The "most iconic block" in Greenwich Village "has been taken over by drug peddlers, prostitutes and marauding youths."

Christopher Street.

Blogging milestones: 40 million visits, 70 million page views.

The visits milestone was reached today, the page views milestone a few days ago:

At the Cool Shade Café...

... sit down and talk to us.

Prof. Chemerinsky says Justice Ginsburg "has in her power the ability to prevent a real shift in the balance of power on the court."

"On the other hand, there's the personal. How do you decide to leave the United States Supreme Court?"

Wow! How much of this kind of moral pressure is being applied to the venerable Justice?

Democrats and liberals have a nightmare vision of the Supreme Court's future: President Barack Obama is defeated for re-election next year and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at 78 the oldest justice, soon finds her health will not allow her to continue on the bench.

The new Republican president appoints Ginsburg's successor, cementing conservative domination of the court, and soon the justices roll back decisions in favor of abortion rights and affirmative action.

Abortion and affirmative action. Abortion and affirmative action. That's the fixed point in constitutional law for a lot of people: it must work out in favor of abortion and affirmative action.

[S]ome on the left say ... Ginsburg needs to put self-interest aside and act for the good of the issues they believe in, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy wrote recently. Kennedy said 72-year-old Justice Stephen Breyer should leave, too....

Get out, you selfish oldies — say some on the left — Obama needs to appoint some liberal ideologues before its too late!

David Garrow, a Cambridge University historian who follows the court, said Ginsburg's situation points to an institutional problem for the court, "the arguably narcissistic attitude that longer is better."

Narcissist!

Justices sometimes look at electoral projections when considering retirement, he said, adding that Ginsburg probably still could decide to retire next summer if Obama's electoral prospects seem shaky.

The rest of the article is a history lesson about how waiting too long doesn't work. Earl Warren, LBJ, Richard Nixon, Warren Burger and all that. The message is clear. The liberal media want Ruth Bader Ginsburg out now.

I know that sounds mean, but it's not me saying it. I'm just paraphrasing for clarity.

Shopping and cooking for yourself is ultimately much more satisfying than going to restaurants.

Argues Mark Bittman.

[The restaurant] experience, effortless and pleasurable in anticipation, is usually expensive — even when it’s at a theoretically inexpensive restaurant — and frustrating; more often than not it’s unsatisfying. (Note that this means it’s also sometimes satisfying, which is why I keep doing it; it’s a gamble.)

When I cook, though, everything seems to go right....

When I'm home everything seems to be right... So sang The Beatles in "Hard Day's Night"... which we were just watching last night... before going out to a restaurant.

Compared with a restaurant, the frustrations and annoyances are minimal, the food is as good or better-tasting, unquestionably healthier and more environmentally friendly, and much less expensive. Saturday night, for example, I fed four people a dinner of nuts, a small frittata, fish, salad and watermelon for far less than two of us would have spent at Applebee’s....

In most restaurants...  you relinquish all control....

There's a larger principle here too, isn't there? It's not just restaurants and home cooking. It's everything that you do outside the home versus home. Compare spending the night in a hotel to sleeping in your own bed. If you embrace the reality of how beautiful home is — and how cheap and comfortable — you may never go anywhere. I think that's the reason we stave off the realization of how much we like to stay home!

"How can a woman who believes in submitting to her husband's will aspire to be president of the United States?"

Libby Copeland looks at Michelle Bachmann's religious orientation. Copeland presents evidence that Bachmann is serious about submission:

In a speech at a mega-church in the Minneapolis area back in 2006, Michele Bachmann explained her decision to pursue tax law. It wasn't her choice, exactly. God had already told her to go to law school; God had also told her to marry a fellow named Marcus Bachmann. Now Marcus told her "to go and get a post-doctorate degree in tax law." This was not a particular desire of Michele's ("Tax law? I hate taxes!"), but she was certain God was speaking through her husband.

"Why should I go and do something like that?" she recalled thinking. "But the Lord says, 'Be submissive wives; you are to be submissive to your husbands.'"

That's the beginning of the article. I'm not sure there anything but blather in the rest of the article. Interesting issue, though. Care to discuss it?

On the occasion of the Wal-Mart sex-discrimination case, looking back 30 years to the Sears case.

Cathy Young brings the historical perspective:

[In the Sears case,] a feminist historian, Rosalind Rosenberg of Barnard College, testified as an expert witness for Sears. Men and women, Rosenberg argued, generally have different expectations and preferences regarding work -- and, however, desirable more equality in the workplace may be, it is "naïve" to see the [statistical] disparities as proof of discrimination. (She was, of course, branded a traitor to the sisterhood.) Sears won the case in 1986....

Women's traditional preferences don't negate the existence of sexist barriers or subtle biases....

Yet legal action is far too blunt and heavy an instrument to deal with these issues. Sometimes, as with the ban on racial segregation or on overt sex discrimination in the workplace, law can change culture in the right direction. But for the law to intrude into a complex web of human relationships and attitudes is an overreach likely to cause more harm than good. For one, we live in a time when state intrusion into private actions is viewed with suspicion. To say that women's advancement requires the government and the courts to micromanage business decisions -- to the point of telling a corporation that it cannot let local managers control promotions and pay -- is to invite a backlash.

At the Late Rose Café...

... you can talk all night.

6th Circuit says Michigan's ban on affirmative action violates Equal Protection.

"The court’s 2-to-1 ruling, which is likely to be appealed, said the voter-approved ban 'unconstitutionally alters Michigan’s political structure by impermissibly burdening racial minorities.'"

Here's the opinion (PDF). Excerpt:

[Washington v. Seattle Sch. Dist. No. 1, 458 U.S. 457 (1982), and Hunter v. Erickson, 393 U.S. 385 (1969),] expounded the rule that an enactment deprives minority groups of equal protection of the laws when it: (1) has a racial focus, targeting a goal or program that “inures primarily to the benefit of the minority”; and (2) works a reallocation of political power or reordering of the decisionmaking process that places “special burdens” on a minority group’s ability to achieve its goals through that process...

Proposal 2, like Initiative 350, has a “racial focus,” because the Michigan universities’ affirmative-action programs “inure[] primarily to the benefit of the minority, and [are] designed for that purpose,” for the reasons articulated by the Court in Seattle. Just as the desegregative busing programs at issue in Seattle were designed to improve racial minorities’ representation at many public schools, race-conscious admissions policies increase racial minorities’ representation at institutions of higher education, see, e.g., Grutter, 539 U.S. at 316, 328-33 (describing the University of Michigan Law School’s minority-student-enrollment aims); Gratz, 539 U.S. at 253-56 (describing admissions policies at the University of Michigan regarding underrepresented minority groups).

I thought the "diversity" interest counted as compelling in Grutter was for the educational benefit of all of the students in the classroom. Under Grutter and Gratz, an interest in benefiting the minority would not support the state's choice to have affirmative action, so how can it work as the basis for saying that the state can't choose not to have it? The Seattle and Hunter cases are a bit strange, and I would not be surprised if the Supreme Court took this case and not only reversed but reframed the doctrine.

"Is Harold Koh the Left’s John Yoo?"

One might well ask.

"How well do you see color?"

Test yourself.

(Via Drawn.)

"Gossip as high-fructose corn syrup."

A theory:

There's this idea that modern diseases of excess are due to the human metabolism being evolutionarily keyed for need. Our bodies haven't become accustomed to the wide availability of nutritionally empty yet calorie-rich foods, hence the obesity epidemic.

Maybe everyone's "social metabolism" is different. Some folks can say and hear whatever they want and always feel great. Others have to be more mindful....

At the Rose Café...

... sit right back down and talk to us.

Why would a man questioned about impulsively grabbing someone's neck impulsively grab the questioner's microphone?

PR fail from David Prosser.

What's your perception of the microphone grab story?
	Prosser is rightfully angry at the abuse he's received from the press.
	Prosser has an unfortunately low level of physical self-control.
	Prosser is insufficiently savvy about media.
	Prosser is a bit awkward in an awkward situation, ie, normal.
pollcode.com free polls

"You can't spell FAILED without DFL!"

Tweeted by a Republican legislator in Minnesota, which is shutting down right now, after a breakdown in talks between Republican legislators and the DFL Governor Mark Dayton.

DFL? It's the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party, which is what you call the Democratic Party in Minnesota. Have you ever noticed?

What if you soul-searched over an event that — you learn later — didn't happen?

Pity France, which self-critiqued over the Strauss-Kahn case that now seems not to have been what it once appeared to be.

His arrest... led to soul-searching about the treatment of women in France and a new assertiveness challenging male behavior. Responses to the latest news seemed to suggest that the debate had become less clear-cut.

“This is a slap in the face of the feminists,” said Marc Marciano, 53, a trader in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a Paris suburb....

What to do with all that insight gained? This reminds me of the old Tawana Brawley story, which led to soul-searching about racial bigotry and then turned out to be a fraud. One solution back then was to claim the insights are still good, even if the news that triggered the soul-searching was false.

In her book "The Alchemy of Race and Rights," lawprof Patricia J. Williams wrote that Brawley "has been the victim of some unspeakable crime. No matter how she got there. No matter who did it to her and even if she did it to herself."

I vividly remember a job talk at my law school in which the candidate described a racially charged incident with the police. He was questioned about whether the incident really happened that way, and his response — delivered quickly and glibly — was that the anecdote worked as an object of study from which to spin off insights whether it was true or not. The job talk was exceedingly well received.

If that seems terribly wrong to you, explain why, when we consume works of overt fiction — novels and movies and so forth — we feel that we derive insights applicable to the real world. I think some fictions resonate. They seem to speak to real life. They are not purely escapist fantasy. If it isn't wrong to use some works of fiction in our efforts to understand the real world, is it necessarily always wrong to use a news story presented as true that later turns out to be false?

UPDATE: "Dominique Strauss-Kahn was released from house arrest on Friday as the sexual assault case against him moved one step closer to dismissal after prosecutors told a Manhattan judge that they had serious problems with the case."