SO, NU? What are you doing here? In case it wasn't clear, The Sound and Fury weblog has moved to http://maxpower.nu thanks to the tireless efforts of Le Garçon Combustible. Change bookmarks, etc. Apologies that links to the old Blogger archives now appear permanently shot. I'd pass the hat and ask for money to pay for the not-free Movable Type hosting, but I make a good living. If you were inclined to donate money to this site, I'll instead encourage you to donate a chunk of change to Magen David Adom and drop me a line that it's been done.

IN RESPONSE TO MY post below, Matt Evans attempts to defend the rape exception to the Republican pro-life position. Evans's argument, however, does not stand up to scrutiny.

Evans starts by arguing from analogy: imagine a putative father who had semen extracted by force and, as a result, fathered a child. Surely no one would insist that this father pay child support for his unwanted child? Ergo, no one would insist that a mother support a pregnancy incurred by force.

There are two problems with this analogy. First, it's unclear that the premise is correct. The hypothetical is so outlandish that there is no precedent directly on point (a problem with some pro-choice analogies, as well, such as Judith Jarvis Thomson's violinist example). But unlike the Thomson case, there are cases parallel to the Evans analogy. Men have been ordered to pay child support even when they have no biological connection to the child. The only cases to the contrary--cases involving custody of frozen in vitro embryos after divorce--justify the refusal to force the ex-husband to be an unwanted father on the precedent of Roe v. Wade. If Roe v. Wade disappears, then so does the rationale for not allowing ex-wives to implant frozen embryos without the fathers' consent, and the state would very likely enforce child support requirements in such a circumstance.

Second, failure to pay child support just isn't the same thing as abortion. A father without the ability to pay ends up without legal obligation. The existing state of child support laws just does not map onto the world where abortion is illegal; an impoverished pregnant woman would still be required to carry her child to term in such a world, even if she would suffer undue financial hardship because of her pregnancy.

Evans's concluding rationalization is "a woman becomes a mother she assumes affirmative duties to protect her child from harm; women who become mothers through force should be exempted from these legal duties." (We'll ignore for purposes of this post Evans's misleading use of "child" to refer to a zygote or embryo.) The fallacy in this statement is obvious: Evans surely is not claiming that a rape victim can carry an unwanted child to term, deliver the baby, and then let it starve without legal consequence. The conclusion therefore has to be modified: "women who become mothers through force should be granted the right to an exerciseable option to either terminate the pregnancy or assuming the affirmative legal duties of parenthood." But once Evans and pro-life politicos make this concession, he acknowledges one of the two underlying principles of the pro-choice position: abortion is not infanticide, and there is an appropriate moral distinction between the two. And the politically acceptable pro-life position is once again forced into an untenable contradiction.

MARGERY LANDRY, formerly of the US Foreign Service, sentenced to twenty years for shooting friend's husband.

Landry, 48, who had pleaded guilty in September to first-degree assault, burglary and other crimes, said that the shooting was a "mistake" and that she had planned only to plant child pornography in the home to help her friend in the divorce case.

The Washingtonian has a good background piece on the case, including the following observation from the victim:

Meanwhile, Slobodow is trying to raise the boys and move on with his life, which he hopes will include another relationship. “The shooting kind of turns women off,” he says.

CAPTAIN SPAULDING on the latest Buffy episode:

Tonight's episode of Buffy was really good as it ramps up the apocalypse against the First Evil. Buffy's speech at the end where she says she's through running and will take the fight directly to the First was particularly great.

Presumably in the next episode, Buffy's first strike policy will be called inhumane. Protestors will demand that she work through the UN and perhaps try to understand the root causes of the First Evil. Maybe Mike Farrell will hold an anti-apocalypse press conference and Sean Penn will visit the First Evil and the Ubervamp.

WOO-HOO! FTC Plans Registry To Block Sales Calls.

FTC officials expect 60 million Americans to register when the list becomes operational -- which won't be for at least several more months. It still faces logistical and legal hurdles, including a possible lawsuit by the telemarketing industry, which makes more than 100 million calls a day.

If and when the list is up and running, telemarketers would have to scour it every three months and would be barred for five years from calling the consumers who signed up. Consumers would then have to renew their registration. If they get called anyway, those on the list can call another toll-free number to complain. The FTC would then investigate and could fine telemarketers up to $11,000 for each banned call.

MSNBC'S JERRY NACHMAN INTERVIEWS Al Franken about the Gore decision:

Nachman: Did you know about this on Friday?
Franken: About Gore's decision?
N: Right.
F: I was there when he called Lesley Stahl.
N: Right.
F: He had only told me, Lorne ["SNL" executive producer Lorne Michaels], [writer] Jim Downey, a few members of the cast.
N: Is that true?
F: No.
N: No?
F: No.
N: So, you didn't know.
F: I didn't know.

THE CLEAN WATER ACT has created a potential ecological disaster in the Chicago River. (via Thomason)

LIFE IMITATES TREEHOUSE OF HORROR XII: The Self-Cleaning Dinner Table. (via Gizmodo)

I'VE MENTIONED Skyscrapers.com before as a marvelous site, but I'm all the more impressed now that I know that they also have prominent low-rise buildings like one of my favorites, Prague's "Ginger & Fred".

MARK GOLDBLATT HAS A good piece on the Central Park Jogger case.

ETIQUETTE QUESTION: When an ex-girlfriend sells a 4,500-word essay to an on-line literary magazine about her history with penises, should I be relieved that I was left out, insulted at the omission, or appalled that the most sexually timid woman I ever dated is trying to market herself as the next Candace Bushnell? (Sorry, no link. My parents read this site.)

IN CASE YOU'RE WONDERING how I'd rank them, I put it as (1) The White Stripes; (2) The Vines; (3) The Strokes; and (4) The Hives.

I LIKE STUART BUCK. He's intelligent, he's a good writer. But every once in a while, he'll drop my jaw with something shockingly... I don't know, "stupid" is too insulting, and also unfair. But a recent post on abortion shows a viewpoint that is sheltered, to say the least.

To wit, Buck suggests that Democrats should oppose abortion because abortions deprive them of future voters; anti-choice voters will continue to have babies, while pro-choice voters will abort theirs. It's the kind of pat argument I've heard self-satisfied activists make unthinkingly; Buck has done this elsewhere, as when he claimed (incorrectly) that there's never been a home-schooler shooting.

More importantly, it is foolish argumentation on many levels.

1) Leaving aside the fact that it's not quite the case that political viewpoints are inherited, it's also far from the case that there's an inverse relationship between abortion rates and birth rates. Sweden, for example, has far fewer abortions per person than the United States does, but also a lower birth rate. (One of the many ironies of the U.S. anti-abortion movement is that they overlap greatly with the strongest opponents to the sort of reforms in sex education and contraceptive availability that might reduce the abortion rate, with the side benefit of also reducing the unwed pregnancy rate and the social problems caused by that. If you believe abortion is murder, why oppose reforms that would reduce the "murder" rate by millions a year? Especially when those same reforms would also help break the cycle of poverty? It's little wonder that pro-choice supporters view much of the anti-abortion movement with skepticism.)

1a) Imagine the same argument as applied to gay rights. Certainly gay rights supporters are more likely to be childless than those who oppose gay rights, but which way has the trend gone in the last thirty years? Sometimes issues of social justice are resolved on the merits rather than by heredity.

2) Why are Democrats pro-choice? It's an interesting example of public choice theory. Abortion was not always an issue that cleanly divided Republicans from Democrats: it was a Nixon appointee that wrote the opinion in Roe v. Wade, and it was a Kennedy appointee who was the strongest and loudest dissenter. The anti-abortion movement, in conjunction with the Christian right, threw their support to the Republican party, which systematically over the last quarter-century purged its rolls of pro-choice members. It quickly became known that a Republican soft on abortion issues (such as, for example, the 1980 edition of George H.W. Bush) would have political troubles. Quick, name four prominent pro-choice Republicans! Christine Todd Whitman, Arlen Specter, maybe George Pataki, and... um... Laura Bush if you pressed her on the subject, but she won't be running for the Senate in 2008. Pro-choice supporters had little option but to move to the Democratic party, which in turn forced its members to toe the line: Al Gore and Dick Gephardt are among prominent Democrats who have flipped on the issue in the last 25 years as a matter of political survival.

2a) Besides, you know, sometimes politicians, on occasion, stand up for principles because they're right. Shocking, but true.

3) I hereby suggest that the Republican position on abortion is far more cynical, politicized, and unprincipled than the Democratic position. The two principled justifications for government limitation on the ability to have an abortion are (a) enforcing morality in the sense of a belief that sex is only appropriate as a means of procreation, and/or (b) a conceptual argument that to cause the death of a zygote/embryo/fetus is akin to murder. I don't see any Republicans calling for a repeal of the Griswold ban on bans of selling contraceptives; it's safe to say that there's a trend against laws against various forms of fornication, with a strong chance that the infamous Bowers v. Hardwick case will be thrown out this term by the heavily Republican Supreme Court. (The original Georgia anti-sodomy statute at issue in Hardwick has already been struck down by the Georgia Supreme Court, without much public outrage.) Nor are Republicans willing to admit to government legislation of morality calling for a subordinate role of women restricting them to childbearing duties. Indeed, I daresay the majority of rank-and-file Republicans, and even a larger majority of Republican political leaders, support the legalized sale of contraceptives and the presence of women in the workforce.

So that leaves "abortion is murder" as the only principled reason for a politician to oppose abortion.

Except if you look at the Republican platform, and the public statements of every anti-abortion politician from W. Bush on down, there's always an exception: make abortion illegal, except in cases of rape and incest.

Why the exception? Either abortion is murder, or it isn't. If life begins at conception, why does the spawn of a rapist and his victim have any less rights than any other unwanted pregnancy? Buck may find Democratic support of abortion mysterious, but it ain't half as mysterious as the willingness of Republicans to carve out an abortion exception for rape victims.

Okay, it isn't all that mysterious: the answer is votes. Something like 74%-84% of Americans support the right to abortion in cases of rape. Any politican principled enough to stand loudly by the proposition that life begins at conception and rape victims have to carry pregnancies to term would have to answer to the voters.

Say what you will about the Democrats and abortion, but at least they're internally consistent.

HAPPY KURT COBAIN DAY!

A lot of people think they can observe Kurt Cobain day simply by wearing a cardigan sweater to work. When these people die they are going to go to hell.

Solemn and heartful observance of Kurt Cobain day involves three brief, measured rituals:

First, make some French Toast. This is to demonstrate that you know that if Kurt Cobain's ghost came into your kitchen while you were eating French Toast, he'd probably lick his pretty pink lips and say, "Man, I sure wish I could eat some French Toast." Then he'd probably just hover over your table and look really jealous. When you're finished with your breakfast, look up at Kurt Cobain's ghost and say, "Shouldn't have killed yourself, Cobain. Fame might be a bitch, but French Toast is still delicious."

(warning: language stronger than your ordinary bear)

GOOD PIECE IN Slate about the appalling Rhodes award to Chesa Boudin.

EXCELLENT ANALYSIS OF The Sopranos, and, even better, of the Slate talkfest on The Sopranos. (via Missy)

BUILD YOUR OWN TIVO.

INTERVIEWS WITH LAW FIRM PERSONNEL who have been caught publicly criticizing their employer tend to have the feel of well-meaning attempts by journalists to get the word on the Pyongyang street. This story on Clifford Chance is no different: "We're six of the happiest people here; we really love the firm."

OVER THE LAST THREE years, Jim Thome hit .256 on the road, 63 points lower than in Jacobs Field. And Veterans Stadium is no Jacobs Field for hitters. And how a fellow hits at age 32-37 tends to be somewhat worse than how he hits at age 29-31. I'm a big Thome fan, and the Braves are due for a fall, but the Phillies need more than Thome and David Bell to make up the 20+ games between them and the Braves, as sweet as an Abreu/Burrell/Thome lineup looks. (When did David Bell become a savior? He's a competent third baseman, but hardly a dramatic upgrade.)

I'D HAVE TO CHECK, but I imagine that the New York Times was among the leaders in pooh-poohing Jack Welch's perks at General Electric--certainly Paul Krugman did. (Corporations often give perks instead of salary to high executives because the perks are tax-deductible and the salary isn't -- thus, the corporation can provide the executive with a higher standard of living at a lower cost to shareholders than they could by just raising his salary. Whether corporations where the executives live like kings or where the cost of such perks are hidden from shareholders are well-run is another question for another time.)

I mention this because I was amused by a recent article in the travel section of the Times. The writer, who was a Times editor, spent three nights with his wife in different New York City luxury hotel suites and justified it with a story about the experience, presumably for all those Times subscribers who are trying to choose between the various $1000+tax hotel rooms available when they visit the home city of the New York Times. A $322 dinner at Lespinasse merited a whole sentence, a $102 afternoon tea half a sentence, but the $150 worth of massages at the St. Regis got edited out. I'm curious if New York Times shareholders footed the entire $5,000 bill, or if the rank-and-file writers at the Times get the same opportunities for expense accounts.

[CORRECTION: I am now informed that the perks are subject to stricter tax rules than straight income, so my sentence in the first paragraph about the reasoning behind corporate perks is incorrect. I still have to wonder whether corporations try to get deductions for some of the perks we have read about in the press. Certainly a number of the "perks" at my job are quite appropriately treated as business expenses by my employer even if they also have the incidental effect of improving my quality of life.]

KREMLIN-WATCHERS TAKE NOTE: The State Department is refurbishing the Iraqi embassy in Washington, D.C., which had been abandoned since diplomatic relations were cut off in 1991. $40,000 in frozen Iraqi bank accounts are being used to repair the roof and add a new gutter and downspout system. The State Department refused to deny that the restoration was in preparation for regime change.

A SPECTACULAR OPTICAL ILLUSION. (via Volokh)

CAPTAIN SPAULDING'S discussion of spin-offs and cross-overs got me surfing, and caused me to discover a bit of trivia I never knew: Lois from Hi & Lois is the sister of Beetle Bailey.

WHO KNEW THAT there was a 1931 version of Hammett's The Maltese Falcon? The lead, Ricardo Cortez in the Bogart role of Sam Spade, later went on to play Perry Mason in a 1936 movie; starlet and Marx Brothers heroine Thelma Todd played Iva Archer, and horror-movie character actor Dwight Frye was Wilmer. Reviews indicate that the pre-Code version was more explicit than the more-famous 1941 edition, but John Huston did a better job in capturing Hammett's style. (via Sjostrom)

THE WEB HAS EVERYTHING, part 1153: Gallery of Macaroni & Cheese Boxes.

NEXT TIME YOU see a Canadian getting all huffy, remind him or her that the top Google search in Canada is for "Britney Spears."

Why Are Black Students Lagging? asks the New York Times.

NEW YORK TIMES article on Charlie Kaufman, author of "Being John Malkovich" and the forthcoming Pirandellian "Adaptation."

AS I'VE SAID BEFORE, I'd be a lot more sympathetic about the plight of the convicted rapists of the Central Park jogger if their defense wasn't, as the New York Times put it, that they were busy mugging someone else in the park when the rapes occurred. The criminals spent a handful of years in prison, which was too little punishment for the other violent acts they committed, even if it does turn out to be too much punishment for a rape they confessed to but didn't commit.

"That was the issue," said Peter Rivera, Mr. Santana's lawyer in 1990. "But we didn't say, `No, when the jogger was raped, my client was on 96th Street, mugging someone else.' That would have been self-defeating."

So, instead, the lawyers attacked the victim.

Let's be clear: it was an injustice if these criminals were convicted of a rape they didn't commit. But given the crimes they did commit, and the punishment they received, I find it hard to say that the overall result was unjust. They got a fair trial: the criminals chose not to use the best evidence that they had of their "innocence" because it would have implicated them in other crimes. The jury, not aware of that evidence, convicted them of a larger set of crimes than the set of crimes they actually committed. In the land of cliches, this is sleeping in the bed you made for yourself.

Of all the injustices that take place in the legal system every day, one where a group of teenagers who committed eight muggings (including one of a schoolteacher who was severaly beaten and kicked) was also mistakenly convicted of a rape that took place contemporaneously in the same vicinity probably doesn't make the top ten thousand. I'm more appalled that the criminals aren't still in jail than I am at the mistaken verdict. The Daily News is more vivid in describing what happened:

The roving gang moved south, stopping at 101st St., where they formed a gantlet and surrounded tandem cyclists Gerald Malone and Patricia Dean.

"I was terrified," Dean testified. "They were grabbing at my legs and pushing at my shoulder. They were making animal noises, grunting. I thought for sure we were going over."

Malone and Dean got away. Others were not as fortunate.

British jogger Robert Garner, 30, was pushed down an embankment and pummeled. He thought he "was going to die."

Teacher John Loughlin, 41, was thrown face down in the grass and whacked in the head with a pipe until he was bloody.

Would Patricia Dean have been raped had the muggers succeeded in overturning her tandem bicycle? We'll never know, but we can make an educated guess.

YOU ALREADY KNEW that Ann Coulter was an idiot, but she confirms it by putting the pseudo-scientific "Darwin on Trial" on her Christmas book list.

VERY IMPRESSIVE DC Ethnic Dining Guide from Tyler Cowen. (via Mooney, who writes about Cowen's theories that globalization diversifies culture, as opposed to reducing it to a melange of McDonald's)

LIBERTARIAN SELF-PARODY: In Defense of Scrooge.

A PRICE WAR between bus companies targeting Chinese immigrant customers has led to $15 round-trip bus fares from DC to NY, Chinatown to Chinatown. That's cheaper than the highway tolls alone.

INCIDENTALLY, APROPOS of the previous entry, the music in the "French Dictionary" Levi's commercial is "Playground Love" by Air.

Ads.com bit the dust and no one told me. It was a nifty site where one could look up advertisements, including names of songs in ads, or catch funny advertisements that people were talking about but you had somehow missed. It's funny that people have had so much trouble finding a way to commercialize content-providing sites, increasingly having to rely on annoying pop-up, pop-under, or, in the case of Slate, screen-obscuring advertising, and here's a site that couldn't make a go of it even though the content was the commercial.

DAVID FRUM IS appropriately upset at a typical New York Times headline:

“Killing Underscores Enmity of Evangelists and Muslims.” Yes, those missionaries and those Muslims really hate each other: Bonnie Witherall showed her hatred by offering free prenatal care to indigent Lebanese; the local Muslim clerics were naturally goaded by this outrage and killed her.

The new Smarter Harper's Index is up.

MINUTES AFTER THE Anter family arrived at their hotel, their vacation was ruined by a suicide bomber. Dvir, 14, and Nor, 12, were killed; their mother is unconscious in an Israeli hospital. BBC coverage.

SO IS EVERYONE getting the "Spin the Dreydel" Orbitz pop-up ad, or do I have a hidden cookie that tells the world that a Jew is using the browser?

ON-LINE GROCERIES IN 2002? If you remember the multi-billion-dollar bubble valuations for Webvan and the like, you may scoff, but FreshDirect seems to have an interesting business model focusing on Manhattan, where grocery prices are abnormally high and there's a demand for quality foodstuffs. Deliveries are on weekends and nights only, increasing the efficiency of the drivers, who avoid rush-hour jams.

I DON'T KNOW HOW Matt Welch beat me to blogging about Garance Franke-Ruta's take-down of Bowling for Columbine, but he did. Small world, etc., etc.

Smarting from the dis by the Yale Law Blog convention, I've been sunning it up in LA for a few days: blog-encounters with Welch, Emmanuelle, Howard Owens, and the always-gorgeous Cathy Seipp at a German beer-garden; and Captain Spaulding was kind enough to treat me to a tasty meal of Guatemalan fried chicken. Moxie is apparently sufficiently smitten with her new beau that she stood me up twice.

I also had a retroactive encounter with Nick Denton; I apparently met him a few months ago at a sushi bar in New York, where he was introduced to me as "Nick," and I was introduced to him with my real name by a mutual film-director friend, and we went our separate ways. The film-director recently sent out a party invitation cc'ing both of us and, in discussing it with her ("Wow, not only are you a hot award-winning film director, but you also know Nick Denton, so now I'm really impressed"), I learned that we already met. Who knew?

IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE for me to pay $5000 for a Segway -- I'd get about a coupla hundred dollars of use out of it -- but it's still pretty cool. Cool, but useless. The thing weighs 83 pounds, so it'd be difficult to shlep it through the Metro. I couldn't really do more with it than go get groceries, or stop by a local restaurant or shopping center, but of course, I could do the same thing on the Metro for $2.20 round-trip, or a $1 parking plus a few pennies wear-and-tear on the car, or just walking. And who'd want to leave it outdoors, exposed to the elements, even if encrypted keys keep it from being driven away? I'm still unsure where the niche is: okay, cops who don't want to use bicycles, or warehouse personnel, or mail-carriers, or eccentric rich students at flat college campuses. (I can imagine a few of my law school professors getting one as a lark.)

MAD MAGAZINE NAILS it on the head with what's wrong with the Onion, and it's funny to boot. (via Spaulding)

BUT DOES HE LOOK BETTER IN GO-GO BOOTS? In frightening news today, I was shopping for ties at Hecht's when a saleslady sidles over to me. "You're the Secretary of Energy, aren't you!" I'm dumbfounded for a minute -- first time I'd been confused for a quasi-celebrity, and I'm searching my head for who the Secretary of Energy is, and the saleslady completes her thought hesitantly, "Spencer Abraham?" I accurately deny it, and I accurately deny ever hearing that comparison before in response to further questioning.

So, not only is the saleslady telling me that I look like a jowly ex-Senator 17 years older than me, but she's effectively rubbing it in my face that she's better at Cabinet Jeopardy! than I am. (In a 200-person American Politics class lecture hall twelve years ago, the professor, telling an anecdote about how Reagan identified his HUD Secretary as "Mr. Mayor," asked if anyone remembered who that cabinet member was. After a moment of silence, I blurted out "Pierce," and then slunk down in my tenth-row seat so I wouldn't be singled out as the flamer who remembered that trivia.)

I still buy some ties from her (ties much more stylish than those Abraham wears), but now I'm worried Moxie won't want to be seen in public with me when we go out for sushi in two weeks.

ANYONE EVER NOTICE THAT Heather Havrilesky has two separate entries for the same blog on InstaPundit?

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON HAS traded in her Lincoln Navigator for a Toyota Prius, and will be producing public-service announcements from the "Got Milk?" people in favor of the concept.

THE REVIEWS FOR THE new Harry Potter movie are crummy, and indicate adaptation troubles that make the movie disjointed, even at 162 minutes, which bodes poorly for the third and fourth books, which were even longer than the second.

I'M LINKING TO THIS piece from the Claremont Institute on the Minnesota election not because it's a special special piece on punditry, but because I'm strangely flattered that they thought sending me a press release would accomplish anything. They'd get more hits if they sent $100 to Moxie, and she looks better in go-go boots than I do.

In other news, the American Lawyer did a big story with a picture spread of Denise Howell because her blog gets 250 hits a day. I, of course, with 350-400 hits a day, am chopped liver, which is why Yale Law School will invite me to attend as a student, but not as a blogger, not that I don't have two pre-existing and mutually interfering, commitments. And I suspect Denise Howell also looks better in go-go boots than I do.

MAKE YOUR OWN BUSH SPEECH. (via gb)

YOU KNOW, IT WOULD have been nice for the Washington Post to mention before an election on a $5 billion tax increase to pay for transportation that part of Northern Virginia's traffic problem stems from the failure of local government to retime traffic lights that were last programmed over a decade ago.

A REAL GOOGLE MIRROR: elgooG.

WATCHING TOO MUCH late night television lately. Things I noticed:

* Michael Moore on Oprah repeating the Halloween candy story I had been telling people all last week. (When I grew up in Houston, trick-or-treating essentially ended because of a mass scare over poisoned candy, even though the only incident was a father poisoning his son for insurance money.) I hope people don't think I was just parroting Michael Moore. What was really happening was that we were both parroting Barry Glassner's "The Culture of Fear." Glassner was on the show, too; I won't comment on the irony of Oprah having guests complaining about fear-mongering. (And I wonder how many "TV Nation" and "Awful Truth" segments focused on wildly remote environmental risks?)

* Carson Daly is terrible interviewer. He had Ted Danson on. He gave Danson a shirt as a reference to a joke on "Curb Your Enthusiasm." The gag, not that funny to begin with (it was a different shirt for one thing), was sufficiently obscure that even Danson seemed confused, and the audience didn't seem to get it either. The interview itself was painful to watch: Daly gushing like a little fanboy.

* Ted Danson gave a pitch on the show for the Toyota Prius, though. Good for him.

* The opening credits montage of a 1990 rerun of Saturday Night Live had an awkward number of close-to-identical shots of an Empire State Building bedecked in red, white, and blue, which makes one suspect that they were editing out shots of the New York skyline with the World Trade Center. It was far more noticeable than if they hadn't done the Soviet-style re-editing, and it just seemed wrong.

* Speaking of which, why is it that The Powers That Be pulled the "Simpsons" episode where Homer visits the World Trade Center, but not the "Simpsons" episode where a missile collapses a fictional New York City Mad Magazine skyscraper into rubble?

NEW YORK PIZZA.

FOLLOW-UP ON A NEW YORKER STORY: Oklahomans vote to ban cockfighting.

1:30 AM AND IT LOOKS like the Republicans have a 49-48 Senate lead, plus small leads in Minnesota and Missouri, with Thune slightly behind Johnson in South Dakota. (Or, technically, 49 to 46 + Jeffords + Landrieu in Louisiana if she wins her run-off.) Democratic votes tend to be concentrated towards the end of the counting (more votes in larger counties that take longer to compile -- which reminds me of my Student Senate campaign where I was down by 21 votes with 60 left to be counted and somehow caught up with an improbable 41-17 run, or something like that). So we're not going to learn anything 'til tomorrow.

The Virginia LaRouchie got 9% of the vote. That's not funny, even as a protest vote. The sales tax hike lost. Bedtime.

IN THE 1988 Baseball Abstract, Bill James describes how when he first started writing, he got a hate-mail letter or two a week that cheesed him off and got him unduly upset, and that now that he was popular, and read by 100 times more people, he got 100 times more letters like that, and, well, he was fed up with it and taking his ball and going home. "Breaking the wand," he called it.

I'm reminded of this, because Lileks got obnoxious mail a day or two ago, and I hope the jerk who sent him the letter doesn't spoil it for the rest of us. Judging by what he's sent me on the rare occasions I've disturbed him with a note over the last five or six years(and almost always with my real-life identity, so he doesn't know me from Adam -- I don't think he even read this site until Combustible Boy signed up), Lileks does a better job of answering his mail than Max Power does. It's an interesting phenomenon how it takes only a couple of people to befoul the pool for everybody else. There are probably only a few thousand spammers who make e-mail miserable for millions. It's not the vast mass of humanity that forces us to install the door locks, it's the 1-2% of bozos at the margin. And it might take just one bile-ful poison pen letter writer to persuade a writer I've been following and enjoying for years to give up his unpaid hobby.

THE DANGER OF being educated as an economist is that you're trained to realize exactly how futile and irrational it is to vote.

Nevertheless, I voted today, and almost immediately regretted it. (Trivia: first time I used a voting machine instead of a punchcard ballot where I had to strip the chad.)

John Warner is running unopposed, and I meant to cast a protest vote for one of his independent opponents. Except that they were an isolationist and a LaRouchie. I voted for Warner.

For Congress, the opposition parties couldn't even find a college graduate to run. Geez, I would've run if they had asked, and done at least as well, and at least I'd have something to say in the voter guide. I voted for the incumbent, but I'm putting my name in the hopper in 2004: there's a greater civic duty to run for office than to hold one's nose and vote for these buffoons.

I voted against the half-cent sales tax increase. If you're going to raise my taxes to build roads, raise gas taxes so that the pollution from the additional roads is at least partially offset from the deterrent to gas guzzling. Moreover, building more roads in the outer suburbs would just encourage more sprawl there, with no net effect on outer-suburb traffic congestion, while increasing congestion in the inner suburbs and the bottleneck bridges into DC. There's also the simple reality that there's no such thing as targeted taxes. Even if every penny from the lottery goes to education or from the sales tax goes to road-building, it just means that there's an offset in the general revenue fund that doesn't have to go to education or road-building. Feh. Let the government learn how to prioritize.

YOU KNOW, I have absolutely no objection when U.S. forces target and kill al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for previous attacks. I'm even not going to complain that the CIA used a missle to do it. But isn't all this something our Secretary of State criticized Israel for?

RESOLVED:

Bill Clinton : Gary Hart :: George W. Bush : Dan Quayle

Discuss.

I'M A WOBBLY WAR supporter, but I still have to appreciate the sentiment behind the Buy Bush a PlayStation 2 movement. (via Buck)

WILLIAM SAFIRE CALLS "jumping the shark" "popular culture's phrase of the year," which is a sure sign that the phrase has jumped the shark.

MY MOMMA TOLD ME there'd be days like this.

LISTEN MISSY GIVES her rules for dating, which nicely coincides with what I told a friend on the phone tonight. ("No, you shouldn't mention your restraining order on the first date.") This has created a kerfuffle on her comments page, but I think things can be resolved by reference to the American Dating Association rules.

READER MAIL. My long-time real-life pen-pal M.E., who figured out my identity on one visit to the page, writes:

The DC Water & Sewer Authority is installing new end-user meters
citywide. While this show of civil efficiency is amazing in itself, what's
really astonishing is item 16 in the agency's FAQ on the new meters:

16. Is this system monitoring my phone calls?
No, this equipment does not monitor phone calls.

The only reason I can come up with for this being in the FAQ is that,
well, it's a question WASA has been asked frequently. Yikes.

Number 17 is similar. Also, Number 3 indicates that WASA doesn't know that there's such a word as "maintenance."

IMDB TELLS ME that I saw "Gothic" fifteen years ago, so it's a good thing I didn't guess "Lair of the White Worm," which I suppose I didn't see.

THE NOT-QUITE-YET-LATE Warren Zevon will appear on the Late Show with David Letterman on Wednesday, October 30th at 11:30pm EST. The entire show will be dedicated to Warren and he will perform 2 songs including "Genius."

I'm not a huge Zevon fan: none of his stuff would end up in my top-twenty-CDs-on-a-desert-island lists, and my favorite Zevon album is probably the out-of-print "Hindu Love Gods" set of blues covers that he recorded with three fourths of REM. But I do have a soft spot for him, because shortly after I discovered college radio in high school, "Sentimental Hygiene" was the first tape I bought because I'd heard its music outside of the normal media channels.

That's not much more than fifteen years ago, and it's amazing what one remembers and forgets; Lileks has been writing about this, so the ephemeral nature of memory is on my mind. A hundred years from now, will someone be fascinated by the 1980s, with its clunky 64K computers and fear of nuclear holocaust? I quiz myself. Was it the Tulane or UNO radio station? Don't remember. What was the name of the DJ you took out on a date? Was it Ursula? Don't remember. How in the heck did a 1510-SAT-scoring geek on the wrong side of the Mississippi River and just out of high school ever finagle a date with her? Again, don't remember, though one suspects it must have been through mutual friends or friends of friends. What movie did you see? That Ken Russell flick about Shelley and Byron. Can you tell me anything about the movie, including its name or any of its actors? No. Wait, I remember that it was rated R. Also, that I was vaguely confused between Ken Russell and Kurt Russell. Where did you have lunch? Easy: the Camellia Grill, often misspelled "Camelia" with one L, as I did before Google corrected me. What did you have for lunch? Don't remember. What did she have for lunch? The "Cannibal Special" -- a quarter pound raw hamburger mixed with a raw egg and chopped raw onion.

The health department doesn't let them serve that any more. Google finds only three web pages on the Web discussing the Camellia Grill Cannibal Special, and one of them is a fetish story about women with bald scalps. Consider this site number four, and only slightly less tasteful.

"THANK YOU FOR SMOKING"'s Nick Naylor pops up as a minor character in Christopher Buckley's new novel, "No Way to Treat a First Lady," which I read in two sittings today waiting for the Metro (it's bad enough they shut down all the roads for a marathon so I can't drive in, but then they run the trains less frequently as if to remind me that normal people don't spend so many hours in the office on a Sunday) and watching the seventh game of the World Series. Thumbs up. Buckley's gotten just as formulaic as, say, John Grisham, but it's an entertaining formula. Part of the fun is the roman à clef guessing of who's who (e.g., doesn't Sandy Clintrick's name sound a lot like Jamie Gorelick, an actual deputy attorney general?) Not perfect, of course: as every other novel with a trial sequence does, this one gets the hearsay rule wrong, and a deputy attorney general would never try a case like this. But a pleasant diversion.

I THINK GLENN REYNOLDS is making a little much of the Islamic tendencies of the Beltway Sniper, John Muhammad. I agree that it's silly that CNN is calling Muhammad "John Williams"; the man got his name legally changed, and this sort of PC pretending that he didn't is becoming all too common. But if one reads the note that Muhammad left behind, with its fourth grade level of literacy and its fantastic schemes of a magic ATM card with a ten-million dollar balance, it's fairly clear that this isn't an Al Qaeda activity. Muhammad is simply a violent idiot, and to the extent he subscribes to violent Islamic ideologies that call for the death of infidels, it is because he is the sort of violent idiot for whom such ideologies appeal, rather than because the Islamofascists persuaded him to do it. If Muhammad were white, he would've been drawn to the Timothy McVeigh circles of black-helicopter paranoia and The Turner Diaries; because he was black, it was the idiocy of the African-American flavor--Nation of Islam--that appealed to him.

Another question is how the heck the Army admits such illiterates into their ranks in the first place, but I'm sure someone will have an explanatory comment. I blame Jimmy Carter, history's greatest monster.

AS JULIA Z. POINTED OUT to me, we've been refusing to broadcast Osama tapes and the statements of prominent Muslim terrorists for fear that they might be using coded messages to sleeper cells. So why in hell was Police Chief Moose announcing "You want us to say 'We have the sniper caught like a duck in a noose.'"?

Hooray for Captain Spaulding takes on Doonesbury better than anyone else to date:

Trudeau does bloggers today (and presumably this week) with the original punchline that bloggers have nothing to say (Check out next week's strip about two guys standing next to each other talking on their cell phones).

I don't have much to say, I will grant. Other than, at least I wasn't dopey enough to fall for the Presidential IQ hoax.

THE ROBOT WARBLOG takes on Max Power and Julia Zlotnick. I have to say the attack on Captain Spaulding was uncalled for, though.

THEY'RE ADVERTISING THE new movie "The Truth About Charlie" with Klint's "Diamond" theme from "Snatch" [track 2]. Last time I saw that, the preview for "Being John Malkovich" used "Brazil's" office worker march music [track 1], which didn't appear in the movie itself, though one can see the preview on the DVD. It's apparently not uncommon for previews to swipe music from earlier movies when the released film has not yet finished being scored ("The Royal Tenenbaums" had the music reworked between the New York Film Festival and its commercial release, for example), but it's rarely so noticeable -- perhaps other musical selections aren't so distinctive.

A SITE WITH all the Futurama songs, plus the Fatboy Slim remix of the theme song.

LAST NIGHT, JULIA and I ended up at the last minute at a Christopher Hitchens reading on Orwell. Hitchens ended up not doing any reading, but, rather, had a discussion with the audience for a little over an hour. The proceedings opened with a moment of "silent outrage" for the victims of the Bali bombing. Hitchens, in a rumpled jacket, and in desperate desire to smoke the cigarette he was holding, was utterly charming. A lot of the questions were of the nature of "What would Orwell think about modern phenomenon X," which would permit Hitchens to riff about what he thought.

"Brothers and sisters. Comrades. Can I call you comrades? Good."

The "root causes" of the Bali bombing: "Australia's support for the independence of East Timor."

On globalization and Michael Moore: Hitchens, working off an Orwell quote about the poverty of colonial Burma, noted that free trade worked to make the poor peoples of the world not so poor. So what if Mexico now imports corn and beans, said Hitchens, if they're now exporting computers and cars? It's racist to say that Mexicans should be restricted to corn and that the jobs in Flint, Michigan are "American jobs" rather than just jobs for Mexicans and Filipinos to compete for. "I've never had the desire to dress up as a turtle or a Teamster."

On Islamofascism: Hitchens noted that Taliban Afghanistan was viewed as a model government by the Islamic fundamentalist movement, and wasn't that argument enough against it? "It's not just a question of means, it's a question of ends." Hitchens pointed out that Orwell had noted the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Fascists of his day. (Paraphrasing:) "There's something totalitarian about an all-powerful central figure who needs to be worshipped, who is always watching you, and whom you can never escape, even in death. Even in North Korea, you can get out from under the government with death. This is a sort of Celestial Korea."

On the lack of an Arabic translation of Animal Farm: "Animal Farm" has never been made available in the Islamic world because of the "porcine representations." "Never underestimate the power of a people with dietary restrictions."

I'm not even beginning to do the hour justice. I'm not one for author readings generally, but Hitchens is always entertaining. Surprised not to see any bloggers there, though there was a spitting image of Listen Missy a few seats away from us.

FOR MATT WELCH: A great story about the history of Thunderstix, which apparently originated with Korean baseball in the 1990s, and have made watching the Angels that much more entertaining. The Pac-10 spoilsports have banned them starting next year in college football.

THE CFR REPORT on Saudi funding of terrorism; the Washington Post summary.

WHY ARE PEOPLE standing still for two to three minutes as they're gassing their cars? Don't they understand there's a notch on the nozzle that allows you to fill the tank without personally holding it? I always multitask when I gas my car, what with windshields and headlights that invariably need cleaning in a smoggy city.

FEAR OF PUMPING GAS in DC. It somehow seems immoral to me to be asking for full-service gas if you wouldn't do so normally. That many gas station owners aren't charging extra for the privilege also goes to show something.

Me, I have a hybrid electric car, so I only gas up once or twice a month. I did wait for a windy night to get gas the last time, however. But I took my time to finish washing my windshield. There aren't any clear sight angles of 100 yards to the Hess on Wilson Boulevard.

I left work late tonight, and passed all the cars stuck on the north 395 as a swarm of police looked for vans--thousands of people must have been trapped for hours. I didn't know it at the time (though I marvelled that some people were so forlorn of making progress that they had switched off their car lights). I was listening to the baseball game. Kent had just gotten hit by a pitch, loading the bases for Barry Bonds, so instead of turning into my garage where I'd lose the signal, I continued on to the supermarket, and sat in the car for the remainder of the inning.

The supermarket was similarly deserted. The cashier wondered how she was going to get home with the 395 and the 66 shut down, and I reminded her about the Key Bridge.

In retrospect, the Seven Corners shooting seems inevitable. The name of the mall comes from the ludicrous number of intersecting roads there providing a potential escape route. (The shooting was at a mall in the southeastern wedge between the 50 and the 7.) And the shopping center there has a Michael's, if at the other end of the mall.

The eerie thing, of course, was that I was loitering in precisely that parking lot fifteen days ago, fitting an HVAC filter I had just bought into the trunk of my car.

I still don't see why they were blocking the north 395, but I suppose I'm lucky they didn't decide to block the south 395.

SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE SLOT MACHINES. I like Mark Evanier's line: "the Joe Piscopo machine is fun because, if you need change, Joe Piscopo himself brings it to you."

Stephen Ambrose Dies at 66.

TO RECAP EVENTS OF the last week: Jerry Falwell, asked point blank the question in a 60 Minutes interview, says "I think Muhammad was a terrorist. I read enough of the history of his life written by both Muslims and -- non-Muslims, (to know) that he was a -- a violent man, a man of war." Statement is broadcast; worldwide outrage; Muslim-led riots in India kill nine. Glenn Reynolds says

nasty remarks concerning religion have a historical tendency to cause violence that no one in Falwell's business should be able to miss. That's particularly so at present when the situation is tense to begin with. That's what made Falwell's remarks "dumb." (Well, it's one of the things that made them dumb).

Volokh and Buck have already commented; as Buck says,

If people who claim to follow a particular religion have a disproportionate tendency to inflict violence on others, and if the founder of that religion engaged in a great deal of violence during his own life on earth, it is incumbent on everyone else to refrain from pointing out these unfortunate facts, lest the adherents of that religion engage in even more violence. Huh?!?

This is a little strong, because Falwell also said "terrorist," which is a bit different than "warrior." And, given the Christian propensity for violence in the first thirteen centuries within its founding, Buck's use of "disproportionate" may not even be appropriate, even if the Christian Scriptures are of a more peaceful nature than the Koran.

That said, it's my turn now to come to the defense of Falwell, an unusual position for me to be in. Falwell has also made stupid criticisms of my fellow feminists and evolutionists. Somehow, however, the feminists and paleontologists have refrained from violent riots. As Volokh and Buck point out, the proximate cause here is the Muslim rioting, not the Falwell remarks. Moreover, that the Muslims riot like this in response should make them more susceptible to criticism than the feminists, not less.

I wonder if Glenn also feels that Salman Rushdie's book was "dumb" -- more people have died in Muslim rioting over that than for anything Falwell said, plus some perfectly useful bookstores in Berkeley were firebombed.

But let's assume for the moment that Falwell should know better and that saying "Mohammed is a terrorist" will "provoke" some lunatic imam in India to cause his congregation to riot.

Where does that put CBS? Not only did they ask the provocative question, they broadcast the provocative answer. That's two different places where they could have circumvented things. How could they not know any better than Falwell?

Falwell said what he said because he's stupid or because he was tired at the end of a long interview and made an impolitic remark. CBS broadcast it to make money.

Falwell said what he said on the spur of the moment with only a short time to reflect. (Pauses on television interviews make you look dishonest.) CBS had days to edit a 60-minute interview into parts of a 16-minute segment, and chose to highlight this remark.

For you "keg of dynamite" theorists out there, how is Falwell any more culpable than CBS?

Finally, imagine that CBS asked a different question: "Do you believe that Mohammed was divinely inspired?" or "Do you believe that the Koran is the received word of God?" Falwell is a Christian: he therefore has to say "No." CBS broadcasts this. Do you think the Muslim outrage over this equally blasphemous remark would be any different? Should sensitivity to Muslims (or to Muslim capacity for violence) keep Falwell from publicly speaking his religious beliefs?

THIS INTERACTIVE DEMO of optical illusions in light shading using computer graphics will enthrall you for, well, minutes.

TROMPE L'OEIL EXHIBIT in DC.

Los Angeles Delis vs. New York Delis.

X10 POP-UP ADS are bad enough, but the latest ones are really infuriating in their historical illiteracy. Can someone explain to me how X10 cameras at the Watergate would've saved the Nixon presidency?

MAYOR BLOOMBERG boycotts the Columbus Day parade, the first mayor in memory to do so, when the organizers sue to keep him from inviting Lorraine Bracco from marching with him.

I'M SEEING OBJECTIONS TO THE plan to use an American military government to lead the transition in Iraq to democracy on the grounds of "colonialism."

My reaction: so what?

What's wrong with a little colonialism? Are people saying that the brown peoples of Iraq aren't worthy of Western-style democracy and freedoms?

I can't think of a better route to peace in the region than the installation of a peaceful freedom-loving Arab government in the Middle East to serve as an aspirational alternative to sharia.

And I would love to see any of these so-called opponents to colonialism speak out against Wahhabist colonialism in Europe or Afghanistan (or the repeated Arab desire to colonize Israel by force and commit genocide in the process). The failure to do so shows that the objection is not to colonialism but to the West and to democracy. It's frankly appalling and close to racist to see people complaining that a repressive and murderous dictatorship might get replaced by a democracy because the people leading the transition aren't the same skin color as the victims of the totalitarian regime.

THE WEBSITE FOR "The Future is Wild", a television series speculating about future evolution coming to the Animal Planet channel in January.

CHARLES JOHNSON, CALL YOUR OFFICE. Captain Spaulding links to an ancient episode of The Lucy Show, but the interesting part of the link is the mysterious pop-up ad for...wait for it!...Saudi Arabia! With images of green doves, the pop-up, titled "The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia - allies against terrorism", invites people to sign up for a mailing list and visit aboutsaudiarabia.net. I imagine the only reason we haven't seen this pop-up sooner is that the newspapers have refused them? A shame, because I can't think of any way to alienate the American people faster than to blizzard them with pop-up ads. I suppose my real annoyance with pop-up ads is the decrepit memory features of Windows, and how opening and closing the new windows permanently sucks memory away, causing computer crashes and unnecessary reboots. I know, I know, get a Mac.

REUTERS ON THE SNIPER INVESTIGATION:

Quoting law enforcement sources, WUSA television reported that detectives who recovered a shell casing in woods near Monday's shooting, when a 13-year old boy was badly wounded, found a Tarot card known as the "Death Card" with a message scrawled on the back that read: "Dear Policeman, I am God."

"I am not going to talk about the investigation. I will not talk about the investigation, I will not put people in harm's way so that people can have good sound bites," Police Chief Charles Moose of Montgomery County, Maryland, told local television on Wednesday.

WUSA said Prince George County police declined comment on any evidence that might have been located. Contacted about the report, a police spokesman told Reuters that she could not confirm it.

But Moose reacted angrily when asked about the alleged message, saying he was disappointed at his own team.

"I would like to think that anything about the investigation would be run through me and released by me," the frustrated police chief said.

"Someone in the team, someone on the law enforcement community has done something I find very inappropriate. It indicates that I don't have control of the team," Moose added.

When will police learn that "I am disappointed that someone on the team has leaked this information" is a confirmation, and defeats the purpose of refusing to confirm the information? WaPo coverage; WashTimes missed the tarot card angle. Good news from the Post is that police are deeming "frivolous" attempts by "psychics" to help them.

I'VE SEEN MORE THAN one commentator excuse the $28 billion punitive damages award against Philip Morris on the grounds that Philip Morris had $72.9 billion in revenue (revenue, not profits) last year.

Philip Morris (MO) has $72.9 billion of revenue not just because of cigarettes, but because they sell a lot of cheese and coffee and cereal and beer and mayonnaise and Jell-O brand gelatin.

So any punitive damages award based on the size of MO's revenues is punishing Philip Morris for being successful at selling cheese. After all, if MO sold less cheese, then the punitive damages would be lower, right?

Yes, punitive damages need to make the tortfeasor feel the sting: I need a larger punitive damages award to deter Warren Buffett from deliberately smashing in my windshield than I do for the guy from the "Bumfights" video. But that rationale doesn't apply to corporations that are being punished for selling products. If they are large, it is because either (1) they sell a lot of innocuous products, and shouldn't be punished for that, or (2) they sell a lot of sinister products, and they will face punitive damages in a lot of other lawsuits. If Philip Morris did something wrong to this lady, there are 10,000 other people that they did something wrong to. If each of those cases award $3 million in punitives, then Philip Morris feels the sting appropriately.

It would be one thing if the $28 billion were a one-time punitive damages award, and Philip Morris would never be punished again. But there are hundreds of other lawsuits from smokers, each of which is seeking punitive damages, and not one of which will be precluded from doing so by this jury's award. This jury's award is thus unreasonably high, because it's punishing Philip Morris for being big than for doing something wrong. There is absolutely no economic rationale to have punitive damages for products liability be more than some reasonable multiple of actual damages.

Of course, actual damages are inappropriate here, also. There's no evidence that the sine qua non of this woman's smoking was Philip Morris's behavior, as opposed to her lack of willpower. Lots of people quit smoking with encouragement from the cigarette companies. Lots of people smoke now even though cigarette companies frankly admit that smoking is dangerous. (Indeed, according to Kip Viscusi, smokers overestimate the risk of smoking.)

I don't smoke, I get annoyed at people who smoke in front of me on a moving escalator, but I still recognize this as a dangerous dangerous case. If the government has the power to randomly swoop in and take a third of your revenues for the year, well, that's a huge disincentive to doing business or investing in a business that can face such confiscatory policies. The same is true when the government's power is backed by a random assortment of twelve underemployed people and a judge who hates corporations. This isn't just cigarettes, it's hospitals, auto manufacturers, food sellers, retail stores, banks, etc. Jury verdicts like this do more damage to the economy than a hundred Ken Lays.

A SAUDI EMIGRE CAMPAIGNS against Saudi intolerance: "America must come and force reform on us, because we are incapable of it." (via Corsair)

A COLLEAGUE TRIED TO talk to me about the New Jersey Supreme Court decision today, and I waved him off, on the grounds that I was old and cynical, and I have come to accept that a bunch of state court judges are going to throw the law out the window to come to a preferred result. It's part of what I call the Judge Judy-ization of the law: judges ignoring legal principles and acting as Solons to dispense rough justice on a case-by-case basis. Editorial page writers will be pleased with some opinions, displeased with others, and the judges feel more important. And, in their role as enlightened despots and philosopher-kings, the New Jersey Supreme Court came to a pretty good decision: let's let a new candidate enter the election.

Now it goes to the U.S. Supreme Court, and there are no happy results: the Court can follow its role and place in federal law and do nothing, which would be procedurally correct on their end, but leave in place the procedural disaster of the New Jersey Supreme Court. Or, they can repeat the Bush v. Gore fiasco, and correct the wild mistakes of a state court, at the expense of the politicization of the institution. This would actually be worse than Bush v. Gore, since there was at least a federal interest that the Court protected by reversing the ugly and even more unforgivable Florida Supreme Court decision.

Of course, if you care about things like the law and consistency in application of the law and separation of powers, Professor Volokh dismantles the New Jersey opinion in a few short paragraphs. Volokh goes on to suggest in later entries, correctly in my view, that there really isn't much of a federal reason for the Supreme Court to take this case.

The Professor's mistake is presuming (if, perhaps, only for the sake of argument) that this opinion is anything other than sui generis.

The thing is, though, that if judges are going to create new law on a case-by-case basis, well, that's not only bad for those of us who would like the law to be predictable so that we can advise our clients on how best to act within the law, but it also brings into full relief the undemocratic nature of most courts, and the executive branch will be hard-pressed to complain when the legislative branch wants to put a little more scrutiny into its duty to advise and consent to judicial nominations. Maybe it's not enough to be a brilliant and fair-minded law professor, a la Michael McConnell, if that law professor has policy views that differ stringently from the mainstream on issues like abortion and church-state separation, a la Michael McConnell.

In an ideal world, judges act as judges, and McConnell is a more than appropriate choice for the bench. But if judges are going to be overriding legislative policy, my standards change.

The breakdown exhibited by the New Jersey Supreme Court is problematic for other reasons. If the New Jersey Supreme Court is not bound by the policy decisions of the legislature, on what grounds are the lower courts bound by the decisions of the New Jersey Supreme Court?

EUGENE VOLOKH steals my thunder by blogging just about word for word what I was going to say about Dahlia Lithwick's interesting Slate piece on Winona Ryder. To wit: good piece, unfair slam at Ken Starr. Adding what Volokh left out: Starr, a former solicitor general, gave up a $2 million/year law practice to take what he viewed to be a public service position. Whatever his faults as special counsel in the Whitewater affair (faults magnified by the Clintons' strategy of an unprecedented stonewall of failing to cooperate), Starr wasn't doing it for personal glory, and cannot be said to have improved his career prospects by his actions. Starr made himself political mud, costing him a shot at a Supreme Court seat, and returning to his law firm at a sharply reduced salary.

I LIKE THE supposed top Belgian joke.

Why do ducks have webbed feet?
To stamp out fires.

Why do elephants have flat feet?
To stamp out burning ducks.

HEY, LILEKS! A MARVELOUS SITE WITH Warner and Disney World War II propaganda cartoons that never get shown on television, either because of the Japanese racial stereotypes, or the disturbing image of Donald Duck wearing a swastika and heiling Hitler, or because we are friends with Germany and we have always been friends with Germany.

I HAVE TO SAY THAT the recent Montgomery County shootings have really highlighted the worst aspects of blogs -- lots of uninformed speculation and unfounded conclusion-jumping. I read all sorts of scenarios drawn from the supposed fact that the victims were killed with one shot each (not so: one shooting didn't kill anyone; the Sarah Ramos shooting left a bullet-hole in a window); that the killings used a super-bullet that left no blood (contradicted by witnesses who saw blood); that the newspapers were hiding the race of the victims (not so); that the newspapers were hiding the race of the gunmen when there's no sign that anyone has seen the gunman or gunmen. The Bryan Preston post that C-Boy linked to was interesting in its discussion of al Qaeda terror tactics -- but Preston completely overstates the claim that the scenarios described in the terror-training tape had any similarity to the shooting spree. They didn't. Is the urge to get an Instalink so great that people feel compelled to rush to be the first add to the noise surrounding the signal? What I read in blogs today subtracted from the discourse rather than added to it.

YOU KNOW, I AM A FIRM believer against discrimination on the basis of skin color, but, upon further reflection, I need to make an exception when the skin color (in this case, blue), is the result of self-induced stupidity.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES, EXAMPLE No. 736. The federal Equal Access Act for Secondary Schools, designed in reaction to urban legends of Christian clubs not being allowed to meet in school, also requires acceptance of the Satanist Thought Society, and local Christians are shocked that such a club is in the high school.

SOMALI WOMEN'S RIGHTS ACTIVIST faces death threats in the Netherlands for criticizing Muslim attitudes towards women. According to another piece,

[One publication interviewed] Ali Eddaoudi, a writer and prison chaplain here in The Netherlands. According to him, "Hirsi Ali has created this problem herself". He accuses her of flirting with the Dutch and telling them what they want to hear. "She wants to be popular without weighing-up the consequences. You can't just say whatever you want, she's hurting people badly" he claims as justification for the threats.

NEAL POLLACK has stopped channelling Andrew Sullivan and is now channelling Tom Tomorrow, with hilarious consequences.

LITERATE SPEED METAL.

BIG POTHOLE.

DISTURBING LIST OF ANTI-SEMITIC incidents at the University of Chicago.

I AM SURPRISED TO learn that it is suddenly a controversial proposition that Supreme Court clerks are screened on ideology. The issue arose in the Estrada hearings.

My appellate clerkship was for a prominent Reagan appointee. I was made to understand that, as a result, I had no hope for a clerkship with the three most liberal justices on the bench in the early 1990s. It was well known that the clerks for these justices blocked resumes from those without sufficient left credentials from getting considered. (I was similarly disqualified from Justice Thomas's consideration because I had not been a member of the Federalist Society.) The only reason to apply was an anecdote that Justice O'Connor had been offended by a candidate that had failed to apply to every single justice for a clerkship. (She didn't select me, either.)

The Senate has the power to advise and consent to judicial nominations, and if they want to screen nominees on ideology, they're certainly entitled: there's no question Estrada was picked on ideological grounds. It's an ugly thing, however, if he's retroactively disqualified for something he did that was considered of no moment in the 1990's. If he was screening candidates for Kennedy, it was because Kennedy wanted him to, and there's no indication that Estrada was acting outside the scope of his agency.

MORE ON THE North Korean kidnappings of Japanese.

THE ESPN.COM READERS' POLL for coaches looks suspiciously like a quarter of the respondents didn't understand the system and voted alphabetically, which was enough to put Rick Adelman over the top.

LIBERALS WHO understand partial derivatives are invited to speak out in the comments section, and we'll forward it on to Rep. Dick Armey.

I FRANKLY THINK it's insane to say anyone but Alex Rodriguez should be AL MVP, but it's still nice to see two Oakland A's go to bat for Rodriguez. How can Miguel Tejada be the most valuable player when he's not even the most valuable shortstop? If Rodriguez doesn't get the award, it'll be the third MVP he's been cheated out of in his short career.

COMMENTS SEEM TO be working again. Apologies to those who were inconvenienced. Not that it was my fault or anything.

INSTAPUNDIT CITES GARY FARBER for the proposition that the wave has a Mexican origin, but this seems to be incorrect. The Hungarian researchers Gary refers to mentioned the Wave as beginning in the 1986 World Cup. But the Wave was being performed at the University of Washington as early as 1981, and was widespread throughout the United States by 1984. It's likely that the Mexicans picked it up from the Americans, and that the Europeans were not aware of the phenomenon until the 1986 World Cup.

Here's another recollection of the first Wave.

On the other hand, this other guy claims to have invented the Wave weeks earlier at an Oakland playoff game in 1981. (Another article, also mentioning the Hungarian research, and hinting at an earlier date.) Regardless, it predates the 1986 World Cup.

A NEW YORK TIMES piece about Division I-AA college football team Wofford, playing powerhouse Maryland this week. It seems like it's out of a throwaway gag in "Radio Days," but Wofford's leading receiver is legally blind.

THE UTTER RIDICULOUSNESS OF the government's smallpox vaccination plan makes me wonder why the heck they're not making vaccine available in advance to those who want it. Instead of trying to vaccinate 200 million people in a week, you could offer the vaccine to anyone willing to sign a waiver--or pass a law with the same effect as a waiver. Charge people $20 each. You vaccinate a bunch of people now, it reduces the risk that the disease gets widely spread in case of an attack, and you reduce the likelihood of a massive logistical snafu that creates panic.

TONY BLAIR'S 65-PAGE dossier on Iraq. (pdf file)

IF I WERE TO DELIBERATELY cause thousands of gallons of gasoline to be burned and hundreds of pounds of NOx and carbon monoxide to be released for no constructive purpose, I would correctly be accused of creating an environmental disaster; there might even be clean air laws prohibiting me from taking such an action. If I were to conspire with others to trap a person intentionally and deliberately for any length of appreciable time in a small compartment against his or her will, you might just call me a kidnapper.

If, on the other hand, I were to conspire with others to trap thousands of people for hours in their cars in a massive traffic jam against their will, well, that just makes me a clever anti-capitalist protestor. And people call capitalism amoral. It's a bloody crying shame that D.C. police give no indication of being willing to enforce the laws and arrest people who are blocking the streets.

P.S. What the heck is with the Washington Post calling one demonstration "a protest and street theater against a rush to war in Iraq" (emphasis added)? Can't the reporters parse from more than a press release and figure out that the demonstrators probably wouldn't exactly be in favor of American force being used against Iraq even if a more deliberative process were used?

STUART BUCK, CALL YOUR OFFICE. A new group is hoping to break the educational monopoly on a scientific "theory" being taught in Georgia science classes, and give equal time to their intelligent grappling theory.

A Georgia group calling itself Teachers for Equal Time has asked that stickers be placed in all new physics textbooks which note that mutual attraction and relativity are not the only theories available to explain gravity and should not be taken as fact.

Teachers for Equal Time hopes that the addition of the warning stickers will pave the way for the teaching of its alternative theory, Intelligent Grappling, the theory that certain intelligent and conscious agents "push" things together.

"Mutual attraction has had a monopoly on the truth for too long," said Dr. Sternberg, "it is time we let children see all of the theories."

"I'm not saying they're little angels," says Dr Sternberg, "Intelligent Grappling only says that conscious agents are the cause of all apparent 'gravitic' phenomenon. There's no religion involved."

More details here.

Intelligent Design says that there is a non-naturalistic,
conscious designer at work at the biological level. Intelligent
Grappling says that there is a non-naturalistic, conscious grappler at
the physicial level. Accepting a naturalistic explanation for one
phenomenon but a non-naturalistic explanation for another is a
philosophically corrupt position and we do not advocate it.

RICH GET RICHER UPDATE: Only 58 members of the original Forbes 400 list of the 400 wealthiest Americans are still on the list twenty years later. As I've said all along, comparing the proportion of wealth held by the top x% over time is misleading, because the composition of those percentiles is in flux.

CAN I ASK WHY the heck jurors didn't say something during a six-week trial when the defective juror could be replaced by an alternate?

I hope the accused juror is prosecuted for perjury, but it's California, so perhaps it's just par for the course.

Ex-State Dept. Worker Pleads Guilty in Attack. Elizabeth Morgan had advised the woman's friend that she had three options in her custody battle involving numerous unfounded accusations of child abuse: obey the court orders, flee with her children, or kill her ex-husband. (It's amazing how little publicity Elsa Newman's conviction received--I just learned about it today. I think the Washington Post kind of passed right on over it. Kudos to Maryland for getting this resolved in the same calendar year as the shooting.)

UPDATE: Update.

GIVE JACK STRAW CREDIT for getting Iraq correct in March. Why don't we have any American leaders being this eloquent?

NEAL POLLACK HAS added permalinks! So I can blog his latest marvelous entry, the following paragraph of which is only the tip of the iceberg:

Meanwhile, I have an annoucement to make regarding my next novel, Hurts So Good, a sequel to Hot To Trot. Because of my dissatisfaction with corporate publishing and chain bookstores, I'm going to release this novel myself, in a limited edition. There will be only five copies printed on golden tickets which will be wrapped around selected candy bars and placed in vending machines at state-university sororities, largely in the south.

The HisTory of Michael Jackson's face.

TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES still has a Bob Greene page, complete with offers of "Product Samples," nyuk nyuk.

THE LA TIMES FINALLY COVERED the West Hollywood attack by Muslims against Jews. Apparently someone even videotaped it, which makes you wonder why the local news haven't been broadcasting the "Kill the Jews" chant instead of the woman smacking her child in the mall parking lot.

RWANDA HAS BECOME increasingly Muslim in the wake of Christian complicity in the genocide there. Of concern is the Saudi Wahhabi influence.

THE GUY WHO did the music in that Volkswagen commercial.

I HAVEN'T SEEN ANY press coverage of this week-old Los Angeles hate crime of a beating by Middle Easterners chanting "Kill the Jews!" Not even in the LA Examiner. What's up with that? (via Facts of Israel)

READER MAIL:

Max,

C'mon, you've been around government long enough to know why the sales tax is needed.
If No. VA is anything like CA, and it surely was in the mid-70's when I lived in Metro DC, a substantial portion of the gas tax is diverted to underwrite various government enabled transportation systems. ie: the vaunted but sucks Metro and all of the commuter bus services serving the government worker commuters at a loss as well as the "don't have an evil car" crowd who are more than happy to suck off the over-taxed vehicle owner.

I think the VA motorist would be more than satisfied if all the state's gas taxes, motor vehicle use taxes, license fees etc. were only spent on VA's highways and roads.

Actually, a big chunk of the sales tax is going to the Metro, so that's not a reason not to prefer a gas tax. (I wasn't around for the mid-70s edition of the Metro, but the current model does a pretty good job of keeping cars off the road and reducing congestion, and could do an even better job with some more money: for example, I would take the Metro if they expanded the six-car Orange-line trains to eight cars, and I didn't feel like a sardine in the morning.)

A gas tax, unlike a sales tax, would encourage use of public transportation and carpooling (as well as more fuel-efficient cars, which would reduce DC smog); therefore, government would need to raise less money to solve the transportation problems in the area.

APPLE COMPUTER OPENED its first store in Houston at 10:00 AM Saturday, and by 10:08, the TeraBlogger was already blogging how underwhelmed he was. They clearly need training from the folks in the Minneapolis branch.

THE OLD EXPLODING SCOREBOARD at the Astrodome. I had forgotten that the home run display lasted 45 seconds.

EUGENE VOLOKH has been having fun occasionally with the lame Bushisms that Slate sometimes runs, but it doesn't really change the underlying principle of how inarticulate Bush can be.

There's a lot of talk about Iraq on our TV screens, and there should be, because we're trying to figure out how best to make the world a peaceful place. There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again.

(via Zilber)

FOR LAN3, a WSJ A-hed on school restrooms. (also via Jacobs)

SOMEONE ELSE IS fed up with San Francisco. (via Jacobs)

THE AMERICAN PROSPECT suggests that no one has actually read William Langewiesche's three-part series on the clean-up of the WTC site. Which is perhaps true: I haven't seen anyone comment on his revelation deep in the third part that one of the firetrucks retrieved from the rubble was staffed by firemen who were clearly in the midst of looting jeans from a Gap store in the Center when the truck was suddenly buried by the collapse of the South Tower, with piles of pants still in the drivers' compartment, where they were retrieved, months later, still neatly folded.

THE MIRACLE OF Canadian health care.

IT WAS VERY KIND of the Washington Post to endorse a Virginia sales tax increase to pay for transportation improvements. If they made it a gas tax, I'd vote for it. When it's a sales or income tax, heck no: tax the people who use the roads the most, rather than those of us who have made the investment to live close to the city to avoid putting stress on the road system with a lengthy commute.

HARVARD PRESIDENT LAWRENCE SUMMERS'S speech on campus anti-Semitism.

FURTHER EVIDENCE OF the Big Bang.

"THE MINUTEMAN" SUMMARIZES blogging on the Central Park Jogger case. One thing I haven't seen anyone focus on is the execrable way in which the rape-defendants handled their trial: I have never seen anyone innocent engage in the sort of ludicrous and offensive blame-the-victim tactics that these defendants did, and that, as much as anything, keeps me skeptical of their renewed claims of innocence.

I do want to comment on this innumerate post:

As Jeralyn points out, false confessions account for 20 percent of wrongful convictions. That's an unconscionable number.

Uh, no, it's not. For example, if there were a million accurate confessions, and five wrongful convictions, and one of those five was a false confession, that would hardly be unconscionable, even though it's 20 percent of the faulty convictions. The appropriate number to consider is the ratio of accurate confessions to coerced confessions. "Twenty pecent of wrongful convictions involve coerced confessions" tells me nothing, and certainly doesn't imply a 20% error rate for confessions.

Most importantly: why is everyone assuming that the Central Park Jogger confessions are coerced? The confessions were videotaped with the parents present. Five separate times for five separate people, who corroborated each other's stories in detail, one of whom led police to the crime scene where the jogger was found. I have yet to hear what additional safeguards the police should have pursued in the Central Park wilding case that they didn't, and how those objecting to those results want to handle future confessions.

What still appalls me is that any of the wilding perpetrators are out on the street. Only by the happenstance that they didn't actually kill anybody (though they sure came close) did they get five-year sentences. So I'm disgusted when I hear people moaning that the rapists lost a few years of their life. Even if they were over-punished for the rape (and I'm far from convinced that they were), they were compensated more than enough for the lack of punishment for their felony assaults.

SPEAKING OF NEW BLOGS, Neal Pollack has been doing a hilarious Andrew Sullivan impersonation. Alas, I can't permalink his take on the Bob Greene case, but it's worth reading.

SPEAKING OF REASON, they have a quasi-blog.

NICE REASON PIECE taking down the Carl Bogus book defending plaintiffs' lawyers. Bogus has apparently written a book about the good plaintiffs' lawyers do without once mentioning the American Trial Lawyers Association.

I'M NOT A BIG Janet Reno fan, but VodkaPundit's characterization of her as a "killer of religious minorities" is appalling. There's something known as proximate cause, and if the Branch Davidians hadn't decided to immolate themselves, they'd be alive today -- as is the case with every single one of the child hostages David Koresh released before he sent his compound up in flames. I'm not going to blame Janet Reno for that.

WASHINGTON'S LEGISLATURE FAILED to amend its voyeurism laws when California learned the hard way that its laws failed to cover perverts who surreptitiously videotape up women's skirts, and was forced to reverse some convictions as a result. The talk show hosts are in an uproar, but the statute is pretty clear that a woman in a geographically public place isn't covered by the law. That four women signed on to the unanimous opinion (and that the prosecutor admitted he wasn't surprised) shows that this really isn't a controversial question.

THIS GUATEMALAN FRIED CHICKEN chain has had small successes in the United States catering directly to the Latin American immigrant market. I'd be curious what makes their chicken so different from American fast-food chicken that one woman could cover her plane fare from Guatemala to the US by taking along a couple of duffle bags of chicken and reselling it. (Indeed, they get their chicken in the U.S. from Sysco.)

There's clearly a pricing problem if the American stores have two-hour lines and rationing, though.

WE HAVE ADDED A COMMENTS feature to make it easier for readers to leave feedback.

COMPARE "TUMBLING WOMAN" to Kahlo's The Suicide of Dorothy Hale.

What the "Tumbling Woman" controversy tells me is that I best not be hearing any New Yorkers giving my flyover-country peeps attitude over their Philistine reactions to Mapplethorpe et al. New Yorkers can be as reactionary as the rest of us, my favorite example of which is the 1973 Carnegie Hall riot over Steve Reich's "Four Organs."

WHEN IN JAPAN, do not use your business card as a toothpick.