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

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.