The Magic Of The Theater

I thought that Yale Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg was, well, nuts, when she demanded that student theatrical groups remove all prop weapons from their productions. In fact, I had fun with that whole incident. Little did I realize that Trachtenberg was actually a little ahead of the curve on that particular bit of madness. Because the British government have taken it a step further.

They are demanding gun lockers for plastic weaponry.

A village amateur dramatic group performing Robinson Crusoe has had to tell police about the use of plastic swords because of health and safety fears.

The Carnon Downs Drama Group, at Perranwell, Cornwall, must lock up its two plastic cutlasses, six wooden swords and a toy gun when they are not in use and appoint a "responsible guardian" for them.

The group said it informed police about the use of replica weapons after studying new health and safety guidelines and new legislation to crack down on violent crime. Later this month, about 700 people are due to attend six performances of the group's pantomime, featuring several swashbuckling sword fights.

Seriously, seriously demented, folks. This is PC on steroids. And this is exactly why British men are rebelling against the tyranny of the forces of the Politically Correct by building ever more lethal rubber band weaponry:

(H/T to Lars Walker over at Brandywine books for that gem of a video. In the credits at the end of the video, I'd only offer one small correction: "I am become death, the destroyer of floppies.")

Thought Control, American Style

A lecture on how not to run the New York Times comes today from Daniel Finkelstein, the op-ed editor for the Times of London. Not that the NYT will take any notice, but it a lesson on how to run an op-ed section that the NYT - and especially the NYT 'public editor' -would be smart to listen to. Finkelstein addresses his comments as an open letter to the readership of the New York Times:

Dear Friends,

I understand that your newspaper of choice has asked William Kristol, the conservative commentator, to provide an opinion column for the paper.

Since I am the op-ed editor of what you Americans call The Times of London, I have followed the controversy that the appointment has caused with great interest.

And with my mouth wide open.

Apparently many of you are outraged to hear of this new columnist. You have been writing in. And the Public Editor has written a column criticising the appointment.

Excuse me, but what on earth is going on?

A quality newspaper should have columns reflecting a wide variety of opinions, even those uncongenial to the majority of its readers. While the bulk of a paper's columnists may reflect the publication's character and view, there must always be space for an alternative opinion.

Thus, for instance, while my paper supported the decision to invade Iraq (which happened to be my view too), many of our columnists (in fact probably a majority) did not concur.

It would never occur to me when selecting an individual columnist to be concerned that some readers might not agree with some of his positions.

And considering that Kristol represents a large strand of American opinion (even if it is a smaller strand of NYT reader opinion) it is entirely unremarkable that his columns should be commissioned.

Finkelstein heaps even more scorn on public editor (or ombudsman) Clark Hoyt, especially for this charming gem of American journalism:

And as for Hoyt's statement that:

This is not a person I would have rewarded with a regular spot in front of arguably the most elite audience in the nation.

Isn't this the most pompous sentence you have ever read in your life?

Yeah, that one is pretty bad. It has it all, pompousness and smarmy sucking up to the rapidly declining readership of the NYT. The left popped numerous blood vessels when Kristol was announced by the NYT - which is amusing in the extreme. The same group that screeches that they are being suppressed on nationwide television are the first to actually try to shut down opinions they don't want to hear.

The Hits Just Keep On Coming

More bad news for Hillary Clinton today. Not only did Clinton supporters lose in their bid to disenfranchise casino workers, but fellow Democrat Senator Patrick Leahy has just endorsed Obama.

"We need a president who can reintroduce America to the world and actually reintroduce America to ourselves," Leahy said in a conference call with reporters. "I believe Barack Obama is the best person to do that."

Leahy said he admires Obama's Democratic rivals, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Sen. John Edwards, and was not making a statement against them. "I'm looking at who can do this best, and I believe that Barack Obama can."

Obama said in a statement that Leahy had "the judgment and courage to vote against the Iraq war, and he's been a champion of our rights here at home, and of human rights around the world."

Obama recently won the endorsement of two fellow Democratic senators from the heartland — Ben Nelson, a popular moderate in largely Republican Nebraska and Claire McCaskill from Missouri, historically a swing state in presidential contests.

You really have to wonder what internal polling is showing at the moment. I suspect it is pretty ugly for Clinton right now with all these party heavyweights going over to Obama. This is not something one expects to see unless the endorser is pretty sure they are in a win-win scenario.

Clinton Surrogates Lose In Nevada

The teacher's union that sued to have the Nevada Democratic "at large" caucuses stopped has lost in court. They are claiming they were not acting for Clinton, a protest that I rather doubt that even they believe. Obama supporters are cheering the court decision. The last minute attempt to keep the casino workers from participating has generated a lot of flak for the Clintons.

LAS VEGAS (CNN) — The Democratic Party can go ahead with a plan to let casino workers take part in Saturday's Nevada caucuses in "at-large" precincts set up in their workplaces, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

The state teacher's union went to court to challenge the plan, arguing that the casino caucus sites Saturday night will give the roughly 200,000 workers on the Las Vegas strip an unfair advantage over other voters who have to work that night. But U.S. District Judge James Mahan rejected that argument after a Thursday morning hearing.

The lawsuit sparked a battle between the 28,000-member Nevada State Education Association and the state's biggest labor organization, the 60,000-member Nevada Culinary Workers Union, which supports the casino caucuses. The culinary workers endorsed Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois in Saturday's contest and accused the teachers union of trying to tilt the race in favor of his leading rival, senator and former first lady Hillary Clinton of New York.

Regardless of the outcome of the caucuses, I suspect this attempt a vote suppression will come back to haunt Clinton. This was a blatant attempt to disenfranchise voters and is not going to go over well with the rank and file.

Defeatist’s Defeat

The Politico reports that the antiwar people, who have spent vast sums of other people's money and accomplished nothing in the past year, are retooling their efforts. They finally figured out that they could not get the votes to cut funds for the troops.

After a series of legislative defeats in 2007 that saw the year end with more U.S. troops in Iraq than when it began, a coalition of anti-war groups is backing away from its multimillion-dollar drive to cut funding for the war and force Congress to pass timelines for bringing U.S. troops home.

In recognition of hard political reality, the groups instead will lower their sights and push for legislation to prevent President Bush from entering into a long-term agreement with the Iraqi government that could keep significant numbers of troops in Iraq for years to come.

The groups believe this switch in strategy can draw contrasts with Republicans that will help Democrats gain ground in November and bring the votes to pass more dramatic measures. But it is a long way from the early months of 2007, when Democrats were freshly in power and momentum for a dramatic shift in Iraq policy seemed overpowering.

“There was a consensus that last year was not productive,” John Isaacs, executive director of Council for a Livable World, said of a meeting attended by a coalition of anti-war groups last week. “Our expectations were dashed.”

Corrosive, yes. Productive, no. I rather doubt their new strategy will be one whit more productive. The war is rapidly diminishing as a factor to voters, which is the reality that is now beginning to catch up with the antiwar groups. Part of their loss in the past year was a major loss of influence over the elections and American politics in general. That is another reality that is coming into play here. They damaged themselves with their vitriolic, all or nothing stance.

There is a lesson there for any groups seeking political clout, folks. Regardless of affiliation.

Selective Vetting

Robert Novak, who has been doing this sort of thing for a very long time, thinks that the Clinton campaign's use of the word 'vetted' repeatedly has a special, coded meaning regarding Barack Obama. So do his sources within the Democratic party.

This frequent use of "vetted" caught the attention of the Democratic community. "Vetted," with a meaning distinct from "experienced," connotes investigating nominees for vice president, the Cabinet and the federal judiciary to uncover anything disqualifying. Its introduction in the presidential campaign by Clinton is tied to reminders — overtly and by insinuation — of Obama's teen-age use of illegal drugs that he confessed in his first book.

The unintended byproduct, to the dismay of Democratic loyalists, disturbs the party's racial chemistry. An assault on the qualifications of Obama, the first African-American with a chance to be elected president, could menace Democratic reliance on overwhelming support for the party's white candidates from black voters. The sudden outbreak of racial conflict in Democratic affairs, which results solely from Clinton's strategy against Obama and has nothing to do with race as such, arouses deep apprehension inside the party.

Clinton agents for many months have privately warned prominent Democrats that Obama as the presidential nominee could not withstand Republican scrutiny ("cannot take a frisk"). While denying my reports of this activity, the Clinton campaign went public when Obama's threat became real instead of merely potential. Billy Shaheen, Clinton's New Hampshire chairman, explicitly raised this long-ago use of cocaine and marijuana, and was fired.

Greg Craig, an Obama senior policy adviser, pointed out to me that the drug question was implied by two other Clinton supporters, Penn and black billionaire Bob Johnson, who were not reprimanded. As for Johnson's denial that he was talking about drugs when he said Obama "was doing something in the neighborhood — and I won't say what he was doing, but he said it in the book," Craig told me, "I don't believe him."

Again, this really isn't anything new. Most people with an intelligence level higher than that of a clam can see what Clinton has been doing, over and over again. Nothing to see here, move along. Except the real - and lasting - damage may have been done to more than Barack Obama. The Clintons are angry at this upstart who raised an obstacle to their planned, 'inevitable' return to the White House and are indulging in their trademark politics of personal destruction to level the obstacle. The difference this time is that even the party faithful see what they are doing. The blinders are off and the Clintons are revealed in all their destructive glory.

And it is not a pretty sight at all.

Mission Accomplished?

Margaret Carlson, writing over at Bloomberg, thinks that the Hillary Clinton campaign has accomplished their goal of playing the race card on Barack Obama. Despite all the mistakes the lurching Clinton machine has made, Carlson thinks that a lot of damage has been done to Obama.

From the start of his career, Obama wanted, and needed, to remove the race card from the political deck. While it isn't clear from whose sleeve the card was pulled, it is likely it wasn't from the person with the most to lose.

If Hillary Clinton's campaign had taken only one shot at Obama, it might have been blown off as a mistake. But four shots constitutes a pattern, with Clinton's former New Hampshire chairman, Bill Shaheen, Representative Charles Rangel, Clinton pollster Mark Penn and Black Entertainment Television founder Bob Johnson all getting into the act.

Going Too Far

Surrogates don't take printed instructions, but neither do they want to upset the candidate they've traveled to the hinterlands to please. And Penn isn't even a surrogate. He's the campaign's top strategist.

In the middle of the drug pile-on, Clinton, desperate after her Iowa defeat, went too far when trying to imprint the message that Obama is all talk and no action. She infelicitously compared Martin Luther King Jr. to former President Lyndon Johnson.

“Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964,'' she said.

In fairness to the Clintons, even masters of the game trip up when the crown believed to be theirs slips out of reach. They had just hours to convince folks in New Hampshire that the guy who Iowans had fallen in love with was wrong for them.

Red-Faced Rant

Bill Clinton, in particular, was furious at Hillary's loss, indulging in the kind of red-faced rants vividly described in George Stephanopoulos's tale of White House life, “All Too Human.''

How dare this upstart backbencher steal this election from Hillary! The press? What a lazy bunch of enablers swallowing this &%*# fairy tale, all this hooey about what we share being so much greater than our differences.

All of these incidents have received a lot of coverage, in the form of ink and pixels all over the media and throughout the blogosphere, of course. But Carlson thinks the Clinton machine has crippled Obama, despite the love fest at the latest debate. She may be right about that, but I think there may be bigger implications in that "victory". I honestly think there may be real and lasting damage done by Clinton to some key voting blocs in the Democratic party by all of this. This could very well be a Pyrrhic victory for the Clintons. If she has, as Carlson writes, succeeded in tagging Obama as the black candidate and he loses to her in the primary, the identity politics backlash may well stagger her campaign. If her surrogates succeed in suppressing the votes of most Hispanic and black working class people in Nevada she may lose even more ground. Probably will, in fact.

So, in crippling Obama, Clinton may well have destroyed herself.

More Zombie Fun

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have cataloged the antics of zombies worldwide for some time. Be it dead parking in Chicago, night of the living dead drag racing in Australia, undead defendants in Malaysia or zombies commuting in Indonesia, we have brought our faithful readers the undead news. Today is no exception! Lithuania has a rather unusual manifestation of the age-old problem of the undead: zombie shoplifters!

VILNIUS (Reuters) - Police in the Lithuanian city of Klaipeda were baffled to discover that a woman arrested for shoplifting last weekend had been registered as dead a month earlier.

The woman's parents had mistakenly identified a body found in a forest as that of their 27-year-old daughter, Natalya Pavlova, who disappeared from home in November, police said on Wednesday.

It emerged that Pavlova was alive and well and living with her boyfriend in the same town.

Sure she was. That's what they all say when they get caught. We wonder if anyone has the distribution rights to this handy publication in Lithuania yet. We sense a ground floor opportunity.

Raging Hypocrisy In Nevada

John Fund takes a look at the amazing amount of hypocrisy on display in Nevada at the moment. Even for the Democrats, who are past masters at this sort of thing, the level this year is staggering. (Republicans are not let off the hook, incidentally, but this year the crown has to go to the Democrats.) First there is the blatant attempt by Clinton affiliates to disenfranchise black and Hispanic voters by abusing the courts.

Both Democrats and Republicans are good at practicing hypocrisy when they need to. But it's still breathtaking to see how some Democrats ignore that it was only last week they argued before the Supreme Court that an Indiana law requiring voters show ID at the polls would reduce voter turnout and disenfranchise minorities. Nevada allies of Hillary Clinton have just sued to shut down several caucus sites inside casinos along the Las Vegas Strip, potentially disenfranchising thousands of Hispanic or black shift workers who couldn't otherwise attend the 11:30 a.m. caucus this coming Saturday.

D. Taylor, the president of the Culinary Workers Union that represents many casino workers, notes that legal complaint was filed just two days after his union endorsed Barack Obama. He says the state teachers union, most of whose leadership backs Mrs. Clinton, realized that the Culinary union would be able to use the casino caucuses to better exercise its clout on behalf of Mr. Obama, and used a law firm with Clinton ties to file the suit.

Mr. Taylor exploded after Bill Clinton came out in favor of the lawsuit on Monday, and Hillary Clinton refused to take a stand. "This is the Clinton campaign," he said. "They tried to disenfranchise students in Iowa. Now they're trying to disenfranchise people here in Nevada." He later told the Journal's June Kronholz, "You'd think the Democratic Party elite would disavow this, but the silence has been deafening." (Late Tuesday the Democratic National Committee quietly filed a motion supporting the Nevada party's rules.)

However, the lawsuit has created an uproar among voters. It was the No. 1 issue among 30 Nevada Democrats participating in a Fox News focus group on Tuesday night; the anger among rank-and-file voters was palpable. The left-wing Nation magazine has denounced the suit as an attempt to "suppress the vote."

Frankly, I think this is the biggest error made to date by the incredibly error-prone Clinton campaign. (And nobody is fooled by the Clinton's pious claims that they have nothing to do with this. Heck, Bubba was in full finger-wagging mode yesterday, huffily defending the lawsuit.) Rank and file voters are very angry about this attempt at vote suppression. But there is even more hypocrisy. Caucus-goers will be required to show identification in order to participate.

Democratic leaders insist workers need only show an employee badge. If they don't have one, a party spokeswoman lamely says "we'll somehow accommodate them." The Las Vegas Review Journal notes "some Strip workers will have no alternative but to provide photo identification." For a party that compares photo ID requirements to Jim Crow poll taxes, even when state governments distribute the IDs for free, the irony is rich.

Fund also nails the Democrat's in Indiana who used a voter registered in two states as a poster child for their claims that the Indiana law "disenfranchised" voters and takes swipes at Republicans along the way. It's worth reading the whole thing. The way things are shaping up so far this year, I rather suspect the toxic atmosphere that has existed for the past eight years or so is finally coming home to roost on the Democrats who did so much to foul the political process. The wheel appears to be turning.