[Guest post by DRJ]

Senior Eye Chart.

Luxury yacht company offers pirate-hunting cruises along the coast of Somalia. [UPDATE by DRJ: Yes, it's a hoax.]

Beware the Obama Evil Eye.

Finally, a trip down memory lane for my generation: The Jackson 5 on Soul Train.

– DRJ

[Guest post by DRJ]

The Obama Administration is working on a plan to secure the border with National Guard troops:

“The Obama administration is developing plans to seek up to 1,500 National Guard volunteers to step up the military’s counter-drug efforts along the Mexican border, senior administration officials said Monday.”

National Guard troops stationed temporarily on the border? That’s just like George W. Bush.

– DRJ

[Guest post by DRJ]

Barack Obama recently signed a massive anti-smoking bill, The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, designed to stop teens and young people from smoking by granting the FDA unprecedented authority to regulate tobacco. This is another example of how Barack Obama uses regulation to accomplish his goals, in this case to get Americans to stop smoking.

It stands in stark contrast to the novel way a Saudi Arabian charity is using to help young people quit smoking:

“RIYADH: The catchy slogan, “Kicking the habit is on you, and marriage is on us,” is meant to entice young grooms to give up smoking by offering an attractive incentive.
***
A draw on August 6 will include the names of the men who successfully quit smoking in a weeklong course. The winner will have all wedding expenses paid while 20 runners-up will get free furniture. Sulaiman al-Soby, secretary general of Purity [the charity], said the aim is to create a smoke-free family. One-third of Saudi school children live in homes with smokers, according to a 2007 health survey.”

Smoke-free and married, by choice. It’s a win-win.

UPDATE — Here’s another stop-smoking method:

“A man was charged with domestic battery after he drenched his wife with a garden hose and attacked her for smoking in the house, according to a police report.”

Surely there is a better way to stop smoking than passing more laws, living in Saudi Arabia or resorting to fisticuffs.

– DRJ

[Guest post by DRJ]

From Hot Air:

“Sanford: I “crossed lines” with other women too. Also, Maria’s my soulmate.
***
During an emotional interview at his Statehouse office with The Associated Press on Tuesday, Sanford said Chapur is his soul mate but he’s trying to fall back in love with his wife.”

Wow. He’s quite a catch.

– DRJ

[Guest post by DRJ]

The Minnesota Supreme Court has unanimously ruled Al Franken is entitled to be the junior Senator from Minnesota. Former Senator Norm Coleman’s appeal based on unfairly rejected absentee ballots was found lacking:

“Coleman’s appeal hinged largely on whether thousands of absentee votes had been unfairly rejected by local election officials around the state.

The unanimous court wrote that “because the legislature established absentee voting as an optional method of voting, voters choosing to use that method are required to comply with the statutory provisions.”

They went on to say that “because strict compliance with the statutory requirements for absentee voting is, and always has been required, there is no basis on which voters could have reasonably believed that anything less than strict compliance would suffice.”

Franken could be seated by the Senate as early as next week, and probably will be seated even if Coleman decides to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

UPDATE: Coleman has conceded.

– DRJ

[Posted by Karl]

When the cap-and-trade boondoggle passed the House last Friday, I noted that the 219-212 margin sent the issue to the Senate with zero momentum.

Jay Cost shows how tough a road the climate bill faces in the Senate:

If the vote in the House on this bill had been calculated like the vote for President in the case of no majority winner in the Electoral College – where each state gets one vote – the climate bill would not have passed. Twenty-two state caucuses voted in favor of it while twenty-eight voted against. The bill passed in large part because of strong support from California and New York, which accounted for more than 26% of the total votes in favor of the bill.

Cost does not leave the analysis there, also noting that a number of Senate Democrats will face pressure to vote against cap-and-trade, while virtually no Senate Republicans will feel pressure to support it:

[M]any Senate Democrats face “pressure” to vote against the party. Nine face “significant pressure,” and another six face “moderate pressure.” A lot of these members might ultimately vote yea – but many of them might not. Of the fourteen Democrats under “significant” or “moderate pressure” who were in the last Congress – twelve either voted against cloture on the Lieberman-Warner climate bill, did not vote, or voted in favor but indicated to Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer that they opposed “final passage of the [bill] in its current form.” Thus, even with 59 Democrats (or 60 if/when Franken is admitted), passage could be difficult.

Cost could have added this year’s 67-31 vote against using budget reconciliation in the Senate for climate change legislation involving a cap-and-trade system. For that matter, he might also have noted the degree to which his map reflected the concentrated benefits of Waxman-Markey, which favors the coastal power companies and doles out boodle to farm states.

Sen. Jim Inhofe thinks that Senate Democrats can muster only 34 votes for cap-and-trade. That might be an underestimate, but the signs to date point to Democrats falling far short of 60 votes in the Senate.

One final note on the House vote: the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza reported:

Nearly three-quarters of the 44 [Democrats] who opposed the bill either are on House Republicans’ target list or are running for statewide office in a conservative leaning state in 2010 — a classic bifurcation between those who are on the ballot in a midterm election and a president who doesn’t stand in front of voters for another three plus years.

But, a deeper look at the list also suggests that the White House could well have driven their vote total on the bill higher if they absolutely needed to as a number (10-ish) of those who voted against the legislation could have been cajoled — or coerced — into casting a “yea” rather than a “nay” if it was absolutely necessary.

Accordingly, even if the House GOP had stood unanimously against Waxman-Markey, the Democrats likely had the votes to pass it. It might have been nice if that handful of squishy Republicans had not voted “yea” to force some vulnerable Dems to make a tough vote. But to the extent that those squishy Republicans are in swing districts where the “nay” vote would have hurt them, the exercise in party unity could easily have been a wash.

—
Update: The Politico has an account of how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi whipped the votes. The Democratic sources for the story have every incentive to make this look like a big achievement, but a close reading shows it was mostly about guilting the more leftist members of the Congress into supporting Pelosi’s position.

–Karl