President Garfield's "spine, removed during autopsy, was passed around to jurors during the trial of his assassin."

Now there's a lurid detail, extracted from Sarah Vowell's "Assassination Vacation," in this NYT review. It's a book about presidential assassins:

We learn ... that the canny thespian John Wilkes Booth, stalking Lincoln that fateful April evening at Ford's Theater, waited for a surefire laugh line to cover his shot; and that the line, a rejoinder in which a female character is dismissed as a ''sockdologizing old man trap,'' hasn't aged all that well. Still, as Vowell writes, ''it is a comfort of sorts to know that the bullet hit Lincoln mid-guffaw. . . . At least his last conscious moment was a hoot.''

I like Sarah Vowell -- from "This American Life" -- and am glad she'll get more attention for her books now that everyone loves her as the voice of Violet, from "The Incredibles." I was just seeing her on C-Span, promoting this book, and she was quite charming, with her cute but profound voice and her flat but expressive intonation.

(I'd buy this as an audiobook, but it's not available on CDs -- only cassette. Too bad!) [ADDED: That's wrong. It is on CD -- at the link provided. Sorry. I've ordered it.]

UPDATE: A reader notes that Vowell makes a special contribution to the deluxe "Incredibles" DVD set, in a piece called "Vowellet":

Author/cast member Sarah Vowell (NPR's This American Life) talks about her first foray into movie voice-overs--daughter Violet--and the unlikelihood of her being a superhero. The feature is unlike anything we've seen on a Disney or Pixar DVD extra, but who else would consider Abe Lincoln an action figure?

Sounds like the new book figures into that.

Dangerous, fugitive cat.

Sentenced to beheading -- in Chile.

Booker, who won in the Supreme Court, gets the same 30-year sentence.

"Too old to become involved in criminal activity? Not on your life, counselor. He'll never be too old," said Judge Shabaz as he handed Freddie Joe Booker the same 30-year sentence he gave him back before Booker fought his way to a victory in the U.S. Supreme Court last January. The Court found a Sixth Amendment problem with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines that led it to reframe the Guidelines as discretionary rather than mandatory. It remains to be seen how much the Booker decision will change things at ground level:

Assistant U.S. Attorney John Vaudreuil said the Booker decision hasn't caused more defendants in this federal district to choose trials over pleas because both Judge Barbara Crabb and Shabaz continue follow the guidelines.

"I can only speak to what's happening here, but our judges look at the guidelines and have largely determined them to be appropriate...Both (judges) have made it clear that one of the goals of following the guidelines is to keep a uniform approach to sentencing cases across the country," Vaudreuil said.

Dylanology.

A roomful of Bob Dylan fans talk about Bob Dylan at the top level of "Dylan geekiness."

One theme running through the evening was Mr. Dylan's aversion to pleasing. The panelists agreed that in the 1980's, in particular, the singer seemed bent on distancing himself from fans, musicians, even his own music. Mr. Hultkrans compared him to Kafka - hiding his best work in drawers.

There was also the question of whether Mr. Dylan is in decline. The writer Luc Sante, who had been a scheduled panelist, apparently held that the period of 1965 to 1967 was the high-water mark, but Mr. Lethem disagreed. "I see" his genius "arising, with equal uncanniness, however fugitive," he said. "There are songs and performances that are as much of the part of the Godhead now as ever."

I agree with Luc Sante. The albums in those years -- "Bringing It All Back Home," "Highway 61 Revisited," and "Blonde On Blonde" -- are the ones I really care about. They seem to be the essence of Dylan, the reason Dylan matters so much. But why? When I read the words to the songs on later albums, many of them seem just as good. I note that it was on the album after "Blonde On Blonde" that Dylan stopped singing in that distinctive voice, that voice we all want to use when we do our Dylan imitations. It seemed like such a ridiculous way to sing.

(Remember the video of the making of "We Are the World," when Dylan didn't know how to sing his lines, and Stevie Wonder sang them for him, using the mid-60s Dylan singing style?)

But there was something mystical about that crazy way to sing that we all lost when Dylan came back after his motorcycle accident with "John Wesley Harding."

The world has never been the same.

UPDATE: Interestingly -- I'm just noticing this -- my ex-husband Richard Cohen was up and blogging about Bob Dylan before I was. His is a dream, analyzed, about Dylan. I'm a little unnerved that Richard ends his post:

A weird phenomenon that often happens when I dream: waking up, I realize that the whole dream was a code for the title of a song or a line for a song. In this case, “All I really want to do is baby be friends with you.”

The weird thing about that is that most of the time I was writing this post, I was planning on titling it with a line from "All I Really Want To Do." I started writing my post because of the line in the article, "One theme running through the evening was Mr. Dylan's aversion to pleasing," which I thought would go well with the song line "I don't want to satisfy you." When I finally got around to searching for "satisfy" on bobdylan.com, where was that line I remembered? I saw I was only imagining it. There are two other "-ify" words-- "simplify" and "classify" -- but not "satisfy." Was there some other line about refusing to please that I could substitute? No. That's just not the way the words of the song go at all. It's good not to be simplified and classified. Why did I transform that into something that would be bad to be denied: you do want to be satisfied. Still, in some way, refusing to please is the unspoken theme of the song. Dylan is saying don't expect me to be your conventional boyfriend -- "I don't want to meet your kin." I will define a new male-female relationship, and it's not all the things you come to me believing you want.

So I ended up thinking about that song a lot this morning -- and damned if my ex-husband isn't mulling it over too. That's just eerie! And weirdly, his "realization" that that song fits that dream seems off, at least if we're to believe his analysis of the dream. But "I ain't lookin' to compete with you" and "I ain't lookin' to... Analyze you." So I'll end this already excessively revealing update right here. Or should I add a Dylan quote? "Nothing is revealed."

The extreme dazzle of extreme celebrity?

The defense witnesses in the Michael Jackson case are putting on an amazing display of the effect of celebrity on the human mind:

During the South American tour, [said the mother of Brett Barnes, who, at age 12, slept with Jackson during two 6-month-long concert tours,] she and her husband had discussed whether their son should be sleeping with Mr. Jackson, but only in terms of whether it was an "imposition" on Mr. Jackson....

Joy Robson, the mother of Wade Robson, now 22, said it was "not a problem" that Mr. Jackson was spending nights with her son beginning 15 years ago. "Nothing ever crossed my mind...."

Or should we say these witnesses must be lying? Even if you decide that Jackson is innocent and trustworthy, how can the opposite never cross your mind?

Mary, graffiti, brown paint, and "Engine Shampoo."

I see a lot has happened recently to the underpass salt stain some people believed to be a miraculous appearance of the Virgin Mary.

Are we ready to start blogging about the '08 election?

Or are we still too tired of presidential campaign blogging? Well, surely we're at least too tired of John Kerry. But here he is, begging for attention. Could there be better evidence of his lack of political skill than his failure to go away and stay away long enough for us to forget how tedious we found him last time? Even during the final months of the '04 campaign, he was always doing best when he was keeping the lowest profile. The strategy that won him the nomination was to hold back, seem adult and dignified, and wait for everyone else to scamper ahead and slip on all of the banana peels. The only way he could ever get the '08 nomination is for the same damned thing to happen again.

Maureen Dowd's chimeras.

Maureen Dowd riffs on the idea of the chimera -- a mythological monster combining parts of different animals. She notes but doesn't seem to take any position on the fears about research that combines human stem cells with animal embryos, then moves on to the place that she usually moves on to: criticizing Republicans.

First, the two Bush wars:

President Bush's experiments in Afghanistan and Iraq created his own chimeras, by injecting feudal and tribal societies with the cells of democracy, and blending warring factions and sects. Some of the forces unleashed are promising; others are frightening.

And then the party itself:

The Republican Party is now a chimera, too, a mutant of old guard Republicans, who want government kept out of our lives, and evangelical Christians, who want government to legislate religion into our lives.

But exploiting God for political ends has set off powerful, scary forces in America: a retreat on teaching evolution, most recently in Kansas; fights over sex education, even in the blue states and blue suburbs of Maryland; a demonizing of gays; and a fear of stem cell research, which could lead to more of a "culture of life" than keeping one vegetative woman hooked up to a feeding tube.

Even as scientists issue rules on chimeras in labs, a spine-tingling he-monster with the power to drag us back into the pre-Darwinian dark ages is slouching around Washington. It's a fire-breathing creature with the head of W., the body of Bill Frist and the serpent tail of Tom DeLay.

Is the scary thing she's perceiving the combination of different things or the components that she would disapprove of whether they were in solo form or not?

I would have thought that the need to combine small factions into a larger party to achieve national power is a source of moderation.

Time to reread The Federalist, Number 10:

AMONG the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction....

The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; and the smaller the number of individuals composing a majority, and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression. Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other. Besides other impediments, it may be remarked, that where there is a consciousness of unjust or dishonorable purposes, a communication is always checked by distrust, in proportion to the number whose concurrence is necessary....

The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States: a religious sect, may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it, must secure the national Councils against any danger from that source: a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union, than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.

