Cloudscape.

What will the Supreme Court do today?

Get the latest news here.

UPDATE: Thanks to SCOTUSblog for the thrilling presentation of the news. I love the way the live-blog automatically updates — no refreshing of the page needed — and makes that hot-off-the-press typing sound — calling me back from whatever page I've wandered off to.

Now, I was just about to say that today's cases aren't the exciting ones we've been waiting for when the live-blog typed out this, from Tom Goldstein:

The only opinion remaining from the March sitting is Heller. The only Justice without a majority opinion from that sitting is Justice Scalia.

So the eagerly awaited gun rights case is almost surely going to be written by Justice Scalia.

UPDATE 2: Greenlaw v. United States:

May a United States Court of Appeals, acting on its own initiative, order an increase in a defendant’s sentence?

Answer: no.

Rothgery v. Gillespie County:

[A] criminal defendant’s initial appearance before a judicial officer, where he learns the charge against him and his liberty is subject to restriction, marks the start of adversary judicial proceedings that trigger attachment of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

The third case, Sprint Communications v. APCC Services, is about standing to sue in federal court, specifically whether assignees of claims have standing. Article III of the Constitution requires the plaintiff in federal court to have a concrete and particularized injury that is fairly traceable to the defendant and likely to be redressed by the requested relief. In this case, the relief would go to the assignor of the claims, not to the plaintiff, the assignee. So was the "redressability" prong of the standing requirement met? Justice Breyer, writing for the majority and answering the question yes, responded to the dissenters this way:

The dissent argues that our redressability analysis could not be more wrong,” because “[w]e have never approved federal-court jurisdiction over a claim where the entire relief requested will run to a party not before the court. Never.” Post, at 5 (opinion of ROBERTS, C. J.). But federal courts routinely entertain suits which will result in relief for parties that are not themselves directly bringing suit. Trustees bring suits to benefit their trusts; guardians ad litem bring suits to benefit their wards; receivers bring suit to benefit their receiverships; assignees in bankruptcy bring suit to benefit bankrupt estates; executors bring suit to benefit testator estates; and so forth.

The Roberts dissent, joined by Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, frets about the loosening of standing requirements but takes some comfort in Justice Breyer's stress on precedent. Roberts:

[P]erhaps we should heed the counsels of hope rather than despair. The majority, after all, purports to comply with our Article III precedents, see ante, at 16–18, so those precedents at least live to give meaning to “the judiciary’s proper role in our system of government” another day. Raines, 521 U. S., at 818. What is more, the majority expressly and repeatedly grounds its finding of standing on its conclusion that “history and precedent are clear” that these types of suits “have long been permitted,” ante, at 5, and that there is “a strong tradition” of such suits “during the past two centuries,” ante, at 16, 19. This conclusion is, for the reasons we have set forth, achingly wrong—but at least the articulated test is clear and daunting.

Achingly wrong. That's a new one. Really, I did a LEXIS search of Federal & State Cases, combined, and no one has ever written "achingly wrong" before. But Roberts's point is: The majority read the precedents badly, but at least it showed it cared about precedent.

George Carlin died.

What a terrible loss. You know I thought he was the best living comedian. We were just talking about that here — last April. I've loved him since the 1970s. There are decades-old routines that spring to mind immediately as the most brilliant comic riffs I've ever heard — the one about all our "stuff" and the comparison between football and baseball (and golf).

"That's the whole meaning of life: trying to find a place for your stuff."



And here's the football/baseball one:



When someone dies, maybe you think about religion and the afterlife. Here's what George Carlin thought of such things:



Now, George Carlin has a special place among comedians because he's got a Supreme Court case about him — FCC v. Pacifica Foundation. You can read the case, and you can watch his 7 Dirty Words routine:



He elaborated on that over the years:



The text of the Supreme Court case includes the FCC's transcript of the version that got played on the radio:

The big one, the word fuck that's the one that hangs them up the most. [']Cause in a lot of cases that's the very act that hangs them up the most. So, it's natural that the word would, uh, have the same effect. It's a great word, fuck, nice word, easy word, cute word, kind of. Easy word to say. One syllable, short u. (laughter) Fuck. (Murmur) You know, it's easy. Starts with a nice soft sound fuh ends with a kuh. Right? (laughter) A little something for everyone. Fuck (laughter) Good word. Kind of a proud word, too. Who are you? I am FUCK. (laughter) FUCK OF THE MOUNTAIN. (laughter) Tune in again next week to FUCK OF THE MOUNTAIN. (laughter) It's an interesting word too, [']cause it's got a double kind of a life - personality - dual, you know, whatever the right phrase is. It leads a double life, the word fuck. First of all, it means, sometimes, most of the time, fuck. What does it mean? It means to make love. Right? We're going to make love, yeh, we're going to fuck, yeh, we're going to fuck, yeh, we're going to make love. (laughter) we're really going to fuck, yeh, we're going to make love. Right? And it also means the beginning of life, it's the act that begins life, so there's the word hanging around with words like love, and life, and yet on the other hand, it's also a word that we really use to hurt each other with, man. It's a heavy. It's one that you have toward the end of the argument. (laughter) Right? (laughter) You finally can't make out. Oh, fuck you man. I said, fuck you. (laughter, murmur) Stupid fuck. (laughter) Fuck you and everybody that looks like you. (laughter) man. It would be nice to change the movies that we already have and substitute the word fuck for the word kill, wherever we could, and some of those movie cliches would change a little bit. Madfuckers still on the loose. Stop me before I fuck again. Fuck the ump, fuck the ump, fuck the ump, fuck the ump, fuck the ump. Easy on the clutch Bill, you'll fuck that engine again.

Hey, I love the "[']." Try to do a Carlinesque riff on [']. Not easy, is it?

And God bless Justice Brennan, who dissented in Pacifica:

My Brother STEVENS, in reaching a result apologetically described as narrow, ante, at 750, takes comfort in his observation that "[a] requirement that indecent language be avoided will have its primary effect on the form, rather than the content, of serious communication," ante, at 743 n. 18, and finds solace in his conviction that "[t]here are few, if any, thoughts that cannot be expressed by the use of less offensive language." Ibid. The idea that the content of a message and its potential impact on any who might receive it can be divorced from the words that are the vehicle for its expression is transparently fallacious. A given word may have a unique capacity to capsule an idea, evoke an emotion, or conjure up an image. Indeed, for those of us who place an appropriately high value on our cherished First Amendment rights, the word "censor" is such a word. Mr. Justice Harlan, speaking for the Court, recognized the truism that a speaker's choice of words cannot surgically be separated from the ideas he desires to express when he warned that "we cannot indulge the facile assumption that one can forbid particular words without also running a substantial risk of suppressing ideas in the process." Cohen v. California, 403 U.S., at 26.

They don't write them like that anymore. They don't even say "My Brother Stevens" anymore. They couldn't bring themselves to say "My Sister O'Connor," I guess, so they had to stop saying "My Brother Stevens."

Was Carlin political? Here's what he said back in 2004 when Tim Russert (of all people) asked him "Do you vote?":

No, I don't. No. I voted up to McGovern. I feel, actually, a little purer, a little more detached emotionally from it. I really have no stake. If you dropped me from an airplane, I would come down left of center, because I believe more in humans than I do in property. But in terms of the minor machinations and the way they put these things together, I've no interest.

He was on Russert's show promoting his book "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?" On the longest 1-day solo drive I ever took — from Austin, Texas to Madison, Wisconsin — I listened to Carlin read "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?"

I have a problem with the Ten Commandments. Here it is: Why are there ten? We don't need that many. I think the list of commandments was deliberately and artificially inflated to get it up to ten. It's clearly a padded list...

When these guys were sittin' around the tent makin' all this up, why did they pick ten? Why ten? Why not nine, or eleven? I'll tell you why. Because ten sounds important. Ten sounds official. They knew if they tried eleven, people wouldn't take them seriously. People would say, "What're you kiddin' me? The Eleven Commandments? Get the fuck outta here!"

I'm really sorry to see this man go. He worked long and hard so many years, making us laugh, bringing us enlightenment:

Mr. Carlin is constantly scribbling notions down in a notebook or recording them on a small voice recorder, and he spends most of his time typing, organizing and reorganizing his ideas in a library of 2,300 files he keeps on his computer — raw material he may someday forge into actual jokes, monologues or material for his books. And as soon as he has recorded a new HBO routine, he begins cycling in fresh material, so that over the course of two years, his entire routine is replaced, and he's ready to record another.

"It's like a sock," Mr. Carlin said. "I darn the sock so much that none of the original material is left. It's the same sock — it's my show — but the old material is gone."

"I have no hobbies and I have no leisure activities," Mr. Carlin added. "My greatest joy is working at the computer with my ideas."

RIP.

Ah...

Do women pay a greater emotional price for having children?

Quite apart from the hit we may take in the workplace — compared to men who have children and men and women without children — do we bear a greater burden because we worry and stress out more over the risks to our children?



Ha ha. I love the bit at the end about students writing exams in terms of how they feel. I've noticed for years that students have substituted the word "feel" for "think" when it's glaringly inappropriate — as in: Justice Scalia feels that the Constitution does not protect the right to sodomy.

Here's a longer segment with more context.

Untitled.

Delicious.

ADDED: That first picture is a Garden Party Hybrid Tea Rose.

Pinknesses.

Bizarre!

John McCain on "Saturday Night Live" in 2002.

What are the new classics?

Entertainment Weekly does a very nice job of ranking the new classics — movies, TV, etc. — from the last 25 years. From the movie list:

1. Pulp Fiction (1994)
7. Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
10. Moulin Rouge (2001)
11. This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
12. The Matrix (1999)
13. GoodFellas (1990)
14. Crumb (1995)
15. Edward Scissorhands (1990)
16. Boogie Nights (1997)
17. Jerry Maguire (1996)
18. Do the Right Thing (1989)
19. Casino Royale (2006)
23. Memento (2001)
24. A Room With a View (1986)
32. Fight Club (1999)
33. The Breakfast Club (1985)
34. Fargo (1996)
44. The Player (1992)
77. Sid and Nancy (1986)
91. Back to the Future (1985)

From the TV list:

1. The Simpsons, Fox, 1989-present
2 The Sopranos, HBO (1999-2007)
3 Seinfeld, NBC (1989-98)
5 Sex and the City, HBO (1998-2004)
6 Survivor, CBS (2000-present)
12 South Park, Comedy Central (1997-present)
14 The Daily Show, Comedy Central (1996-present)
17 The Office (U.K. version), BBC2 (2001-03)
18 American Idol, Fox (2002-present)
21 Roseanne, ABC (1988-97)
22 The Real World, MTV (1992-present)
28 The Larry Sanders Show, HBO (1992-98)
30 Late Show With David Letterman, CBS (1993-present)
38 Beavis and Butt-head, MTV (1993-97)
39 Six Feet Under, HBO (2001-05)
43 Late Night With Conan O'Brien, NBC (1993-present)
45 Curb Your Enthusiasm, HBO (2000-present)
49 Twin Peaks, ABC (1990-91)
55. Pee-wee's Playhouse, CBS (1986-90)
63. Mystery Science Theater 3000, Comedy Central (1989-96), Sci Fi (1997-99)
64. The Osbournes, MTV (2002-05)
69. The Colbert Report, Comedy Central (2005-present)
75. Project Runway, Bravo (2004-present)
79. The Comeback, HBO (2005)
83. Absolutely Fabulous, BBC2 (1992), BBC1 (1994-2004)

From the book list:

4. The Liars' Club, Mary Karr (1995)
5. American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
7. Maus, Art Spiegelman (1986/1991)
11. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer (1997)
28. Naked, David Sedaris (1997)
33. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (2005)
66. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace (1997)
72. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon (2003)

(The book list is heavily weighted toward fiction.)

From the style list:

1. Madonna at the MTV Video Music Awards (1984)
2. Sarah Jessica Parker in the opening credits of Sex and the City (1998)
3. Michael Jackson in the ''Thriller'' video (1983)
4. Sharon Stone at the Oscars (1996)
5. Kurt Cobain and grunge style (1991)
7. Amy Winehouse's frocks, bold bras, and sky-high bouffant (2007)
13. Tom Cruise's Ray-Bans and tighty whities in Risky Business (1983)
16. Courtney Love's vintage slip dresses, Mary Janes, and home-grown dye jobs (1995)
17. The leather trenches and Neo-style shades in The Matrix (1999)
48. The goth look of Robert Smith and the Cure (1987)

From the tech list:

3. TiVo (1999)
4. iPod (2001)
5. YouTube (2005)
7. Digital Video Cameras for Consumers (1995)
9. Satellite-Radio Stations (2001)

From the video games:

1. Tetris (1985)

Ha ha. Sorry, I'm old!

From the stage list:

21. Hedwig and the Angry Inch (1998)

Sorry, I've seen a lot of these — the most expensive of these cultural pleasures — and didn't like them very much.

Romantic gestures (these aren't numbered for some reason):

• John Cusack blasts Peter Gabriel outside Ione Skye's window in 1989's Say Anything...
• Ewan McGregor breaks into ''Your Song'' while wooing Nicole Kidman in 2001's Moulin Rouge (2001).
• After her beloved Pedro (Marco Leonardi) dies making love to her in Like Water for Chocolate, Tita (Lumi Cavazos) eats matches, literally igniting her inner flame and burning her whole ranch to the ground.

Movie posters (pictured here):

The Devil Wears Prada
The 40 Year-Old Virgin
Jungle Fever
The Silence of the Lambs

Death scenes:

• Steve Buscemi + a woodchipper + the pure white snow of 1996's Fargo = arguably the most hilarious ooky death on film.
• Mel Gibson, sans intestines, bellows ''Freeeeedommmmmm!'' in Braveheart (1995).
• Warring exes Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner fall to their doom on a chandelier in 1989's The War of the Roses.
• Jack telling Rose not to say her goodbyes before freezing to death in Titanic (1997).
• Lucy Liu losing her head to Uma Thurman's blade in Kill Bill Vol. One (2003).

