Howard Bashman reports:

Supreme Court of California rules that a state law requiring an adult who has oral copulation with a minor to register with police as a sex offender is unconstitutional because no such requirement exists for adults who have sexual intercourse with minors: Today’s ruling, by a 6-1 margin, can be accessed here.

My wife, who has prosecuted sex crimes for years, always thought this was an odd discrepancy.

P.S. Mrs. P. notes that, as a practical matter, the only time you’d ever use this statute is when the child is sixteen or seventeen and the act was “consensual,” since other (harsher) laws apply to younger minors or forcible oral copulation.

Via Dafydd ab Hugh and Power Line comes a link to this ABC story about shipments of deadly bombs coming into Iraq from Iran.

Skeptical? I was cautiously skeptical myself. But even Richard Clarke is convinced:

“I think the evidence is strong that the Iranian government is making these IEDs, and the Iranian government is sending them across the border and they are killing U.S. troops once they get there,” says Richard Clarke, former White House counterterrorism chief and an ABC News consultant. “I think it’s very hard to escape the conclusion that, in all probability, the Iranian government is knowingly killing U.S. troops.”

The phrase “Richard Clarke, Bush Administration shill” doesn’t have the ring of truth . . . which strongly suggests there is something to this.

It feels like an act of war to me.

The obvious question becomes: what, if anything, are we going to do about it?

UPDATE: In comments below, m.croche posts a link to a lefty who says the story is bogus.

UPDATE x2: See also this m.croche comment and the link therein. Croche seems to think it proves Bush a liar, which it doesn’t. It does indicate a lack of evidence as to whether the Iranian government is behind it.

[Posted by The Angry Clam]

Aviation Week has a story currently about a secret two-stage to orbit military spaceplane that was supposedly operational.

Considering that Aviation Week isn’t the Weekly World News, and that these guys also guessed the existence of the sweet-as-hell F-117 before it was publicly announced, I don’t think that it is entirely implausible that they’ve got the broad outlines for the program correct. The descriptions of the Blackstar also align fairly closely with the numerous reports of the Aurora aircraft.

If Aviation Week’s correct that the program has been scrapped, the real question becomes “what even cooler toy did they get to replace this?”

The L.A. Times has a story about that nutty teacher who indoctrinated his students with all sorts of anti-American leftist claptrap. The paper’s story is titled Issues of Free Speech Arise After Teacher Criticizes Bush.

It’s too bad that the paper’s web site doesn’t provide a link to the audio and transcript of the teacher’s rant. You can access them here. Having those materials on hand helps provide the full context for the snippets that the paper chooses to quote and characterize. For example:

(more…)

[Posted by The Angry Clam]

Remember how a bunch of pinhead law professors were mad that, when they took a ton of the government’s money, they had to allow military recruiters?

They lost 8-0. No Ginsburg, no Souter, no Stevens on their side.