Shopping.

Nina has a nice post commemorating our shopping trip today, complete with photos of: the black Corvette that passed us, cute kids at the Apple Store children's table, and the two of us as photographed by a really nice digital movie camera at the Sony Store. By the way, I don't agree with her interpretation of the mentality of the man in the Corvette. I think he just wanted to hang around with another cool car. Nina was convinced the car looked "like a gun." In the Sony Store picture, you can see the carrying case I bought for my laptop. It's orange with three-dimensional dots!

Disappearing.

A blank page seems to have replaced my blog. Maybe a new post will cure things. I hope.

UPDATE: Well, the second time it worked. What the hell was that? That was a real damn-you-Blogger experience. I'm really trying to stand by Blogger and believe in the long run, it will be the best. I know if I went somewhere else, it wouldn't be perfect either. But, jeez, that was unnerving!

Disappearing.

Disturbingly, when I try to go to my blog right now, I get nothing but a blank. Somehow, I'm thinking publishing a post will cure the problem, so here goes.

The "right" to change the Pledge?

Tyler Cowen asks if a teacher has "the right to change the Pledge of Allegiance." As The Washington Times reports:

The students in Vincent Pulciani's seventh-grade class were reciting the Pledge of Allegiance this week when they heard the voice over the intercom say something they'd never heard before, at least not during the Pledge.

Instead of "one nation, under God," the voice said, "one nation, under your belief system."

It wasn't a classroom teacher, it was an intercom voice that was changing the words.

If a teacher in class had changed the words as a classroom exercise, it would be very different, and better, really than leading the class in a rote incantation. But then I'd want to have a debate in which the students could participate. Here's what I'm picturing:

TEACHER: Not everyone believes in God, so when we say the Pledge today, let's change "one nation, under God" to "one nation, under your belief system."

STUDENT #1: That sounds kind of awkward and ugly, and anyway, why are we standing and saying a pledge together if the words aren't about a shared belief? Why don't we just stand and say "I pledge allegiance to my personal individuality as a human being in the world"?

STUDENT #2: Also "under your belief system"? Is that even good English? Why am I pledging to your belief system and not my belief system?

STUDENT #3: Well, what if my belief system is Communism? The United States isn't under that!

TEACHER: You all raise very good points. My idea was to be more inclusive, but I can see I've introduced some new problems. Actually, I'm pretty impressed by the way you figured out those problems.

STUDENT #1: Yes, maybe we could spend more time in school figuring out problems instead of saying pledges.

STUDENT #2: If we didn't try to do these individuality-crushing mass exercises, the whole problem of "inclusiveness" wouldn't even come up.

STUDENT #3: Why don't we spend more time studying what the flag actually stands for? It would be a better use of your time too.

TEACHER: Of course, that would be best for all of us... Why don't we have a little discussion about why you think government officials want us to use class time to say this pledge every day?

Oh, that's just what I dream school could be like! But really why are we talking about whether a teacher has a "right" to change the Pledge, and not whether a teacher has a right not to have a disembodied intercom voice intrude on the class with a rote exercise?

UPDATE: Joe Gandelman has some good wisecracks.

Readability.

Stephen Bainbridge and Gordon Smith are fooling around with a website that purports to calculate the readability of your webpage. Gordon is especially fascinated by two quite different scores, both of which purport to represent how many years of schooling one would need to read his writing. Steve seems to assume that a smarter person writes harder-to-read prose -- which would put Kevin Drum on an unusually high level. [UPDATE: Steve's only kidding.]

But if you read how the calculations are done, you'll see it's all about the length of your words and sentences. So a person who likes to start a new sentence with "and" or "but," instead of going with a comma when there's an independent clause, will get a lower grade level score. So will a person who follows Strunk and White and chooses Anglo Saxon rather than Latin-derived words. I'd say you're probably writing better if you end up with a lower grade-level score.

These simplistic calculations don't encompass enough factors to really tell us how hard or easy it is to read someone's prose. Mark Twain scores lower than Reader's Digest in one calculation, because, I'm guessing, he likes to insert periods, spices things up with some very short sentences, and edits out stuffy polysyllabic words. But I'll bet you can skim through Reader's Digest faster, because there aren't so many surprising observations.

The real question is how sophisticated your ideas are. If you are saying simple things in convoluted prose, you're a terrible writer who doesn't deserve to be read. Point me to the writer -- like Mark Twain -- who's saying striking, new things in clear prose! Blogs, especially, should be easy to read. But blog posts should contribute something new to the mix. Do you seriously think you're doing a better job if you're writing something harder to read? Don't you think Mark Twain worked over his prose to make it readable?

Frankly, I'm disgusted by the atrocious writing I have to read every day as part of my job. Frequently, reading judicial decisions and law review articles, I struggle to get the point, I take the time to decode the eye-glazing verbiage, and when I get it translated into plain English, I see it's a pretty simple point. This kind of writing is a product of laziness, the lack of genuinely interesting ideas, a careerist effort to seem smart and high-level, and a selfish lack of consideration for the reader.

UPDATE: Sissy Willis agrees with me and is nice enough to point out that my post is easy to read and adds something to the mix -- which is the standard I set for blogs. Also, people seem to be assuming that these calculations are something new, but I can remember when a grammar check on Microsoft Word ended with these numbers. And there's another problem with assessing a blogger's writing this way: a good portion of the writing on a blog is in the quotes. I'd like to see my numbers with the quotes excluded: a lot of the fusty writing is in the quotes.

Theater reviews that make you very nervous.

Here's a correction in today's NYT:

A theater review in Weekend yesterday about "The Beauty Inside," by Catherine Filloux, about a 14-year-old Turkish girl whose brothers try to kill her after she is raped, said that music used in the play, composed by Elizabeth Swados, harmonizes the rapist's sexual moans with the sound of prayer from a minaret. No sound of prayer is used in the play. The article should have made it clear that this was the reviewer's interpretation of the sound.

Did Moussaoui admit to being part of the 9/11 conspiracy?

He tried not to:

He said that despite his guilty plea he had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks.

Instead, he said, he had been planning to participate in a separate undisclosed plot to fly a plane into the White House at a different time....

"I am guilty of a broad conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction to destroy the White House," he said, offering a new account of his role in plots that is at odds with the different versions government prosecutors have put forward.

Speaking with a heavy French accent, Mr. Moussaoui said there was nothing in the indictment or the fact sheet to which he assented that demonstrated that he was supposed to participate in the Sept. 11 attacks.

"You can't point to me and say that Moussaoui came to U.S. to participate in 9/11," he said.

He told the court he felt it was important to emphasize that he had not admitted any connection with the Sept. 11 attacks because that would increase the pressure for his execution "when the government brings victim statements to court."

He tried not to admit to being part of the 9/11 conspiracy, but he didn't succeed. We use the date 9/11 as shorthand for the attacks that took place, because they happened to occur on one day, but that doesn't mean that attacks planned for a different day were a different conspiracy. He's admitted to being part of a conspiracy to attack buildings with planes, and it appears to be one large conspiracy, which was planned to take place over the course of more than one day. The conspiracy was stopped, so the additional events didn't take place, but if there is one conspiracy, he is responsible for all the acts of the co-conspirators, and he has admitted to being responsible for everything that took place on 9/11!

That's the position of the U.S. government:

[Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales and other officials also noted that the statement of facts signed by Mr. Moussaoui included an admission that he "knew of Al Qaeda's plan to fly airplanes into prominent buildings, and he agreed to travel to the United States to participate in the plan."

The statement also said that Osama bin Laden "personally selected Moussaoui to participate in the operation to fly planes into American buildings and approved Moussaoui's attacking the White House. Bin Laden told Moussaoui, 'Sahrawi, remember your dream.'"

That's one conspiracy. I can't believe Moussaoui won't get the death penalty for that. Moussaoui said in court that he'd fight against the death sentence, but as he left the courtroom he shouted: "Allah akhbar! God curse America!"

Senator Feingold lectures at the Law School.

The topic: "Upholding an Oath to the Constitution: A Legislator's Responsibilities." Russ Feingold spoke about his devotion to the oath he took as a senator to uphold the Constitution and the second oath he took for the Clinton impeachment trial. Feingold was the only Democratic senator to vote against the motion to dismiss the impeachment. He applied a legal standard to the motion and had to vote the way he did because he could not say that there was no chance of proving the charges against the President. Democratic senators admitted to him in private that he was right. "It was a vote where I tried to move beyond partisanship."

Feingold talked about his campaign finance reform law, which he cared about because he was "tired" of hearing that politics was "about money, not ideas." He reminisced about the court case, challenging the constitutionality of the law, and described sitting through a nine-hour deposition conducted by the great First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams. Abrams began his questioning praising Feingold to his face for his reputation for upholding the Constitution. As Feingold put it later in the question session, Abrams spent the nine hours "trying to confuse me." I'd say the praise that he started off with was a deliberate effort to unnerve the senator. Feingold could hold his ground, he thought, because he believed his position was consistent with his oath to protect the Constitution, because "we spent a great deal of time crafting that bill" to avoid constitutional violations. He respected the Supreme Court's precedent on campaign finance regulation, even to the point of regretting a vote he had cast early on in his career about amending the Constitution to overrule Buckley v. Valeo. The First Amendment should not be diminished, he thought, even by the amendment process.

He spoke about the Patriot Act and his anguish at the speed with which it was pushed through the Senate, beginning with a closed door hearing on October 3, 2001. After Feingold voiced his civil liberties concerns, Attorney General John Ashcroft telephoned him, and, in that conversation, Ashcroft, according to Feingold, agreed that Feingold had raised many reasonable concerns, but that he still wanted his support. Later, according to Feingold, "the White House overruled Ashcroft."

[NOTE: The remainder of this post is an attempt at reconstruction of text that disappeared mysteriously on April 23, 2005. To do the reconstruction, I went back to my handwritten notes and also used two paragraphs that were quoted on Instapundit.]

Feingold objected to this sort of "legislation on the fly." Many members of Congress admitted to him that they had not read the text of the Patriot Act. A procedure was adopted that barred amendments, and the text had not gone through the Judiciary Committee, so there had been no chance to call attention to constitutional problems. Feingold decided to oppose unanimous consent because he "felt he had no choice" and he needed to uphold his oath to the Constitution. He described a difficult conversation he had on the floor of the Senate with Tom Daschle as "suffocating. " Feingold offered his amendments, and Daschle oppposed him, in what Feingold called a "frightening scene." With deep disapproval, Feingold quoted Daschle as saying "My argument is not substantive, it's procedural."

In his work on the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Feingold said he votes against amending the Constitution. He thinks it is better to craft legislation so that it is constitutional (as in the case of campaign finance reform) or simply to reject the amendment as not important enough (as with flag burning).

He ended his speech with the observation that it has been complex to keep his oath to uphold the Constitution and that he has "struggled constantly to get it right."

He took a few questions from the audience. The first was from Professor Alan Weisbard, who asked if a legislator has a duty to interpret the Constitution independently from the courts. Feingold said that there was an obligation not to pass the law if it was clearly unconstitutional, but that he didn't need to be certain or to predict what the Court would say. He could vote for the law as long as he had a good faith belief it would be upheld. "The presumption is it's constitutional unless somebody tells me it really can't fly." This seemed odd to me and made me rethink his opposition to the Patriot Act. Where was the presumption? Must it not be that he opposed the Patriot Act as a matter of policy?

My colleague Jim Jones asked him what he does if he's convinced the Supreme Court has gotten a decision wrong. Feingold said he tries to craft the legislation to avoid the constitutional problems and that he also looks to elections to change who is on the Court. Feingold seemed to be thinking again of the campaign finance reform law, which I don't think was what Jones had it mind. Jones was, I think, concerned about the perniciously wrong cases, like Plessy v. Ferguson. With some more prodding, Feingold said he said he believes the cases that permit the death penalty are wrong, but that the new death penalty case (making it unconstitutional to execute a person who committed his crime as a juvenile) is an "exciting example of how the Constitution can evolve." Jones, still not satisfied, asked whether he was just counting the Justices' votes, and Feingold said he mostly had to accept that they are right, for example, with the Line Item Veto case. "I respected it ... that's the normal situation," he said, but he acknowledged that there are "extreme situations" he'd treat differently. He then joked that this really was like being back in law school, which drew a big laugh from the crowd.



I would never have said this out loud, but I couldn't help thinking how interesting it was that Feingold shaped his whole lecture around the sanctity of the oath, when just a few days ago he announced that he was getting a divorce, his second. Was I the only one who thought how strange it was to hear a man piously invoke a passionate fidelity to an oath when he had -- so conspicuously -- gone back on the marriage oath twice?

But I like Senator Feingold. I do think he's a good man. I don't presume to know what happens to people in their marriages, and I am divorced myself. Nevertheless, he could have discussed his devotion to the Constitution from some perspective other than the fact that he'd sworn an oath. Taking an oath to the Constitution, after all, is not the strongest reason to support it.

