The effort to cancel the one black person on the Court.

On the front page of The Washington Post right now:



Can you even guess what that's about? I tried and I guessed wrong. I thought maybe there was a prediction that Justice Thomas might be conscious of a likelihood that he'd be leaving the Court within the next 4 years and he might be swayed by a desire to control who appoints his replacement. But, no, that would also be a ground to demand that Justice Breyer recuse himself.

Here's the column. The reason is that he might be carrying a decades-long grudge against Joe Biden for the way he ran the Senate Judiciary Committee in the hearings on his confirmation.

Ugly political imagery.

Last night I posted a couple of photographs of rather creepy posters seen in Madison. There was a third photograph I was going to include, of a poster seen in the window of the Rainbow Bookstore a few days ago. After previewing the draft of my post, I decided to delete it: it was too ugly. Today, I see there is an article in the Washington Post about a new novel that consists largely of a character fantasizing about killing the President. (The book is "Checkpoint," by Nicholson Baker, an author I have liked very much in the past, though I never read "Vox," his novel about phone sex that Monica Lewinsky was said to have bought for Bill Clinton.) I found the Washington Post article via National Review's Kerry Spot, which I saw had linked to this post of mine that bemoaned the lack of rational discussion in politics. The Kerry Spot post enumerates many recent over-the-top expressions of rabid hostility to Bush (such as Nicholson's book). Considering that, as well as the ad in The Nation that Andrew Sullivan linked to yesterday, I will go ahead and post the photograph I declined to show yesterday, which I consider extremely offensive, especially considering the recent beheadings in Iraq: