Henry K. Lee, Chronicle Staff Writer

(04-30) 14:44 PDT NAPA — Two Napa landlords accused of evicting a woman because they felt she had too many children have agreed to pay her $18,000 to settle her housing-discrimination complaint, officials said today.

The Supreme Court ruled today that states can require voters to produce photo identification without violating their constitutional rights, validating Republican-inspired voter ID laws.

In a splintered 6-3 ruling, the court upheld Indiana’s strict photo ID requirement, which Democrats and civil rights groups said would deter poor, older and minority voters from casting ballots. Its backers said it was needed to deter fraud.

It was the most important voting rights case since the Bush v. Gore dispute that sealed the 2000 election for George W. Bush.

The law “is amply justified by the valid interest in protecting the integrity and reliability of the electoral process,”‘ Justice John Paul Stevens said in an opinion that was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy.

The electoral process will never be perfect. Nevertheless, we need to always strive for that ideal. In this case, either extreme - draconian voter ID laws (which Indiana’s certainly isn’t) versus ID laws so loose that just anyone can vote - takes us farther away from that ideal. A balance is needed, and requiring a photo ID is not asking too much when that ID can be obtained for free and even without leaving home. Justice Scalia worded it very well by saying, “The burden of acquiring, possessing and showing a free photo identification is simply not severe, because it does not ‘even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.”‘

How will the “Europeans are so much more evolved than Americans” moonbats spin this one?

Kids in Europe drinking heavy at early age
Some as young as 13 end up in hospital after ‘coma drinking’

A 13-year-old schoolgirl in southern Austria celebrated the start of her spring break with a bottle of schnapps.

She ended up in intensive care.

In other countries across Europe, adolescents are making similar headlines for drinking themselves into a stupor, often passing out in the process.

And they’re getting younger: A June 2006 European Union-commissioned report says nearly all 15- to 16-year-old European students have had alcohol at some point in their lives and, on average, now start when they’re just 12 1/2 years old.

The data stem from a 2003 survey by the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs.

More than 1 in 6 have “binged” - had five or more drinks on a single occasion - three or more times in the last month, said the report by the London-based Institute of Alcohol Studies. It excluded EU newcomers Bulgaria and Romania.

In contrast to the United States, where even adults are often asked to prove their age when buying beer and other alcoholic drinks, laws in Europe are more lax and the drinking age generally hovers around 16 or 18.

The above quote and the waffle remark are both telling us the same thing: That Obama has difficulty keeping up his “nice guy” image. Keeping it up quite simply wears him out. It is not who he really is so keeping up that image tires him and he just HAS to rest from it. It is not who he really is.

And as someone who has studied psychopathy (I have a couple of academic journal articles on the subject) that is very familiar. Psychopaths also typically present a “nice guy” image — something that sucks in the females wholesale. The psychopath says and does all the right things and people promptly put their trust in him. And then when they least expect it, he “goes bad” on them. “Why did he do that?” is the typical distressed response, “He was so nice and then he went and did ….”.

The sucker in the story gets very thoroughly betrayed and has no clue as to why the psychopath suddenly changed. The answer, of course, is that the nice guy act was all a pretense in the first place and because it was not genuine the psychopath just could not keep it up for long. The “change” that distressed the sucker was the mask being dropped and the psychopath reverting to his true type.

And that is what we see in both reports of Obama’s behaviour above. By the time he got to his waffle he just could not keep up his act, even under the full glare of media scrutiny. He HAD to have a rest from acting. So the Obama we see on the campaign trail is just a false front for the very dismal soul that lies beneath it. If America elects Obama, it will not get what it voted for. It will get a horror. An entire nation will have been conned.

Maybe. But sometimes a waffle is just a waffle.

Yes, the title of this post accurately reflects its adolescent tone.

I have never, in my 46 years, enjoyed a presidential race but I’m enjoying the hell out of this one! You’re racist if you don’t vote for Obama! You’re misogynist if you don’t vote for Clinton! You’re both if you vote for McCain!

And the most uber-delicious part is going to be the fallout from the Democrat convention when the Democrat presidential candidate is chosen, not by the common folk, but by the elites.

There’s no avoiding it. The presidential candidate will be chosen, not by popular vote of the huddled and oppressed masses, but by the insider and super-rich elites.

And no matter who they choose the other side will go ballistic with cries of unfairness, disenfranchisement, and misogyny/racism. While the latter charges will most likely be untrue, they will certainly be the just desserts of decades of liberal identity politics. The cries of unfairness and disenfranchisement, however, will be utterly true and will have been brought to you by the party of the people, the voice of the common folk, the bastion of the poor – the Democrats.

Find a comfy chair and stock up on popcorn. This is gonna be good.

UPDATE: JammieWearingFool has a good post on the same topic:

Racist Democrats Fear Racial Divide

Well, it’s about time. Considering how liberals are the biggest racists on the planet and conveniently play the race card any chance they get, it’s good to see them get a little taste of their own medicine.

UPDATE: Flopping Aces sees it much the same way:

If they had a normal primary like the Republicans do, ie. popular vote takes the cake, instead of using SuperDelegates this thing would have been wrapped up already and Hillary would be the nominee. Instead the party couldn’t trust the people so they turn to the elites.

How ironic.

Even more ironic is the fact that in 2000 the Democrats whined about the Electoral College (similiar in nature to primary delegates) because Gore won the popular vote. Now Obama is saying that the delegates should not overrule the popular vote and the Clinton camp is arguing the opposite.

By Laurel Rosenhall

Principal Jana Fields thought she was doing a good thing for her school when she pulled African American students into a meeting last week to discuss upcoming standardized tests.

The school’s African American parents, on the other hand, thought Fields was being racist when she told the children their past scores were lower than those of their white classmates.

Now Madison Elementary in North Highlands is confronting a dilemma spreading throughout California’s public schools: How should educators close the racially marked gap in test scores?

By Amanda Gardner

TUESDAY, April 22 (HealthDay News) — Contrary to popular belief, life expectancies are not rising steadily and uniformly across the United States.

In fact, new research shows that between 1983 and 1999, death rates for women went up in many poor counties and, overall, geographical and racial disparities in life expectancy have worsened across the country.

“Disparities are going up not because people are getting better and some are getting better faster,” said Majid Ezzati, an associate professor of international health at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. “The worst off are simply not getting better, and some are getting worse, and this is especially the case for women. One out of five females’ health has not gotten better and, for a subset of those, mortality has gotten worse.”