Hopes for Voter Fraud in Indiana Dashed by Supreme Court

AP: Supreme Court Upholds Photo ID Law For Voters in Indiana

The case concerned a state law, passed in 2005, that was backed by Republicans as a way to deter voter fraud. Democrats and civil rights groups opposed the law as unconstitutional and called it a thinly veiled effort to discourage elderly, poor and minority voters — those most likely to lack proper ID and who tend to vote for Democrats.

There is little history in Indiana of either in-person voter fraud — of the sort the law was designed to thwart — or voters being inconvenienced by the law’s requirements.

“We cannot conclude that the statute imposes ‘excessively burdensome requirements’ on any class of voters,” [Justice John Paul] Stevens said.

CRAWFORD ET AL. v. MARION COUNTY ELECTION BOARD ET AL.

From the Aliza Shvarts School of Artsy Ideas / Meet Professor Pia Lindman

How can anyone take art seriously when artists feel compelled to do this shit?

Thankfully, this is very tame compared to what Yale “art student,” Aliza Shvarts, considered “art.”

Speaking of talent-challenged Ms. Shvarts, while the controversy she caused focused entirely on her, there was one person we all forgot: her advisor, the “performance artist” Ms. Pia Lindman.

Apparently Lindman didn’t do much advising when it came to Shvarts. Upon reviewing some of Lindman’s “art,” however, one shudders to imagine what advice Lindman might have imparted on the 22 year old Shvarts.

Of course, Lindman is much older than 22, so she should know better than post the following revolting comment online:

Working with video, I perceive the act of recording as a performative gesture and part of the content of the work. In residency at the World Financial Center, I submerged a camera in the harbor nearby, in an attempt to create a point of access to an otherwise impenetrable corporate environment further rendered paranoid by the traumas of the World Trade Center disaster.

Confused? You should be. Academics long ago turned writing into an impenetrable fog. Bear with me while I untangle Lindman’s mess:

When I video record something, I make it part of my art. If you thought the corporate types around the WTC were bad before, you shoulda seen what wackjobs they were AFTER 9/11! They wouldn’t let me video record when and where I wanted, so I dunked a camera into the water near the WTC to show what it would look like underwater.

Imperfect, yes, but at least my translation is comprehensible.

So the World Trade Center was an “impenetrable corporate environment” which was “rendered paranoid” by 9/11. I can’t imagine why any corporate environment should be “penetrated.” Nor can I understand why anyone in lower Manhattan would be “paranoid” after their neighborhood was turned into Danta’s Inferno.

Sticking a camera into a harbor was supposed to achieve exactly what? Insofar as it takes zero talent and less imagination to dunk a video camera into water (No, I don’t care how she did it) I cannot fathom how such a project would be deemed “art.”

With this academic “advising” Shvarts, little wonder that Shvarts found phony abortions to be great for an art project.

Yale University, ladies and gentlemen!

Another Smashing Liberal Idea

The ignorance of economics among liberals is really a sight to behold. With more corn going to biofuel, guess what’s happening to the cost of food? (No, it’s not decreasing, you smelly hippy.)

Western governments listened to the ecowarriors . . . The EU decreed that 5.75 percent of petrol and diesel must come from “biofuels” by 2010, rising to 10 percent by 2020. The United States added to its 51 cent-per-gallon ethanol subsidy by mandating a fivefold increase in “biofuels” production by 2022.

The result is that big government accomplished at a stroke what the free market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you’ve suddenly got less to eat? Or, to be more precise, it’s not “you” who’s got less to eat but those starving peasants in distant lands you claim to care so much about.

[...]

The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death. On April 15, the Independent, the impeccably progressive British newspaper, editorialized:

“The production of biofuel is devastating huge swaths of the world’s environment. So why on Earth is the government forcing us to use more of it?”

You want the short answer? Because the government made the mistake of listening to fellows like you.

— Mark Steyn

No matter. It’s all Bush’s fault anyway!

Obama Blogger is a Communist

WND: Official Obama blogger flies Communist Party flag — Campaign journalist’s work appears in ‘revolutionary Marxist’ journal

In the same week the Obama campaign quietly removed from its official website a page managed by a fundraiser tied to the Islamic terrorist group Hamas, its official blogger has come under attack as a “hardcore Marxist” for hanging a Communist Party flag in his Harvard campus apartment and publishing in a self-professed ‘revolutionary Marxist’ journal.

Sam Graham-Felsen, a journalist-on-leave from The Nation, joined Obama for America in March 2007 where he works for the New Media department as the official blogger, daily presenting the campaign’s public face. Now he’s under fire for his reputed Marxist sympathies

It figures.

At least Felsen isn’t blowing up government buildings or shouting hate-filled rants at a pulpit. Felsen simply follows a failed ideology responsible for the deaths of 100 million and the oppression and torture of many more. Don’t be so judgmental!