"Don't take away our portable Rome..."

"...where we can all have our houses and our cars, and our lovers and our wives, and our office girls and parties and drink and drugs." That's how John Lennon described the attitude of the circle that surrounded the Beatles -- why they never told their tales or showed the photographs they had:

"If you couldn't get groupies, we had whores," he claimed. "Whatever was going.

"There were photos of me crawling round on my knees coming out of whorehouses in Amsterdam with people saying: 'Good morning, John.'"

The BBC airs the 1970 interview today.

"People don't understand what happens to you when you become a judge. When you take that oath, you are transformed."

The NYT has this news article on yesterday's meeting between Samuel Alito and Senator Arlen Spector:

The White House and Mr. Specter hastily arranged the visit after an uproar over Wednesday's release of a 1985 memorandum reflecting Judge Alito's passionate belief that Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court's landmark abortion decision, should be overturned....

"Well, Judge Alito characterizes it as a personal opinion," Mr. Specter said. "I don't. That's what Judge Alito says."...

[A] colleague of Judge Alito, Judge Edward R. Becker of the Third Circuit, who is also a close friend of Mr. Specter, said Friday that the memorandum did not reflect Judge Alito's approach on the bench, which he said was to look "at every case anew with an open mind."

"It is not the Sam Alito I know," Judge Becker said. "People don't understand what happens to you when you become a judge. When you take that oath, you are transformed. You are a different person. You have a solemn obligation to be totally impartial and fair."

Mr. Specter said that was the point Judge Alito made in their meeting.

He said the judge "raised a sharp distinction, as he put it, between his role as an advocate and his role as a judge," adding, "And with respect to his personal views on a woman's right to choose, he says that is not a matter to be considered in deliberation on a constitutional issue of a woman's right to choose, the judicial role is entirely different."

And the NYT has this editorial, expressing a lot of skepticism but stopping short of rejecting the nomination. Its bottom line is the same as Specter's: "The Senate needs to look through the cloud of explanations and excuses and examine where Judge Alito really stands on abortion rights." That is, we know with some assurance what he thinks of abortion. The question for a judge is what he thinks about rights.

Judge Becker says, "People don't understand what happens to you when you become a judge. When you take that oath, you are transformed." Well, people quite rightly don't "understand" that you become "transformed" into some inhuman machine that can generate purely legal reasoning. Efforts to convince us that you undergo a complete transformation fail because we are not dupes. We've trained ourselves not to believe assurances about the pure motives of those who would take power. But some transformation must take place, if we are talking about a human being who has enough moral character to be considered for the position in the first place. We also go wrong if we imagine that judging is nothing but repackaged politics.

Still, if we know a judge's attitudes will surely, if subtly, affect decisions, we've got to worry when the nominee has clearly expressed personal hostility to a right we care about. The fight to deprive women of the control over the insides of their own bodies has gone on too long already. Now, we are threatened with a new surge of legal attacks, as a newly configured Court revives the hopes of the opponents of abortion rights. I've supported the Alito nomination because I recognize the significance of the President's appointment power and because Alito is clearly an accomplished man of excellent character. But I do think he needs to demonstrate a commitment to the structure of constitutional rights that we have counted on for so many years.

UPDATE: Let me add a word about the fact that Alito has taken various positions as a legal advocate and not simply as a private individual. Aren't his ideas about abortion, expressed in legal writing, as an advocate, something that relate to abortion rights and not simply to abortion? An advocate has a goal in mind and, in pursuit of this goal, searches for legal arguments that might persuade a court. What an advocate does with legal texts and arguments is different from what a judge does. Advocates don't really think their arguments are the best answers, just that they are professionally arguable and would produce the desired results. If you asked the advocate to be honest and say what he would decide if he were the judge, assuming this advocate was honest and ethical, he would often admit that he would reject his own argument. Thus, Alito can properly distinguish the arguments he supported as an advocate with the goal of overturning abortion rights from the opinions he would reach as a judge.

"I wrote Lennon's obituary for this newspaper the day after he was shot, Dec. 8, 1980."

Paul McGrath writes a memorial to John Lennon, which he publishes 5 days before the 25th anniversary of Lennon's death:

By and large, he had found his peace. He had survived his vices, his politics, his rages and his therapies, avoided the junkie's death unlike so many, only to meet a cheap little handgun in the hands of a sad case like so many others he had met, kids who believed in some desperate part of them that this man could actually pull them out of the pit. And he couldn't. All he could do was write and sing, and in those songs tens of millions did in fact find a real solace, a pushing back of the fog and the dark.

I'm going to pick out a set of John Lennon songs to play it as I drive my car -- baby, you can drive my car -- in the next week. I'll reveal the song list later. If you care about John Lennon, tell me, what is your song list?

UPDATE: After collecting 35 songs from my various CDs, I selected these 17:

Happiness Is A Warm Gun
Come Together
Tomorrow Never Knows
Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!
Instant Karma!
Strawberry Fields Forever
Rain
Across the Universe
She Said She Said
Don´t Let Me Down
You've Got To Hide Your Love Away
Girl
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
In My Life
I'm So Tired
Revolution
A Day In The Life

I'm going to put the second group of 18 in my car too:

A Hard Day's Night
Please Please Me
Not A Second Time
You Can't Do That
All I've Got To Do
I Call Your Name
Sexy Sadie
Julia
If I Fell
I'm A Loser
Ticket to Ride
I'm Only Sleeping
I Feel Fine
Help!
Mind Games
I Am The Walrus
All You Need Is Love
You Know My Name (Look up the Number)

Some things about the sequencing I did on purpose. Others I find amusing now that I notice, like that I put the two songs with exclamation points together. These are all songs that appeal to me for one reason or another, and I didn't put them in the order that I favor them, though I did put my favorite one first.

UPDATE: Al Hurd remembers John and lines up 3 discs worth of songs.

"It became clear that, beyond new wars, what has kept the song alive is its melody, and its vehemence: that final 'I hope that you die.'"

Greil Marcus goes on about Bob Dylan's "Masters of War":

Dylan had stopped singing "Masters of War" by 1964. Songs like that were "lies that life is black and white," he sang that year. He brought it back into his repertoire in the 1980s; he was playing more than a hundred shows a year, and to fill the nights he brought back everything. It was a crowd-pleaser, the number one protest song. But nothing in the song hinted at what it would turn into on February 21, 1991, at the Grammy Awards telecast, where Dylan was to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award.

The show came square in the middle of the first Iraqi-American War—a break from round-the-clock footage of the bombing of Baghdad....

With that night, the song began its second life. In the fall of 2002, when George W. Bush made plain his intent to launch a second Iraq war—on November 11, just after the midterm elections that Bush had used the specter of war to win—Dylan appeared at Madison Square Garden and again offered "Masters of War" as an answer record to real life....

It became clear that, beyond new wars, what has kept the song alive is its melody, and its vehemence: that final "I hope that you die." It's the elegance of the melody and the extremism of the words that attract people—the way the song does go too far, to the limits of free speech. It's a scary line to sing; you need courage to do it. You can't come to the song as if it's a joke; you can't come away from it pretending you didn't mean what you've just said. That's what people want: a chance to go that far. Because "Masters of War" gives people permission to go that far, the song continues to make meaning, to find new bodies to inhabit, new voices to ride.

Read the whole thing, which includes descriptions of other singers doing the song, including those kids at Boulder High School.

I remember listening to "Masters of War" in the 1960s. It releases the young mind to think a new thought: All these people who run the world deserve to die. It emboldens you to sing along with this seemingly profound insight, and, singing along, you find yourself expressing utterly hard anger and hatred.

Without saying why it's time to read a tragicomic book...

John Simon picks five:

1. "In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust (1913-22)....

2. "The Good Soldier" by Ford Madox Ford (1915)....

3. The Plays of Anton Chekhov (1896-1904)....

4. "The Journals of Malte Lourids Brigge" by Rainer Maria Rilke (1910)....

5. "Vile Bodies" by Evelyn Waugh (1930)...

Read them and weep. And laugh. I guess. These seem to be the choices of a very old man. I'll bet you younger folks can come up with some nice post-1930 tragicomic things to read.

Saddam on trial -- in a Western suit with a pocket square but no tie!

Robin Givhan wonders what that means:

The pocket square was a particularly distracting flourish. Paired with a tie, a pocket square tends to make a man look more formally attired. But without that accompaniment, it can look almost jaunty and rakish -- like Sinatra or Dino in Vegas.

Hussein's style choice throws the viewer off balance. Is his modest paean to the Flamingo a simple reflection of his hair-dyeing, gold-leaf-loving, frightful vanity? Or has he decided to beat the "occupiers" from within their own system? Take it over, or mock it?

And I thought it was shocking when I opened my office door one morning and found a man sleeping on my sofa.

But this... this... Oh, it's so horrible. And hilarious. (Via Dan Drezner.)

Defending Alito, Senator Specter conveniently forgets his own role in destroying the Miers nomination.

There's an amusing passage at the end of the NYT report on Senator Specter's statement today after meeting with Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. Specter opined that people ought to wait until the confirmation hearings to find out what Alito has to say about a memo on abortion he wrote as a lawyer in the Reagan administration.

Ms. Miers was "really sort of run out of town on a rail," Mr. Specter said. Senator Specter himself helped to weaken the nomination when he suggested that Ms. Miers needed "a crash course in constitutional law."

"Cameron offers audio commentary, and so does a much welcome and much sassier Kate Winslet. "

Come on, you know you want the new, improved DVD of "Titanic." DiCaprio does not contribute. Is he being snooty or does he know he's not good at commentary? Who cares? More audio time for the divine Miss Winslet.

"I for one do not dance to dance music; disco for me is a lofty metaphysical mode that induces contemplation."

Camille Paglia sniffs at Madonna's new "Confessions on a Dance Floor."

You decide if it's worth paying for a Salon subscription or watching a commercial to read the whole thing. If I'm watching a commercial and I think it's too long, it doesn't help my mood that the name of the product is Infiniti.

You know, I don't dance to dance music either. I've been at concerts where I'm just standing there like a statue and some stranger says to me "How can you not dance?" My answer: "I'm an intellectual!" Yeah, I'm in a metaphysical mode, man. You're intruding on my contemplation.

IN THE COMMENTS: Ron quotes Nietzsche, connecting dancing and intellectualism.

"'Sleeper Cell' is better than '24.'"

Alessandra Stanley gives us a strong heads-up about a new TV show (on Showtime):

"Sleeper Cell" is a spy thriller for the new phase in post-Sept. 11 television drama. Until now, most series about counterterrorism clung to cartoon ideations of can-do agents and fiendishly efficient terrorists - reflecting, perhaps, an almost childlike hunger for American indomitability at a time when news reports are less reassuring. Even Jack Bauer on Fox's "24" has a comic-book supercompetence to match that of his enemies, brilliant terrorist masterminds intent on bringing the United States to its knees. (If terrorists can be sloppy or lazy, then there really is no excuse for not catching them.)

In this series, the F.B.I. is a vast bureaucracy riddled with complacent midlevel agents who carelessly screw up surveillance work and bosses who are as concerned with diverting blame as they are with deterring attacks. Even the terrorist fanatics are killing machines with a human face. Some of them make foolish mistakes, from bragging about a secret operation on the telephone to a relative in the Middle East to panicking when they think they are being followed. Others secretly miss their wives and make weepy phone calls home in the middle of the night.

So the cartoonish characters and plots on network TV dramas about counterterrorism are attributable to the viewers' "childlike hunger for American indomitability"? What's the explanation for the cartoonish characters and plots on all the other network TV dramas?

Do schools violate the privacy of openly gay students when they inform the parents?

The NYT reports on what an ACLU lawyer called "the first court ruling we're aware of where a judge has recognized that a student has a right not to have her sexual orientation disclosed to her parents, even if she is out of the closet at school."

Christine Sun [the ACLLU lawyer who represents Charlene Nguon, said:] "It's really important, because, while Charlene's parents have been very supportive, coming out is a very serious decision that should not be taken away from anyone, and disclosure can cause a lot of harm to students who live in an unsupportive home."...

Conservatives criticized the judge's reasoning. "This court ruling is so unrealistic that it borders on ridiculous," said Carrie Gordon Earll, a spokeswoman for Focus on the Family, a socially conservative group based in Colorado. "In a disciplinary action by the school, you can't expect them to lie to the parents and not give details of what happened. It seems ironic to raise privacy as an issue in a public display of affection. She'd already outed herself."

Advocates for gay rights, however, welcomed the judge's decision to let the case proceed, but said it was too soon to celebrate.

"I wouldn't yet go out and tell a kid in Iowa to walk down the halls at school holding hands with his boyfriend," said Brian Chase, a lawyer with the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. "It isn't fair, but gay kids expressing affection are not treated the way straight kids are."

The lawsuit seeks to clear Ms. Nguon's record and create a districtwide policy and guidelines for the treatment of gay students.

Schools often tell parents things about their children that are news to the parents but no secret at all at the school. The news that one's child is gay is a unique item of information, however. For a gay person, telling a parent is a special moment in the relation between parent and child. The young person thinks about when to tell the each parent and how to put it. These are decisions that take into account everything that young person knows about the parents attitudes and moods. How it is done has intense short term and deep long term effects on the relationships a person has with each of his or her parents. For a school to preempt that profound interaction and dump the news on a parent to add some extra dimension to a discipline report betrays a contemptible lack of dedication to the interests of students.

This is not a legal opinion of mine. I don't know the law in this area enough to have a legal opinion. This is an ethical judgment.

IN THE COMMENTS: Several readers talk about their own experiences coming out to their parents. One reader finds the complaint in the lawsuit and discovers a blogging angle:

Paragraph 28: While Charlene was serving her one-week suspension in or about March 2005, Principal Wolf called her and her mother in for a meeting at the school. At the meeting, Principal Wolf threatened to expel Charlene for an offcampus “blog,” an online journal entry, wherein Charlene had criticized another student for being materialistic and criticized teachers for favoring that student. He also threatened that he could have Charlene arrested and her computer confiscated for the blog entry, but none of those things happened.

And there's a link to another version of the news story, one with better detail, revealing the problem to be not just the disclosure of information to the parents but also the discriminatory application of the school's rule against public displays of affection:

In his 13-page ruling issued Monday, [Judge] Selna wrote that the administrators failed to take "action to stop or remedy the alleged harassment and discrimination" and failed to enact an "adequate formal or informal policy to ensure that Santiago High is providing a learning environment free from discrimination" as required by the California Education Code.

While attorneys for the district argued that Nguon had no right to privacy regarding her sexual orientation because she had been openly demonstrative toward her girlfriend in public on the campus, Selna agreed with Nguon's attorneys that because an event is not wholly private, it does not mean that an individual has no interest in limiting disclosure or dissemination of the information.

"The court finds that (Nguon) has alleged a serious invasion of her privacy interest by Wolf when he disclosed her sexual orientation to her mother," Selna wrote.

"The court finds that plaintiffs have sufficiently alleged disparate treatment of (Nguon) on the basis of her sexual orientation," Selna wrote.

"Plaintiffs have alleged that (Nguon) was disciplined for expressive conduct that is not similarly punished when engaged in by heterosexual students," Selna wrote. "Hence the complaint alleges discriminatory treatment regarding a clearly established constitutional right, and Wolf is not entitled to qualified immunity."

"I actually, like, look down on people who, you know, get depressed."

"I don't relate to that kind of mentality. All I can do is just sit there and laugh. I think Felicia is definitely destined to... be done." That's Alla on tonight's "Apprentice." What a character, that Alla! She was the one that I bonded with in the first episode. She had the strongest persona. In the end, tonight, though, I wanted Felicia to defeat her. Did Trump make the right decision? Sure. Of course. The final episode has the right two competitors.

"The little beasts are agitated."

Squirrels!

EXTRA: Fiona de Londras spots the hilarious -- and grisly -- misplaced modifier in the BBC news story.

Sexomnia.

A defense to rape that worked in Canada.

[A]t a trial, sleep experts testified that [Jan] Luedecke suffered from sexomnia.

A judge then ruled Wednesday that the landscaper was essentially sleepwalking during sex and was not guilty of the rape....

Four other women testified the Luedecke had previously had "sleep sex" with them as well, according to the report.

We know the Oscar is phallic.

But could you tone it down a little bit?

ADDED: Via Oscar Watch.