† Dispatch From Bizzaroland: The budget showdown and threatened government shutdown gave President Barack Hussein Obama yet another opportunity to lead by not leading, reports The Washington Post:

This has been a season of leadership tests for President Obama. From Egypt to Libya and now the budget, he has been called upon to deal with rapidly unfolding events, and the questions about his leadership style have followed a consistent pattern.

Is he too slow to react? Is he diffident in the face of serious challenges? Is he reluctant to exercise the full powers of the presidency? Would events have turned out differently had he moved with greater force earlier? …

The battle over this year’s federal budget is the latest example. For weeks, Republicans have called on the president to get his hands dirty in the struggle to fund the government for the current fiscal year and thereby avoid a government shutdown. For weeks, he resisted. Now, in the past few days, he has dived in. …

“His instinct is to avoid conflict and to deliver on his promise of getting beyond ideological partisan debates,” said Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

But Mann said that style of leadership may have run its course, given the wide gulf between the parties on budget priorities. “I think it’s come close to the end of the line for him,” he added. “And this is a really truly fateful moment in his presidency. ... It’s time for him to engage.” …

As in all the leadership tests he has faced, the Obama record will rest on whether his style, seen by some scholars as almost unique among presidents, produces productive results. The deadline on round one is coming fast [emphasis, The Stiletto].

In some precincts, the MIA Obama calls to mind the hapless William Howard Taft about as much as he does the helpless Jimmy Carter (sixth item). Taft was a one-term wonder. Let’s hope history repeats itself.

† Defending The Indefensible: During a budget hearing last week, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), chairman of a House appropriations subcommittee, “singled out for criticism the lawyers who represent Guantánamo Bay detainees such as accused 9/11 conspirator Khalid Sheikh Mohammed” instead of using their time and talents to represent the poor, reports The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times:

“That’s the pro bono work? The pro bono work should be helping poor people here in the United States,” said Wolf. … “Some of these people who represent Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ought to consider going into the inner city.”

The Legal Services Corp. is facing a potential budget cut of $70 million for the current fiscal year, and Wolf’s subcommittee is considering what its budget should be for the 2012 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.

† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: Life imitates Edith Wharton's "The House of Mirth" for people who have lost their homes, can’t make the monthly rent but aren’t quite destitute enough to live under a highway overpass. One of them is former car salesman Jerry Raymer, whose daughter Beth Raymer writes about his straitened circumstances for The New York Times Sunday Magazine:

It’s 3 p.m., time for a makeshift happy hour in the parking lot of Value Place, an extended-stay motel here in town and a haven for those who have been foreclosed upon. No background check is required; no credit card needed. It’s the housing equivalent of a throwaway cellphone. …

There are more than 170 Value Places near cities and military bases around the country. At this one, painted dishwater-brown and in the shadow of a Wilbur Smith Law Firm DUI Defense billboard, roughly 80 percent of the 129 units are occupied by permanent residents, those who have fallen on hard times and have no foreseeable checkout date. Single parents, war veterans, hookers and men whose ex-wives supposedly took everything they worked their whole lives for. …

Jerry Raymer, Room 128 … details his Corvette with a toothbrush. … I used to visit him at his three-bedroom on Spoonbill Lane, seven miles down the road. He would grill steaks on the patio while I would soak in the hot tub. But after he lost his job at Plattner Automotive, he lost his home - one of 1,421 foreclosure filings in Lee County in February 2010. So this year, I’m spending spring break in Room 313. …

By 2 a.m., the racket yields to the gentler sounds of residents calling it a day. Through the walls, you can hear one resident blow up an air mattress; another sniffs his nasal spray. Across the hall, a 10-year-old is rapping himself to sleep with an Eminem song. He pauses at the curse words and then drifts off altogether.

† Does The U.S. Need An Election Monitor? (second item): On the heels of a report by the CO Department of State’s Election Division that 11,805 non-citizens in CO registered to vote via the state’s “motor voter” program and 4,947 of them improperly voted in the 2010 mid-term elections, comes word that 14K previously unreported ballots in the WI Supreme Court election swung the vote total back in the favor of incumbent  Justice David Prosser and gave him a lead of some 7,500 votes over challenger and union darling JoAnne Kloppenburg.

The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, an expert on voter fraud, calls for an independent investigation of the inexplicable failure of Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus to report the results of the Milwaukee suburb of Brookfield to the MSM media outlets for several days, and urges her to “resign her position out of a sense of shame”:

If the mistake was innocent, it resulted from a lack of transparency. Ms. Nickolaus has long been criticized for keeping her county's election data on private office computers that are not part of the county network. But of equal concern is her decision to no longer report the individual breakdown of results from cities in her county on her office's website. If she had, everyone could have seen that the city of Brookfield was listed as reporting that no votes had been cast. In addition, Ms. Nickolaus's office never reported what percentage of the county's vote had been counted at any point on election night.

Ms. Nickolaus still hasn't provided a full explanation of what happened, but the public deserves answers. …

Conspiracy theories about what happened in Waukesha will flood the Internet. But Ramona Kitzinger, the Democrat on the Waukesha County Board of Canvassers, says she is "satisfied [that the new numbers] are correct" and that there has been no manipulation of the data.

An investigation has been requested – but at the federal level and not at the state level, where it belongs. The Christian Science Monitor reports:

US Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D) of Wisconsin is asking US Attorney General Eric Holder to launch a federal investigation into the handling of votes in Waukesha County. In a letter sent Friday night, Rep. Baldwin wants the Justice Department Public Integrity Section, which investigates election crime, to see if votes were mishandled following Tuesday’s election.

“Numerous constituents have contacted me expressing serious doubt that this election was a free and fair one,” she wrote. “They fear, as I do, that political interests are manipulating the results.”

State Democrat leaders are also calling for investigations into the matter and Kloppenburg announced she would raise money for a recount. State Rep. Peter Barca told the Green Bay Post-Gazette Friday that Nickolaus’ actions “doesn’t instill confidence in her competence or integrity.” …

Election night numbers are not yet verified in the election as 12 of the state’s 72 counties have not yet finalized the canvass process, which is expected to take place late next week. Once that is complete, candidates have three days to file a request for a recount.

† Updates To Previous Posts (seventh item, A To Z Approach On Illegal Immigration In AZ): Two judges on a three-judge panel of the oft-reversed Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a preliminary injunction issued by District Court Judge Susan Bolton that blocked four key provisions of Arizona's controversial ant-immigration law, SB 1070 on the grounds that the law had a harmful effect on U.S. foreign policy and turned state law enforcement officers into DHS agents, SFAppeal.com reports. AZ Gov. Jan Brewer is on record as saying she would appeal an adverse outcome, and citizens around the country are donating money to help fund the effort.

† Updates To Previous Posts (Is It Too Soon To Discuss The “I Word”?): You may not have heard much about this on the evening news, but libertarian constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein, who served in the Department of Justice during the Reagan administration, drafted an article of impeachment against President Obama over his attack on Libya. And he’s no stranger to the impeachment process, Politico reports:

Fein is a small-government conservative who worked on the impeachment of President Bill Clinton and also called for the impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and his work doesn't represent the Republican Party line. But it comes as some Republicans on the Hill, led by Senator Rand Paul, object vociferously to Obama's decision to strike targets in Libya without Congressional authorization. …

"If he can wipe out the war powers authorization, why can't he wipe out Congress's authority to spend?" asked Fein. "If we're going to be a government of laws, and not descend into empire, this is Caesar crossing the Rubicon."

Fein said a number of Congressional offices have expressed interest in his proposal.

† Updates To Previous Posts (eleventh item, Take The Veil Off, Or Go Home): Today is V-Day in France: The day the ban on full face veils goes into effect. A woman who conceals her identity behind a niqab or burqa while in public risks a fine of 150 euros ($216). The Associated Press reports that some women plan to flout the new law:

Karima has a plan. If police stop her for wearing a veil over her face, she'll remove it — then put it back on once they're out of sight.  …

"This law will keep women at home. If I take it off for police and it's too humiliating, maybe I'll stay home," she said. "If it becomes unbearable, if it becomes persecution, I'll leave France."

Reuters reports that Rachid Nekkaz, a French real estate tycoon of Algerian descent, has announced he will sell off one of his properties to raise two million euros to he can reimburse women who have been fined for breaking the burqa ban.

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, Multiculturalism Vs. Animal Rights): As is the case with Muslim feast day Eid al-Adha and the requisite ritual throat-slitting of animals and West Africans in the U.S. indulging their taste with "bushmeat," PETA is MIA when it comes to the renewed popularity of Haitian voodoo practices involving animal sacrifices in some NYC neighborhoods. The New York Times reports:

In New York, where there are roughly 300,000 people who were born in Haiti or are of Haitian descent - the largest concentration in the United States - richly painted basement voodoo temples are sprinkled around Harlem and in parts of Brooklyn and Queens. Mambos, or voodoo priestesses, say they can barely keep up with “demann,” or prayer requests; spiritual love recipes to lure recalcitrant lovers are the most popular. Voodoo prayer circles in which practitioners meet to commiserate have also proliferated, with a notable intensity in the months since the earthquake. …

Some people are turning to voodoo in response to financial hardships caused by the recession. And among younger Haitian-Americans, voodoo is a means to reconnect with their roots. …

In voodoo, a healing-based religion that was brought to Haiti by slaves from Western and Central Africa, followers commune with one God — Gran Met — by worshiping potent and sometimes temperamental lwas, or spirits, believed to hold sway over love, morality, reproduction and death.

According to scholars, up to half of all Haitians practice some form of voodoo, often in conjunction with Catholicism, which intermingled with the belief systems of enslaved West Africans when Haiti was a French colony.

Yet because the religion is often practiced furtively in basement temples, and because of its emphasis on spirits, spells and animal sacrifices, it has been stigmatized as primitive.

But scholars stress that voodoo has played a central role in Haitian history, sustaining people who have endured oppressive governments, grinding poverty and natural calamities.

† Updates To Previous Posts (sixth item, Another Day, Another Dem Ethics Scandal): The New York Times wants to know, “what happened to the investigation?” by the House Ethics Committee of allegations that Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) of helping a troubled bank in which her husband held stock to get a government bailout, adding that “[t]he reputation of the bipartisan Ethics Committee can only sink lower if the case continues to drift.”

† Updates To Previous Posts (penultimate item, Katie Couric Kills): The New York Times reports that, “For Katie Couric, the offer in 2006 to become the anchor of “CBS Evening News” came with another incentive, one she prized almost as highly, according to two of her friends: the chance to report for ‘60 Minutes,’ the newsmagazine that for Ms. Couric stood for the kind of serious journalism she had always aspired to” but that “she found a chilly reception from some of the staff members at the venerable program” that seemed to emanate “from the top, the show’s executive producer, Jeff Fager.” Devoting her week-end media commentary on FOX News to a post-mortem of  the erstwhile CBS anchor’s tenure, Liz Trotta said that Katie Couric’s failure to catch as a journalist – inside and outside Black Rock - because of her “giggling, grinning image with very little background,” adding: “There’s a very, very big difference between doing the news, even if you’re a woman, and giggling all the time.”

Note: The item on the ruling on AZ SB 1070 has been updated and includes a link to the decision.