Same fantastic content, easier to remember name!

-AR

And, yes, smartasses, I am aware that my governor is the star of Last Action Hero.

-AR

All that is a rather convoluted way of saying: I’m not too scared of this guy.

Doesn’t exactly look like the face that’s going to enlarge the tent of the GOP. Nothing says kinder and gentler like a tobacco lobbyist from Mississippi.

-AR

It came out in oral argument that one question asked firefighters whether fire equipment should be parked “uptown, downtown or underground when arriving at a fire” even though New Haven doesn’t have an uptown or downtown. (Apparently some of the questions were based on questions relevant to New York City firefighters.) Not that that matters, since everyone knows you park your equipment underground when arriving at a fire.

In lieu of evidence to the contrary, I like to imagine the New Haven test was a hybrid of Stuff White People Like and a discriminatory SAT question, and looked something like this:

1. You arrive at a yacht that is engulfed in flames in the marina. The yacht owner tells you his wife is trapped aft. The yacht owner means his wife is trapped:

A) In the front of the yacht.
B) In the back of the yacht.
C) On the left side of the yacht.
D) On the right side of the yacht.
E) Under the yacht.

2. A panicked homeowner asks you to save “the greatest Bruce Springsteen album in existence” from the upstairs bedroom of his burning home. When you get upstairs you see five Springsteen albums. Which do you grab?

A) Darkness on the Edge of Town
B) The Rising
C) Born to Run
D) The River
E) Nebraska

-AS

The Scalia-led majority held that the 6th Amend. Confrontation Clause was violated by the prosecution’s offering into evidence a lab technician’s “certificate” attesting to the fact that a substance was cocaine in lieu of calling the tech as a witness.

DA offices are calling the decision a train wreck. Since government testing labs are way behind on their testing already, the delays will inevitably get a lot worse if the lab techs who do the tests have to spend a lot of time in courthouses waiting to testify. Especially in less-populated states where one or two labs may do testing for the entire state, and especially when substances are sent to FBI labs in Wash. DC for analysis, the financial ramifications may put prosecutions as far out of reach for the government as Bentley cars are for law professors.

-AS

-AR

A few thoughts:

1. Despite the fact that he represents everything I fear most politically, and is in the news for deceiving his family, the press conference made me really like Mark Sanford. There’s such a sweet naivete to it, at least when stops rambling and starts answering questions, like he’s unaware that his political career is collapsing and just wants to let everyone know what he’s been thinking and feeling. It’s a bizarre sight seeing a politician struggling to be as honest as possible, rather than as evasive as possible, and giving reporters more information than they expected.

2. Despite the video making me like Sanford, the person I really like is the young lady standing behind him and giggling at his suffering the entire time. Whose bright idea was it putting random teenagers in the background? I under the general utility of diversity and children at a political event, but do you really want to invoke family when you’re admitting to abandoning your wife and kids on father’s day to visit your mistress on another continent? Pay particular note to the segment starting at 11:00, when she ducks down to whisper to some dude and the uptight girl behind her keeps glancing down at them.

3. Aside from Sanford’s wife and kids, the person I most feel sorry for is Tom Davis, an apparent friend of Sanford’s who he invokes five times in the course of the press conference. I just imagine Davis standing off camera, doing the whole waving the hand in front of the throat move. Note to any of my friends: if you ever turn yourself into a national punchline, I will stand by you, but when you have to do the humiliating mea culpa thing, please leave me out of it.

4. My favorite part (besides the giggling girl) is the fact that Sanford spends three minutes rambling about the Appalachain Trail, then declares himself a “bottom line guy” who’s just going to “lay it out” . . . and then spends four and half minutes with vague apologies (mostly to Tom Davis) before actually admitting to having an affair.

-AR

Or, as Walter Dellinger puts it (much more elegantly):

To treat membership in all-male or all-female (or all-white and all-black) organizations as logically indistinguishable is to ignore everything we know about history and context. Having the women in an organization get together among themselves and share their experiences may or may not be a good idea. But it is fundamentally different from having the men—who may have run the institution for the last century—have meetings from which women are excluded.

There is no better example of the false triumph of logic over experience than the 1896 decision in Plessey v. Ferguson, where the Supreme Court upheld Louisiana’s law mandating separate railroad cars for white and black passengers in an opinion making the logically correct observation that the law treated the two races exactly alike. It was the court’s Southerner, John Harlan of Kentucky, who, in dissent, uttered the two critical words that destroyed that logic: “everyone knows,” he wrote, before continuing to describe the true meaning of segregation as oppression of the black race.

The best passage in the exchange comes from Dahlia Lithwick:

[Famed constitutional law scholar Herbert] Wechsler’s subjective belief that he was as hard hit by forced racial segregation as Charles Houston suggests that our sense of what’s “fair” is inevitably constrained by the limits of our own experience and imagination. Instead of railing about Sotomayor’s alleged sexism and racism, it’s worth trying to imagine what she knows that we do not yet understand. The only other alternative is to become a nation of bitter, atomized victims, struggling to be the most aggrieved. In his talk at the Brennan Center, John Payton hailed the deep truth in Sandra Day O’Connor’s vision from Grutter, the Michigan affirmative action case: “Nothing less than the nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to the ideas and mores of students as diverse as this Nation of many peoples.

The strangest thing about watching angry white men complain about double standards or policies intended to remedy discrimination is the way such complaints always involve complaining about others playing the victim while simultaneously claiming victimhood. Whenever I see, say, Bill O’Reilly, rail about anything related to identity politics, I can’t help but think, “Man, how angry would this dude be if he was black/gay/Hispanic/female?”

-AR

-AR

OK, I lied, I do have more to say. Excuse me while I get on my soapbox and do a little moralizing. While I usually agree with most every word Adam Serwar writes, I disagree with him that we shouldn’t care about politicians’ infidelities. Trust is important in a democracy. And while the sex aspect causes too much attention to be paid to infidelity, a politician’s personal life definitely matters (and not only when there’s blatant hypocrisy at play). Obviously it’s not important enough a factor that I’m going to support George Bush over Bill Clinton, but if a person cheats on their spouse (or is a bad tipper, or yells at the coach during their kid’s little league game, etc.), that is going to effect whether I want them to be the person speaking for me in my government.

I strongly supported John Edwards in the Democratic Primary, in 2004 and especially when he moved to the left in 2008. When his affair was revealed, it made me question whether he actually believed the things that made me support him in the first place. If someone could be that dishonest to the people closest to him, why would I trust him when he says he’s deeply committed to ending poverty? I still haven’t answered the question for myself if I would vote for Edwards again if I had another crack at the Democratic Primary. His platform was that much better than Clinton or Obama that I don’t regret for a second the time I spent campaigning for him. But the choice between a faithful Edwards and an unfaithful Edwards is an easy one.