To bring it back to Dowd's genetic metaphor: let's remember the good of hybrid vigor and the disadvantages of inbreeding. Politically, inclusion, diversity, and assimilation seem to work better than exclusion and the enforcement of ideological purity. Is it any wonder the Republicans have outplayed the Democrats recently?

UPDATE: Here's Captain Ed's reaction to Dowd's column. One point:

Dowd's argument is that democracy somehow is not only foreign to Arabs, but unnatural -- about as racist an argument that the New York Times has allowed in its editorial pages in decades.

And let me add that the whole fear of the chimera struck me as awfully similar to old racist fears about "miscegenation." Just substitute "mongrel" -- as in "mongrelization of the races" -- for the fancy-schmancy word "chimera." The horror of mixing divergent lines? It's a rather ugly metaphor.

Do whatever your mother taught you to do.

My Madisonian co-bloggers are all blogging about Mother's Day, which I've blogged about only in the context of making fun of a moronic ad. Tonya is training her son to behave properly on days of celebration. And in Tonya's comments, Nina's all "To be able to celebrate another with full pomp and ceremony, down to the last flower, is totally awesome." Nina, on her own blog, is writing about Mother's Day in her usual elliptical style. Oscar has a kind of tribute to "Blogger Moms" and links to me. Am I supposed to be one of the "Moms Who Blog"? Much as I like links and recognition in general, I don't belong on a list of "Moms Who Blog." There are plenty of women who blog about being mothers, and they should be linked on the occasion of Mother's Day. But not by me: I don't read blogs like that and have no idea which ones are good. While I may mention an occasional thing about one of my sons, it's not the main thing I do over here. This isn't a Momblog. Do I have anything to say about Mother's Day? Well, I just got everyone twisted up over my complaints about big weddings, so maybe I shouldn't kick another one of femaledom's sacred cows. I should find a sacred bull to kick. I won't interfere with your weekend of maternal adoration. Do whatever your mother taught you to do. About everything.

UPDATE: Is this post too cranky? I say no. I'd be irked to be called a Law Professor Mom, after all. I'm taking a feminist position here. But I did want to add that Tonya's dialogues with her son are really hilarious. So, though I don't read Momblogs, I do always read Tonya's blog, and I highly recommend the post linked above, which has one of those dialogues.

"Always go for the jugular. Never agonize in an opinion."

That's advice from Justice Black to Justice Blackmun, per Jeffrey Rosen's review of Linda Greenhouse's new book. Which looks terrific, by the way.

Blackmun didn't manage to follow the advice:

He agonized endlessly, publicly lamenting having become emotionally involved in case after case. And he apologized for his decisions, calling them "inadequate and hesitant."

Most interesting here is how he struggled with Roe v. Wade, bent on making the case about the rights of the doctors and not the women.

Justice Blackmun was no feminist, and he strenuously resisted claims involving women's rights for most of his tenure on the court. He complained when the court voted before Sandra Day O'Connor's arrival in 1980 to omit the traditional reference to "Mr. Justice." He was impatient with the briefs that Ruth Bader Ginsburg filed as an advocate for the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of women's rights, calling one of them "mildly offensive and arrogant," and dismissing her as "too smart."

"Do you like marshmallows?"

In case you missed that Rosie O'Donnell TV movie, here are the highlights. (Via Metafilter.)

So, is it always 1969 in Madison?

Yesterday, I posted a couple pictures of the t-shirts in the window of our local hippie nostalgia store -- Sunshine Daydream -- which led a commenter to write "The people in Madison must be really poorly dressed." Not to be baited, my response was "Yes, all we wear is tie-dyed hippie clothes!" Then somebody else wrote "So, is it always 1969 in Madison?"

Today, I got in my car to go in to the Law School faculty meeting and the satellite radio was set on the 60s "Decades" channel and the song playing was "Hair," from the "Album of the Week" "Hair." Next song: "Good Morning Starshine." Then, the news from 1969. (Did you know Ted Kennedy opposed the death penalty for Sirhan Sirhan?)

So, is it always 1969 in Madison?

I arrive at the faculty meeting and the first person I see is Tonya. Nice shirt!

Wisely pondering the delicate balance.

I didn't get much out of this NYT op-ed called "Chopping Off the Weakest Branch." The author, Ron Chernow, who wrote a biography of Alexander Hamilton, offers up some historical material from around the time of Marbury v. Madison. Yes, there was a big political struggle about the role of the judiciary back then. But so what?

[B]efore they starve the lower courts of funds, Republicans in Congress and the conservative evangelicals who support them would be wise to ponder these events of the early 1800's. For all the talk today of tyrannical judges, the judiciary still relies on Congress for its financing and on the executive branch to enforce its decisions. It could easily, once again, end up at the mercy of the other two branches, upsetting the delicate balance the framers intended.

That's how the piece ends. So it would be "wise to ponder"? Okay, ponder on! But that's the end of the essay. Chernow only frets that Congress might "upset[] the delicate balance the framers intended." So it's the framers' intent we're following? Since the role of the judiciary -- and the role of the federal government -- has already evolved far away from anything they specifically intended, what can this mean other than please don't upset the "delicate balance" we happen to have currently? And why isn't part of the framers' vision the power the Constitution gives Congress to push back against the judiciary? Congress was given a set of checks, and Marbury says nothing against Congress exercising those checks. Indeed, the statute found unconstitutional in Marbury had the defect of giving the Supreme Court too much jurisdiction.

Of course, cutting off funding for the judicial branch is a foolish way to push back against the judicial power, and I tend to doubt such a foolish plan will gain much footing. The most significant check is appointing new federal judges as vacancies occur. This process of continually replacing judges is not disturbingly chaotic like cutting off funding. It's entirely orderly and necessary.

The real dispute now is how to carry out that process, which must, under the Constitution, take place, in part, in the Senate. Does Chernow's historical account tell us anything about how political that should or shouldn't be? Chernow takes the side of President Adams and the Federalists against Thomas Jefferson. But it was Adams who tried to preserve his party's power by stocking the judiciary with Federalists. So if the Adams side of the dispute was correct, what is the lesson to "wisely ponder" about what Bush and the Senate Republicans can do with appointments?

The constitutionality of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.

SCOTUSblog notes (via How Appealing) that the Ninth Circuit is inquiring into the constitutionality of the changes to the habeas standard that were made back in 1996 as part of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act:

The 1996 law was expressly intended by Congress to sharply curtail the right of state prison inmates, under federal habeas, to challenge their state convictions and sentences. A key section of AEDPA bars a federal court from granting any habeas writ on an issue that was raised in state court, unless the state court decision “was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application, of clearly established federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States.” (That is 28 U.S.C. 2254-d-1.)

The Ninth Circuit’s new order, issued Wednesday, raises the question whether that section “unconstitutionally prescribes the sources of law that the Judicial Branch must use in exercising its jurisdiction and whether under the separation of powers doctrine this court should decline to apply the AEDPA standards in this case.” By citing Marbury and City of Boerne on that issue, the Circuit Court was relying on two strong statements by the Supreme Court that Congress’ power to control how the courts carry out their judicial function is strictly limited by separation-of-powers principles.

Let me recommend the dissenting opinion of Judge Ripple in the 1997 Seventh Circuit case Lindh v. Murphy (which reached the Supreme Court, but not on this issue). Judge Ripple found a separation of powers violation in the AEDPA standard back then. I'd excerpt some of the opinion for you, but it's too ponderous for the general reader, and I can't find a pithy paragraph. The majority in this en banc case shot down the argument summarily. It's hard to believe a court at this late date would have much success coming back to this issue, which was very well known at the time the act was passed, but there may be something about the context of this new case that makes the argument especially appealing.

Slow start.

It's a rainy day here in Madison. The rain is knocking the petals off the red bud trees I've been enjoying just outside my dining room window for the last couple weeks. I'm getting a late start blogging (and everything else) today, because I lost about three hours of sleep in the middle of the night after someone dialing a wrong number woke me up at 2 a.m. People, when you're making phone calls in the middle of the night, be especially careful about the right number!

Now, I'm seeing that, during the night, my Site Meter clicked up over 1.5 million. That's pretty cool. It just hit 1 million around the 31st of January, a year and a half month after it began. Anyway, this traffic milestone -- and thanks for reading! -- is making me sorry I don't have some solid blogginess for you yet today.

So, I need to do some paper-reading and I want to do a little blogging. I've got an exam to write and an exam to grade and I'm working on a presentation for the local Bar Association about the Supreme Court's constitutional cases this term. Unfortunately, the cases I'm most interested in will not come out in time for my talk (next Tuesday). Thinking back over the term so far, I'm not coming up with much constitutional law of significance, especially outside of the criminal law area. There is the death penalty case (about those who commit their crimes at an early age), but what else?

UPDATE: That's "cases" not "case" I'm most interested in. What are they? The medical marijuana case (Raich) and the case about the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (Cutter). There's also the negative commerce clause case about wine importation (Granholm).

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ambivablog writes about blogging guilt (and links here).

In the sun.

It's been said that it's always the female students lolling about, sunning themselves on the hill. But see:



A boy!

Down on Library Mall, the cherry trees are reaching the end of their glamorous show, lots of people are having nice al fresco lunches ...



.... and a couple of people are staking out the anti-war position: