† Is Obama Already A Lame Duck?: Four months before midterm elections, 58 percent of voters say they have no confidence that President Barack Hussein Obama will make the right decisions for the country, 56 percent disapproves of his handling of the economy, and 53 percent of those who say they definitely will vote in November disapprove of the way he is handling his responsibilities, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll:

About two-thirds of all voters say they are dissatisfied with or angry about the way the federal government is working. …

Overall, a slim majority of all voters say they would prefer Republican control of Congress so that the legislative branch would act as a check on the president's policies. Those most likely to vote in the midterms prefer the GOP over continued Democratic rule by a sizable margin of 56 percent to 41 percent.  

While 90 percent of black voters approve of Obama’s job performance, the president’s popularity has dropped among the elderly, young voters, Republicans, Democrats, whites and Latinos, reports The Washington Post, and “[t]he loyalty many blacks feel to Obama does not always spill over to other Democratic candidates”:

Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster, warned that not even politically engaged black voters … are necessarily going to turn out for Democrats in the fall. "These are Obama voters. These are not Democratic voters," he said. "They are leaning toward Democrats in their views, but these surge voters are not a part of the traditional Democratic voting bloc. That's the big X factor here. We can't turn surge voters out by two weeks of black radio."

To that end, the Democratic National Committee has launched a $50 million nationwide effort to try to lure these "surge voters" back to the polls in November.

Only 40 percent of white voters overall approve of Obama’s performance in office in the Post/ABC survey, and 43 percent of whites strongly disapprove of the job he is doing. Obama has also lost the arugula crowd: 54 percent of college-educated whites give his job performance the thumbs down.

With white voters motivated to vote Republican to tie Obama up in knots during the second half of his only term in office™ and black voters indifferent towards supporting white Democrat candidates, it’s no wonder House leaders are sniping at White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs for stating the obvious about the Dems chances in November because the truth will pierce through whatever hopium is still floating around and dispirit the party’s base, which can only depress turnout even further.

† What Al Gore Hath Wrought (second item): The MN Supreme Court found no evidence to back up then-Sen. Norm Coleman's (R) claim that thousands of absentee ballots had been wrongfully excluded by inconsistently applied rules about accepting absentee ballots. Now an 18-month study by conservative watchdog group Minnesota Majority finds there were inconsistent rules about accepting the votes of felons that appear to have cost the incumbent his rightful victory - not that Attorney General Eric Holder will investigate the egregious case of voter fraud that robbed the citizens of MN of the candidate they chose to represent them, FOX News reports:

[A]t least 341 convicted felons in largely Democratic Minneapolis-St. Paul voted illegally in the 2008 Senate race between Franken, a Democrat, and his Republican opponent, then-incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman. 

The final recount vote in the race, determined six months after Election Day, showed Franken beat Coleman by 312 votes - fewer votes than the number of felons whose illegal ballots were counted, according to Minnesota Majority's newly released study, which matched publicly available conviction lists with voting records. 

Furthermore, the report charges that efforts to get state and federal authorities to act on its findings have been "stonewalled." 

"We aren't trying to change the result of the last election. That legally can't be done," said Dan McGrath, Minnesota Majority's executive director. "We are just trying to make sure the integrity of the next election isn't compromised." …

McGrath says the report shows that more still has to be done. 

"Prosecutors have to act more swiftly in prosecuting cases from the 2008 election to deter fraud in the future," he said, "and the state has to make sure that existing system, that flags convicted felons so voting officials can challenge them at the ballot, is effective. In 90 percent of the cases we looked at, the felons weren't flagged." 

"If the state had done that," he said, "things might be very different today."

† Obama Is Just About Every U.S. President All Rolled Into One!: Globe and Mail (Toronto, ON) columnist Konrad Yakabuski sees similarities between President Barack Hussein Obama and Bill Clinton based on his choice of Clinton’s budget director Jacob Lew  (“a proven deficit slayer”) for the same job in his administration:

The President is most in trouble with the kind of voters who tend to turn out most in midterm votes. And as a major Washington Post/ABC News poll shows, they are increasingly set on turfing Democrats in November. …

This sounds awfully familiar for Democrats who remember the thrashing they took in 1994 – the first midterm vote of Mr. Clinton’s presidency – when Republicans retook control of both houses. A chastened Mr. Clinton moved to embrace Republican ideas, especially welfare reform and deficit reduction. He won re-election easily in 1996. …

For Mr. Clinton, attacking the deficit turned out to be both good economics and good politics. For Mr. Obama, the choice is not as clear.

The President’s top economic advisers are pushing for additional stimulus, fearful that failure to prime the pump more could stunt the recovery or reverse it entirely. Mr. Obama’s political team, led by senior adviser David Axelrod and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, argue the public mood dictates at least the appearance of fiscal restraint.

Tuesday’s nomination of Jacob Lew as director of the White House Office of Management and Budget probably says more about where Mr. Obama intends to take the budget debate after the midterm elections than before them. But it likely isn’t the change progressives had in mind when they voted for him

† The Accidental Nominee (second item): Two years ago, supporters of Hillary Clinton gathered evidence that voter intimidation and voter fraud was rampant in the caucus states, and The Stiletto Blog linked to a 35-minute, documentary about caucus fraud in IN and TX by filmmaker Gigi Gaston that is being looked at with fresh eyes (as opposed to being blindly ignored before) in the wake of the New Black Panther voter intimidation case and the MN voter fraud case that cost incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman (R) his seat in a very close election with challenger - and now Senator - Al Franken (D): 
 

† (Islamo)Fascist Fashionistas: At Berlin Fashion Week 2010, German label Starstyling presented two face veils that are ideal for the young, fashion-forward Muslim woman (but not in France):  

† Updates To Previous Posts (eighth item, Take The Veil Off, Or Go Home): France's National Assembly voted 335-1 in favor of a bill “to forbid concealing one's face in public” – there is no mention of Islam, veils, burqas or niqabs - in all public spaces, even in the street and now heads to the Senate, where it is expected to pass, reports The Associated Press: 

France's government has sought to insist that assimilation is the only path for immigrants and minorities, and last year it launched a grand nationwide debate on what it means to be French. …

Legislator Berengere Poletti, of Sarkozy's party, said face-covering veils "are a prison for women, they are the sign of their submission to their husbands, brothers or fathers."

The niqab and burqa are also seen here as a gateway to extremism and an attack on secularism, a central value of France for more than a century. …

The legislation … calls for euro150 ($185) fines or citizenship classes, or both. The bill also is aimed at husbands and fathers - anyone convicted of forcing someone else to wear the garb risks a year of prison and a euro30,000 ($38,000) fine, with both penalties doubled if the victim is a minor. …

Officials insist the law against face-covering is not discriminatory because it would apply to everyone, not just Muslims. Yet they cite a host of exceptions, including motorcycle helmets, or masks for health reasons, fencing, skiing or carnivals. …

In Cairo, Islamic scholar Abdelmotie Bayoumi said a French ban would not violate Islamic law, but would violate personal freedoms.

"The niqab has no strong legitimacy based on Quran or in examples from the Prophet's life that makes it a religious imposition on women. A Muslim woman wears the niqab not because of religious duty, but as a personal freedom," said Bayoumi, whose books include "Contemporary Testimonies," about the full-face veil.

The Stiletto thought it odd that AP suggested an equivalence between face-obscuring pieces of cloth that serve no purpose – not even religious obligation – other than to reinforce the subjugation of Muslim women by their fathers, husbands, brothers and even sons to safety gear like motorcycle helmets and fencing masks until she read this ridiculous post by philosopher and University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum in The New York Times "Opinionator" blog discussing a similar ban being considered in Spain.

Nussbaum, too, equates face veils with masks worn for safety reasons by “surgeons, dentists, (American) football players, skiers and skaters” as well as to “hats pulled down over ears and brows, scarves wound tightly around noses and mouths” during the chill of winter.

She also argues that burqa opponents in Spain who point out that they are uncomfortable (the country’s climate is on the warm side) should instead ban high heels on those grounds, but won’t because they “are associated with majority norms (and are a major Spanish export).” Right. Burqas are associated with the societal norms of Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan – as are honor killings of women - and the last time The Stiletto checked, neither of those countries are in Western Europe.

† Updates To Previous Post (States’ Rights Vs. The Feds): While The New York Times tried to gin up dissention amongst conservatives over U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro striking down part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act on constitutional grounds and affirmed the Tenth Amendment right of MA to recognize same-sex marriage, The Washington Post takes the opposite tack and points out that the silence of Tea Partiers and libertarians (a group that overlaps to a far greater degree than Tea Partiers and Republicans, not that you would know it from a recent Gallup poll which did not include libertarianism amongst the political self-identification of the respondents) is deafening:

While many conservative organizations immediately decried a federal judge's decision last week to invalidate the federal ban on recognizing gay marriages, tea party groups have been conspicuously silent on the issue.

The silence is by design, activists with the loosely affiliated movement said, because it is held together by an exclusive focus on fiscal matters and its avoidance of divisive social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. Privately, though, many said they back the decision because it emphasizes the legal philosophy of states' rights. …

That view is perhaps not surprising, considering the strong libertarian strains within the tea party movement. One of the nation's best-known libertarians, Bob Barr, has opposed the Defense of Marriage Act over his concern that it violated states' rights - a notable about-face, considering that Barr wrote the DOMA legislation in 1996 when he was a Republican congressman from Georgia.

 † Updates To Previous Posts (sixth item, Why We Need Gitmo): While acknowledging that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani and other enemy combatants have rights under the Sixth Amendment, Southern District of New York Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled that “the [more than five year] delay in bringing Ghailani to trial, after he spent two years in CIA custody and three more at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, was constitutional” reports New York Law Journal:

"Two years of the delay served compelling interests of national security," Kaplan wrote in his 46-page opinion. "None of the entire five-year delay in this prosecution subjected Ghailani to a single day of incarceration that he would not otherwise have suffered" because the executive branch has the authority to detain enemy combatants for the duration of the U.S. involvement in hostilities against al-Qaida. …

Kaplan made it clear enemy combatants may only be held to prevent them from resuming hostilities, not to punish them. So while combatants must be released when hostilities have ended, he said, they can still be prosecuted "in appropriate circumstances."

Ghailani cannot be punished by the United States for the 1998 bombings of embassies in Tanzania and Kenya that killed 224 people unless he is convicted before a military commission or in an Article III court, the judge said. [Explanatory link added by The Stiletto.]

Without such a prosecution, Kaplan said, the United States "could not lawfully give vent to the outrage felt both here and in Africa at these murderous attacks on innocent civilians."

"This prosecution therefore serves at least two purposes that our government could not lawfully achieve without an appropriate conviction," he said, "to pass a moral judgment on and to punish Ghailani if in fact he committed the alleged crimes."

Four of Ghailani's co-defendants were convicted in 2001 before Judge Leonard Sand, but Ghailani remained at large, allegedly working as a cook and bodyguard for Osama bin Laden.

† Updates To Previous Posts (Is Hillary Clinton Campaigning For President?): On his blog, Bernard Goldberg boldly predicts that “Hillary Clinton will run for president in 2012 - yes 2012 - challenging President Obama for their party’s nomination” (The Stiletto must either be even bolder or far more foolhardy, because she hinted at this possibility back in February and laid out a potential scenario – actually, her dream scenario – last month):

Is it a long shot?  Sure.  But it's no longer crazy.

If it’s occurring to millions of Americans who voted for Obama, it must be occurring to Hillary Clinton too:  The magic is gone.  …

A recent Rasmussen right track/wrong track poll shows that only 28 percent of Americans think the country is heading in the right direction; 66 percent think we’re heading in the wrong direction. This is very bad news for the president. You think Hillary hasn’t noticed?

If things don’t improve, independents, who switch back and forth from one party to another all the time, will have no trouble abandoning President Obama next time around. Blacks won't, of course, and that poses a real problem to any challenger. White liberals would never forsake America’s first black president … [b]ut Hillary gives them the opportunity to assuage their white liberal guilt and - bonus! - make history all over again.  …

You think Hillary hasn’t figured that one out, either?

† Updates To Previous Posts  (third item, Daycare Workers Allegedly Gave Sleep Aid To Children At Nap Time): Former Ohio church day care worker Pamela Hartley was sentenced to six months in prison for giving children candy spiked with the OTC sleep aid melatonin to get them to take naps. But Hamilton County Municipal Judge Melissa Powers “suspended all but 30 days and put her on three years' probation afterward,” reports The Associated Press. The judge also ordered Hartley not to work as a child care provider again.

Editorial Note: The Associated Press issued a correction to its report: Hartley must serve six months - not 30 days – in jail. AP says the Hamilton County prosecutor's office was the source of the erroneous information.