"[George Magazine's] purportedly post-partisan stance seemed to many people naïve."

"'Ultimately, you can’t have a political magazine that doesn’t have a politics,' Victor Navasky, then the publisher of The Nation, told The New York Times in an article headlined 'George Wins Readers, but Little Respect.' Arguably, the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal was the publication’s undoing. In the spring of 1998, when the independent counsel Ken Starr was deep in his investigation of the Clinton White House, George published a puffy cover story on the film 'Primary Colors,' an adaptation of the roman à clef about Mr. Clinton’s 1992 campaign. (For a brief while, America had its own Elena Ferrante in Joe Klein). The magazine further showed its hand when it referred to the under-fire president as the 'chief charmer.' When Mr. Kennedy and his staff tried to cover the imbroglio, they made choices that would now seem cringe, like publishing a write-around article about Ms. Lewinsky’s past accompanied by a full-page caricature of her biting into a hot dog."

From "The Lasting Appeal of John F. Kennedy Jr./A CNN documentary and an upcoming series by Ryan Murphy delve into the nation’s most famous son, who remains fixed in the 1990s" (NYT)(gift link, so you can see the whole story... and all the beefcake pix of the famously gawked-at boy).

Why is it so difficult to find that caricature of Monica Lewinsky biting into a hot dog?

Google gives me 2 pix of Obama stuffing something into his mouth and one of Reagan. This is the most obvious caricature idea for Lewinsky. You'd think dozens of lame efforts would show up in this search. And George Magazine published one. Where is it? Is Google caring for our presumed devotion to the beloved boy? I mean John John. Not that rogue Bill!

Are you listening to the mild dronings of the President's lawyers?

Have you been half asleep and have you heard voices? I hear them calling Trump's name...

"Kenneth W. Starr and Alan Dershowitz to join Trump’s legal team."

WaPo reports.

And for the first the first time, I'm picturing myself watching the big trial and not avoiding it.

ADDED: I should confess that I watched the entire swearing-in ritual yesterday...



I paid close attention, watching each and every Senator sign the book. I took note of who was left handed, what sort of watches they had on, wondered who the Senator with the really long hair was, gasped aloud at the low-necked, red-caped stylings of Kyrsten Sinema....

"There’s little question that Acosta was out-lawyered, but perhaps he was also disarmed by the attentions of these celebrity attorneys."

"[Alan] Dershowitz, then a Harvard law professor, had famously defended O.J. Simpson. [Ken] Starr, of course, was the independent counsel who investigated the Clinton Whitewater case, leading into the Monica Lewinsky cliffhanger. In a 2011 letter trying to defend himself after the cushy plea deal, Acosta wrote that he faced 'year-long assault on the prosecution and the prosecutors' by 'an army of legal superstars.' He also asserted that defense lawyers 'investigated individual prosecutors and their families, looking for personal peccadilloes that may provide a basis for disqualification.'... Pending further revelations, one thing is clear: Acosta should step down from his Cabinet position for dereliction of duty in his prior role — and because he has the spine of a mollusk. In deciding not to fully prosecute Epstein in 2007 — and then agreeing to bury the proceedings without advising the victims — he violated the law, betrayed the victims’ trust and displayed rare cowardice before justice. Finally, nobody likes a whiner."

From "One thing is clear from the Jeffrey Epstein revelations: Acosta must step down" by Kathleen Parker (WaPo).

I don't like the ugliness of "dereliction of duty" and "spine of a mollusk" and "whiner," but I do think Acosta should resign. When it mattered most, the cries of a wealthy man overwhelmed those of ordinary people. That's not what belongs in the Labor Department.

"if... only."

if. fucking. only. https://t.co/6N7SFiKRln

— Monica Lewinsky (@MonicaLewinsky) March 27, 2019

"Mark Penn, Ex-Clinton Loyalist, Visits Trump, and Democrats Are Not Pleased."

That's the headline for a column by Annie Karni in the NYT. Excerpt:

As Democrats have moved to the left, Mr. Penn, with his centrist politics, has become alienated from a party in which he once reigned as a winning pollster and is a frequent guest on Fox News and the author of op-ed articles criticizing the special counsel’s investigation as a “partisan, open-ended inquisition.” He has even adopted the president’s term “deep state” to describe people he views as Democratic operatives sabotaging the Trump administration from within the government....

In an email, Mr. Penn played down the significance of the visit.... “Despite my misgivings about the Mueller investigation, let me be clear as a lifelong Democrat under no circumstances would I work paid or unpaid for President Trump nor was this meeting about that in any way.”...

In an interview with Politico Magazine last year, Mr. Penn said that as a White House adviser during Ken Starr’s investigation into Mr. Clinton, he saw up close the emotional damage that a special counsel can wreak on a president and on a functional White House. And he said he saw little difference in how the investigation affected Mr. Clinton then and Mr. Trump now — even though Mr. Clinton never tweeted the words “Witch Hunt!”

“The Clintons didn’t put their emotions on Twitter, but trust me, they had them, and they weren’t particularly different from Trump’s,” he said....

"The eccentric hedge fund manager, whose friends included former President Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Prince Andrew, was also suspected of trafficking minor girls..."

"... often from overseas, for sex parties at his other homes in Manhattan, New Mexico and the Caribbean, FBI and court records show. Facing a 53-page federal indictment, [Jeffrey] Epstein could have ended up in federal prison for the rest of his life. But on the morning of the breakfast meeting, a deal was struck — an extraordinary plea agreement that would conceal the full extent of Epstein’s crimes and the number of people involved. Not only would Epstein serve just 13 months in the county jail, but the deal — called a non-prosecution agreement — essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes, according to a Miami Herald examination of thousands of emails, court documents and FBI records.... As part of the arrangement, [Miami prosecutor Alexander] Acosta agreed, despite a federal law to the contrary, that the deal would be kept from the victims. As a result, the non-prosecution agreement was sealed until after it was approved by the judge, thereby averting any chance that the girls — or anyone else — might show up in court and try to derail it. This is the story of how Epstein, bolstered by unlimited funds and represented by a powerhouse legal team, was able to manipulate the criminal justice system, and how his accusers, still traumatized by their pasts, believe they were betrayed by the very prosecutors who pledged to protect them..."

From "How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime" by Julie K. Brown (Miami Herald). Acosta is now the Secretary of Labor. Acosta did not respond to inquiries about this article, but in 2011, he is said to have "explain[ed] that he was unduly pressured by Epstein’s heavy-hitting lawyers — [Jay] Lefkowitz, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, Jack Goldberger, Roy Black, former U.S. Attorney Guy Lewis, Gerald Lefcourt, and Kenneth Starr, the former Whitewater special prosecutor who investigated Bill Clinton’s sexual liaisons with Monica Lewinsky."

"Certainly, if Mueller wanders outside the bounds of professionalism and basic integrity, he can and should be fired."

"Concerns are already being raised — including about Mueller’s friendship with Comey and his staff-packing with anti-Trump partisans. He will be closely watched. In the meantime, Congress is busily carrying on its constitutionally ordained function of oversight. What we’ve seen over the past week has not been pretty, but it is effective and important.... Notwithstanding reports that the special counsel has launched an inquiry into whether the president obstructed justice, the early returns also suggest the absence of any Oval Office criminality, even with the unsettling use of Trump Tower business methods where they don’t belong.... [T]he official processes now under way should continue unimpeded. Let the legislative and executive branches fulfill their respective roles, ordained at the founding and matured by the wisdom of sobering experience gained over the course of seven generations."

Writes Kenneth Starr in a WaPo op-ed with the silly title "Firing Mueller would be an insult to the Founding Fathers."

Silly, because Starr doesn't mention the "founding fathers" or fret about "insulting" eminent figures of the past. In the context of highlighting the practical value of an independent prosecutorial function, Starr refers to the "structural arrangements put in place at the founding of the nation and augmented through the experience of succeeding generations." If he were about venerating the choices of the founding fathers, he wouldn't have said "augmented through the experience of succeeding generations." The founding fathers adopted a text that said: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States." If you wanted to respect that — rather than "the experience of succeeding generations" — you'd align with Justice Scalia, who dissented in the case that approved of the independent counsel law:

In his analysis of the statute, Scalia relied on constitutional text, pointing out that Article II vests not some but all of the executive power in a president. And because it does, the independent counsel law must be unconstitutional "if the following two questions" are answered affirmatively: "Is the conduct of a criminal prosecution .  .  . the exercise of purely executive power?" and "Does the statute deprive the President of the United States of exclusive control over the exercise of that power?" Scalia said they must be answered affirmatively: the first because "governmental investigation and prosecution of crimes is a quintessentially executive function," the second because "the whole object of the statute" is to deny a president exclusive control over the exercise of purely executive power.

That's the losing side, of course, but the independent counsel law — the law under which Starr dogged Bill Clinton — died a natural death in 1999. 

"President Trump reiterated his false claim that at least three million illegal immigrants cast ballots for Hillary Clinton..."

"... calling on Wednesday for an investigation into voter fraud, even though his own legal team has argued that no such fraud occurred," says the NYT.

I disapprove of the use of the phrase "false claim" in a news article. Trump deserves criticism if he is purporting to know things that he does not know, but the NYT is also asserting that it knows something it does not know. Trump's allegation could be true. How can you know for certain without a thorough investigation?

It would be much stronger for the NYT to say that Trump's statement is unsupported and merely a suspicion (a suspicion that supports his political interests).

The obvious reason for choosing to call it a false claim rather than an unsupported claim is that if we actually already know it's false, then no investigation is needed.

So the question is why would the NYT want to take that position? It makes me suspect that they are afraid something will turn up — if not 3 million illegal immigrants* voting, then other voting problems that are damaging to the Democratic Party.

I can see another reason to want to avoid an investigation: If there is an ongoing investigation, it will keep the question of illegal voting in the public eye. The NYT might want to say: There's no significant illegal voting, so let's just move on (or just talk about how dangerously delusional Trump is). But if there is an investigation, it prolongs our attention to the issue, and people's feelings about illegal voting are kept raw. There's no closure.

And there is resonance with other immigration issues. People hearing about the allegation and the investigation may feel stimulated to see the presence of illegal immigrants as a bigger problem than it actually is and they may increase their support for deportations and wall-building. Whatever the investigation eventually shows, those policies are going forward now and depend on public acceptance.

An investigation takes the pressure off Trump. We needn't dwell on whether he got it completely wrong or just alternative-factishly wrong. We can wait to see what the investigation says. And if the investigation says there is no illegal voting, Trump can take credit for finding that out for us (as he took credit for solving the mystery of whether Obama was born in the United States). The investigation, however, is likely to find at least some problems, and the focus can easily shift to those, causing us to forget about the precise allegation that got the investigation started. (I'm thinking about how the Whitewater land deal started Ken Starr's investigation into President Clinton but led to other things that completely distracted us from the question whether anything was corrupt about Whitewater.)
________________________

*I would normally avoid using the phrase "illegal immigrants," because I think some people find it offensive, but the NYT used it!

"By the way, Janet Reno still walks the face of the earth. It's not too late to tell whatever truth she may have suppressed to keep her job."

I wrote that on April 15, 2014, and I'm digging through my archive this morning, looking for Janet Reno, because I see that Janet Reno has died. She was 78 and had been suffering from Parkinson's disease since 1995, when she was the Attorney General of the United States. Her name is associated with 2 painful events in the Bill Clinton administration, Waco and Elian Gonzales. Reno was also the person under the now-defunct Ethics in Government law who determined when an independent counsel would be appointed and when that person should be removed for misconduct, so she was connected to the Bill Clinton impeachment, since she caused the independent Whitewater investigation to begin and she allowed Kenneth Starr to complete his mission.

From the NYT obituary:

Mr. Clinton, committed to naming a woman as attorney general, settled on Ms. Reno after his first choices — the corporate lawyer Zoe Baird and the federal judge Kimba Wood — withdrew their names in the face of criticism after it was revealed that they had employed undocumented immigrants as nannies....

Two months later, she gained the nation’s full attention in a dramatic televised news conference in which she took full responsibility for a botched federal raid of the Waco compound of an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventists, the Branch Davidians.

The assault, after a long siege involving close to 900 military and law-enforcement personnel and a dozen tanks, left the compound in flames and the group’s charismatic leader, David Koresh, as well as about 75 others, dead, one-third of whom were children....

Questions about her handling of the Waco raid resurfaced in 1999, when new evidence suggested that the F.B.I. might have started the fire that destroyed the compound....

... Elián González, the 6-year-old Cuban boy who was found floating on an inner tube off the coast of Florida after his mother and 10 others drowned in a failed crossing from Cuba by small boat... became a unifying figure among Cuban exiles in South Florida, who were determined to see him remain in the United States in defiance of the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro.

Ms. Reno favored returning Elián to his father in Cuba, and she became immersed in negotiations over his fate because of her ties to Miami.

Ms. Reno was on the phone almost up to the moment agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service burst into the Miami home of Elián’s relatives and took him away at gunpoint.....

Waco was the subject of that 2014 post of mine, quoted above. That old post was titled "Dick Morris says Bill Clinton 'hated' Janet Reno but wouldn't oust her because he feared 'she would tell the truth about what happened in Waco.'"

"Reno threatened the president with telling the truth about Waco, and that caused the president to back down."

"Then he went into a meeting with her, and he told me that she begged and pleaded, saying that . . . she didn't want to be fired because if she were fired it would look like he was firing her over Waco... And I knew that what that meant was that she would tell the truth about what happened in Waco.

"Now, to be fair, that's my supposition. I don't know what went on in Waco, but that was the cause. But I do know that she told him that if you fire me, I'm going to talk about Waco."

Morris was on TV to discuss the Cliven Bundy incident. What bad luck for Hillary: It has people needing to talk about Waco again....

By the way, Janet Reno still walks the face of the earth. It's not too late to tell whatever truth she may have suppressed to keep her job. What is Morris saying? First, the point seems to be that Reno convinced Clinton that to oust her would give rise to inferences that he believed his administration had done something wrong in Waco. Then Morris adds his inference of what he "knew" it "mean": that there was some "truth" that had been suppressed that would come out.

But Reno's argument didn't require that there be anything more to tell, and Morris knows that, because he goes right to his "to be fair" remark. He doesn't know. And if there was some suppressed truth Reno could tell, why hasn't she told it yet? One answer is that she doesn't want to tell on herself, but that would have been true at the point when she was begging and pleading to keep her job.

Perhaps she left a note. More likely, we will never know.

Here are the names and ages of the 76 people who died at Waco, including Startle Summers, Hollywood Sylvia, Chanel Andrade, and Paiges Gent, who were only 1 year old. They would be 23 years old if they had lived. There were also four 2-year-olds, including one with the sad name Little One Jones.

As for Elian Gonzalez. He's 22, and he just graduated from University of Matanzas with a degree in  industrial engineering. He spoke at his graduation ceremony, promising Fidel Castro that he and the whole class would "fight from whatever trench the revolution demands."

One day after the NYT publishes "Kenneth Starr, Who Tried to Bury Bill Clinton, Now Only Praises Him"...

... we learn — from Inside Higher Ed — that Starr is expected to resign from his job as president of Baylor University, where the Board of Regents has been considering firing him for looking the other way when the school's football players were accused of sexual assault and domestic violence.

There have also been a lot of reports that the board voted to fire Starr. 

Here's our discussion, yesterday, about the NYT article, which seemed framed to help Hillary Clinton by offering up the supposedly surprising news that Ken Starr is a fan Bill Clinton's. The Times downplayed Starr's current troubles, which undercut the value of his seeming admiration for Bill Clinton.

I didn't say this yesterday, but I think it was unfair to Starr to write that he "tried to bury Bill Clinton." Starr was appointed Independent Counsel to investigate the Clintons, beginning with the Whitewater matter and expanding into the death of Vince Foster and then various other matters — "the firing of White House Travel Office personnel, potential political abuse of confidential FBI files, Madison Guaranty, Rose Law Firm, Paula Jones law suit and... possible perjury and obstruction of justice to cover up President Clinton's sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky."

Whatever criticisms he may deserve for going too deeply into these things, he was acting in the role of a prosecutor, under a charge from the 3-judge division that appointed him and subject to removal for good cause. One may be dismayed at all the things he turned up, but I don't see why he deserves to be seen as motivated by an intent to destroy Bill Clinton. He was a prosecutor, and if he were on a personal vendetta, why didn't Attorney General Janet Reno fire him?

By the way, Trump has brought up the old Vince Foster story, and there's some amazement that he's willing to sully himself with the sort of tawdry material that GOP candidates have traditionally left to others, as the NYT is talking about in its new article, "As Donald Trump Pushes Conspiracy Theories, Right-Wing Media Gets Its Wish":

[B]y personally broaching topics like Bill Clinton’s marital indiscretions and the conspiracy theories surrounding the suicide of Vincent W. Foster Jr., a Clinton White House aide, Donald J. Trump is...  defying the norms of presidential politics and fashioning his own outrageous style — one that has little use for a middleman, let alone usual ideas about dignity.

The Times observes that the Hillary campaign is trying to figure out how to interact with an opponent like this. It's much harder to decline to respond when material is purveyed by the GOP candidate himself and not just right-wing radio and websites. The Times quotes James Carville recommending no response at all.

Then it goes to Anita Dunn, who was once Obama's communications director. (This isn't in the Times, but let's not forget: She's the one who called the Obama White House "a genuinely hostile workplace to women.") Dunn told the Times that Hillary needs to figure out how to respond or Trump gets viewed as "winning the day" whenever he lobs one of his attacks.

And then here's the last sentence of the article:

Half-jokingly imagining Mr. Trump dredging up the 1993 federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex., she said, “We haven’t heard ‘David Koresh’ yet.”

I don't know why that "Half-jokingly" is there. I fully expect Trump to bring up the Waco siege, and there's nothing amusing about it at all.  

"No one wakes up with a passion to pursue togetherness. Half of the country is comprised of introverts, loners, and competitive a-holes."

"Those folks want less togetherness, even if they mean it in an entirely different way. On an irrational level, togetherness – in all its forms – is simply not a universal desire. Compare that to making America greater, which is all good, all the time, to all Americans."

Says Scott Adams, criticizing Hillary Clinton's new slogan "We are stronger together."

I was thinking of the Hillary slogan this morning as I wrote that post about Ken Starr quoting LBJ quoting God saying "Come, let us reason together."

The thing about God's "together" was that He was going to run the show and drastically punish the people if they didn't get together and do things His way.

And that's the problem with a leader or would-be leader using togetherness. We're supposed to get together into the obedient mass that can be ruled over by this power seeker.

On Sunday, we were talking about Hillary's new slogan — which she'd just unveiled on "Meet the Press" — and many of the commenters saw the problem. Henry said it first, without using the f-word:

We are stronger together could be symbolized by a bundle of sticks.

Ah, I was just reading about the Oval Office yesterday — quite by chance in a book about LBJ:

THE ORNAMENTATION OF THE ROOM— an oval thirty-five feet, ten inches long and twenty-nine wide at its widest point, with a ceiling rising in a gentle arch from a cornice sixteen feet high— was restrained. The symbols of power in it— on the ceiling, in plaster, the presidential seal; above French doors classical pediments and representations of “fasces,” bundles of bound rods with an ax protruding, that in ancient Rome symbolized a magistrate’s authority— were muted, subtle, in low relief and painted to blend in with the ceiling and walls. 

ADDED: "We are stronger together" really means: I will be stronger when you are together under me. As John Lennon sang long ago: "Come together, right now, under over me."

A NYT headline: "Kenneth Starr, Who Tried to Bury Bill Clinton, Now Only Praises Him."

Bury... Only...?

Okay, I will read this for you....

The presumptive Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump, increasingly seems to be trying to relitigate the scandals that Mr. Starr investigated, dredging up allegations of sexual transgressions by Mr. Clinton to accuse Hillary Clinton — the likely Democratic nominee — of having aided and enabled her husband at the expense of Mr. Clinton’s female accusers.

"Sexual transgressions" makes what Bill Clinton did sound merely naughty and therefore forgivable. Submerged is the lying under oath, the sexual harassment in the workplace, and — as Donald Trump says (in what is definitely not relitigation) — the allegation of rape.

But Mr. Starr expressed regret last week that so much of Mr. Clinton’s legacy remains viewed through the lens of what Mr. Starr demurely termed “the unpleasantness.”

His remarks seemed almost to absolve Mr. Clinton, if not to exonerate him.

“There are certain tragic dimensions which we all lament,” Mr. Starr said in a panel discussion on the presidency at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

Starr was on a panel promoting a book about the Presidents, to which he contributed a chapter. His chapter is on Ronald Reagan. Somebody else wrote the Clinton chapter. Starr chose to minimize himself on the subject of Clinton, it seems.

For some time, Mr. Starr, a Christian who is now the president and chancellor of Baylor University, a private Baptist school in Waco, Tex., has sought to put his years as a political combatant behind him....

Mr. Starr now is contending with criticism of his own leadership over Baylor’s handling of sexual assault charges leveled against several of its football players....

The Times article goes on to discuss Starr's invocation of the reliable old topic of civility in political discourse. On that subject, Starr quoted LBJ, because what better exemplar of civility is there than LBJ? "Come, let us reason together." That's the quote. As if the take-away from the LBJ years is reasoning together.

But what about that Baylor football problem? The Times does give us a link. It goes to The Dallas Morning News. Excerpt:

And as the sex-assault scandal has grown to encompass at least eight alleged attacks involving football players, two of whom have been convicted in criminal court here, [Starr's] oddly timed written statements have grown more legalistic.

Even at this conservative and sports-mad college, students say they are frustrated by the muted response of the Baylor administration, which the 69-year-old Starr has led for the past six years....

As for that LBJ quote, if you Google it, the first hit is from the Lord:

Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.

LBJ was quoting God, and quoting him out of context, for which he was criticized by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. God wasn't inviting the people of Sodom and Gomorrah to have a civil conversation with him:

"I was a virgin to humiliation of that level, until that day" — the day the Starr Report came out — said Monica Lewinsky...

... in a TV interview yesterday.

If you're going with the "virgin" metaphor, I don't think you can have levels. You don't get to be a "virgin" at multiple levels. Unless she'd never been humiliated before — and did Bill Clinton not humiliate her? — then she was not a humiliation virgin at the point when Ken Starr released his dry, detailed descriptions of her interactions with Bill. But it is funny for someone who chose a lot of daring and transgressive sexual activities with our sexy President to attempt to con us into thinking that she lost her virginity to the snoopy prosecutor who enabled the President's constituents to visualize what she had done.

Political locution of the week: "continuity election."

NYT columnist Charles M. Blow uses the term "continuity election" 3 times in his new column, which I've discussed at length in the previous post. On first use, he says:

There are two kinds of presidential elections: change elections and continuity elections. For many of those who see 2016 as a change election, finding an anti-Obama may seem quite appealing, and Christie fits that bill in style and tone.

Obama is "polished and professorial," while Christie is "brash and blunt." Blow doesn't mention it, but Obama's key word in 2008 was "change" (along with "hope") and a lot of people who thought George W. Bush was brash and blunt felt good about the idea of undoing the Bushiness with Obama-style politesse. Enough yang. We need yin. For 2016, do we need yang again? Do we want another "change election"? Or is more yin the thing? That would be a "continuity election."

"Congratulations, Mr. Starr!"

"As a result of your callous disregard for cherished constitutional rights, you may have succeeded in unmasking a sexual relationship between two consenting adults."

"If everybody could see this, it would make people feel so good about this branch of government and how it’s operating."

Kenneth W. Starr —  former federal judge, Solicitor General and independent counsel — quotes Justice Elena Kagan in a NYT op-ed arguing — as so many have argued before — that the public deserves video access to the oral arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court.

The main argument against it, as stated by the resistant Justices, is that some Justices would showboat for the cameras and try to get the sound bite of the day. I think an unspoken reason why they resist cameras — when they release audio to the world — is that they don't want us all checking our how they look, particularly if they look tired and old. As I said back in 2005:

The Justices have life tenure, and they know how to use it. We just saw 11 years pass without a retirement. Presidents go through through entire terms without a single opportunity to choose a fresh voice for the Court. It has become the norm for Justices to hold their seats as they pass into old age and severe illness. With the support of four gloriously able and energetic law clerks and the silence of the other Justices, no slip in a Justice's ability ever shows in his writing. But the Justices do need to take their seats on the bench for oral argument, and it is here that the public has the chance to judge them.

This judgment may be unfair. Some Justices, as noted, are better looking than others. Some will subject themselves to hair and makeup specialists, and others won't tolerate it. And getting older damages even the prettiest face. Some Justices love the verbal jousting with the lawyers in the courtroom, while others think that all they need is the written argument and opt out of the live show. With cameras, Justice Scalia would win new fans, and "The Daily Show" would wring laughs from Justice Thomas's silent face. The read is inaccurate.

But the cameras would expose the Justices who cling to their seats despite declining ability. It is true that the journalists in the courtroom might tell us if a Justice no longer manages to sit upright and look alert. But the regular gaze of the television cameras would create a permanent but subtle pressure on the Justices to think realistically about whether they still belong on the Court. Self-interest would motivate them to step down gracefully and not cling too long to the position of power the Constitution entitles them to. I think this new pressure would serve the public interest. It would institute a valuable check on the life tenure provision, which has, in modern times, poured too much power into the individuals who occupy the Court.

A new counterargument occurs to me as I reread that. A President with the power to appoint a new Supreme Court Justice will think about how well the nominee will represent the administration's political agenda on TV. He'd want someone who looks and speaks persuasively to the public through the new medium.

Justice Kagan talked about making people feel so good about the judiciary, and, obviously, she intended to convey the notion that the Justices stick to legal arguments and apply themselves to puzzling through the various texts. But if one Justice — say, Elena Kagan — has the skill and charisma to project into the camera and make her approach to interpretation lodge in the minds of the people, those who support the other "side" would want an equivalently powerful voice. That good feeling could be comfort with the abuses of power by the other branches of government or a complacency that whatever we need and want can be provided by a benevolent Court.

And yet, I suspect, that if people had more access to the arguments, we would become involved in the substance of the law and attempt to work through the actual legal problems at a higher level than we do now. I know I would love the ability to make clips from the video to incorporate into blog posts that discuss and explain the issues. Of course, I would jump at the opportunity to extract funny little things for all sorts of diverse bloggerly purposes. But the Court, like the other branches of government, deserves to be laughed at too.

"'I guess it depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is,' observed one of the justices, a sly reference to Starr’s previous job."

"Starr did not take the bait. He merely smirked and carried on with his argument."

The justices were particularly interested in whether Prop 8 invalidates some 18,000 nuptials performed between the court’s initial ruling and the passage of the initiative. And they zeroed in on the precise wording of the proposition, which read: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."

Justice Alito opts out of the cert. pool.

He's rejecting the efficiency of the system of shared law clerks in which clerk writes a memo relied on by Justices using the pool to decide whether to grant the petition to the Supreme Court to hear a case.

A petition accepted that must later be dismissed as “improvidently granted” is a significant embarrassment to the clerk in question. On the other hand, it is hard to get into trouble, [Pepperdine School of Law dean Kenneth] Starr said, by recommending a denial. “The prevailing spirit among the 25-year-old legal savants, whose life experience is necessarily limited in scope, is to seek out and destroy undeserving petitions,” he wrote.

The justices decided 67 cases last term, about half the number in an average year two decades ago. But Justice Alito has said the rise of the pool and the size of the docket are unrelated.

Starr's theory implies that they are related, and Alito's statement was made last year. Perhaps he's changed his mind.