From SF:

Just when you thought the Federal Election Commission had it out for the blogosphere, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors took it up a notch and announced yesterday that it will soon vote on a city ordinance that would require local bloggers to register with the city Ethics Commission and report all blog-related costs that exceed $1,000 in the aggregate.

Blogs that mention candidates for local office that receive more than 500 hits will be forced to pay a registration fee and will be subject to website traffic audits, according to Chad Jacobs, a San Francisco City Attorney.

Personal Democracy wonders if they will be forced to register their own blogs.

UPDATE: Riding Sun thinks this accusation is overblown.

Thank you, Mr. Clinton:

One in five U.S. teenagers say they have engaged in oral sex, an activity that some adolescents view as not sex at all and certainly less risky than intercourse, a report released Monday said.

John Kerry has sent an email to supporters. There is a panic among the minority party that they may not be able to filibuster judicial nominees.

Imagine a world in which every appointment to the federal judiciary is tightly controlled by an extreme element within one party. Imagine the kinds of judges that will sit on the federal bench - even on the Supreme Court — if George W. Bush never needs a single Democratic vote.

Imagine the kind of decisions those judges will make on everything from civil rights to civil liberties to a woman’s right to choose and family privacy.

Republican leaders in the Senate have done more than imagine. They’re getting ready to force a Senate vote that would take a giant step towards creating that kind of America.

Senator Frist, the Senate Majority Leader, has a plan to make President Bush’s judicial nominations immune to a Senate filibuster. If he can convince enough Republican Senators to go along, the nomination and confirmation of judges will become a tightly-controlled, one-party affair.

We’re calling on Republican Senators to pull their party’s leaders back from the brink. It’s time to stop advancing a dangerous tactic that would deny millions of Americans any meaningful role in decisions vital to America’s future.

James Taranto comments, that even if the filibuster-proofing occurs…

But there’s no reason it has to be forever! If the Democrats won a majority in the Senate, they could restore the minority’s right to filibuster. Democratic Senate candidates in 2006 could run on the promise to restore the filibuster, and, if that proves insufficient to win a majority, they could repeat it in 2008. Sooner or later, it’s got to work.

Now, you might say, if they were the majority, they wouldn’t need the right to filibuster. But this is a matter of principle! It’s about the character of American democracy! Besides, it wouldn’t be the first time politicians ran on a platform that was against their political interests. In 1994 one plank of Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America was a constitutional amendment limiting the terms of congressmen.

Mary adds her thoughts:

Imagine a world in which every judicial nominee is given a simple up or down vote.

Imagine a world in which the legislators that the people voted into office had the opportunity to confirm judges nominated by the president the people elected.

…

I think the judicial nominees deserve a vote, rather than being choked by a “one-party affair” filibuster.

In other filibuster advertising news, Addison points to Ed’s analysis of the People for the American Way filibuster ad:

I suspect that Neas found the nearest thing to a Republican he could find to stand up in front of the cameras and mouth a script from Norman Lear. Unfortunately for PFAW and Ralph Neas, the best they can do is to get Ted Nonentity to front for their pathetic ad campaign. If nothing else, we can all get a laugh out of this absurdly earnest and richly ironic meltdown of PFAW’s credibility.

There’s lots of buzz over the weekend on the Zogby Schiavo poll in contrast to the skewed polls released a week or so ago.

The new question:

“If a disabled person is not terminally ill, not in a coma, and not being kept alive on life support, and they have no written directive, should or should they not be denied food and water?”

David Limbaugh:

Well, now Zogby releases a poll, after Terri’s death, after having asked the right questions and determined that 79% of the respondents said Terri should not have her food and water taken away and only 9% said she should.

Others commenting include Blue State Conservatives, Ankle Biting Pundits, Michelle Malkin, Blather Review, Bookworm Review, and Willisms, who says:

People want to believe in the courts, that they are objective and fair, that they follow the rule of law. People did not realize the facts were not scrutinized in any of the last-minute cases, only the legalistic jargon.

Also Air Force Voices, Life News, Hyscience, Blogs For Terri, the Orthodox Blog, Anthony Surace, PC540, My View of the World and many others.

Hindrocket grabbed a screenshot from the The New York Times on April 2nd. Apparently they couldn’t find anyone that liked the pope.

Even as his own voice faded away, his views on the sanctity of all human life echoed unambiguously among Catholics and Christian evangelicals in the United States on issues from abortion to the end of life.

need some quote from supporter

John Paul II’s admirers were as passionate as his detractors, for whom his long illness served as a symbol for what they said was a decrepit, tradition-bound papacy in need of rejuvenation and a bolder connection with modern life.

There’s a screenshot over at Powerline.

While we’re on the subject of whacky school stories (see the previous Berkeley entry), check out this one:

Of all the things that can make a person see red, school principal Gail Karwoski was not expecting parents to get huffy about, well, seeing red. At Daniels Farm Elementary School in Trumbull, Conn., Karwoski’s teachers grade papers by giving examples of better answers for those students who make mistakes. But that approach meant the kids often found their work covered in red, the color that teachers long have used to grade work.

Parents objected. Red writing, they said, was “stressful.”

…

He has instructed his teachers to grade with colors featuring more “pleasant-feeling tones” so that their instructional messages do not come across as derogatory or demeaning.

Wow.

Erase the Name of Thomas Jefferson

The loony left is at it again in The Peoples’ Republic of Berkeley. An April vote will be held by parents, teachers and students at the city’s Thomas Jefferson Elementary School on whether to change the school’s name because Jefferson owned slaves.

…

This latest salvo by the left in a continuing crusade of destructive political correctness is misguided in that it ignores the temper of the times. Slave ownership was common for men in Jefferson’s social and economic circles, including George Washington and other prominent Southerners. Jefferson inherited his Monticello estate, on which slaves were kept, from his father.

Customs matter in evaluating historical figures. Suppose the death penalty is eventually abolished and virtually all Americans come to look back at the practice with revulsion. Will the name of a death penalty proponent such as Ronald Reagan, or even Bill Clinton, be removed from schools or public buildings because the former presidents weren’t “enlightened” during their time?

…

This will not be the first name change at a Berkeley school. In the late 1990’s a school named for Christopher Columbus was rebuilt as Rosa Parks Elementary and more recently Abraham Lincoln Elementary was changed to Malcolm X. Since Lincoln opposed slavery his sin must have been the fact he was a Republican.

So, it looks like the “Author of the Declaration of Independence, secretary of state under Washington and later the third president of the United States, Jefferson was a philosopher, architect, musician, scientist, horticulturist, diplomat, inventor, historian and, at age 76, founder of the University of Virginia” can’t hold a candle to the man whose main accomplishments include the creation of the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee and leading a nationwide boycott of California table grapes.

Let’s see… wrote the Declaration of Independence, president of the US … started a union … what a dilemma having to choose between two such men. How would you vote?