Donald hopes for duel for top spot with McIlroy

Luke Donald believes golf fans could be in for a treat in the coming months as he and world number one Rory McIlroy battle it out head-to-head for top spot in the world rankings.

Donald and McIlroy have exchanged the position throughout the season but the sense of drama has been lost given the way the rankings changes have come about, with the two players taking advantage of each other's off-weeks.

McIlroy is enjoying his third spell as number one after first climbing to the peak with victory in the Honda Classic at Palm Beach Gardens in March.

Opposition grows to… fingerprinting illegals?

Most of the stories I cover involving my home stomping grounds of New York are uniformly negative, I’m sorry to say. (And yes, that includes the New York Jets.) But the state is what it is. What’s a guy to do? This fact makes it all the more pleasant for me, though, when I come across something positive to report, and it seemed as if I’d found just such a story this weekend. Next week the Empire State will finish rolling out a program called Secure Communities.

A program that gives federal immigration officials access to the fingerprints of undocumented immigrants booked into local jails will start Tuesday across New York state despite staunch opposition from advocates and lawmakers, including Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Julia: A paean to subservience in the Hubby State?

You’ve come a long way, baby. The old advertising motto that targeted women who thought of themselves as liberated in the 1970s came with no small measure of irony, since the point of the ad was to get women hooked on Virginia Slims cigarettes. Jessica Gavora sees a similar kind of irony in the Barack Obama campaign’s rollout of “Julia,” their composite woman who lives her 67-year life under the beneficence of the Obama presidency. Gavora argues that Obama wants to create not just a nanny state but a Hubby State, in which women marry the federal government — a far from liberating existence:

“The Life of Julia,” the Obama campaign’s new interactive Web ad, follows a cartoon everywoman, Julia, through the milestones of a middle-class American life: education, work, motherhood, retirement. One milestone is pointedly missing: marriage.

But, then again, why should Julia get married? She doesn’t need to. Like a growing number of single women with children, Julia is married to the state.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in this rather creepy slide from the Life of Julia presentation:

Note that there is no mention of a husband, or even a father, biological or involved. In the entire slide series, Julia never gets married, and indeed except for one single reference to having sex, is never shown as being with a man at all. Her son shows up in just one slide, and is never mentioned again after the slide shows Julia handing Zachary off to the Nanny State:

Blind shooter gets his guns back

Is justice blind? Sometimes. And so is New Jersey resident Stephen Hopler, a gun collector and enthusiast from the Garden State. (Hat tip to Warner Todd Huston.) Or at least he was until the local authorities decided that a blind guy shouldn’t have weapons. Then things began to look ugly, at least for those who could see.A blind gun collector can keep his gun permit and will have the weapons previously seized from his house by police returned to him, following a judge’s order handed down Friday in Superior Court in Morristown.

Steven Hopler, 49, of Rockaway Township won the latest battle in an ongoing war over his Second Amendment rights. The Morris County Prosecutor’s office had asked Judge Thomas Manahan to revoke Hopler’s firearms ID card and seize all guns in his possession, arguing Hopler abused alcohol and posed a danger to others by being a gun owner.

Video: Get off of Jonah Goldberg’s lawn, you darned kids

I love a curmudgeonly rant, and so this interview of National Review’s Jonah Goldberg is right up my alley. This excerpt of a longer interview with the Daily Caller’s Ginni Thomas focuses on Jonah’s issues with the “youth culture,” the obsession with the worldview of the least experienced of our citizenry. Goldberg notes that “we’re all born idiots,” and that some people are a lot closer to that point in time than most of the rest of us:


“It is a simple fact of science that nothing correlates more with ignorance and stupidity more than youth,” the National Review Online editor said in an interview. “We’re all born idiots, and we only get over that condition as we get less young.”

So why all the focus on the youth vote and “millennials” in politics? Goldberg says young people having so much influence in a society is unhealthy.

“My view is, they’re going to run the country some day, so we should really explain why they’re so frickin’ stupid about so many things,” he said.

Goldberg says in the interview that he would prefer a much higher voting age than 18, and while I agree that these voters tend to be the least sophisticated and informed voters in any election, I still disagree with Goldberg on this point. The law treats 18-year-olds as fully responsible for their actions. The purpose of elections is to form a representative government that binds all citizens and holds them accountable. That includes 18-year-old citizens, which means that they should have the right to participate in the formation of legislatures and executive branches that create and enforce those laws.

