Politics and other nightmares

Can you just imagine what would have happened had this really come to pass?

The idea of Oprah Winfrey as a U.S. senator may seem far-fetched to many — among them Rod Blagojevich's one-time chief of staff John Harris.

As expected, but welcome nonetheless:

The Supreme Court reversed a ruling upholding Chicago's ban on handguns Monday and extended the reach of the 2nd Amendment as a nationwide protection against laws that infringe on the "right to keep and bear arms."

The 5-4 decision appears to void the 1982 ordinance, one of the nation's strictest, which barred city residents from having handguns for their own use, even at home.

OMG! The Fourth of July falls on a Sunday this year. You know what that means:

. . . thanks to Indiana's outdated alcohol laws, you won't be able to buy your alcoholic beverage of choice in the store on the day of your celebration.

Hey, a prediction I got right for a change. Back in March, I predicted in the "No props for the peeps" post that the prosecutor would have a tough time making a voyeurism case against Fort Wayne upskirter David Delagrange, who was nabbed for using a camera attached to his foot to shoot video up the skirts of women and girls at Castelton Square Mall in Indianapolis. Sure enough:

I did an earleir post about the anniversary of the Supreme Court's notorious Kelo decision and the backlash of eminent domain reforms in its aftermath. New York is one of the states in which officials haven't seen the light yet:

If you own a piece of property in New York State, you won't like today's ruling by the state's high court.

As a proponent of vigorous debate among known combatants, I applaud this Supreme Court decision:

Via The Corner, a warning that the National Popular Vote, the backdoor effort to eliminated the Electoral College, is dangerously close to succeeding:

If each of these states is counted, NPV could have as many as 169 electoral votes in favor of its plan. It needs 270. NPV has come startlingly close to success even as most Americans remain completely unaware that the presidential-election process is so close to being turned on its head.

Continental Structural Plastics is considering leaving Ohio and bringing its 214 jobs to Indiana because of an environmental rule Ohio has that we don't have, one requiring the use of a machine that reduces pollution but costs $500,000 a year to operate.

But the company says the machine is no longer needed to meet Ohio Environmental Protection Agency standards because it has cut production at its paint shop and it has increased use of robotics and air recycling.

It gets harder to criticize our enemies when our allies are such jerks:

Judicial officials say a Saudi court has convicted four women and 11 men for mingling at a party and sentenced them to flogging and prison terms.

The men, who are between 30 and 40 years old, and three of the women, who are under the age of 30, were sentenced to an unspecified number of lashes and one or two year prison terms each.

We've arrived at the fifth anniversary of Kelo v. City of New London, the despicable case in which five of nine Supreme Court justices tried to effect the final dismantling of property rights in this country. The drug company Pfizer, beneficiary of other people''s property, never got around to using its ill-gotten gains for its planned facility, and the company even announced it was moving out of New London entirely. Some justice there, at least. And: