Current Affairs

The Supreme Court today will hear arguments in the case of the demented or evil (take your pick) Fred Phelps and his merry band of pranksters, who have graced Indiana among their visits to picket military funerals with their "God hates fags" and "Thank God for dead soldiers" signs. It is almost universally agreed among followers of all religious doctrines and across the political spectrum that the Westboro Baptist Church's actions are vile and despicable.

Project Vote Smar has a handy little website called VoteEasy that should help those who want to be informed voters. It sent out questionnaires to candidates to get their views on such issues as crime and abortion, the education and the economy and taxes -- 12 in all. But it didn't just print the results of those who answered the questions. For those who didn't respond, the Vote Smart people used everything from candidates' statements and stories about them to their voting records to discern their stands as best they could.

This seems a little, well, behind the times:

Students at Indiana University will build basement printing presses and print their own underground newspaper, learning from a legendary Polish journalist whose low-tech publishing innovations fueled the popular uprising that brought an end to Communist rule in Poland.

[. . .]

The Indianapolis Star on Sunday published an editorial about how unfriendly to voters and the voting process the state is. We make it harder than most states for third-party candidates to get on the ballot. And we have a very narrow window for voting -- our 6 p.m. closing time for polls, for example, is one of the earliest in the nation.

Maybe I'll become a member of the Druids, who, after thousands of years, are going to finally be recognized by Britain as a religion. I could get in on all that good tax-deduction stuff without having to do any heavy metaphysical lifting:

Druids worship nature and that they also believe in the spirits of places such as mountains and rivers, as well as in

So it's true that no good deed goes unpunished:

BRITAIN'S most generous man Jimi Heselden died in a final tragic act of courtesy, it was revealed yesterday.

He accidentally reversed his motorised two-wheel Segway scooter over a cliff - to MOVE out of the way of a walker.

The kind-hearted tycoon then plunged 50ft to his death.

A writer at The Nation Review's blog, The Corner, takes up the cause of congressional meddling in TV volume and lumps it in with the congressional ban of the incandescent light bulb and the federal government banning all-caps street signs and even dictating the font:

Just outrageous:

INDIANAPOLIS -- The owners of a cookie shop that has operated for more than two decades at the Indianapolis City Market could face eviction.

But it's the reason behind that possible eviction that is raising provocative questions that pit the rights and moral beliefs of a business owner against the obligation of the city to do all it can to prevent discrimination and encourage tolerance.

Did I fall asleep in the Twilight Zone and wake up in 1996? Bill Clinton is currently the most popular politician in America, and Kiss isn't being considered for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, again.

I've expressed some ambivalence about laws forbidding texting while driving. My anti-nannystatism inclines me to be against them, but my knowledge that those texters could hit me makes me put texting  in the same category as driving drunk (laws against which even staunch libertarians tend to support). Here's an argument against such laws: