The people who organize Veteran's Day Parades do so to honor veterans. When you decide to stop doing that, it stops being a Veteran's Day parade, and just becomes a pro-war parade that happens to be held on Veteran's Day.

I'm not arguing that this group had a "right" to participate: it was, after all, a private parade. I do, however, think that men and women who have served their country deserve, at the very least, to have their voices heard on the day dedicated to them. They've earned that much, if not more.

PG offers this as well:

It is contradictions of one's understood purpose that I am protesting. I would never attempt legal action to make the VFW associate with vets whose views the VFW found objectionable. I do, however, attempt moral rhetoric to make the VFW understand why they appear to be contradicting their own purpose.

As I understand it, Veterans Day honors our nation's veterans. It is not intended to honor the particular wars in which they fought. Indeed, I consider it necessary to remove consideration of the particular wars so we can honor all veterans regardless of the justice of the war in which they fought.

I think the VFW is very, very wrong not to see that one can "hate the war and love the soldier." This is what I was addressing in my comment and post. An organization that claims to be for veterans yet cannot encompass this understanding is a lousy organization.

The central problem with these sorts of conclusions is that they do not appear to be supported by the facts whatsoever. Their entire position is built on a counterfactual hypothetical scenario that does not in any way resemble the facts as they actually unfolded.

As near as I can tell from the press account, the VFW was not marching in support of the war at all. The parade offered no opinion on the war and was not organized to do so. It was just honoring veterans in general. It was unconnected with and apparently adopted no position on the present administration's military campaigns.

This is typical of Veterans Day parades. They generally espouse no political positions. Veterans of all stripes and beliefs are allowed to march in them. They are not celebrations of the current war, any other war, or war in general. In short, the VFW was not conveying a message about the present war one way or another. The event's sole focus was on honoring and supporting veterans.

The anti-war veterans showed up to this parade, but they were not content to merely honor and support veterans. They had a dual message: that they supported the veterans and were against the war. It was the anti-war veterans that showed up with an additional unwanted and controversial political message. This was bound to provoke, as the war is a contentious issue. Moreover, by injecting a subject matter into the parade that had nothing to do with the event, these anti-war veterans were effectively transforming an apolitical parade into a political march.

Mind you, the VFW did not exclude anti-war veterans from the parade simply because they, in good conscience, oppose the war. It excluded anti-war veterans who attempted to transform a simple procession honoring veterans into a platform for propagating views that the VFW did not care to convey and for which the parade was not organized. Although it is obvious from the VFW leaders quoted in the article that they find the anti-war position to be contemptible, a careful reader will note that nothing in the story indicates that the VFW was leading a pro-war parade.

So when Ampersand and PG complain of the VFW's failure to abide by its mission (of honoring veterans) or of excluding veterans with certain viewpoints from the parade, their criticism is wildly off the mark. Like all national holidays, Veterans Day is a non-partisan affair. We do not use occasions like it, Memorial Day, or the Fourth of July to make partisan political points or engage in contentious moral disputation. We do not do so precisely because such rancorous debates have no place on an occasion that is for Americans of all creeds. Veterans Day is indeed about honoring veterans, so why couldn't these anti-war veterans content themselves with doing so, rather than using the occasion to fulminate on a controversial issue at a venue devoted to an entirely different apolitical event?

This is the proper context for considering the VFW's expulsion of the anti-war veterans. There is nothing "despicable" (Ampersand's original description) about refusing to allow others to transform an apolitical event into a political one, particularly when the political position being advanced is one that the VFW does not agree with and does not care to endorse. To argue that the VFW is in the wrong on this matter, one has to essentially believe that it has no right to object to the naked politicization of its events, and that it has no right to not advance a political position that it finds distasteful. This wrongheaded condemnation of the VFW is what led me to criticize Ampersand's and PG's position in the first place.

Doesn't look good so far-- 543,211 to 506,901 (Blanco leading) with 3/4 of the precincts reporting . . .

UPDATE: 589,789 to 543,876 . . .
UPDATE AGAIN: That's pretty much that.

How to find the results of today's contests:

Jindal v Blanco:
No precint has reported yet. Polls close at 8p. Thanks to Oxblog for the link.

#3 LSU at Alabama:
Kickoff is at 6:45pm EST.

Bobby Jindal is everywhere-- even in the acknowledgments of books by Ronald Dworkin.

Some time ago I bashed this Dinesh D'Souza piece on Kantians against Atheism. It turns out Dennett's defended himself too, shortly and sweetly.

[Not that I intend to defend this whole nonsense about renaming atheists "brights"]

This week's New York Times contains a glowing review of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's autobiography (for sale in the sidebar over there), which is hopefully going to be the first of a trilogy (if he holds out against cancer for long enough). I'm only part of the way through it, but it's enchanting so far.

I saw it in the bookstore and told myself that it was too expensive to buy right now. Then I read the first three or four pages while standing there and told myself it was only money.

One note: I think that those who have read a lot of Marquez's other work-- especially Love in the Time of Cholera (his best), and 100 Years of Solitude-- will get a lot more out of it. In other words, this is the deep end.

This week's Ethicist column contains the following dilemma:

I am a physician. A school-bus driver admitted to the E.R. was agitated, paranoid and threatening, and his urine was positive for recent cocaine use. Over the next six months, he was admitted twice more in a similar condition. I told him that his cocaine use could endanger his passengers; he shrugged it off, saying that he uses only during his off hours. I refused to sign a form giving him medical clearance to return to driving and still consider him a threat to the kids. The hospital lawyer said I could not report him to his employer, citing patient confidentiality. What do you think?
Anonymous, Connecticut

Physicians should be loath to violate patient confidentiality. A person is unlikely to seek medical care if doing so means he'll lose his job or receive a visit from the cops. You should breach confidentiality only if your patient presents a serious, imminent threat to himself or others and if there is no gentler way to deter that threat. Alas, you seem to be in such a situation....

Is it disrespectful to America's troops to oppose the War in Iraq? Is it disrespectful to make one's opposition public, marching about with leaflets? Is it disrespectful to our veterans to use a day for the celebration of veterans as a platform for advertising one's disagreement? These, are, I think hard questions, and ones on which reasonable people can disagree.

In fact, reasonable people are dis-agreeing. At issue is a Veterans for Foreign Wars parade where the VFW kicked out a couple of anti-war veterans groups. Ampersand says that it's despicable. PG says that it's definitely legal, but that it's "a denial of their own stated mission". Our guest The Curmudgeonly Clerk writes that the right to not associate or to not speak "is essential to the preservation of a fundamental right, not some mere legal technicality," and "It would be authoritarian to require the VFW to involuntarily adopt, associate with, or distribute a political or moral message with which it disagreed." Unlearned Hand thinks The Clerk's argument is "not... fair or honest to the points that Ampersand and PG were really making. . . . The point they are making is very simple: it seems strange, and perhaps morally wrong, to organize a parade ostensibly to celebrate veterans and then exclude particular veterans because they oppose the current war. "

Take a deep breath.

