If you’re from Ohio, Arizona, Arkansas, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Florida, Indiana and Colorado, today’s the day to get your sh*t together and register to vote.

Virginia voters have definitely heard to the call to get up and out, as many registration booths have been “overwhelmed” by the amount of people trying to insure their say in this election.  According to the Los Angeles Times;

“Virginia has logged more than 300,000 new voters since the year began. The state does not record party affiliation, but it says that 41% of the new registrants are under the age of 25, and an additional 20% are between the ages of 25 and 34.

The influx of young voters, a core part of Obama’s voting coalition, is an encouraging sign for the Democratic nominee in a state that has not picked a Democrat for president in more than 40 years .”

It’s always encouraging when young people put down their ipods and blackberrys and decide to take responsibility for a nation they’ll soon be controlling, and it’s even more encouraging that a Democratic candidate unlike any other is the one that gets them fired up.

No matter what party you affiliate yourself with, it’s got to make you happy that someone has finally (seemingly) lit the fire under the ass of America’s youth.

And Now the News with Kandy Korrespondent

On Wednesday, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of ending the death penalty for the crime of child rape. This is the second such ruling this year. Last September an unofficial national moratorium on the death penalty went into effect when the court agreed to hear two appeals to lethal injection arguing that the practice causes extreme pain constituting cruel and unusual punishment. The moratorium was ended when the court finally ruled on April 16th that Kentucky’s, the state in question, guidelines for lethal injection did not in fact constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

The death penalty tends to be considered a “third-rail” issue along the lines of abortion. The sudden willingness of the highest court to rule on such cases seems to mark a shift in this regard. Anti-death penalty activists are hopeful that this current trend will end in an eventual ban on its usage. The United States is one of the few “western” countries to still use the death penalty.

In Other News:
Also on Wednesday, during a phone-in town hall meeting Presidential hopeful John McCain told a Floridian voter that only World War III would justify reinstituting a national draft. While this calms some fears, the fact that he failed to define World War III of course still leaves the issue a bit open to interpretation. Given the current ambiguous nature of the so-called “War on Terror”, it is unclear at what point a conflict would in fact obtain such a label. Read More »

This just in: Britney has finally ceased the madness and allowed herself to be checked into a hospital for at least 72 hours. It’s not completely clear why she’s there (Perezhilton is reporting it may be due to a suicide attempt, and that Brit’s new psychiatrist called the hospital), but because she was committed, she must stay at UCLA Medical Center for three days.

Apparently, B. Spears’s mom wants to take her home to Louisiana once she’s released, to get her away from her paparazzi pals and the douche twins, Sam Lufti and Adnan Ghalib.

Hopefully, all of this will happen, and Britney will get better, and I will stop feeling a personal need to put her in a headlock and march her to rehab myself.