UPDATE: Many of the commenters think it isn't fair for me to compare marriage vows and the oath to support the Constitution. And one commenter asks the interesting question: "What on earth can account for the view that amending the constitution is wrong but that allowing the constitution to 'evolve' under the watch of political judges (with no Constitutional basis for this evolution) is preferable." Here's the answer I give in the comments:

Thanks for making me think about that! There really is an answer. The idea is that it's terrible to amend the Constitution because you're taking away something that's there. We've been revering the First Amendment (to take the prominent example) all this time, and it would be unseemly to use political power to remove it as an obstacle. But if a court would just say, that obstacle you imagine really doesn't exist, then you haven't wielded political power against the revered document. Of course, [Feingold] still supports using political power to stock the courts with people who will perceive the evolution he wants them to perceive. It all just works so much better if you can get a judge to do it for you. Plus it is very hard to amend the Constitution, so if you try, you'll probably fail, and your enemies will rake you over the coals the whole time -- for wanting to change the Constitution. Acting through the courts is so much more politically palatable. And the beauty of it is that you can continue to lavish praise on yourself for your devotion to the Constitution.

The Earth Day march.

I heard the drumbeat of a student protest march, so I grabbed my camera and stood on my office sofa to catch these shots of an Earth Day march:





Note the position of the first bicycle, which appears in both photos, to gauge the size of the march.

The chant was: "Hey hey, ho ho, burning coal has got to go."

The sniffing dog.

I spent the early afternoon in the faculty library, participating in a workshop on a paper on democratic theory, written by one of my colleagues. Midway through the workshop, we were politely interrupted by security people who told us they needed to bring through the sniffing dog. We kept our discussion going while the big, leashed German shepherd loudly huffed around the periphery of the room.

What's the security occasion? Russ Feingold is giving a lecture today at 4. I'll attend and take notes (and maybe photos) and will probably come up with something bloggable.

Not incredibly outrageous.

Justices O'Connor, Scalia, and Breyer took part in another one of those discussions about whether it's okay -- or "incredibly outrageous" -- for judges to refer to foreign law. We've already heard plenty from Scalia and Breyer on the subject, so the article (in the NYT) focuses on O'Connor:

''This is much ado about nothing,'' she said in response to a question by moderator Tim Russert of NBC. ''Our Constitution is one that evolves. What's the best way to know? State legislatures -- but it doesn't hurt to know what other countries are doing."

O'Connor also said she reads 1,500 pages a day. Mostly lawyers' briefs, I presume. The life of a judge! Do you envy it?

Blogs buzzing about religion and Microsoft.

The NYT seems to be going out of its way to frame and feature stories about how the agents of religion are controlling things behind the scenes. This front page story, about how Microsoft withdrew its support for a state law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation, introduces a rumor this way:

Blogs and online chat rooms were buzzing on Thursday with accusations that the company, which has offered benefits to same-sex partners for years, had given in to the Christian right....

Microsoft officials denied any connection between their decision not to endorse the bill and the church's opposition, although they acknowledged meeting twice with the church minister, Ken Hutcherson.

Dr. Hutcherson, pastor of the Antioch Bible Church, who has organized several rallies opposing same-sex marriage here and in Washington, D.C., said he threatened in those meetings to organize a national boycott of Microsoft products.

After that, "they backed off," the pastor said Thursday in a telephone interview. "I told them I was going to give them something to be afraid of Christians about," he said.

It's no surprise that Hutcherson would be eager to provide a useful quote. Presumably, he likes to see himself as a power wielder. Microsoft itself has been long been a leader in recognizing gay rights on its own -- as the article notes -- and already offers more than the state law would require.

By the way, the paper copy is worded differently: "Blogs and online chat rooms were aflame on Thursday with accusations that the company, which has offered benefits to same-sex partners for years, had caved to the Christian right." Was some decision made to tone it down? Maybe "aflame" seemed to contain a slur against gays, but that doesn't explain replacing the strong verb "caved" with the weak "given in."

MyPyramid, MyTaxMoney.

Gerry Daly links to a post from yesterday, notes Stephen Bainbridge's Patrick Swayze imitation, and issues a challenge to the blogosphere.

A Polish birthday celebration.

Nina writes that in Poland, when she was growing up, it was the person with the birthday who provided the food to others, who apparently were doing their part just by dropping by with good wishes. So we were happy to play along with that tradition. She set the table with her best hand-painted Russian plates:



Mmmm... the layers there are, from top to bottom: caviar, sour cream, smoked salmon, potato:



This borscht is homemade, as is that puff pastry:



And there's a whole story to why there's already a slice out of that cake -- a story of drunkenness and karaoke:



Nina's got her own account of the party, from which I'm going to snag this picture of me trying to get another photograph:

"This Court is, in fact, a Goldwater and a Reagan Republican Court."

Lawprof Marci Hamilton has a new essay up at Findlaw.com: "Senator Frist and Representative DeLay's Claims of Supreme Court Judicial Activism and Anti-Religion Bias: Why They Aren't Persuasive":

Even if politics must define the Supreme Court -- and the truth is, law defines it far more -- then today's name-calling by both the far left and the far right misses the mark. This Court is, in fact, a Goldwater and a Reagan Republican Court.

The Goldwater Republicans, embodied by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, believed in individual rights, separation of church and state, and federalism. No wonder, then, that they believe that no single religious viewpoint should determine whether a woman could obtain an abortion.

Meanwhile, the Reagan Republicans were united under a single banner of smaller government (which translates into states' rights, or federalism).

These positions have been all but abandoned by the current Administration, but they were and are, above all, moderate ones. ... [F]ederalism is not a partisan stance, but a constitutional basic. And the principle of separation of church and state, too, is no more partisan -- and no less part of our Constitution -- than, say, the fact that we have a bicameral legislature.

There's much more in the essay. You should read it.

But it's a rainbow-striped tomb!

You know what bugs me the most about the government's newly revised "food pyramid"? It's that it's called "MyPyramid." MyPyramid!

First, unless you want me to pronounce it mip-ee-RA-mid, put the damn space in. It's not cute to take out the space. It's just irritating.

But second, what's with the "my"? This is your recommendation for everyone. Am I supposed to think you think I'm special? Is this, like the removal of the space, supposed to be cute? Like "My Little Pony," my little advice from the government?

Could you please stop wasting my little tax contribution telling me what to eat, especially coming up with ideas like having a tomb as a symbol of health?

UPDATE: Stephen Bainbridge has more.

Redbud.

What redbud looks like today in Madison.

More fun, more comfortable, better nostalgia.

While some women are paying maybe $600 for pair of jeans to distinguish themselves in our heavily jeans-clad culture, other women are fed up with of all the tight clothes and wearing billowy long skirts:

"I'm tired of all those tight little skirts and pants I have to keep pulling up to get them to cover my rear," [artist Elizabeth] Huey said as she held up several alternatives she considered more compelling. They were breezy, colorful skirts redolent of Woodstock, midnight hayrides and prom nights: the sort of thing that she once could find only at vintage stores. "Now they're everywhere," she said. "It's exciting."

Leping Pu, a 40-year-old doctor shopping at the store, was also drawn to fuller skirts. "Designer clothes have been so tight you can't put them on," muttered Dr. Pu, who wore a floral-patterned skirt that swirled around her calves. "I like something free enough to give you space to move."

Jeans once were about freedom, comfort, and affinity with the working class. I remember a period in the 1970s when young people wore only Levi's or Lee jeans and scoffed at older women who bought "designer jeans." (The brands of the time were Jordache, Sassoon, and Gloria Vanderbilt.) Lately, we've been reliving that period, with a bizarre misplaced nostalgia for things that were not considered good at the time. So I'm glad to see the hippie skirts come back. More fun, more comfortable, and better nostalgia.

"Willie and the Hand Jive."

Driving in to work this morning, I had the satellite radio set at the 1950s decade channel, and I came in at the middle of Neil Sedaka's "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do," which I greatly enjoyed. Even better was the next song, The Johnny Otis Show doing "Willie and the Hand Jive." One of the many things I love about this song is that even though the title and the first two verses convince you it's about masturbation, they build deniability into the lyrics with lines like this:

Mama, Mama look at Uncle Joe
He's doin' that hand jive with sister Flo
Grandma gave baby sister a dime
Said, do that hand jive one more time...

Willie and Millie got married last fall
They had a little Willie Junior, and a-that ain't all
You know, the baby got famous in his crib, you see
Doin' that hand jive on TV.

So if you think the song is about masturbation, there must be something terribly wrong with you! Great joke all around.

These are the days of miracles and wonders.

I guess everyone's going to link to Peggy Noonan's essay about the new pope, and I wasn't going to pope-blog, but this line jumped out at me:

It is an age of miracles and wonders, of sightings of Mary and warnings, of prophecy, graces and gifts.

Didn't you think of two things?

1. Paul Simon's "Graceland." Was that on purpose? Google says yes. Search for "Paul Simon" and "miracles and wonders" and the first thing that comes up is this old article by none other than Noonan.

2. "Sighting of Mary"? Is Noonan excited about the salt stain on the Chicago underpass? Too bad we can't get a miracle in the form of improving the flow of traffic on the Kennedy Expressway.

UPDATE: Argonautical Ramblings is photoblogging the underpass stain and the assembling crowds. The link is to the blog itself. Each photo is a separate link, unfortunately, but here's the post that begins the series. Thanks to the commenter here who pointed out this site.