All right. I think The Clerk's point is more relevant than Unlearned Hand gives him credit for. Yes, it's true that the VFW haven't violated anyone's constitutional rights, and everybody seems to concede that. As The Clerk further points out, not only have the VFW not violated anybody's rights, but anybody who tried to make them do otherwise would be violating theirs. That's not inherently dispositive, of course-- there are lots of despicable things one can do by exercising one's First Amendment rights. But it should at least stop one to think. Why do we think it's a good thing to protect the rights against compelled speech and association? Because we think it's very important to be able for private people and bodies to pick what they want to say and how exactly they want to say it.

Now it seems to me like the "this is despicable" criticism must therefore be divided into one of two broad groups. Either it's bad to exclude the anti-war groups from the parade because excluding them isn't really related to the message of honoring veterans on Veterans Day, or it's bad to exclude them because whatever belief the anti-war veterans oppose is wrong on the merits.

PG writes that this was "a denial of their own stated mission." Ampersand writes "it's not about honoring veterans, as it claims to be. It's about honoring veterans with 'patriotically correct' opinions." Both Ampersand and PG miss the VFW's point. The VFW thinks that opposing the war on Veteran's Day isn't "honorable" to veterans. This isn't a denial of their mission, it's just that Ampersand and PG don't like the VFW's interpretation of its own mission.

Now, the VFW hasn't (so far as I know) explained why it thinks that opposing the war is dishonorable to those who fought in it and other wars, but I think it has two good arguments. The first is that it's generally disrespectful to hijack one cause's celebration for another. Just as it's wrong for the anti-war folks to use a Valentine's Day parade to publicize their anti-war views, or the KKK to use a July 4th parade to spread a message of hatred, the VFW could reasonably believe that the presence of anti-war groups will attract attention to the wrong parts of the event. (The VFW wasn't, so far as I know, kicking out veterans who happened to be anti-war but were marching in other parts of the parade. It only kicked out those groups whose very purpose/message was anti-war).

I'm not sure how strong this argument is as applied here-- it depends a lot on the precise facts. But there's a second argument the VFW can make-- that it's disrespectful to oppose the war on a day of remembrance for our veterans, that it's not a legitimate way of honoring them at all. Look, the VFW could say, you may oppose this war, you may oppose a lot of wars, but this is what a lot of our veterans gave parts (or all) of their lives to, this is what we're honoring them for having done. To say that the mission itself was not a worthy one cats a pall and a shadow on all that they've acheived, it says that while they may have been worthy men they didn't complete worthy ends. That's not the way we want to honor our veterans and we aren't going to do it that way. If you want to do it your own way, have your own parade.

Now, this is a very controversial and interesting position, and I'm not sure I agree with it myself, but it's a perfectly reasonable position for VFW to have, and I don't think it's "despicable" at all. And this gets back to the Curmudgeonly Clerk's argument, which is more relevant than Unlearned Hand gives it credit. The rights to not speak and not associate are important not just because they're things we have to do because the Constitution says so. They represent values that we ought to support. You can and should feel free to disagree with the VFW's opinion on the merits, but you shouldn't disagree with the way they've chosen to express that opinion.

And the opinion that anti-war is anti-veteran is certainly arguable, and possibly even wrong, but I, for one, think it's going overboard to suggest that it's "immoral". (Especially if the VFW (rightly) thought that other veterans would be sickened or hurt by the anti-war displays-- one such veteran is quoted in the FTU article).

UPDATE:

Unlearned Hand, in a new post, makes much too much of my comment that "You can and should feel free to disagree with the VFW's opinion on the merits, but you shouldn't disagree with the way they've chosen to express that opinion."

Let me rephrase what I said far too clumsily. Ampersand's, PG's, and Unlearned Hand's disagreement with the choice to kick veterans out of the parade amounts to disagreement with the substance of VFW's position. Indeed, it's rare (but not unheard of) that people seriously criticize the way somebody has chosen to express their opinion unless they also disagree with some part of that opinion themself.

Unlearned Hand drags out example after example, The Klan, Nazis, etc., and there's nothing wrong with criticizing those terrible things but what makes cross-burning and Nazi marches despicable isn't the fact that they involve burning pieces of wood, or marching up and down the street. What makes this despicable is what they're saying. So what I was trying to say above, and will here reiterate, is that this argument should rest on the merits of the VFW's opnion about respect and the war. Hopefully we can all agree that if the VFW's position were correct-- if they were, say, a black pride march keeping the KKK out-- that there would be no problem.

This brings us to Unlearned Hand's other error. I wrote, ". . . you shouldn't disagree with the way they've chosen to express that opinion." (emphasis new). I may not have made this clear enough (though I hoped I had), but I don't mean to generalize that claim to all claims. There are plenty of examples of acceptable messages being conveyed in despicable manners-- but the examples that Unlearned Hand gives aren't (his examples all involve despicable messages). But we could come up with some if we wanted.

In other words, kicking people out of a parade because they don't support what the parade does is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Thus, in this case what should be at issue is whether or not the message of the parade (and the VFW's decision about who supported that message) was correct, incorrect, or despicable.

This isn't because I hold some mysterious Anti-First Amendment principle like the one Unlearned Hand made up, it's because this particular means is perfectly reasonable, it's the end that's (rightly) up for debate.

Personally, I think VFW's decision might be correct or incorrect, but it probably isn't despicable. If others disagree then let's move the debate to the merits, and get away from the red herrings.

TALLAHASSEE—A group of 30 military veterans critical of the war in Iraq hoped to use Tuesday's Veterans Day parade to call attention to the increasingly deadly conflict but instead found themselves fighting for something much more fundamental.

* * *

Parade chairman Ken Conroy, a Korean War veteran, said he ejected the anti-war veterans because they were offensive and because Tallahassee police also wanted them removed. He offered to refund their $10 registration fee and said he was not suppressing the group's free speech rights.

"They can have their free speech, just not in the parade," Conroy said. "They belong on the sidewalk."

* * *

Tallahassee police Sgt. David Folsom denied police played any role in the situation and said Tuesday was the first time he could recall anyone being excluded from the parade.

* * *

"We don't care where they are, as long as they're somewhere else," said Charles LeCroy, an Air Force personnel superintendent in Vietnam and second vice commander of American Legion Post 13 in Tallahassee. "It's disrespectful, that's what it is, and I just can't stomach or tolerate or conceive of it."

It is pretty clear that these folks were thrown out precisely for the views that they were espousing. What's less clear is at whose instigation the ejection occurred. The police deny any involvement. Given that the VFW officials have envinced general contempt for the ejected veterans, the assumption that it was they rather than law enforcement authorities who were behind the expulsion does not tax the imagination.

Of this brouhaha, Ampersand writes that it is "despicable." PG concedes that the VFW's conduct is legal, but declares that its legality does not make it right. I think that both are incorrect. Although I am firm believer in broad, nearly absolutist free speech rights, both Ampersand and PG are overlooking necessary corollaries of our constitutional speech rights—freedom of association and freedom from compelled speech. PG's argument about legality misses the point by failing to notice that this is a situation in which multiple parties claim to enjoy speech rights at the same venue. The First Amendment provides a clear solution to this conflict, one which is essential to the preservation of a fundamental right, not some mere legal technicality.

Perhaps, the best case to illustrate the point that I am trying to make is Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston, 515 U.S. 557 (1995). The case revolved around the exclusion of gay individuals from an ethnic pride parade who wished to march identified as gay members of Irish ethnicity. Notwithstanding a state public accomodations law, the Court held the exclusion to be constitutional for reasons that are equally applicable to the Veterans Day parade. Writing for a unanimous Court, Justice Souter opined:

The issue in this case is whether Massachusetts may require private citizens who organize a parade to include among the marchers a group imparting a message the organizers do not wish to convey. We hold that such a mandate violates the First Amendment.

* * *

In the case before us, however, the Massachusetts law has been applied in a peculiar way. Its enforcement does not address any dispute about the participation of openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual individuals in various units admitted to the parade. Petitioners disclaim any intent to exclude homosexuals as such, and no individual member of GLIB claims to have been excluded from parading as a member of any group that the Council has approved to march. Instead, the disagreement goes to the admission of GLIB as its own parade unit carrying its own banner. Since every participating unit affects the message conveyed by the private organizers, the state courts' application of the statute produced an order essentially requiring petitioners to alter the expressive content of their parade. Although the state courts spoke of the parade as a place of public accommodation once the expressive character of both the parade and the marching GLIB contingent is understood, it becomes apparent that the state courts' application of the statute had the effect of declaring the sponsors' speech itself to be the public accommodation. Under this approach any contingent of protected individuals with a message would have the right to participate in petitioners' speech, so that the communication produced by the private organizers would be shaped by all those protected by the law who wished to join in with some expressive demonstration of their own. But this use of the State's power violates the fundamental rule of protection under the First Amendment, that a speaker has the autonomy to choose the content of his own message.

"Since all speech inherently involves choices of what to say and what to leave unsaid," one important manifestation of the principle of free speech is that one who chooses to speak may also decide "what not to say." Although the State may at times "prescribe what shall be orthodox in commercial advertising" by requiring the dissemination of "purely factual and uncontroversial information," outside that context it may not compel affirmance of a belief with which the speaker disagrees. Indeed this general rule, that the speaker has the right to tailor the speech, applies not only to expressions of value, opinion, or endorsement, but equally to statements of fact the speaker would rather avoid, subject, perhaps, to the permissive law of defamation. Nor is the rule's benefit restricted to the press, being enjoyed by business corporations generally and by ordinary people engaged in unsophisticated expression as well as by professional publishers. Its point is simply the point of all speech protection, which is to shield just those choices of content that in someone's eyes are misguided, or even hurtful.

* * *

. . . The message it disfavored is not difficult to identify. Although GLIB's point (like the Council's) is not wholly articulate, a contingent marching behind the organization's banner would at least bear witness to the fact that some Irish are gay, lesbian, or bisexual, and the presence of the organized marchers would suggest their view that people of their sexual orientations have as much claim to unqualified social acceptance as heterosexuals and indeed as members of parade units organized around other identifying characteristics. The parade's organizers may not believe these facts about Irish sexuality to be so, or they may object to unqualified social acceptance of gays and lesbians or have some other reason for wishing to keep GLIB's message out of the parade. But whatever the reason, it boils down to the choice of a speaker not to propound a particular point of view, and that choice is presumed to lie beyond the government's power to control.

* * *

. . . Without deciding on the precise significance of the likelihood of misattribution, it nonetheless becomes clear that in the context of an expressive parade, as with a protest march, the parade's overall message is distilled from the individual presentations along the way, and each unit's expression is perceived by spectators as part of the whole.

* * *

. . . When the law is applied to expressive activity in the way it was done here, its apparent object is simply to require speakers to modify the content of their expression to whatever extent beneficiaries of the law choose to alter it with messages of their own. But in the absence of some further, legitimate end, this object is merely to allow exactly what the general rule of speaker's autonomy forbids.

Id. at 559, 572-75, 577-78 (internal citations omitted).

As in Hurley, this was a privately organized (VFW) parade. Accordingly, the organizers were entitled to exclude any message that they did not wish to convey or with which they did not care to associate. What I think that Ampersand and PG fail to understand is that this situation is not about whether the VFW was entitled to squelch those with whom it disagrees. Rather it is about whether these protesting veterans could impose their speech on those who do not share their views. It is about whether the VFW could be compelled to convey a message that it finds offensive and distasteful.

Consider their criticism. PG writes:

However, the private group was nonetheless engaged in a form of censorship, as well as a denial of their own stated mission. As Ampersand put it,

I think it's scummy to hold an event honoring American veterans and then kick out a bunch of veterans who were peacefully marching because you don't agree with their political opinions. It suggests that the parade was organized in bad faith; it's not about honoring veterans, as it claims to be. It's about honoring veterans with "patriotically correct" opinions.

What this criticism fails to appreciate is that, as the speaker, it was the VFW's right to define its purpose and message, to decide what it would and would not say. It is not for Ampersand and PG to do so anymore than it was for the anti-war veterans to decide. This was not a march and counter-march, protest and counter-protest, or demonstration and counter-demonstration. Rather this was one unified event organized under the auspices of a single organization. It was entirely within the rights of the VFW to exclude marchers who wished to put forward the dual message of support for veterans and non-support for the Bush administration's Middle-Eastern military campaign. But more importantly, it would be a violation of the VFW's rights to require it to do otherwise. These anti-war veterans simply had no right to compel the VFW to endorse their message or provide a venue for its propagation.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of our freedom from compelled speech and association. Our ability to refrain from endorsing political or moral positions antithetical to our beliefs (or to refrain from speaking at all) is every bit as fundamental to our rights under the First Amendment as the right of free speech. Indeed, these are aspects of free speech that are, in reality, inseparable from it. As a result, Ampersand's and PG's criticism of the VFW on "freedom of speech" and "censorship" grounds is utterly incoherent. It would be authoritarian to require the VFW to involuntarily adopt, associate with, or distribute a political or moral message with which it disagreed. To do so would be unconscionable, despicable even.

Some inexplicable chain of websurfing this evening led me to think about one of the best T.V. shows ever, which I sorely miss-- MacGyver. Do any readers know if dvds, videos, etc. of old MacGyver episdoes are for sale anywhere, or if old episodes can be downloaded anywhere?