That doesn’t mean that politicians should pander to them, or at least at the expense of both older voters and common sense. They may be running the country someday, it is true, but it is equally true that they may be performing brain surgery someday too. That doesn’t mean I want them practicing on my head when they’re 18 and haven’t learned anything about it yet.

In fact, I’d say that a sure sign of political desperation is when a politician has to focus on the least-sophisticated and least-experienced voters to gain any traction. That’s a giveaway that their policies are probably too simplistic and unrealistic to sell elsewhere. One case in point: ObamaCare. Obama got a great deal of support from young voters on this policy — and now they will be forced to needlessly buy comprehensive health insurance at great expense when a simple catastrophic policy would suit their needs much more economically, in order to subsidize the health-care costs of middle-aged and senior voters. Suckers!

Perhaps that experience will have taught the youth culture an important lesson. If so, Jonah will try not to bark at them when their radios are too loud or order them off his darned lawn. Jonah also has a new book out, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas — be sure to check it out.

Quotes of the day

Former President George W. Bush’s pollster for his 2004 re-election, Jan van Lohuizen, has put out a memo to Republican operatives suggesting a shift in the way the GOP discusses same-sex marriage…
“Recommendation: A statement reflecting recent developments on this issue along the following lines:

“‘People who believe in equality under the law as a fundamental principle, as I do, will agree that this principle extends to gay and lesbian couples; gay and lesbian couples should not face discrimination and their relationship should be protected under the law. People who disagree on the fundamental nature of marriage can agree, at the same time, that gays and lesbians should receive essential rights and protections such as hospital visitation, adoption rights, and health and death benefits.’”

Disneyland Paris turns 20, with mixed results

FRANCE, MARNE-LA-VALLEE: Disneyland Paris fetes its 20th anniversary Thursday, but while Mickey Mouse now draws nearly twice as many visitors as the Louvre's Mona Lisa, his fantasy park is not yet out of the financial woods.

A rare glimpse of North Korea by train

DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF KOREA, Pyongyang: For those who have the rare opportunity, the train linking Dandong in China to Pyongyang in North Korea offers a unique glimpse of the most closed country in the world.

Weary of Dubai traffic? Get Dh1m flying car You could soon be flying over Sheikh Zayed Road instead of being stuck in traffic on the road

If the daily commute from home to office and back is becoming a bit of a drag for you, here’s some exciting news.At last week’s New York International Auto Show, US firm Terrafugia Inc. unveiled the Transition, a vehicle that can operate both as a car and, when push comes to collision, a plane.
Until now, the flying car has been a subject for science fiction and children’s books authors. No longer, it seems. A commercially available version of the car could see the light of the day as soon as next year, the company hopes.

Pending regulatory approvals (and that means a lot, by the way), Terrafugia plans to sell the contraption by 2013 for $279,000 (Dh1.02m). The Transition, in effect a two-seat aircraft with foldable wings, already has about a 100 ‘customers’ who’ve put down a deposit of $10,000 (about Dh37,000) to be among the first owners of the car (or plane, whichever way you’d like to look at it) once it becomes a commercial reality.

The company says that roughly 100 aircraft have been reserved, representing an order backlog of over $25 million. Refundable airframe reservations are currently being accepted to hold a place in production. “We are currently marketing to pilots and to people willing to become pilots to use the Transition. All sorts of people have placed reservations, from retired couples planning to travel to independent business people with clients spread over a large geographic area,” says the firm.

Queen to re-open historic Cutty Sark ship

UNITED KINGDOM, London: The restored Cutty Sark will be re-opened by Queen Elizabeth II on Wednesday, five years after the 19th century British tea clipper was ravaged by fire.

Summer hotspots to entice UAE travelers

With vacations fast approaching, here are the top new destinations to include in the travel plans

Summer holiday planning is already buzzing up the phone lines for local travel agents, as weary UAE residents plan their escape from the sizzling heat that’s fast approaching.

Major local carriers such as Emirates and Eithad Airways have already announced top new destinations for their summer flightplan, targeting the disconcerting traveller who is eager to explore new grounds that may even take them off the beaten track.

French tourism spot faces car ban

FRANCE, Mont Saint-Michel: Cars have been banned from the foot of Mont-Saint-Michel in northwest France. People coming to the country's most visited tourist site now have to park their vehicles three