† Photosensitivity: FOX News anchor Shepard Smith made an on-air request to the news organization’s lawyers to file a Freedom of Information Act request to acquire the photo(s) showing the lifeless Usama bin Laden that President Barack Hussein Obama refuses to release , but legal experts are divided on whether such an effort would be successful, The National Law Journal reports:

"Theoretically, they could win," said Scott Hodes, who from 1998 to 2002 was the acting unit chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Freedom of Information/Privacy Act Section's litigation unit and is now a solo practitioner in Washington. "It will not be an easy decision. There are reasons on both sides."

FOIA requires that all federal agency records be accessible to the public unless there exists a specific exemption - and there are nine, covering everything from trade secrets to the location of wells. The most applicable in this case would be those dealing with national security.

But first, there's a major threshold question, said national security law expert Mark Zaid, who heads his own five-lawyer firm in Washington. That is, who has the photos?

The pictures, presumably, were taken by operatives from the Defense Department's Navy Seals or the Central Intelligence Agency - both subject to FOIA as federal agencies. The White House, however, is exempt from FOIA requests. …

Alternately, the agencies could claim that the photos fall under one FOIA exemption, which covers records "to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy and are in fact properly classified."

† Higher Taxes For Thee, But Not For Me: The Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore points out that wealthy liberals like Warren Buffett, George Soros, Bill Gates Sr. and Mark Zuckerberg declare that they would be happy to fork over more of their money to Uncle Sam, but none of them voluntarily contributes to a special fund at the Treasury Department for taxpayers who want to voluntarily donate money to reduce the public debt:

Last year that fund and others like it raised a grand total of $300 million. That's a decimal place on Mr. Zuckerberg's net worth and pays for less than two hours worth of federal borrowing.

There are also a handful of states, including Arkansas, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, that have set up accounts for people who want to contribute more to the public fisc, but the amount raised in these states is generally in the thousands of dollars, the equivalent of a rounding error in state budgets.

When taxpayer groups in Massachusetts won an income tax rate cut to 5.3% from 5.85% in 2001, they created an option for those opposed to the cut to file at the old rate. But according to Massachusetts tax records, each year only about 1,000 tax-me-more enthusiasts - fewer than 0.1% of the state's residents - choose the optional higher tax rate. The total raised in voluntary tax contributions for the past tax year was a pitiful $69,000 … [a]nd this is arguably our most liberal state, where Mr. Obama won over 60% of the vote. So much for the irresistible liberal urge to "give back to the country."

Groups like Responsible Wealth, a network of more than 700 individuals in the top 5% of income in the U.S., have raised millions of dollars in contributions from their "patriotic members," arguing for the need for more income and estate taxes to balance the budget. But that money isn't used to help balance the budget. It's used in lobbying efforts to force higher taxes on millions of other, often less wealthy Americans - which is hardly a self-sacrifice.

The Stiletto objects to idea that those who have prospered have an obligation to “give back to the country” because “giving back” suggests that they took something from their fellow citizens. Only people who have benefitted from taxpayer-funded government set-asides for minorities or women should “give back” what they took – but not people who plowed their own savings or sweat equity into their businesses. These people do not owe their success to anyone other than themselves, and if they want to “give” money to charities or to state and federal coffers to help reduce public debt The Stiletto commends their generosity. But President Barack Hussein Obama and other redistribute-the-wealth types (AKA socialists) refuse to acknowledge the difference between “give” and “give back.” It’s not the same thing.  

† Sleepgroping: Israeli Rabbi Gavriel Bidany, 47, was convicted of fondling a 23-year-old Israeli Army officer while she slept during a March 27 Delta Airlines flight from Tel Aviv to NYC, The Smoking Gun reports:

Gavriel Bidany, a 47-year-old father of 11, was found guilty this afternoon in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn. …

The verdict was rendered following a two-day bench trial before Magistrate Judge Ramon Reyes. Bidany, an Israeli citizen, faces a maximum of six months in prison when he is sentenced by Reyes on May 12. In reading the verdict at 2 PM, Reyes called the victim's testimony "compelling and wholly believable," while dismissing the testimony of Bidany, pictured above, as "not worthy of belief." …

The victim, who commands a missile defense unit, has a “substantial number of soldiers serving under her charge” and is “currently deployed in a front-line role,” according to a court filing.

† Honor Killing And Beheading: Stereotype Or True To Type?: A 20-year old girl in MI was shot in the head by her stepfather, who thought she was straying from Sharia, Star Tribune (Minneapolis) reports:

Rahim A. Alfetlawi, 45, was charged Monday in Warren, Mich., with first-degree premeditated murder and two weapons offenses. He remained jailed without bond.

Alfetlawi is accused of killing Jessica Mokdad Saturday afternoon in her grandmother's home. Warren Police Lt. Michael Torey said "the biological father was letting her be a little more Americanized than what [the defendant] wanted."

Mokdad attended Coon Rapids High School and was on the dean's list in the fall of 2009. Assistant principal Tyrone Kindle described her on Tuesday as a standout student with a great smile who at times confided in him. …

Torey said that Alfetlawi was upset that Mokdad left the Coon Rapids home of Alfetlawi and Mokdad's mother, Wendy, several weeks ago to live with her father in Grand Blanc, Mich.

Alfetlawi confronted his stepdaughter at her grandmother's home in Warren, where she was moving some things that had belonged to her great-grandmother. She was shot with a 9mm handgun and died at the scene, Torey said.

† Garbage In, Garbage Out: Part II: In this Wall Street Journal op-ed George Mason University economics professor Donald Boudreaux performs the thought experiment, “Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education”:

Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. Nearly half of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build and operate supermarkets. Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address. And each family would get its weekly allotment of groceries - "for free" - from its neighborhood public supermarket.

No family would be permitted to get groceries from a public supermarket outside of its district. Fortunately, though, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer. Private-supermarket families, however, would receive no reductions in their property taxes. …

Public supermarkets would have captive customers and revenues supplied not by customers but by the government. Of course they wouldn't organize themselves efficiently to meet customers' demands.

Responding to these failures, thoughtful souls would call for "supermarket choice" fueled by vouchers or tax credits. Those calls would be vigorously opposed by public-supermarket administrators and workers.

Opponents of supermarket choice would accuse its proponents of demonizing supermarket workers (who, after all, have no control over their customers' poor eating habits at home). Advocates of choice would also be accused of trying to deny ordinary families the food needed for survival. Such choice, it would be alleged, would drain precious resources from public supermarkets whose poor performance testifies to their overwhelming need for more public funds.

† Updates To Previous Posts (sixth item, Obama - Not McCain - Will Be Bush III): The Washington Post reports that President Barack Hussein Obama has President George W. Bush to thank for “the signature national-security success of his tenure,” despite having campaigned “against the ends-justify-the-means legal system adopted by the Bush administration to capture, detain, question and try terrorist suspects, including those at the center of bin Laden’s pursuit”:

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have forged a military so skilled that it carried out a complicated covert raid with only a minor complication. Public tolerance for military operations over the past decade has shifted to the degree that a mission carried out deep inside a sovereign country has raised little domestic protest.

And a detention and interrogation system that Obama once condemned as contrary to American values produced one early lead that, years later, brought U.S. forces to the high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and a fatal encounter with an unarmed Osama bin Laden.

But the bridge connecting the two administrations has also led Obama to the same contested legal terrain over how to fight against stateless enemies and whether values should be sacrificed in the pursuit of security. …

Benjamin Wittes, the research director in public law at the Brookings Institution, said that “the executive branch does not fundamentally alter its nature when a presidency changes.”

“It’s very easy to focus on changes in interrogation guidance or standing detention authority,” Wittes said. “But the truth is three successive administrations have really made a priority out of capturing, finding and killing Osama bin Laden, and there’s a lot of continuity in that.”

But Obama held his nose while continuing his predecessor's policies, forced to do so only because his administration could not develop viable alternatives to them. Or, as former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) put it in the first debate of the Republican presidential primary campaign in Greenville, SC last night:
 

The decision he made with Usama bin Laden was a tactical decision. It wasn't a strategic decision. The strategic decision was made by President Bush to go after him. What President Obama has done on his watch, the issues that have come up while he's been president, he's gotten it wrong strategically every single time.