Today's Chicago Maroon runs a story about the University of Chicago's suicide policy. One of the many points at issue is the school's basic rule that after a suicide attempt, they'll kick you out of housing (and possibly out of school for a year, as happened to the article's subject). Something very similar happened to a girl in my dorm (when I still lived in the dorms).

It's possible there's some really good and well-considered reason for this, but I can't think of it. I hesitate to attribute such motivations to an institution I adore, but it's hard to avoid wondering if the policy is really just part of a "not on my watch" policy. (Suicides of enrolled students, or students in housing, after all, look much worse than those of people the university isn't actually responsible for). From the article:

“Suicide attempts are not acceptable at the University, even if they stem from mental illness or emotional problems,” reads a copy of a letter sent to Julie’s attorney. “Suicidal conduct renders a student unqualified to study at the University and live in a dormitory, as any violent or seriously disruptive conduct would render an employee unqualified.”...

“They flip-flop between the issue of conduct and illness,” [Julie's lawyer] said, explaining that if a student had gotten into a fistfight on campus—an example of misconduct—he or she would be entitled to a hearing.

In her latest post, Sara Butler begins, "Crescateer Amanda Butler," thus attempting to coin a new term for a blogger at Crescat Sententia. This, of course, flies in the face of my own preference-- "Crescatter". (The former rhymes with "Mouseketeer." The latter has some resemblance to "Mad Hatter.")

I don't really believe in settling grammatical problems by popular vote, but still, I'm very curious how the vote would turn out, so I invite reader input. Please cast your vote below:

I've noted before that I was reading John Hart Ely's Democracy and Distrust. I just finished it. I thought the beginning-- where he attacks the false binary of clause-bound interpretivism/non-interpretivism, provides support for reading content into the 9th Amendment and the Privileges and Immunities Clause, etc.-- was quite brilliant. I thought that the part of the book for which he's more famous, the discussion of how Judicial Review ought to actually function, how we ought to determine when minorities are "discrete and insular," etc. was less convincing. In particular, Ely has this maddening way of raising (to me) damning objections to his argument, and then not really resolving them convincingly.

Anyway, he ends with an unsatisfying discussion of one possible objection to his theory:

Harry Wellington suggests an example, "a statute making it a crime for any person to remove another person's gall bladder, except to save that person's life." Surely, he says, that has to be unconstitutional. Now Wellington has me (sort of): I don't think that law is unconstitutional. Curtains for my theory? I've led you along all this way only to confess error at the very end? Well, no, since that law couldn't conceivably pass.
"But suppose it did."
"Come on, it wouldn't. We've got problems enough without hypothesizing absurdities."
"Suppose it did."
"Okay, I'll play your game. If it passed, I think we could get it repealed pretty quick."
"What if we couldn't?"
"Then I'd suppose my elected representatives had found out something about gall bladders that you and I are unaware of."
"Suppose they hadn't. Suppose they were just acting crazy."
"Vote them out. Impeach them. Repeal the law."
"Can't. Most people believe they're doing the right thing."
"And they're just acting crazy too?"
"Right."
"I don't suppose we can reason with them."
"Nope."
"You know what you're telling me? That you don't believe in democracy. With neuroses like yours, I sure as hell would be worrying about problems a lot less rarified than substantive versus participational review. Like whether I'm going to read in tomorrow's paper that my dog is under consideration for Secretary of Agriculture."
"Let's leave your dog (and my psychological state) out of this. They pass it. What do you do?"
...[Some discussion of occupying the Capitol, etc.]
It is an entirely legitimate response to the gall bladder law to note that it couldn't pass and refuse to play any further. In fact it can only deform our constitutional jurisprudence to tailor it to laws that couldn't be enacted, since constitutional law appropriately exists for those situations where representative government cannot be trusted, not those where we know it can.

As readers of Daniel Drezner will know, he was recently here at Cambridge giving a lecture. Since I've just recently come out in favor of blogging on the things academics say in public, I figured I'd better show that I'm not a hypocrite, so what follows is a report on the speech that Professor Drezner gave and the questions he was asked.

As Professor Leiter would have me stipulate, any quotations are from my own notes, and any characterizations are my own synthesis of what Professor Drezner said. If he thinks I'm wrong, then he can try to correct the record when he gets back to blogging. Until then, you're stuck with me.

Drezner told us four possible stories to explain U.S. Foreign Policy.

The first was realism, associated with the politics of John Mearsheimer. Under realism, the U.S. recognizes that it's the top dog, and has no interest in letting anybody else get even close to being able to think about challenging us. Thus the lack of respect for epiphenomenal international institutions (the powerful will listen to them only if they represent the appropriate balance of power). Of course, Mearsheimer and many other realists opposed the War in Iraq, because they thought it was an unnecessary war that would be at best unhelpful in maintaining our position.

The second was neoconservatism, in otherwords, the claim that Ideas Have Power. On the one hand, this makes neo-cons almost Wilsonians, with a belief in the fundamental powers of democracy and free markets to tame man's passions. But, oh, how to get there? This idea is also caught up with the idea of American Exceptionalism (see this week's Economist): The U.S. is a beacon of wonderfulness and democracy, and explains our belief that we can remake Iraq. According to Drezner, the fundamental question that neo-cons face is "Can we turn Iraq into Kansas City?" (As an addendum I add, if we did, could they get a better baseball team?) This discussion was also filled with random digs at democratic foreign policy for not really having a better idea than democracy and free-markets. Of course, democracy is one of those things it's hard to be against, but it's all about the process.

Story three: bureuacratic politics. This is definitely the one in which the (British) audience seemed to find the most belief and resonance. In this story, Bush is trying to imitate Ronald Reagan's management style-- articulate a broad vision and let somebody else figure out the details. And as with Ronald Reagan, the result is a cabinet that will hardly speak with itself. At times, suggested Drezner, it seems like "the last person who talked to George W Bush has the upper hand."

Story four: Liberal Internationalism. Don't laugh. Obviously such a claim has to begin with "look beyond Iraq..." and then examples such as our policy in North Korea (not invading), trade promotion authority (whose failure isn't our fault) support this view. And you can argue (I guess) that we were going into Iraq not out of disrespect for international organizations, but in order to ensure that the U.N. Security Council had teeth. Maybe.

Then the questions came, and Drezner's tongue became considerably looser. One audience member (and reader of this blog) asked whether Drezner's claim that 9/11 changed everything was really true. Wasn't there some continuity between Bush's campaign and his current foreign policy? Weren't the seeds there? Drezner warned us that he spoke with some very minore experience in avising the Bush campaign's foreign policy: "There was no continuity whatsoever." [That said, of course, Bush's foreign policy does resemble Bill Clinton's. Think of it as a downward slope-- Clinton started out going into Somalia with the U.N. That was a disaster. Then we did Bosnia, with a UNSC resolution and with NATO rather than the U.N. Then came Kosovo, with the same non-UN support, and with NATO. Now came Iraq...] Was Drezner disappointed with the way foreign policy turned out? He seemed to imply so: "I figured Wolfowitz and the actual defense department officials were smarter than (Richard Perle)."

Another audience member asked, Will Bush step up the withdrawal from Iraq? "No. If you see a hasty pull-out and Iraq sort of disintegrates into chaos . . . there's no way to spin that."

To what extent can this administration's tendency to piss people off, the fact that "This administration is god-awful at 'gardening'" be attributed to the personalities involved rather than their actual policies? Remember, Drezner said, that we thought Bush had the foreign policy dream team, the equivalent of the 1920-something Yankees. But these guys hadn't held audience since 1992. "I don't think they realized that things like Kyoto and the International Criminal Court mattered to anyone else."

Drezner then went into a discussion of how the administration's behavior resembled a prisoner's dilemma, in which we are now executing the "grim trigger" (wherein if somebody pisses you off, you punish them until the end of time.) I'm not actually convinced Drezner's thought carefully enough about the payoffs, and I think this comes closer to resembling a different game, like the Cain-and-Abel game, or the kick-them-while-they're-down game, (I don't know the actual names for any of these). (The latter game features payoffs of 10,10; 8,3; 3,8; and 0,0; and can lead to the perverse (but equlibrium!) result that the players will play one of the "8,3" results forever. I think it explains a lot about the Israeli-Palestine peace process.)

Why not turn Iraq over to the U.N.? Well, firstly, the U.N. isn't a single actor. Secondly, remember the last time tried solo nation-building was in Cambodia. Thirdly . . . "I'm not sure the U.N. wants Iraq at this point. Would you want Iraq at this point? . . . This is your mess, baby."

Oh, and why the difference between Britain/Spain's role and France/Germany's reaction to the war? "Schroeder did it for domestic politics. Chirac just did it because, well, he's French. [Eruption of laughter.] Good to know the anti-french jokes still go ever well here."

Somebody who actually looked like a grown-up asked, Why not mention the war on terror in the four scenarios? After all, Perle and Wolfowitz wanted to invade IRaq long ago. How do the neo-cons explain the increase in the potential of terrorism coming from post-war Iraq? How could they justify taking a cold-war approach to the War on Terror?

Complicated questions, of course, deserve complicated answers. Firstly, it's wrong that we're limiting ourselves to Cold War tactics in fighting terror (c.f. money laundering, financial intelligence, etc.) Secondly, "The enemy of the U.S. is weak states." Terrorists are one thing, but they still need a place to hang their hats. So we need to either build states up or smash them down. Thirdly, (and, says Drezner, you could get this out of the administration only if you "liquor 'em up,") their expectations were probably wrong about how easily things would go in Iraq. "Iraq will temper the neo-con enthusiasm for remaking states willy-nilly."

Will the U.S. strike somewhere else in 2006? "Between you and me, it's Syria. (uncomfortable pause). Just kidding." Drezner added, "We don't have the manpower, unless we get our of Iraq to invade another country, which would possibly be the stupidest move ever."

The penultimate questioner asked-- What would Clinton do? What would the Democratic challengers do? Drezner answered: Anyone would invade Afghanistan, Clinton would never have invaded Iraq. The new Democratic challenger (Drezner's money's on Dean) will shore up the troops there. There's no pulling out now. And he might bring in the U.N. He might be able to bring in the U.N., who would be relieved that "Oh, thank God, Bush isn't in power."

What will a 2004 Bush cabinet look like? Drezner first told us that he wasn't nearly as sure as we seemed to be that Bush would win. He conjectured that we might lose Powell, Rumsfeld, Armitage, and Rice-- time in Washington takes years out of you, he said. "Do they show West Wing repeats here?"

Matthew Yglesias wants to know if Susan Moller Okin is "still on her Ahab-like quest to prove that Volokh Conspirator Jacob Levy misquoted her in his book." Having attended the colloquium at which she spoke today, I can report that Jacob Levy's work was not mentioned, either positively or negatively. I was, however, rather surprised at the vitriol with which she attacked the tax-exempt status of the Catholic Church in America. I mean, it seems to me that if one is going to start complaining about misogynistic institutions receiving support from the U.S. government, a much better place to start would be the monarchy of Saudi Arabia, or at the very least, complain about the role of the Catholic Church in denying third-world women access to legal birth control, not their failure to open the priesthood to women in the United States.

"We knew that this would be a very provocative thing for us to do," said John Thomas, editor of Playboy.com. "Wal-Mart has a conservative corporate image and we knew they wouldn't be thrilled. But we're hoping that the company will be pleased once they see how fun the pictures are and how empowered the women at Wal-Mart feel."

Ah yes, empowerment through pornography. Thank the Goddess for those feminists at Playboy! Without them, the disenfranchised female masses would somehow have to muddle through life without the benefit of having their vaginas photographed with a zoom lens. How could a woman possibly have any self-esteem unless she knows that she too could appear in magazine devoted to male masturbatory impulses?

My thoughts on pornography in general are somewhat ambiguous. The views espoused by Catherine MacKinnon during her anti-pornography crusade are a far greater danger to the health of the Republic than pornography itself. Similarly, I find anti-pornography screeds like this New York Metro article to be rather overstated and unconvincing. For example:

Dr. Ursula Ofman, a Manhattan-based sex therapist, . . . surmises that cyberporn may play a role in what she describes as "the truly stunning things women today feel obliged to do sexually with a man—whether it's something like anal penetration or simply not bothering to please themselves."

Anal Sex! The Devil, you say? Only deviants would consensually engage in such conduct. We ought to pass a law. Funny, this all sounds so familiar . . . .

However, the acknowledgment of such ambiguities and countervailing concerns hardly amounts to pornography empowering women. Indeed, it is hard to gainsay the fact that pornography is an exploitative enterprise. For example, it is difficult to imagine that any of the contestants participating in Who Wants To Be a Porn Star? will be edified by their experience. It is outright obnoxious to hear contrarian assessments from less-than-disinterested purveyors of pornography like John Thomas. I suspect that Playboy is about as empowering to women as Amos and Andy was to black folks.

Do you read En Banc, Crescat Sententia (duh), The Volokh Conspiracy, Crooked Timber, Begging to Differ, or Southern Appeal (or some other large-ish group blog I haven't mentioned-- Hit and Run? The Corner? Tapped?)? Do you have one particular blogger who just sticks in your craw?

The Volokh Conspiracy is kind enough to provide a URL to let us exclude the bloggers we detest. The rest of us group-blogs either don't have that kind of technical adeptness or that kind of courtesy for our readers.

At any rate, I'm offering a challenge/proposal to the big group blogs-- let the readers vote off one particularly loathed conspirator, survival-style. Email Eugene Volokh, Kieran Healy?, Steve Dillard, Unlearned Hand, Steve Dunn, me, and/or the proprietor of your favorite group blog and encourage them to join the "group-blog survivor sweepstakes," and you'll finally have your chance to get rid of Ted Barlow, Tyler Cowen, David Bernstein, or, of course, me. If you can convince enough of them to agree, then so too will Crescat.

I can't imagine that any of the group-blogs will accept if this is permanent exile at stake, so how about a week's banishment, after which things can return to normal? (Or not, I suppose). We could do the voting either via private email or public blogpoll (the former protects against voter fraud, the latter against blogger fraud).

It's all the fun (and class) of reality T.V.

[Note: By listing the bloggers I did up above, I don't mean to say those are the ones I would vote off myself. But that should be obvious.]

Lawrence Solum has an incredibly widely-cited post on the downward spiral of nominees. It's worth reading.
.
Almost everything worth saying in response has been said already. My own suggested solution is the same as Josh Chafetz's (which I think we chatted about during his trip to Cambridge)-- let's logroll.

For every Estrada, Pickering, Owen, Brown, whatever, the Democrats can have their . . . well, I don't know who the Democrats would want, but there are plenty of perfectly reasonable judges (though I may disagree with a lot of them a lot of the time) on the otherside of the spectrum. Surely a reasonable bargain on ideologies could be reached.

One final observation-- like Matt Yglesias, I'm not particularly appalled when legislatures play politics with judicial nominees. I mean, it makes me a little sad when people purposefully misrepresent what the nominees say, or when they pretend that they want nominees to "follow the law" when they really have litmus tests, or whatever. But it doesn't particularly surprise me, and it doesn't make me any sadder than congressional politics usually does.

When Lawrence Solum requests that we find judges who possess the virtue of justice, I think he's quite optimistic, but I think his hopes are worthy, and I share them. When he wants Senators to behave honorably too, I'm afraid he might be dreaming.

Judge Kozinski, writing:

We decide whether Congress can, under its Commerce
Clause power, prohibit the mere possession of homemade
machineguns.

In Ghettoization of Minority Scholars, En Banc's PG discusses a legal conference she recently attended at which all the minority JDs and most of the women sat on the Race & Ethnicity and Gender panels, respectively. It reminds me of a speaker session, "Women in Academia," that the campus Feminist Majority chapter hosted this Monday.

As such luminaries as Wendy Doniger (first woman on the Committee on Social Thought) and Melissa Harris-Lacewell spoke about their research interests' connections with issues of gender, I kept thinking to myself, "yes, but why are you so interested in gender?" This led to, "why do you think of yourself so prominantly as a woman and why do I not?" I never resolved this question, but I suspect that it could be because I don't find the subject particuarly interesting.

I mainly think of myself as a woman if I'm walking around late at night, if people are being particuarly friendly (especially if I'm in a skirt above my knees and the people are men I don't know well or at all), or if I'm trying to figure out why one of my roommates won't do his dishes (I disgard it, though, because gender doesn't answer the question well: one roommate does his, the other doesn't eat at home).

I don't think of myself as a woman when I think of intellectual interests. Why am I in awe of Robert Penn Warren, Michael Ondaatje, and Graham Greene? Why do I get a nerdy spasm of glee when I learn there's a circuit split on the bill I'm writing a final paper on? Why does a walking in on a discussion of Ayn Rand's philosophy lead me to walk out and hope no one noticed my entrance? Maybe it's my stubborn refusal to believe that my biology affects my mind (much as I do accept that strong coffee cheers me up), but I just don't think the fact that I'm a woman is primary among my strong interests and dis-interests. So have no fear, PG, give me a few years and I'll be sitting on the panel that doesn't look like it was drafted by gender (so I should look for you on anti-trust then? hells, no!)

It's Thursday night in Cambridge, which means it's time for Will's weekly poker retrospective, where I once again contemplate the failures of my playing style (which could most charitable be termed tight/confused). If you've got some vice more sophisticated card-playing, then pass on, pass on.

Firstly, a question. In a 3-pound unlimited rebuy tournament (for the first hour) what possesses somebody to rebuy 11 times? I mean, I felt sorry for him, really-- he went all-in before the flop on ten consecutive hands and lost every time. Even playing the kind of schlock he was playing, luck could have come his way at least once.

Anyway, thanks to the extra chips he invested in our table, as well as some rather confused all-in callers, I joined the big table with something approaching twice as many chips as anybody else had. Then I fell into my usual pattern. Call the blinds with some rather strange hands (I have an inexplicable attachment to things like K-7 suited), lose them, get the nuts, win enough money to finance my terrible play, etc.

Anyway, this brings us to the hand to contemplate:

I'm sitting in the big-blind (I think it's 800), and get handed 2-7 of spades. Blech, I say to myself. Oh well. People fold around the table, and I sit chuckling to myself. The little blind calls the big blind, and we enter the flop heads-up. It's 2-7-8. I avoid my smile. Okay, I think. A small bet. 1000. After a bit of a pause, Vlad, who's been steadily losing chips until a recent rash of random blind-stealing, goes all-in with about 7000 chips, about 2/3 of my stack.

Hum. What could he have? 2-7, like me, I suppose. Or, more likely, a 7 ot 8 and an overcard. (Could he have a pocket pair? Maybe.) I decide 7-8 is unlikely and 8-2 a risk, and I call it. He has K-10.

Oh, one thing. King-Ten are of clubs. So are the 2 and the 8. Okay, I think to myself, what are my chances (answer 65%).

But, yeah, a club flips, and that's more or less the end (I think the final blow was an all-in move with my K-K drawing nearly dead against some A-A.)

Still, couldn't have done it differently, I suppose. But ex ante rationality doesn't always make for ex post satisfaction.

. . . Senator Charles Schumer has been remarkably frank in offering a legal realist (dare we say Critical Legal Studies?) analysis of the judicial selection process. Consider the following report from the Harvard Crimson:

On Friday, Schumer echoed and intensified the message of a controversial June 2001 New York Times Op-ed, where he argued that the Senate should consider appointees' ideology as part of "its responsibility to advise and consent."

And,

Schumer said he considers three criteria when looking at a nominee: legal excellence, ideology and diversity. With respect to ideology, he added that judges should be moderate and aim to interpret rather than make law.

There is, you will notice, an interesting tension within Schumer's remarks. On the one hand, he believes that political ideology is the key to the judicial selection process. When Schumer spoke in the Spring at hearings on the Republican proposal to limit filibusters of judicial nominees, he was even more frank about this—arguing that judicial decisions are driven by political views and not by the rules laid down. On the other hand, Schumer is afraid of being too frank about his commitment to the ideological selection of judges, mouthing the formalist line that judges should "interpret rather than make law."

Schumer is not just a legal realist when it comes to judicial decisionmaking, his clarion call to consider political ideology in the confirmation process is fueled by a legal realist conception of the Senate's "advice and consent" role. As Schumer sees it, Senators have always considered the politics of judicial nominees, the difference is that he is willing to do so openly and honestly. As he phrased it in a press release in 2001:

One thing is clear: the ideology of particular nominees often plays a significant role in the confirmation process. Unfortunately, knowing when and to what degree ideology should be a factor for the Senate is far more obscure.

For whatever reason, possibly senatorial fears of being labeled partisan, legitimate considerations of ideological beliefs seem to have been driven underground. It's not that we don't consider ideology, we just don't talk about it openly.

* * *

It is high time we returned to a more open and rational consideration of ideology when we review nominees. Let's make our confirmation process more honest, more clear, and hopefully more legitimate in the eye of the American people. . . .

Professor Hasen has penned a mild dissent from Solum's more formalist approach, arguing that, "at least when it comes to constitutional adjudication of rights, talk of formalist judging is just 'pie in the sky.'" In short, Hasen would appear to agree with Schumer to some extent. Although a judge's political preferences undoubtedly influence constitutional outcomes to some extent, "pie in the sky" seems far too uncharitable. An honest judge is constrained by a whole host of legal norms.

This is the problem with legal realism. It's not that legal realism has no merit, it's that its merits are always overstated. Consider, for example, Professor Powe's assessment (as related by his likeminded colleague Brian Leiter):

Lucas A. (Scot) Powe, Jr. has a pithy way of expressing the idea. He likes to say: "Anyone teaching constitutional law who discusses only the doctrine is guilty of educational malpractice." . . . Why malpractice? Because such a teacher will not equip his or her students to advise clients intelligently about constitutional law issues, since what courts do with these issues, on the realist view, has far more to do with extra-legal political and related considerations than with doctrine.

The difficulty with this notion, as I see it, is that we do not need the assistance of law professors to perceive the obvious. Powe may as well stand before his students and sagely advise them that doors are sometimes made of wood. That Scalia's and Stevens's contrasting views of the Constitution are of necessity politically informed and that this information impinges on their jurisprudence is plain as day. Almost no one fails to understand this. However, what many people, including lawyers, do fail to appreciate are the convolutions and subtleties of legal doctrines, constitutional and otherwise. The interaction between a judge's ideology and these preexisting legal doctrines is doubtless complex; however, if it is true that the former sometimes overbears the latter, it is equally true that the latter often constrains the former. How often have we read words to the effect of "Were we writing on a blank slate . . ." in a legal decision?

Solum concludes by lamenting the potential end result of confirmation wars: thorough politicization of the judiciary. Hasen has a nice but not entirely satisfactory rejoinder to Solum's now familiar refrain: "believing that ideology matters is not the same as believing the system is corrupt." Hasen is right, of course. Not every politician is Boss Hogg. However, what Hasen's reply fails to appreciate is that federal judges are not politicians at all, notwithstanding the intersection of judicial decisionmaking and politics. The legal process, even at the appellate level, even concerning constitutional issues, is not mere "pie in the sky." The selection of our federal judges should not proceed as if it were.

Pejman Yousefzadeh provides a much-needed antidote to the latest ... stuff ... that Ted Barlow posted over at Crooked Timber.

I like Crooked Timber a lot, I really do. But do you ever have those "I really like this group blog, but this one person's posts just never seem to quite match the tone, content, or quality of anybody else's" moments? (Yes, yes, I know, you're thinking to yourself, most of the folks at Crescat Sententia are really great, but let's get rid of that "Will" character . . .)

I'm sure The Clerk will tell me what grevious sin of law Dahlia Lithwick has committed in this Slate article, but until then, I shall enjoy it in my naive ignorance. So far as questions from the Justices go, Justice Scalia gets the prize for this dig:

H. Bartow Farr III represents Hanson's widow, and as he starts to speak, Scalia hijacks him with a hypo in which a man "hurls himself into the sea, intending to commit suicide," while nearby there is a dock with 30 people, each with a life preserver at his feet, all of whom refuse to throw a life preserver to the drowning guy. "I don't know," he adds. "Maybe they're 30 libertarians."

[on eating in flight:] True, you still have the perfumed towelette: but this cannot be distinguished from the little envelopes of salt, pepper, and sugar, and so, after you have put the sugar in the salad, the towelette has already ended up in the coffee, which is served boiling hot and in a heat-conducting cup filled to the brim, so that it may readily slip from your seared fingers and blend with the gravy that has no congealed around your waist. In business class the hostess pours the coffee directly into your lap, hastily apologizing in Esperanto.

In the latest departure from traditional marriage procedure, some American men are beginning to take their wives' last names, either using the woman's name in addition to their own or nixing their given names completely.

"I've definitely heard more about both the husband and wife hyphenating," said New Jersey-based wedding expert Sharon Naylor. "It's really picked up in the past few years, although it's still a very small number."

For example:

Kelly Shubert-Coleman, 23, said her husband Jon, 29, chose to put his name before the hyphen because the Coleman often got left off.

"I actually wanted to combine them into one name, but hyphenating was enough for him."

The Shubert-Colemans decided to hyphenate because they wanted their kids to share their last name, and neither wanted to give up their individual identity.

Some notion of equality of the sexes serves as an impetus for some as well. One man explained:

"Initially I don't think I would have accepted [taking my wife's name] as an idea, but I really thought if you wanted to be equitable, both names should have equal weight," he said. "We have all these friends who are complete equals in their marriages and lives, but when they get married the default is the husband's name."

As the second excerpt indicates, couples can do whatever they choose regarding their own names, but getting society to go along with their decision is another matter altogether. Hyphenated names are often considered ungainly and inconvenient. So those who have no shared emotional stake in an extended surname are likely to abbreviate it to comport with their own sensibilities.

It is difficult to imagine that this trend will turn the tide against patrilinealism. Convenience and cultural inertia, if nothing else, will pose a formidable obstacle to change. In some quarters, outright disapproval rather than mere inertia is more likely to be the case.

Personally, I have never fully understood the modern tendency of some women to retain their maiden name or adopt a hyphenated surname after marriage. Although I can understand the desire to retain one's established identity, declining to adopt one man's name in lieu of retaining another's (or combining the two) seems an odd way of expressing one's personal autonomy or equality. In a patrilineal society, a woman will end up bearing her father's or her husband's name, or both in the event of a hyphenated surname. Moreover, in a certain sense, the very notion of a surname is a delimitation of individuality.

This is not to say that the present custom is the exclusive or exclusively right naming convention. Spanish surnames, for example, feature a marriage of matrilinealism and partilinealism. Excepting the Romans, hereditary surnames are apparently a relatively new phenomenon altogether. Nonetheless, being a creature of my place and time, this latest development is jarring to say the least.

Update: An astute reader raises an issue that had not even occurred to me. Assuming for a moment that this trend in hyphenation were to pick up steam, what on earth would people do a generation from now? As the reader in question put it, "what will young Tyler Shubert-Coleman and Dakota Smith-Wollensky do when they get married and seek to join their hyphenated last names together in hyphenated bliss just like mom and dad did?"

I received a huge amount of email in response to my post about men's tie lengths, where I asked, essentially, Why is Humphrey Bogart's tie so short?

What follows is an assortment of the most intelligent reader commentary, generally discussing knots, pant-height, and suit-style:

Wrote one reader:

(B)ack in the day the waistline on men's pants tended to be higher than it is today, especially if the pants were worn with suspenders.

So, with the coat (and possibly vest) in mind, a longer tie would have seemed pointlessly long.

That was a time when, in writing, if a man was "in his shirtsleeves", it was a notable point, because otherwise he was assumed to have his coat on.

First, it wasn't the type of knot used that determined the height of the tie during the "Bogie" era. A longstanding discussion has been going on regarding this in GQ's "The Style Guy" column (by Glenn O'Brien). Back in the 1940's, men wore suits differently than today. The pants were cut with higher waists, sometimes above the navel (as Fred Astaire tended to do), and the ties were made differently. Ties were smaller, wider (until the early fifties, when they changed over to the thin, Blues Brothers style of tie), and generally tied a few inches above the waistline, wherever that may be. Thus, Bud Abbot's ties looked like squat pyramids that rested just below his solar plexus. Incidentally, it had nothing to do with the type of knot used. Most men, today, tend to use the Windsor or Half-Windsor. The Windsor is better with a wide, British collar, but a Four-in-Hand could work just as well as a Windsor with a modern tie (and would still leave the tie hanging at what is now the traditional location, on the belt).

I just wanted to note that Carson, from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, says that a properly tied tie should hit (or was it cover?) the belt-buckle. Anyway, it's certainly official that now "style" dictates the tie be longer than Bogart's. Interesting observation though.

Silk for ties is prohibitively expensive. One way to tell if you're looking a high-quality tie is to look at the material that the loop through which you thread the narrow blade is made out of (the loop is usually the black piece of silk that the tie designer's name is written on). If the loop is made from the same material as the tie, you're looking at a great tie. If the loop, the tie and the tie's lining are made from the same material, you're looking at a masterpiece that is far beyond the means of most men. I've never actually seen a tie like this in a store.

If tailors are skimping on the loop, you can imagine how much money you can save by economizing on the length. When most men wore three-piece suits, the length of the tie could be very short, since you could cut the price of the tie by more than half. When three-piece suits went out of fashion, ties took a while to catch up and longer ties were more expensive anyway, so you can imagine why Bogart would choose this look for his characters. It's a signal, and one contemporary viewers fail to get. To us it looks boyish.

In general, men's tailors would often do things like this. I don't know if you ever read A. Dumas' The Three Musketeers, but there is a scene at the beginning where D'Artagnan accidentally disovers that Porthos' baldric was glittering with gold in the front, but was nothing but simple buff behind. Vainglorious as he was, Porthos could not afford to have a baldric made entirely of gold, and he is so embarrassed that he challenges D'Artagnan to a duel.

Tyler Cowen links to a fascinating site about the economic behavior of children. The most interesting line Cowen quotes:

Boys claim to be more aggressive bargainers than girls do, but they are not.

Christina Hoff Summers : The University of Chicago :: Catherine MacKinnon : Oberlin?

False.

Ampersand's latest crusade against Sara Butler includes this post, arguing basically that Sara's event that hosted Christina Hoff Sommers was a failure because it only got 80 people to attend. Amp writes:

"Over 80"? At a campus as conservative as Chicago?

How lame can they get?

Jack Shafer has class.

If I were a wine I would be...


This quiz was created by Krazy K. Take it here!

(Link via Professor Bainbridge.)

I'm slightly suprised by how often our sitemeter reveals that people are coming to this site by googling "crescat sententia." Glad to have you, but it seems that once you remember the name, the www.__.org is the easy part.

Someday, I'll write something intelligent and relevant about the HLR gender-disparity debate. Read The Curmudgeonly Clerk for one side, and Chris Geidner for another.

For now, however, I'll simply note that as with petards, Cori Dauber, free love, The Righteous Brothers, social justice, style, Latin, and God, Tom Stoppard has an insight on the matter:

Annie: You're jealous.

Henry: Of Brodie?

Annie: You're jealous of the idea of the writer. You want to keep it sacred, special, not something anybody can do. Some of us have it, some of us don't. We write, you get written about. What gets you about Brodie is he doesn't know his place. You say he can't write like a head writer saying you can't come in here without a tie. Because he can't put words together. What's so good about putting words together?

Henry: It's traditionally considered advantageous for a writer.

Annie: He's not a writer. He's a convict. You're a writer. You write because you're a writer. Even when you write about something, you have to think up something to write about just so you can keep writing. More well chosen words nicely put together. So what? Why should that be it? Who says?

Henry: Nobody says. It just works best.

Annie: Of course it works. You teach a lot of people what to expect from good writing, and you end up with a lot of people saying you write well. Then somebody who isn't in on the game comes along, like Brodie, who really has something to write about, something real, and you can't get through it. Well, he couldn't get through yours, so where are you? To you, he can't write. To him, write is all you can do.

Henry: Jesus, Annie, you're beginning to appal me. There's something scary about stupidity made coherent. I can deal with idiots, and I can deal with sensible argument, but I don't know how to deal with you...

In lecture this morning, somebody raised their hand and asked a question. The lecturer nearly fell over from shock.

Tom Cruise was nearly beheaded by his co-star while filming The Last Samurai.

Let us but hope that this will not fuel the (thankfully weak) sword-control lobby.

Steve Bainbridge has found a pretty good suggestion for how to make political hay of the Janice Rogers Brown filibuster. [An interesting dilemma for me: I definitely support the Brown nomination, but I'm much less sure I support the Bush presidency. If the ad were to be effective at all (big if), would it be more likely to help Bush's candidacy or Brown's?]

If Matthew Yglesias is allowed to admit he's never seen Casablanca, and Amanda can admit she's never read Hamlet, then I'll allow as how until this morning, I'd never read a word by John Hart Ely. Nonetheless, I began during my econ lecture, and he's enthralling.

That said, my query: On page 40 of Democracy and Distrust, he says, "at the time of (the Fourteenth Amendment's) ratification only three Acts of Congress had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court." Despite the copious endnotes (ninety-some in that chapter alone), there's no reference for that claim, which I find a pretty fascinating one. Does anybody know what three?

Apropos yesterday's post, I also can't pass by without noting that on page 43, Ely discusses how interpretivism "is hoist by its own petard."

UPDATE:

Unlearned Hand, Josh Chafetz, Mark Shawhan, and Jacob Levy all write in to point out that the first two laws are a part of the 1789 Judiciary Act and a part of the Missouri Compromise (struck down in Marbury v. Madison and Dred Scott v. Sanford, respectively). With those two being so famous, one would think that the third would be equally obvious.

DOUBLE UPDATE:

Courtesy of my all-knowing father, the elusive third case: