he also gave us a broken no-new-taxes promise and David Souter. Bush was more Rockefeller than Goldwater, during a time when America and the world needed more of the latter and less of the former. ...

On November 4, we will elect a Republican who straight-out hates Reagan conservatives or a Democrat who regards the Reagan vision as venomous. No matter who wins, the conservative revolution will have been quelled.

Read the whole thing.

In 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney applied his judicial powers to conclude once and for all the vexatious arguments about the extension of Slavery to the the Western territories which had persisted since 1820. In Dred Scott v. Sandiford , he ruled that persons of African descent could never be US citizens, slaves could not sue in court, and Congress had power to exclude Slavery from the territories. So there. The result, of course, was the Civil War.

The Wall Street Journal editorializes today on the folly of judges usurping the decision-making power of the people as a whole.

Judges invent wedge issues. Always have. As with California’s Supreme Court, many of the berobed judiciary take it as their solemn duty to do the people’s thinking for them on the modern world’s most difficult and divisive social issues. So it was with Roe v. Wade, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared 50 state legislatures irrelevant. The aftermath has been more than 30 years of the abortion wars.

California’s Supreme Court is not the law of the land, but its 4-3 ruling, titled “In re Marriage Cases” for six consolidated appeals, explicitly told both the state’s voters and its elected legislature to get lost. Back in 2000, California voters by 61% approved a proposition asserting that the state could only recognize a “marriage” between man and woman.

Now comes the court. In the court’s words: “[T]he core set of basic substantive [court’s emphasis] legal rights and attributes traditionally associated with marriage . . . are so integral to an individual’s liberty and personal autonomy that they may not be eliminated or abrogated by the Legislature or by the electorate through the statutory initiative process.” This rule by judicial decree could hardly be clearer. What is also clear is that judges should again be an election issue.

The school of thought which holds that the American people should cheerfully accede to whatever social world unelected judges design for them is Democratic orthodoxy. ...

The gay community wants social acceptance. It should look to what flowed from Roe v. Wade: unending bitterness. A wiser course in 21st-century America is to trust the democratic process.

Josh Marshall and Think Progress were pretty amused at how Chris Matthews humiliated Kevin James, a quite obscure conservative talk radio personality and no Rush Limbaugh, who, alas! did not know what Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement actually involved, and was not very good at getting himself out of trouble.

But, then, at 4:53 minutes, Mark Finkelstein notes, the triumphant Matthews makes reference to the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole as “under Bush.”

5:27 video

For the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Nike, Portland, Oregon manufacturer better known for more demotic athletic footwear, has introduced the Nike Ippeas, an up-dated take on the traditional riding boot.

Press release quoted by Sneaker Freaker:

Nike Ippeas (Greek for “Rider”) should be: “Hippeas” -DZ
Sport: Equestrian

Equestrian footwear has not changed much in the last century. The sport is steeped in traditional English heritage where leather boots, wood soles, and hard-pressed leather outsoles have been standard issue for horseback riding since the 1800s. Nike designers wanted to bring new innovation to that paradigm while still respecting the institution of the sport. For Beijing, Nike’s Equestrian footwear reflects the best elements of the sport’s deep traditions, but is elevated by innovative design and unique performance features. Again, designers started with the athlete. After listening to insights and ideas from top equestrian athletes, several rounds of prototypes were produced and improved with each effort. The final creation was the Nike Ippeas, a beautiful leather and synthetic boot that provides protection, support, traction, traditional aesthetic, and horse control in a total package that also reduces weight by eliminating the need for strap-on spurs.

Nike developed many innovations for the Nike Ippeas, including rubber pads for the outsoles of the boots to improve stirrup traction, an adjustable titanium screw-in spur system (inspired by track spikes) that eliminates the need for additional hardware on the ankles, and a full-length engineered zipper for easy on-and-off. Perhaps the most revolutionary development is the most subtle: a thin, high-abrasion synthetic rubber material on the medial side of the boot that delivers improved grip on the horse and saddle, which gives the rider better communication with the animal and increased stability during demanding jumps.

Key Features:

Crafted footwear that marries innovation with the classic silhouette a riding boot
Rubber outsole pads to improve traction on stirrups
Asymmetrical zipper for comfortable on-and-off
Track and field-inspired screw mount spurs (three possible positions)
Full length Zoom Air cushioning for underfoot comfort
High-abrasion synthetic rubber on medial boot for control and communication

Eugene Volokh explains how legislation banning sexual orientation discrimination in Masasachusetts, Vermont, and California was then taken by their highest courts to constitute a new basis for interpreting their state constitutions. The California decision notes:

This state’s current policies and conduct regarding homosexuality recognize that gay individuals are entitled to the same legal rights and the same respect and dignity afforded all other individuals and are protected from discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation.

BBC:

Divers in France have found the oldest known bust of Roman dictator Julius Caesar at the bottom of the River Rhone, officials have said.

The marble bust was found near Arles, which was founded by Caesar.

France’s culture ministry said the bust was from 46BC, the date of the southern town’s foundation.

The ministry described the bust – which shows a lined face and a balding head – as typical of realist portraits of the Republican era.

It said other items had been found at the same site, including a 1.8m (6ft) marble statue of Neptune from the first decade of the third century AD, and two smaller statues in bronze.

Divers taking part in an archaeological excavation made the discovery between September and October 2007.

Luc Long, the archaeologist who directed the excavations, said all the busts of Caesar in Rome were posthumous.

A good story from Tom Wolfe:

My brother-in-law happened to be present in 1943 in a general store, and here were three good old boys who were too old to go into the armed forces, talking about the war.

And one of them says, “You know, this whole war—the whole problem here is this man called Hitler. I don’t know why we just don’t go over there and shoot him.”

And his friend says, “Well, I’m sure it’s not that easy. I don’t know how you can just go over there and shoot him.”

And the first says, “Look, you get me over there in a boat, I’ll shoot him.”

“How are you going to do that?”

He says, “Well, I’ll go to the front door and I’ll ring the bell.”

His friend says, “Are you crazy? He’s not going to come to the front door. The whole place has probably got a big wall around.”

He said, “Okay I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll wait until its dark, I’ll go around to the wall and back, I’ll climb over it and I’ll hide behind a tree with my rifle. And in the morning when he comes out in the yard to pee, I’m going to shoot him.”

These were Scotch-Irish people. They loved guns and guns mean a lot to them. And they hated officials and they hated all the layers of bureaucracy. They believed the government can’t get anything done right. It’s all so simple. You just have to go over there and do it yourself.

H/t to Frank Dobbs.

The Guardian describes how Europe’s intensely regulated employment policies are resulting in a generation of losers.

With inflation soaring, property prices sky high, wages relatively static, labour markets gridlocked and sluggish or slowing economies, ..tens of millions of Europeans raised to expect that their degrees and diplomas will assure them a relatively high quality of life.. are now realising that the world has changed. The disappointment is a shock with big political, social, cultural, even demographic consequences. ...

In 1973, only 6 per cent of recent university leavers in France were unemployed; now the rate is 25 to 30 per cent; salaries have stagnated for 20 years while property prices have doubled or trebled, though the overall proportion of French people living in poverty has not changed. Whereas in the 1960s the poor were mainly the old, now they are the young; in 1970, salaries for 50-year-olds were only 15 per cent higher than those for workers of 30; the gap now is 40 per cent.

‘Some talk of a war between the generations, but that’s a little simplistic. It is more that the system means that the haves are keeping what they have and no one is helping the have-nots,’ said Chauvel. ‘The big determinant in France now of success is not your educational level but the wealth of your parents, if they can support you during your twenties as you fight your way into a closed employment market.’

French economists speak of ‘insiders and outsiders’. The insiders are those who already have a job and are well-defended by the battery of French laws protecting the workforce and the unions. The outsiders are those without work which, naturally, include newcomers on the job market. Chauvel says the problem is particularly bad in Latin countries where parents are expected to support their children much longer.

But, cheer up, Europe! we have a political party right here in the United States firmly committed to bringing us European-style labor market regulations, too. They call themselves democrats, and they are favored to win in November.

H/t to MeaninglessHotAir.

Karl Rove looks at recent GOP special election losses, and talks about the Party’s future prospects.

The GOP can’t take “safe” seats for granted when Democrats run conservatives who distance themselves from their national party leaders. The string of defeats should cure Republicans of the habit of simply shouting “liberal! liberal! liberal!” in hopes of winning an election. They need to press a reform agenda full of sharp contrasts with the Democrats.

Why is it tough sledding for Republicans? Public revulsion at GOP scandals was a large factor in the party’s 2006 congressional defeat. Some brand damage remains, as does the downward pull of the president’s approval ratings. But the principal elements are the Iraq war and a struggling economy. ...

What is clear is that John McCain and Republicans will prevail only if they convince voters that there are profound consequences at stake in Iraq, and that more and better jobs will follow from the GOP’s approach of lowering taxes, opening trade, and ending earmarks and other pro-growth policies.

Republicans also face challenges with the young (whose opposition to the war and attraction to Mr. Obama have made them Democrats) and Hispanics (the fastest-growing part of the electorate). A recent survey offers some encouraging news. Mr. McCain is polling as high as 41% with Hispanics – close to President Bush’s 44% in 2004.

Democrats shouldn’t be complacent after Tuesday. Their problems start with Mr. Obama’s 41-point loss to Hillary Clinton in West Virginia. Mr. Obama lost the primary because the rejection of him by blue-collar voters is hardening. The last Democrat to win the presidency without carrying the Mountain State was Woodrow Wilson in 1916.

Barely half of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters in Indiana, North Carolina and West Virginia say they’re ready to support Mr. Obama against Mr. McCain today. Without solid support from these voters, Mr. Obama will be in trouble in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, West Virginia, Wisconsin and other battlegrounds.

So far, Mr. Obama owes his success to elites captivated by his personality. But in the general election, most folks will care more about a candidate’s philosophy and stand on the issues. And what’s considered mainstream values in a general election is different than in a primary.

Rove’s conclusion is that GOP can win, but it will require persuading voters that difference in philosophy between our candidates and theirs matters. John McCain is not exactly the ideal Republican spokesman for principled Conservatism.

Gateway Pundit notes that Polar bear numbers are up in 11 of 13 regions of Canada recently.

And successful conservation practices have dramatically restored bear numbers over the past half century.

While Arctic ice levels are at their highest point in 15 years.

But none of these considerations prevented the Bush Administration’s Department of the Interior from swallowing journalists’ fairy tales based upon somebody’s computer model and placing Polar Bears on the Threatened Species List. The purely imaginary decline, thought by some Interior Department experts to be a future possibility, is attributed to imaginary Anthropogenic Global Warming.

There’s your Republican government at work for you, identifying a non-existent problem contrary to the evidence of the facts on the basis of the other side’s ideology out of political cowardice.

Obama or Hillary can complete the process next year, and assure that all energy exploration in the Arctic will be firmly prohibited by law.

Al Jazeera 2:38 video

Jim Geraghty transcribed a portion of the report:

REPORTER: It may be hard to believe, but working in this tiny Internet cafe in Gaza City may just be one of Barack Obama’s biggest fans.

Before every U.S. primary, 23-year-old Ibrahim Abu Jayyab gathers 17 of his friends to try and rally support for Obama’s campaign in the U.S.

So why does a young Palestinian living in Gaza spend so much of his time and money on an election thousands of miles away?

ABU JAYYAB: [translated] It all started at the time of the U.S. primaries. After studying Obama’s electoral campaign manifesto, I thought, ‘this is a man that is capable of change inside America.’ As for potential change in the Middle East, he can also do that. I think he can bring peace to the area, or at least this is what we hope.

REPORTER: And the game plan? Ibrahim and his friends call random numbers in the U.S. before every primary to deliver one simple message:

ABU JAYYAB: [in English] Elect Senator Obama. I will change. I will achieve… the justice in the Middle East.

How about the endowments of major universities? Massachusetts is thinking about doing just that.

WSJ:

Massachusetts legislators, demonstrating a growing resentment against the wealth of elite universities in tight economic times, are studying a plan to levy a 2.5% annual tax on the portion of college endowments that exceed $1 billion.

After all, as Jim Manzi notes:

Viewed purely in terms of economics, Harvard is really a $40 billion tax-free hedge fund with a very large marketing and PR arm called Harvard University that has the job of raising the investment capital and protecting the fund’s preferential tax treatment.

Hat tip to David Nix.

George C. Scott plays General Patton Slapping a Malingering Soldier in 1943

The Wall Street Journal explains liberalism’s latest atrocity: first, cowardice is promoted to a medical condition; then it becomes possible to argue that cowards should receive medals for their war-time sufferings.

With an increasing number of troops being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (Completely undocumented journalist’s factoid – JDZ) the modern military is debating an idea Gen. Washington never considered—awarding one of the nation’s top military citations to veterans with psychological wounds, not just physical ones.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates offered cautious support for such a change on a trip to a military base in Texas this month.

“It’s an interesting idea,” Mr. Gates said in response to a question. “I think it is clearly something that needs to be looked at.”

In order to assist in some necessary cozying back up to liberal Jewish voters after his recent endorsement by Hamas, Jeffrey Goldberg did a softball interview with his Obamatude in the Atlantic.

Obama assures Goldberg that some of his best intellectual influences are Jewish and that he thinks Zionism is peachy keen, then he puts his foot in it.

JG: Do you think that Israel is a drag on America’s reputation overseas?

BO: No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy.

Referring to “infecting” is a nice touch, too.

Somehow I don’t think this interview is going to help him much in Palm Beach County.

AP:

The Marine Corps far surpassed its recruiting goal last month and could eventually be more than a year ahead of schedule in its plan to grow the force to 202,000 members.

All military services met or exceeded their monthly recruiting goals in April, with the Marine Corps signing 142 percent of the number it was looking for, the Pentagon said.

I guess the spells Code Pink cast last Friday didn’t work.

AP reports that the recent wave of coyote attacks on small children in the Greater Los Angeles is part of a larger pattern, and is now the subject of academic study.

The coyote was limping as it approached a girl in a sand box at a public park — but it was still dangerous. It snapped its jaws on the girl’s buttocks and her nanny had to pry the toddler from the wild animal.

Less than a week later, a coyote in a mountain resort town some 35 miles away grabbed a girl by the head and tried to drag her from a front yard until her mother scared it away.

A spate of coyote attacks in the fast-growing suburbs east of Los Angeles have left parents on edge and puzzled wildlife officials.

“Their aggressive behavior seems to be on the upswing,” said Steve Martarano, a spokesman with the state Department of Fish and Game. “They just seem to lose their fear of humans.” ...

“We’re not sure what pushes them over the edge,” said Robert Timm, a wildlife specialist with the University of California system. “There may be no single explanation for it.” ...

Since last year, there have been seven coyote attacks in the Chino Hills area, including four in which children were bitten. State wildlife officials have killed 23 coyotes to protect the public.

Timm, the University of California scientist, said coyotes behave in predictable ways when they turn aggressive such as snatching pets during the daytime or chasing joggers and bicyclists.

If people recognize these signs, they may be able to thwart an attack, he said.

Timm has created a Web site, CoyoteBytes.org, where residents in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties can report coyote bites or sightings. Scientists use the information to study the scope of the problem.

It isn’t really terribly confusing, actually. Today’s America, in the West, frequently features the close proximity of Nature in the wild with dense urban areas. Nobody in California’s cities and suburbs has the old-fashioned 12 gauge shotgun propped up behind the kitchen door ready for invading predators. Without hunting pressure to make Western predators fearful of human beings, they will inevitably grow bolder over time and sooner or later incidents of human predation will occur.

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

Earlier postings.

Members of today’s rising generation (for some mysterious reason) love pirates. They turn pirate movies into hits, frequent pirate bars, throw pirate parties, and as the Boston Globe explains, they even look to pirates as a political model.

Marcus Rediker, the author of the pirate histories “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” and “Villains of All Nations,” sees pirate democracy less as a means for order than as a political statement, a pointed reaction to the working sailor’s life. When pirates roamed the seas, Rediker says, it was the law-abiding merchant ships that were run like miniature tyrannies. Captains held absolute power. Floggings were routine and often deadly. When pirates recruited sailors from the ships they pillaged, they opened a window to a different kind of society – far from the one the working-class sailors would otherwise find on land or sea. Rediker argues that pirate democracy “is not about human nature at all. It’s about the specific experience of sailors and the way that they wanted to imagine a better world.”

Piracy, says Rediker, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh, was “a fascinating, almost utopian kind of experiment.” Indeed, he says, pirate democracy was purer than what was practiced in Athens: The Greeks didn’t give slaves the vote, but pirates offered the right to everyone, black or white. (It’s probably also safe to say that pirates didn’t have superdelegates.) Before each voyage, the crew elected a captain who could be deposed at any time, as well as a quartermaster whose main purpose was to make sure the captain didn’t have too much power. A written charter outlined ship rules, which tended to prohibit theft and violence aboard and set strict rules for the presence of women. (Contrary to popular myth, Leeson, says, pirates usually set limits on drinking. “A drunken pirate crew,” he points out, “would be less effective than a sober crew.”)

Pirates even conducted a version of a fair trial, Rediker says, when determining the fate of captured captains. If any pirate on board knew the man from his merchant ship days, he could testify about his treatment. A captain who turned out to be kind was sometimes spared his life. And in a precursor of our own democratic love of political satire, pirates wrote coarse, hilarious plays that mocked the upper classes’ criminal justice system.

August J. Pollak has a very good cartoon commenting on the noticeable partisanship of the MSM’s commentary.

via HuffPo.

Yale’s Harkness Tower

Bert Prelutsky, at PJM, has a few choice remarks on presidential politics and the Ivies.

Ivy certainly looks nice, but you wouldn’t want to stroll through it. Here in Southern California, it’s common knowledge that most of our rodents hang out in the stuff. If bubonic plague ever breaks out in L.A., the source will be found lurking in the shrubbery.

What has me dwelling on ivy is my recent realization that much of what I don’t like about American politics — namely, American politicians — can be traced back to Ivy League schools. It can’t just be a coincidence that four or five universities keep spitting out presidential candidates and their spouses with the sort of regularity that Notre Dame used to turn out All American football players.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Susan Estrich reads some of the handwriting on the democrat party’s wall, then tries to be optimistic anyway.

It is a thought that sends shivers down the backs of Democrats, a name that brings to mind memories of an election lost that might have been won, against a war hero once referred to in headlines as a “wimp” who won not so much by his own strengths but because of the skill of his operatives in painting his lesser-known opponent as an out of touch “liberal” who refused to salute the flag or admit his mistakes, not to mention his supposedly unpatriotic wife.

Could Obama be another Dukakis?

It isn’t just die-hard Clinton supporters who are pointing out the similarities. Even some Obama backers who believe that the nomination fight is over see the possible parallels, and are determined to avoid them, or at least try.

Fox News:

Members of the anti-war group Code Pink gathered Friday with a cauldron of flowers outside a controversial Marine Corps Recruiting Center in Berkeley, Calif., to use witchcraft to rally against the Iraq war.

Code Pink members unfurled a pink banner reading “Troops Home Now” and waved signs as they began the protest, which they promised would include incantations and pointy hats for a “witches, crones and sirens” day.

“Women are coming to cast spells and do rituals and to impart wisdom to figure out how we’re going to end war,” Zanne Sam Joi of Bay Area Code Pink told FOXNews.com.

Code Pink’s announcement promised that Friday, May 9th: Witches, Crones, Sirens: perform rituals of leaving, cast a spell of peace and love over the station, rendering nil the recruiting of our youth to become fodder for this occupation of Iraq.

Link to earlier Code Pink vs. USMC postings.

The London Times reports, 4/26, on another ethical breakthrough in the home of the cuckoo clock.

Under a new Swiss law enshrining rights for animals, dog owners will require a qualification, anglers will take lessons in compassion and horses will go only in twos.

From guinea-pigs to budgerigars, any animal classified as a “social species” will be a victim of abuse if it does not cohabit, or at least have contact, with others of its own kind.

The new regulation stipulates that aquariums for pet fish should not be transparent on all sides and that owners must make sure that the natural cycle of day and night is maintained in terms of light. Goldfish are considered social animals, or Gruppentiere in German.

The creator of this animal Utopia is the Swiss federal parliament, the Bundesrat, which adopted a law this week extending to four legs the kind of rights usually reserved for two. The law, which comes into force from September 1, is particularly strict over dogs: prospective owners will have to pay for and complete a two-part course — a theory section on the needs and wishes of the animal, and a practice section, where students will be instructed in how to walk their dog and react to various situations that might arise during the process. The details of the courses are yet to be fixed, but they are likely to comprise about five theory lessons and at least five sessions “in the field”.

The law extends to unlikely regions of the animal kingdom.

Anglers will also be required to complete a course on catching fish humanely, with the Government citing studies indicating that fish can suffer too.

The regulations will affect farmers, who will no longer be allowed to tether horses, sheep and goats, nor keep pigs and cows in areas with hard floors.

The legislation even mentions the appropriate keeping of rhinoceroses, although it was not clear immediately how many, if any, were being kept as pets in Switzerland.

Also in Switzerland: Rights for Vegetables

Democrats want felons to vote and don’t want anyone asking for IDs. The latter objectionable practice would prevent fictitious persons and the deceased from exercising their franchise.

Now, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry identifies one more constituency ideal for democrats: kids!

I do understand that some children are too young to read the ballot or to perform the actual physical act of voting, and that those kids shouldn’t vote directly. I believe that for very small children, their parents should vote in their stead. However, as soon as they can vote, kids should be able to. What age? 16? 15? 14? 7? Actually, I think another age barrier would be just as senseless as the one we have now. Kids should be able to get the vote when they decide they want the vote. A child who is old enough to vote (and who is a better judge of that than himself?) should be able to walk into his friendly neighborhood voting registration office and register for himself.

(There is also the matter of which parent gets the vote. This is a false debate: each country’s law has rules to decide who has parental authority in cases of divorce, etc. Whoever has parental authority should vote for the kids.)

If you base your politics on nothing but crude oversimplifications and appeals to emotion, of course you’d want kids making all the decisions.

video ad for Wireless DVD Projector ($2900, ouch!) & Wireless Webcam with light saber IP phone (only $400) in the form of (miniature) R2-D2 droids.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Mayor Bloomberg’s attorneys argue in their brief, and the Second Amendment may wind up excluded, being traded for a similar gag order on references to the National Rifle Association, the New York Sun reports.

Lawyers for Mayor Bloomberg are asking a judge to ban any reference to the Second Amendment during the upcoming trial of a gun shop owner who was sued by the city. While trials are often tightly choreographed, with lawyers routinely instructed to not tell certain facts to a jury, a gag order on a section of the Constitution would be an oddity.

“Apparently Mayor Bloomberg has a problem with both the First and the Second amendments,” Lawrence Keane, the general counsel of a firearms industry association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, said.

The trial, set to begin May 27, involves a Georgia gun shop, Adventure Outdoors, which the city alleges is responsible for a disproportionate number of the firearms recovered from criminals in New York City. The gun store’s owner, Jay Wallace, says his store abides by Georgia and federal regulations and takes steps to avoid selling firearms to gun traffickers. Mr. Wallace’s store is one of 27 out-of-state gun shops sued by New York City, and the first to go to trial.

City lawyers, in a motion filed Tuesday, asked the judge, Jack Weinstein of U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, to preclude the store’s lawyers from arguing that the suit infringed on any Second Amendment rights belonging to the gun store or its customers. In the motion, the lawyer for the city, Eric Proshansky, is also seeking a ban on “any references” to the amendment.

“Any references by counsel to the Second Amendment or analogous state constitutional provisions are likewise irrelevant,” the brief states. ...

Of the city’s recent motion to preclude mention of the Second Amendment, a lawyer for Adventure Outdoors, John Renzulli, said, “If you can’t discuss the Bill of Rights in a court of law, where should we discuss these issues? Should we reserve it for the tavern?”

Mr. Renzulli said the city’s lawsuit did implicate the Second Amendment: “The politics involved here is whether the city has the power to go into another state and control the lawful sale of firearms.”

Still, Mr. Renzulli said he did not plan to oppose the city’s request regarding references to the Second Amendment. Mr. Renzulli, who has defended suits against the gun industry in Judge Weinstein’s courtroom before, said that in the past the defense has struck a deal with the plaintiffs on the matter: Lawyers for the gun industry won’t mention the Bill of Rights to the jury, if the plaintiffs don’t mention the National Rifle Association.

“We usually say we’re not talking about the Second Amendment and you’re not talking about the NRA as a huge lobbying group that controls the legislature,” Mr. Renzulli said.

He said he expected a similar agreement to be struck in the Adventure Outdoors case.

The Sun article fails to note that care had to have been taken to assure that this suit will be coming up before Judge Jack B. Weinstein, an activist leftist appointed to the bench by Lyndon Johnson, who routinely makes headlines with rulings favoring this sort of politically-motivated litigation.

Adventure Outdoors needs a better attorney. How can anyone be properly represented in a lawsuit involving firearms who thinks there is some kind of stigma attached to the National Rifle Association?

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

He tells an audience in Oregon.

0:24 video

I was always fascinated by the infinite, strange and ‘scandalous’ ways that insects copulate.”

Isabella Rossellini makes her directorial debut in a series of short films dramatizing the mating habits of invertebrates.

Produced for the Sundance Channel, the series of six very short, 1-2 minute, films, titled Green Porno, were made in a small screen format intended to be watched on cell-phone or iPod.

Rossellini commences each film, dreamily remarking that “If I were a…..(earthworm, spider, dragonfly, bee, firefly, praying mantis, snail, or fly)”, then appears herself in simple, childish costumes playing the male member of the species. The female is typically an even simpler cardboard mock-up.

She brings a peculiar enthusiasm and panache, especially for a woman of her sophistication and maturity, to a project featuring such a strange combination of slightness and deliberate bad taste.

pdf description of the series

4:11 interview with Rossellini video

Hat tip to U 2.

AP:

The way the warden sees it, the more than 400-pound black bear living in the middle of the sprawling Louisiana State Penitentiary is an extra layer of security.

“I love that bear being right where it is,” Warden Burl Cain said Monday. “I tell you what, none of our inmates are going to try to get out after dark and wander around when they might run into a big old bear. It’s like having another guard at no cost to the taxpayer.”

The bear was first seen by an inmate crossing a road in the prison on Friday. It was taking a stroll near the center of the state’s only maximum security prison, which is about 115 miles northwest of New Orleans. Most of the roughly 28-square-mile prison is run as a farm, but about 5 1/2 square miles is mostly untouched piney woods.

Prison workers measured the bear’s footprints, which were six inches in diameter, Cain said.

“Every inch equals 75 pounds, so that would make it about 450 pounds,” Cain said.

Fox News reports two more attacks on toddlers by opportunistic coyotes in the Los Angeles area in the same week as the prior Chino Hills park attack.

A coyote grabbed a 2-year-old girl by the head and tried to drag her from the front yard of her mountain home in the third incident of a coyote threatening a small child in Southern California in five days, authorities said.

The coyote attacked the girl around noon Tuesday when her mother, Melissa Rowley, went inside the home for a moment to put away a camera, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department said in an incident report.

Rowley came out of the house and saw the coyote dragging her daughter towards a street. She ran towards her daughter, and the animal released the girl and ran away, said sheriff’s spokeswoman Arden Wiltshire.

Rowley took her daughter to a hospital where the toddler was treated for several punctures to the head and neck area, and a laceration on her mouth. She was then flown to Loma Linda University Hospital for further treatment, although her injuries were not life-threatening.

State Fish and Game wardens and county animal control authorities set traps for the coyote and were monitoring the neighborhood high in the San Bernardino Mountains about 65 miles miles northeast of Los Angeles.

On Friday, a nanny pulled a 2-year-old girl from the jaws of a coyote at Alterra Park in Chino Hills, a San Bernardino County community about 30 miles east of Los Angeles. The girl suffered puncture wounds to her buttocks and was treated at a hospital.

A coyote came after another toddler in the same park Sunday. The child’s father kicked and chased the coyote away.

First Alterra Park attack.

Very bad teenage boys.

Having used his bully pulpit on AM Radio to persuade Republicans to cross over and vote for Hillary in several of the democrat primaries, a strategic political move which he has dubbed “Operation Chaos,” Rush Limbaugh, during his radio program yesterday, paused from mocking the Mainstream media, to hint that he may continue his Operation Chaos strategy in the general election, advising Republicans to crossover again to vote for John McCain.

Darryl Fears, in a Washington Post blog, quotes Toni Morrison, in a recent Time magazine interview, distancing herself from the Clintons by asserting that people who read her New Yorker description of Bill Clinton as “the first black president” misunderstood her.

People misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race.

It’s true that Morrison’s “first black president” comment was occasioned by the necessity for leftists like herself to defend William Jefferson Clinton in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky sex-and-perjury scandal, and Morrison did indeed attempt to depict Mr. Clinton as being railroaded (and, in her own hypertrophied rhetoric, “lynched” and “crucified,” just like a poor black man), but the heart of her comparison, the section quoted time and time again by a nation, half chuckling in agreement, half shaking its head in embarrassed chagrin at the use of these racial stereotypes by a famous black novelist, was:

White skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.

And, though she didn’t actually write it down, every New Yorker reader read between-the-lines the additionally silently-implied comparison: “sexually promiscuous, predacious, and incapable of self-restraint, can’t keep it in his pants.”

We misunderstood her? I don’t think so.

This 13:01 video could be less stridently partisan in tone, but it does clearly identify Obama’s ties to Black Liberation Theology, a pseudo-Christian ideology founded upon racism, Marxism, and Antisemitism.

If he becomes the democrat party nominee, you can expect to see more artful and subtle presentations making exactly the same points.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

Everybody knew that Hillary would win in Pennsylvania, and when she did, the media yawned and declared the result was long predicted. Obama winning in North Carolina, a major African American population state, with 91% of blacks voting his way, was also absolutely predictable, but Barack Obama’s success in North Carolina has been hailed by the MSM for two days now as a decisive event on the scale of Marathon or Waterloo.

The International Herald Tribune describes the avalanche of analysis declaring the race over and urging Hillary to get out of the way..

Very early Wednesday morning, after many voters had already gone to sleep, the conventional wisdom of the elite political pundit class that resides on television shifted hard, and possibly irretrievably, against Senator Hillary Clinton’s continued viability as a presidential candidate.

2:08 “It’s Over” video

Today, open bribes are on the table.

A prompt withdrawal from the contest for the Democratic nomination offers Sen. Hillary Clinton the prospect of major rewards.

One of the most inviting is the near certainty that the Obama campaign would agree to pay back the $11.4 million she has loaned her own bid, along with an estimated $10 million to $15 million in unpaid campaign expenses.

In addition, Democrats, both those who are loyal and those who are opposed to her campaign, say the odds of her winning a top leadership spot in the Senate would improve dramatically if she gracefully conceded now.

But, just look at the upcoming calendar:

MAY 2008
May 13: Nebraska, West Virginia
May 20: Kentucky, Oregon

JUNE 2008
June 3: Montana, South Dakota

Obama is likely to do well in left-coast Oregon, where moonbats nest densely in the forests of Portland and Eugene, but Hillary will trounce him in Kentucky and West Virginia, and she ought to have the edge in all the others.

The Left’s cheer-leading press wants to proclaim it’s over, but the decision is not so simple for serious adult democrat party functionaries who would like to win. Obama has the leftwing base, the media, and the Kennedys on his side, but he remains the most leftwing state legislator in Illinois transported to the US Senate by a fluke, burdened with a variety of radical personal associations, and jeopardized by a ticking time bomb of Chicago machine politics scandal. The “friend” who paid for Obama’s yard is currently on trial for fraud and extortion, and might spill something ripe to save his own skin any day.

Ed Koch says: “the (democrat) party is walking needlessly and unaware into a general election buzzsaw.”

Obama is a smooth article, but he is your typical leftwing elitist snob of Ivy League background, straight out of a one-party democrat urban stronghold, with a closet full of skeletons. He’ll be running against a genuine war hero in a time of national emergency. Obviously no one can predict what will happen in the course of months of intense campaigning, but the chances are very good that as the American people see more of Obama, week after week, all that smooth charm and glib rhetoric may begin to pall. Obama has an excellent chance of pulling off a McGovern-sized debacle for his party.

So those superdelegates will have to think long and hard about electability.

Democrats have a record of insisting upon maximum electoral inclusivity. They want felons to vote. They don’t even want anyone to be inconvenienced or discountenanced by being required to produce valid identification.

If you happen to spoil your ballot, or accidentally vote for the wrong candidate, a national election should go on and on, they argued in 2000, and you should get to do it all over again, because the correct choice of each and every single voter must be recorded.

Suddenly though, we are now listening to a very different tune.

Democrat party voters in Florida and Michigan, we are told, should be completely disenfranchised and excluded from participation in deciding their party’s choice of nominee for the presidency, through no fault or mistake of their own. They didn’t commit any crime or mess up any ballot. It’s just because their state leadership moved the date of their state’s primary forward contrary to the wishes of the DNC.

In 2000, every hanging chad was sacred, and the nation’s political processes could remain paralyzed indefinitely, as week succeeded week, because the vote of every single Floridian had to be definitively counted. In 2008, that same Florida voter can go hang (like a chad). The Left means to crown Obama, and if the voters of Florida and Michigan happen to be in the way, that’s just too bad. A 48 state primary process will be fine.

Matthew Yglesias supplies a fine example of Phariseeism.

From the duck, forwarded by Karen L. Myers.

Harold Ickes explains to the Politico that the Clinton camp knows where it can get some reinforcements.

The campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) has begun urging party officials and news organizations to include the disputed Florida and Michigan delegations when figuring the number of delegates needed to win the nomination.

That unorthodox approach could put her in striking distance of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) over the next month.

Harold Ickes, Clinton’s chief delegate strategist, said in a telephone interview that the senator is likely to finish the primary and caucus season on June 3 “substantially less than 100 delegates behind” Obama’s total if those two states are included.

“We don’t believe that this party is going to go forward into a presidential race without seating both Florida and Michigan,” Ickes said.

But the Democratic National Committee had declared those delegates should not be counted as punishments to the states for moving their contests so soon in the process.

So Clinton’s argument depends on the actions of the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee when it meets May 31 to consider pro-Clinton challenges that would seat those delegations.

Clinton’s new magic number to clinch the nomination is 2,209 delegates, compared to the 2,025 that would be needed without Florida and Michigan.

“The Obama people keep talking about 2,025, which implies they don’t intend to seat Florida and Michigan,” Ickes said. “We think that’s a mistake on the part of the party – it’s foolish.”

Maureen Dowd is shocked at what a cynical politician that once sweet young Hillary has become. How dare she stand in the Left’s way?

heaven help the Democrats as they try to shake off Hillary. On top of her inane vows to obliterate Iran, OPEC and the summer gas tax, she plans “a nuclear option” during her Shermanesque march to Denver. Tom Edsall reported on The Huffington Post that the Hillaryites will try, at a May 31 meeting of the Democratic Rules and Bylaws Committee, to renege on their word and get the Michigan and Florida delegations seated. Addressing supporters here, she urged the counting of the Florida and Michigan votes, noting “it would be a little strange to have a nominee chosen by 48 states.”

“It’s full speed onto the White House,” she said. ...

It’s hard to believe that this Hillary is the same Wellesley girl who said she yearned for a more “ecstatic and penetrating mode of living.” What would that young Hillary — who volunteered on Gene McCarthy’s anti-war campaign; who cried the day Martin Luther King Jr. was killed; who referred to some of her “smorgasbord of personalities” in a 1967 letter to a friend as an “alienated academic,” and an “involved pseudo-hippie”; who once returned a bottle of perfume after feeling guilty about the poverty around her — think of this shape-shifting, cynical Hillary?

She’s so at odds with who she used to be, even in the Senate, that if she were to get elected, who would voters be electing?

Obama is like her idealistic, somewhat naïve self before the world launched 1,000 attacks against her, turning her into the hard-bitten, driven politician who has launched 1,000 attacks against Obama.

As she makes a last frenzied and likely futile attempt to crush the butterfly, it’s as though she’s crushing the remnants of her own girlish innocence.

Howie Carr identifies the message of the hour you’ll soon be reading in the MSM.

These next few days are going to be a terrible time for Hillary Clinton. The title of our next episode is, “Get Out Already, Hillary!” It becomes ever clearer just how much the mainstream media is in the satchel for Barack Obama. It’s not just Chris Matthews who gets a tingle up his leg when he hears Barack. They all swoon.

And now they are going to demand that Hillary quit. The din will be incessant. They want to get down to what they consider the real Lord’s work, bashing John McCain. The trust-funded Ivy Leaguers of the press corps want to make the Rev. John Hagee the same household word that Jeremiah Wright has become.

The Clintons know this. Why do you think Paul Begala sounded so bitter on CNN last night?

“We cannot win with eggheads and African-Americans,” he said. “That’s the Dukakis coalition.”

Time will tell if the democrat party’s Rube Goldberg Superdelegate system is really capable of functioning as a safety mechanism to prevent that party’s radical activist base from selecting yet another George McGovern-style leftwing candidate to lead them to electoral disaster.

Despite Obama’s victory in North Carolina (based on a little-reported 91% of the black vote), it is too soon to count Hillary out. Yesterday’s news of the Clinton Campaign identifying the elimination of OPEC as a policy goal constitutes the single best strategic insight of the 2008 campaign so far.

Obama has the media, the Kennedys, and the activist nutroots on his side, but the Clintons still have a loyalist group representing a strong percentage of their party’s most proficient professionals.
—————————————————————-
BREAKING NEWS

The Clinton Campaign canceled public appearances today, and is reportedly going into private conference with superdelegates to see if there remains any possibility of victory.

Rick Moran identifies the key factor behind Obama’s advantage:

Clinton’s major problem showed in Pennsylvania and especially in Indiana; she is being outspent by Obama everywhere. Turnout in rural areas was not quite what the Clinton camp was banking on while Obama’s voters showed up in record numbers. It could be that her campaign is now suffering a bottleneck in funds which is beginning to tell at the ballot box. And with hope for victory becoming ever fainter, there is a good chance that her ability to raise money in the amounts that would enable her to compete effectively with Obama may be at an end.

She can’t keep being outspent 3 or 4 to 1 in every state and get the blow out victories she absolutely needs to close the delegate gap with Obama. Instead, that gap widened last night to where it is now, almost 150 delegates and climbing, thanks to Obama’s continued success in wooing Superdelegates.

Is this the end of the line for Hillary Clinton? The consensus among the talking heads on cable appears to be coalescing around the idea that she should wind her campaign down and get out of Obama’s way.

Ben Smith reports, but fails to recognize or understand, that Hillary Clinton has managed to identify the United States’ key foreign policy aim: the destruction of the OPEC oil cartel, which represents a monstrous and increasingly burdensome tax upon the economies of the West levied by a collection of backward dictatorships and parasitical Third World regimes. The incomprehensibly vast wealth transfers effectuated by this artificial manipulation of the pricing of a basic world commodity have not produced the enlightenment and content prosperity of its beneficiaries, but has instead emboldened them to promote religious intolerance and hostility toward the West, while enabling them to fund the arming and training of a new Order of Assassins, a series of militant bands of murderous fanatics bent on suicidal violence aimed at innocent victims in Middle Eastern countries and South East Asia as well as Europe and the United States.

Destroy OPEC, and you cut the Gordian Knot. You eliminate Terrorism at its source by removing its funding. You also simultaneously revitalize the economies of every country in the entire productive world by extracting a major parasite that has been feeding upon its vitals.

Clinton’s attacks on oil prices as artificially inflated, Enron-style, keep escalating, and today she appeared to threaten to break up the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

“We’re going to go right at OPEC,” she said. “They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world, they decide how much oil they’re going to produce and what price they’re going to put it at,” she told a crowd at a firehouse in Merrillville, IN.

“That’s not a market. That’s a monopoly,” she said, saying she’d use anti-trust law and the World Trade Organization to take on OPEC.

Clinton has cast herself as a warrior for working people against the oil industry and malicious “speculators,” and made that—along with her push for a gas tax holiday—central to her closing message in Indiana.

It’s a potent message, like the attack on “Wall Street money brokers,” with deep roots in American politics. It’s also very hard to figure out what exactly she means by the threat to break OPEC.

Kiss Obama goodbye, lefties. Hillary is going to run on this one, and he will be toast.

And John McCain had better move rapidly to adopt the same policy, or he could also be in deep trouble.

Polskie Radio:

The weekly Wprost, out tomorrow, shows a politburo document, signed by Mikhail Gorbachev, which appears to warrant a KGB contract killing on John Paul II.

So claims Polish journalist John O. Kohler in a book, also released tomorrow, Chodzi o papieża. Szpiedzy w watykanie – (About the Pope: Spies in the Vatican). The politburo document says: “Use all available possibilities to prevent a new political trend, initiated by the Polish pope…”

The document, which dates back to November 1979, – one year after Karol Wojtyla became pope – is signed by eight top Party officials including Konstantin Rusakov, who coordinated action with the Polish communist party, and Mikhail Gorbachev.

In Rome, Pope John Paul II survived four bullets on May 13, 1981 shot by Turk Mehmet Ali Hagca.

“If this information is true, Gorbachov should be brought to account,” said Zbigniew Chlebowski, head of the ruling Civic Platform’s parliamentary party.

KRQE:

In one corner an aggressive panhandler. In the other a disabled, wheelchair-bound Vietnam veteran who turned out not to be the underdog.

When the two met up five days ago in northeast Albuquerque the attacker became the attacked.

Gary Gould said the attempted mugging had him fighting for his life reminding him of what it was like fighting for his life in Vietnam.

“I can’t walk; I’m paralyzed,” he told KRQE News 13 today. “I got blown up in Vietnam.

“I’ve been in a chair for 38 years.”

Gould, 58, is safe at home now miles away from the Billiard Palace where he took a break from playing pool last Thursday. He said he went out back to smoke a cigarette when a man approached him asking for money.

“He put his hand out like this,” Gould said. “I said, ‘I don’t have any money. Get out of my face, man.’”

Melvin Romero should have listened he didn’t. Instead he then demanded money and repeatedly stabbed Gould with a pair of scissors, according to a criminal complaint.

Gould has some marks and bruises now, but Romero’s the one who ended up hurt the most.

“When he stabbed me, I grabbed him, and I wrestled him to the ground,” Gould said. “Every time he kept trying to get back up, I had to knock him back down.

“They transported him, and I heard he lost a pint of blood.”

Romero wasn’t booked into jail until Monday four days after the attack because that’s how long it took him to recover in the hospital.

Priya Venkatesan, Dartmouth ‘90

Joseph Rago, at the Wall Street Journal, is running a bit late in covering a recent political correctness flap at Dartmouth, but I’m even later since I only learned of this news story from him.

Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their “anti-intellectualism” violated her civil rights.

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will “name names.”

The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.

Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. “My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful,” she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. “They’d argue with your ideas.” This caused “subversiveness,” a principle English professors usually favor.

Ms. Venkatesan’s scholarly specialty is “science studies,” which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, “teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth.” She continues: “Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct.”

The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan’s seminar, then, was to “problematize” technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the “problems” owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such skepticism was “intolerant of ideas” and “questioned my knowledge in very inappropriate ways.” Ms. Venkatesan, who is of South Asian descent, also alleges that critics were motivated by racism, though it is unclear why.

After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on “ecofeminism,” which holds, in part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out. One student took issue, and reasonably so – actually, empirically so. But “these weren’t thoughtful statements,” Ms. Venkatesan protests. “They were irrational.” The class thought otherwise. Following what she calls the student’s “diatribe,” several of his classmates applauded.

Ms. Venkatesan informed her pupils that their behavior was “fascist demagoguery.” Then, after consulting a physician about “intellectual distress,” she cancelled classes for a week. Thus the pending litigation.

The original story, Dartblog 4/26 quotes Ms. Venkatesan’s emails

Email 1:

——- Original Message——-
From: Priya Venkatesan
To: [REDACTED]@Dartmouth.edu ; editor@dartmouth.com
Sent: Friday, April 25, 2008 [time redacted]
Subject: Class Action Suit

Dear Student:

As a courtesy, you are being notified that you are being named in a potential class action suit that is being brought against Dartmouth College, which is being accused of violating federal anti-discrimination laws. Please do not respond to this email because it will be potentially used against you in a court of law.

Priya Venkatesan, PhD

Email 2:

—- Forwarded message from “Priya Venkatesan”—-

From: “Priya Venkatesan”
To: < [REDACTED]Dartmouth.EDU>,
Subject: Re: Class Action Suit
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 [time redacted]

Dear Student:

Please disregard the previous email sent by Priya Venkatesan. This is to officially inform you that you are being accused of violating Title VII pertaining to federal anti-discrimination laws, by the plaintiff, Priya Venkatesan. You are being specifically accused of, but not limited to, harassment. Please do not respond to this email as it will be used against you in a court of law.

Priya Venkatesan, PhD

Email 3:

Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2008 20:56:35 -0400 (EDT)
From: Priya.Venkatesan@Dartmouth.EDU
To: “WRIT.005.17.18-WI08”:;, Priya.Venkatesan@Dartmouth.EDU
Subject: WRIT.005.17.18-WI08: Possible lawsuit

Dear former class members of Science, Technology and Society:

I tried to send an email through my server but got undelivered messages. I regret to inform you that I am pursuing a lawsuit in which I am accusing some of you (whom shall go unmentioned in this email) of violating Title VII of anti-federal [SIC] discrimination laws.
The feeling that I am getting from the outside world is that Dartmouth is considered a bigoted place, so this may not be news and I may be successful in this lawsuit.
I am also writing a book detailing my experiences as your instructor, which will “name names” so to speak. I have all of your evaluations and these will be reproduced in the book.

Have a nice day.

Priya

Priya Venkatesan’s academic goal:

After finishing up my studies in literature, I entered a molecular biology lab at DMS with the intention of seeking parallels between scientific practice and literature. My interests in graduate school were mainly theoretical, as I textually analyzed certain aspects of scientific communication. However, for me, a question remained: Is there room for literary theory within the framework of the laboratory?

Priya Venkatesan left Dartmouth and wound up at Northwestern. She announced that she was withdrawing her law suit the students, and would avenge herself on them via a novel, but she was still planning to sue Dartmouth.

Dartmouth Review interview 4/30.

————————————————————————————-

Dartmouth Independent 5/1 update and bio.

One female student was a nose-blower,” says Priya Venkatesan, who, until just a few weeks ago, was a professor in Dartmouth’s writing department. A 1990 graduate of the College, Venkatesan spent the better part of her twenties earning a Masters in Genetics and a PhD in Literature. But those were different days. Now, Venkatesan finds her thoughts occupied by that student who “incessantly disrupted class with her nose-blowing.” Or the one who interrupted her lecture on bioethics with “a real evil look that made me feel very uncomfortable.” Or the one who loudly declared that Lyotard was “cheesy.”

A casual observer might conclude that Venkatesan is on the edge of a nervous breakdown, frantically trying to confront her demons that sometimes appear to her as students. But Venkatesan has no apparent demons; in fact, she seems like she has had a very normal, undramatic life. Raised halfway between New York City and Albany by traditional Hindu parents, Venkatesan suggests that her heavy inculcation in Indian culture may have played a part in her ardent desire to excel academically (but then again it may not have – such is the nature of the self-described “postmodernist in the laboratory”). ...

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

The Barrister lost a fence in a recent hurricane, and being foolish enough to ask permission to rebuild it, finds himself confronted with a Catch-22.

I go to down to our little Town Hall, just to stay on the right side of the law, to make a cautious inquiry. Town Hall sits in a nice old colonial house in the center of town, with a brick addition on the back. “It’s about a pool fence,” I tell the receptionist, who is doing nothing at all. “P&Z”, she replies. I go up the stairs to P&Z, and wait for 20 minutes while it is decided that it is OK with the all-wise and all-knowing government for someone to install central vacuuming in their house.

“It’s about a fence,” I finally am able to say. “Go the Building Dept.” I go to Building Dept., where there are two guys hanging around the desk. “It’s about a pool fence.” The guy is friendly and helpful. “Show me where on the map.” I show him the property, and he says “Got to go to Wetlands first.”

I am now running short on time. I go down the stairs and to the back to Wetlands. The nice young lady takes about 20 minutes to determine that the obvious fact that my property abuts a river. “You can’t build a new fence there – that’s a high-velocity flood zone.”

“But I am required to have a fence around the pool”, I insist, “because the town requires it”. And then I made a foolish error, mainly because I was impatient and had limited time. “The old fence was washed away when Katrina blew through here in the fall, so all I need to know is whether it is OK to replace it.”

“An unfenced pool? That is a zoning violation. I am obligated to inform the P&Z inspector.” I sputtered “But but but..I only need to replace it.” She replied “We will need it inspected first, but you are probably currently in violation, because we take pool safety seriously in this town. But construction in a wetlands flood zone will require a variance and a hearing which will take several months to schedule. You can begin by filling out these forms”, she said, handing me a packet about one inch thick. “Honestly, I might suggest to you that you get a local lawyer to represent you in this matter, because these issues become complicated, especially when you want something grandfathered.”

San Jose Mercury News:

A nanny pulled a 2-year-old girl from the jaws of a coyote Friday when the animal attacked the toddler and tried to carry her away in its mouth, officials said.

The girl was playing in a sandbox at Alterra Park in Chino Hills in San Bernardino County. Around 10:30 a.m., the caretaker heard screaming and saw a coyote trying to carry the child off in its mouth, officials said.

The babysitter grabbed the child and pulled her from the coyote’s grasp, the sheriff’s department said in a statement.

The coyote then ran off into nearby brush.

The child suffered wounds to her buttocks and was taken to Chino Valley Medical Center and was later released…

Miller said there was another attack in the area in October when a coyote bit a 3-year-old girl playing in a cul-de-sac. The girl needed treatment for puncture wounds to the head and thigh, Miller said.

CNS:

The William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library will not make available to the public the documents that former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger illegally took from the National Archives in 2003.

A letter from the library said the total 502 pages from the Millennium Alert After Action Review (MAAR) are “restricted in their entirety,” under federal law and that the documents are “classified in the interest of national defense or foreign policy.”

Further, the library stated the documents contain “confidential communications requesting or submitting advice between the president and his advisors, or between such advisors.” ...

Berger, who was national security advisor for President Clinton from 1997 to 2001, took five different copies of pages from the classified MAAR out of the archives by stuffing them in his suit and exiting the archives building. Berger did that at a time (September-October 2003) when the 9/11 Commission was beginning to investigate both the Clinton and Bush administrations’ handling of the terror threat in the led up to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The Millennium Alert After Action Review was reportedly a 1999 assessment of how the nation was handling terrorist threats. The assessment was distributed to only 15 people in the Clinton administration and contained 29 recommendations, according to published reports.

On Oct. 2, 2003, Berger removed four documents, each of which were versions of MAAR. Berger left the building and later went to a construction area, according to the National Archives Inspector General’s (IG) report. He removed documents from his pockets, folded the documents and slid them under a trailer at the construction site, the report said. That night, the IG reported, Berger went to his office and cut with scissors three of the four pilfered documents into small pieces.

When the National Archives contacted him two days later to say documents were missing, he said he did not take them, according to the IG report. Berger later called the archives to tell them he found two of the documents, but not the other two.

In April 2005, he pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge of removing and retaining classified material. He was fined $50,000, sentenced to two years probation and 100 hours community service, and stripped of his security clearance for three years. He also relinquished his license to practice law.

The Guardian contributes a further citation to the Warmlist, which already has sharks booming and sharks moving north.

Two deaths in the waters off California and Mexico last week and a spate of shark-inflicted injuries to surfers off Florida’s Atlantic coast have left beachgoers seeking an explanation for a sudden surge in the number of strikes.

In the first four months of this year, there were four fatal shark attacks worldwide, compared with one in the whole of 2007, according to the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.

‘The one thing that’s affecting shark attacks more than anything else is human activity,’ said Dr George Burgess of Florida University, a shark expert who maintains the database. ‘As the population continues to rise, so does the number of people in the water for recreation. And as long as we have an increase in human hours in the water, we will have an increase in shark bites…Another contributory factor to the location of shark attacks could be global warming and rising sea temperatures. ‘You’ll find that some species will begin to appear in places they didn’t in the past with some regularity,’ he said.

But there’s really no cause for alarm, as Australian scientist Phil Chapman explains, Global Warming is over, and colder weather is probably on the way.

All four agencies that track Earth’s temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930.

Happy new rights-holder in the Helvetic Republic

Wesley J. Smith, in the Weekly Standard, reports on Europe’s latest ethical breakthrough which extends liberal egalitarianism not merely beyond our own species, but beyond our own Kingdom.

You just knew it was coming: At the request of the Swiss government, an ethics panel has weighed in on the “dignity” of plants and opined that the arbitrary killing of flora is morally wrong. This is no hoax. The concept of what could be called “plant rights” is being seriously debated.

A few years ago the Swiss added to their national constitution a provision requiring “account to be taken of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms.” No one knew exactly what it meant, so they asked the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology to figure it out. The resulting report, “The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants,” is enough to short circuit the brain.

A “clear majority” of the panel adopted what it called a “biocentric” moral view, meaning that “living organisms should be considered morally for their own sake because they are alive.” Thus, the panel determined that we cannot claim “absolute ownership” over plants and, moreover, that “individual plants have an inherent worth.” This means that “we may not use them just as we please, even if the plant community is not in danger, or if our actions do not endanger the species, or if we are not acting arbitrarily.”

The committee offered this illustration: A farmer mows his field (apparently an acceptable action, perhaps because the hay is intended to feed the farmer’s herd—the report doesn’t say). But then, while walking home, he casually “decapitates” some wildflowers with his scythe. The panel decries this act as immoral, though its members can’t agree why. The report states, opaquely:

At this point it remains unclear whether this action is condemned because it expresses a particular moral stance of the farmer toward other organisms or because something bad is being done to the flowers themselves.

What is clear, however, is that Switzerland’s enshrining of “plant dignity” is a symptom of a cultural disease that has infected Western civilization, causing us to lose the ability to think critically and distinguish serious from frivolous ethical concerns. It also reflects the triumph of a radical anthropomorphism that views elements of the natural world as morally equivalent to people.

Why is this happening? Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal, it was only logical that we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights.

Complete article.

“Carrot Juice is Murder” 4:29 video

From Glenn Reynolds via Bird Dog.

Noemie Emery, in the Weekly Standard, relishes the ironies of this year’s democrat party nomination battle.

‘Strange new respect’ is the term coined by Tom Bethell, an unhappy conservative, to describe the press adulation given those who drift leftward, those who grow “mature,” “wise,” and “thoughtful” as they cause apoplexy in right-wingers, and leave their old allies behind. But no new respect has been quite so peculiar as that given by some on the right to Hillary Clinton—since 1992 their ultimate nightmare—whose possible triumph in this year’s election has been the source of their most intense fear. Lately, however, a strange thing has happened: A tactical hope to see her campaign flourish—to keep the brawl going and knock dents in Obama—has changed to, at least in some cases, a grudging respect for the lady herself. ...

..she began to rouse outrage in parts of what once was her base. It is a truism that liberals think people are formed by exterior forces around them and are helpless before them, while conservatives think individuals make their own destiny. Liberals love victims and want them to stay helpless, so they can help them, with government programs; while conservatives love those who refuse to be victims, and get up off the canvas and fight. Hillary may still be a nanny-state type in some of her policies, but in her own life she seems more and more of a Social Darwinian, refusing to lose, and insisting on shaping her destiny. If the fittest survive, she intends to be one of them. This takes her part of the way towards a private conversion. She is acting like one of our own.

If this weren’t enough to make right-wing hearts flutter, Hillary has another brand-new advantage: She is hated on all the right fronts. The snots and the snark-mongers now all despise her, along with the trendies, the glitzies; the food, drama, and lifestyle critics, the beautiful people (and those who would join them), the Style sections of all the big papers; the slick magazines; the above-it-all pundits, who have looked down for years on the Republicans and on the poor fools who elect them, and now sneer even harder at her. The New York Times is having hysterics about her. At the New Republic, Jonathan Chait (who inspired the word “Chaitred” for his pioneer work on Bush hatred) has transferred his loathing of the 43rd president intact and still shining to her. “She should now go gentle into the political night,” he advised in January. “Go Already!” he repeated in March, when she had failed to act on his suggestion. “No Really, You Should Go,” he said in April after she won Pennsylvania, which made her even less likely to take his advice. “Now that loathing seems a lot less irrational,” he wrote of the right wing’s prior distaste for both the Clintons. “We just really wish they’d go away.”

And what caused this display of intense irritation? She’s running a right-wing campaign. She’s running the classic Republican race against her opponent, running on toughness and use-of-force issues, the campaign that the elder George Bush ran against Michael Dukakis, that the younger George Bush waged in 2000 and then again against John Kerry, and that Ronald Reagan—”The Bear in the Forest”—ran against Jimmy Carter and Walter F. Mondale. And she’s doing it with much the same symbols.

“Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11,” the New York Times has been whining. “A Clinton television ad, torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook, evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war, and 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden . . . declaring in an interview with ABC News that if Iran attacked Israel while she were president,” she would wipe the aggressor off the face of the earth. “Clinton is saying almost exactly the same things about Obama that McCain is,” Chait lamented: “He’s inexperienced, lacking in substance,” unprepared to stand up to the world. She has said her opponent is ill-prepared to answer the phone, should it ring in the White House at three in the morning. Her ads are like the ones McCain would be running in her place, and they’ll doubtless show up in McCain’s ads should Obama defeat her. She has said that while she and McCain are both prepared to be president, Obama is not. They act, he makes speeches. They take heat, while he tends to wilt or to faint in the kitchen. He may even throw like a girl.

And better—or worse—she is becoming a social conservative, a feminist form of George Bush. Against an opponent who shops for arugula, hangs out with ex-Weathermen, and says rural residents cling to guns and to God in unenlightened despair at their circumstances, she has rushed to the defense of religion and firearms, while knocking back shots of Crown Royal and beer. Her harsh, football-playing Republican father (the villain of the piece, against whom she rebelled in earlier takes on her story) has become a role model, a working class hero, whose name she evokes with great reverence. Any day now, she’ll start talking Texan, and cutting the brush out in Chappaqua or at her posh mansion on Embassy Row.

In the right-wing conspiracy, this adaptation has not gone unobserved. “Hillary has shown a Nixonian resilience and she’s morphing into Scoop Jackson,” runs one post on National Review’s blog, The Corner:

She’s entering the culture war as a general. All of this has made her a far more formidable general election candidate. She’s fighting the left and she’s capturing the center. She’s denounced MoveOn.org. She’s become the Lieberman of the Democratic Party. The left hates her and treats her like Lieberman. . . . Obama is distancing himself from Wright and Hillary is getting in touch with O’Reilly. The culture war has come to the Democratic Party.

She might run to the right of McCain, if she makes it to the general election, and get the votes of rebellious conservatives. Or she, Lieberman, and McCain could form a pro-war coalition, with all of them running to pick up the phone when it rings in the small hours. The New York Times and the rest of the left would go crazy. Respect can’t get stranger than that.

And she’s right.

From a conservative perspective, it is definitely possible to argue that Hillary winning would be the best thing.

The responsibility for a new spate of liberal programs and entitlements (and their untoward consequences) would belong to the democrats, as would adult responsibility for American foreign policy. If we need to bomb Iran, the radical left and the media will be tearing away at their own Party.

Hillary additionally could very possibly be capable of assembling a more competent and responsible cabinet team than John McCain. Bill’s appointment of Richard Rubin as Treasury Secretary, and continuation of Greenspan’s tenure at the Federal Reserve, demonstrated a pragmatic commitment to a good economy.

If McCain wins, liberal Rockefeller-style Republicanism will be back in business, and any real conservative presidential candidate will face the kind of entrenched internal Party opposition that Barry Goldwater did. On the whole, the prospect of trying a come-back with a better Republican candidate four years down the road has some real advantages.

Another satisfied customer of Shearman & Sterling LLP

International Herald-Tribune:

Al-Arabiya television reports that a former Guantanamo detainee carried out a recent suicide bombing in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

A cousin says Abdullah Saleh al-Ajmi, a Kuwaiti released from Guantanamo in 2005, was reported missing two weeks ago and his family learned of his death Thursday through a friend in Iraq.

The cousin, Salem al-Ajmi, told Al-Arabiya on Thursday that the former detainee was behind the latest attack in Mosul, although he did not provide more details.

Three suicide car bombers targeted Iraqi security forces in Mosul on April 26, killing at least seven people.

Mosul is believed to be the last urban stronghold of al-Qaida in Iraq.

His Wikipedia entry lists the US Military’s Administrative Review Board’s Summary of Evidence

A Summary of Evidence memo was prepared for Abdallah Salih Ali Al Ajmi’s Combatant Status Review Tribunal, on (redacted) . The memo listed the following allegations against him:

The detainee retreated to the Tora Bora region of AF and was later captured as he attempted to escape to Pakistan.

On September 2, 2003 (just under two years after 9/11), four of Shearman & Sterling’s finest Thomas Wilner, Neil H. Koslowe, Kristine A. Huskey, and Heather Lamberg Kafele filed a Petition for writ of Certiorari on behalf of Al Ajmi and eleven others.

Mr. Wilner wrote:

All these prisoners have asked for is a fair hearing, one in which they have the chance to learn the charges against them and to rebut the accusations before a neutral decision maker.”

Subsequently, the prisoner denied everything:

Al Ajmi denied participating in Jihad.

Al Ajmi stated he went to Pakistan to learn and memorize the Koran—he never traveled to Afghanistan.

Al Ajmi denied any contact with the Taliban. He acknowledged that he had previously confessed to the allegations he was being asked to comment on—but those were false confessions:

“These statements were all said under pressure and threats. I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t bare [sic] the threats and suffering so I started saying things. When every detainee is captured they tell him that he is either Taliban or Al-Qaida and that is it. I couldn’t bare [sic] the suffering and threatening and the pressure so I had to say I was from Taliban [sic] .”

Al Ajmi denied participating in military operations against the coalition.

Al Ajmi denied being placed in a defensive position by the Taliban:

“I am not an enemy combatant. I said this only because I was under pressure and threats and suffering.”

In response to the allegation that he admitted spending eight months in the front line at the Aiubi Center in Afghanistan, Al Ajmi responded:

“I never entered Afghanistan. I never fought with anyone. My intentions were to stay four months only but under the circumstances I had to stay for eight months. I never fought. My intentions were never to go to Afghanistan my intentions were to go to Pakistan.”
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Appearing again before an Administrative Review Board, he responded to board member questions:

Al Ajmi My role was [sic] in this Tabligh [sic] to call people to pray, to do good. To let people know that there is an end to this world so they can pray and do well.

Board Member Is it a religious organization?

Al Ajmi Yes it is.

Board Member Al Ajmi I believe that your dedication to your religion is genuine, what direction or path will that dedication take should you be released?

Al Ajmi For peace.

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Al Ajmi was repatriated to Kuwait November 3, 2005, where he was freed on bail, while he awaited trial. His trial began in March 2006, and he and five others were acquitted on July 22, 2006.

On April 26, in Mosul, seven members of the Iraqi security forces were killed by suicide car bombing, thus proving the excellence of the legal services provided by leading American law firms like Shearman & Sterling.

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Hat tip to Major DRH.

As the Journalism industry opens a Washington museum dedicated to its own glory, Andrew Ferguson notes the symbolic role played by Walter Cronkite, whose misreporting of the 1968 Tet Offensive did more for the cause of Communism in Southeast Asia than General Giap.

If Walter Cronkite’s mom was going to put together a scrapbook of her son’s career—well, it would be a miracle, because she’d be about 125 years old by now. But if she did, I doubt that it would contain more admiring images of the former CBS newsreader than you’ll find in the Newseum, the new journalism museum that held its boffo grand opening this month in Washington, D.C. Cronkite is everywhere in the Newseum. He hovers over it like a guardian angel, or a patron saint. You can’t turn around without hearing his phlegmy baritone rumbling out from a hidden speaker or see some grainy footage of him announcing President Kennedy’s death or wiping his eyes at the moon landing or definitively pronouncing the Vietnam war a “stalemate.”

And that’s the way it is—at the Newseum, anyway. But why?

I don’t know how the Newseum’s curators would explain Cronkite’s omnipresence (I do know they would use the word “iconic”), but I have an explanation of my own. Cronkite is a kind of synecdoche for American journalism. His career traces the arc of the news business over the last 70 years, from the grubby, slightly disreputable trade of the early 20th century to the highly serious, obsessively self-regarding profession it has become, here in the first decade of the twenty-first. A college drop-out, plucky but unimaginative, Cronkite knocked around a series of newspaper jobs in the 1930s, followed the troops into Normandy, worked for a wire service after the war, and filed workmanlike copy all the while that was notable for nothing in particular. Then came television, and celebrity, which he acquired thanks to the unprecedented reach of mass media rather than through any peculiar merit of his own. From the 1960s onward Cronkite was transformed by some mysterious process into a figure implausibly larger than a newspaper hack, a spiritual force as imposing and weightless as a dirigible. He was an oracle, a teller of truths, the conscience of a nation, “the most trusted man in America.”

American journalism followed the same trajectory into self-importance, borne aloft on the same draft of hot air and vanity. Our terrific country offers lots of ways to make a living, but with the possible exceptions of movie acting and architecture, only modern journalism would have the nerve to celebrate itself with something as gaudy and improbable as the Newseum. The Freedom Forum, a nonprofit foundation seeded with money from the Gannett newspaper chain, conceived and underwrote the museum for $450 million, and a half dozen newspaper and media companies kicked in another $122 million to pay for exhibits and other trimmings. That’s $572 million—a lavish sum by any measure. It’s especially impressive from an industry that is, according to its own incessant complaints, going broke.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.