More lists at the link, but I'll stop here.

Space pics.

Beautiful! (Via The Corner.)

Not everything is falling apart.

Tom Brokaw is the new host of "Meet the Press" — until November.

This is good — for us and for NBC. Can you imagine if they'd given it to Olbermann or Matthews?

"Is Obama's new faux-presidential, alternative-reality seal his 'Mission Accomplished'?"

Speaking of seals.

"The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault."

"Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country's sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance." Write Alan Fram and Eileen Putman. (Via Drudge.) They summarize the evidence:

Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.

Polar bears are adrift. They just don't know what to do with themselves any more. Slaughtering baby seals with our bare paws, what kind of a life is that? It may nourish the body, but what about our souls? Oh, you mean they are drifting on that melting iceberg? Anyway, the point is that everything seems to be going to hell:

"It is pretty scary," said Charles Truxal, 64, a retired corporate manager in Rochester, Minn. "People are thinking things are going to get better, and they haven't been. And then you go hide in your basement because tornadoes are coming through. If you think about things, you have very little power to make it change."

Thanks for the tip. IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O. writes:

My great-great-great grandmother had six kids in Indiana when her husband and oldest son went off to fight in the Civil War. Both died, leaving her with five kids and a farm. She worked hard and they did okay. Her oldest kids grew up and moved to California in the 1870s. She followed not long after, and continued to work. “Soft,” she said in a newspaper article when she turned 100, talking about that present generation. “The world is full of weaklings.” People with heart and courage respond with heart and courage. Those that never really did like to complain about how bad things are, in order to justify their own anxiety and give fuel to their fretting.

AND: Also from the comments, read this from Steve.

The NYT "public editor" Clark Hoyt concludes that Maureen Dowd "by assailing Clinton in gender-heavy terms in column after column, went over the top."

"Went over the top" is a pretty mild criticism though, don't you think? Surely, a columnist can exaggerate for comic effect and lampoon public figures. "Over the top" is almost a compliment. So it was over the top? Was it over the line?

... Dowd’s columns about Clinton’s campaign were so loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband that they could easily have been listed in that Times article on sexism...

That Times article? That Times article? For crying out loud! Link!!! To be fair, if you scroll to the bottom of the page, under the heading "Past Coverage," you'll see "Critics and News Executives Split Over Sexism in Clinton Coverage" — with the link I've carried over, and you can figure out that it's the same article referred to in the first paragraph of Hoyt's article. But dammit, Times, put links in the text as you refer to things.

Back to the subject at hand:

“I’ve been twisting gender stereotypes around for 24 years,” Dowd responded. She said nobody had objected to her use of similar images about men over seven presidential campaigns. She often refers to Barack Obama as “Obambi” and has said he has a “feminine” management style. But the relentless nature of her gender-laden assault on Clinton — in 28 of 44 columns since Jan. 1 — left many readers with the strong feeling that an impermissible line had been crossed, even though, as Dowd noted, she is a columnist who is paid not to be objective....

Politically correct is never a term one would apply to Dowd’s commentary. Her columns this year said Clinton’s “message is unapologetically emasculating,” and that she “needed to prove her masculinity” but in the end “had to fend off calamity by playing the female victim.” In one column Dowd wrote, “She may want to take a cue from the Miss America contest: make a graceful, magnanimous exit and wait in the wings.”

“From the time I began writing about politics,” Dowd said, “I have always played with gender stereotypes and mined them and twisted them to force the reader to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes.” Now, she said, “you are asking me to treat Hillary differently than I’ve treated the male candidates all these years, with kid gloves.”

Hoyt never says that Dowd went over the line, and I don't see that he's criticized her in any significant way. Nor should he! Her explanation of what she does and why it's right is dead on. Hoyt went through an appropriate "public editor" analysis in response to criticism, and he let it seem as though he was disapproving, and yet I don't see that he really was.

Have the balls to say she was right.

Should Americans respond to Michelle Obama the way the French respond to Carla Bruni?

"He has five or six brains which are remarkably irrigated," wrote Carla Bruni, explaining her love for Nicolas Sarkozy, quoted in Maureen Dowd's column today. That kills me.

But here's what I want to talk about:

If an American first lady, or would-be first lady, described herself as a “tamer of men” and had a “man-eating” past filled with naked pictures, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, sultry prone CD covers, breaking up marriages, bragging that she believes in polygamy and polyandry rather than monogamy, and having a son with a married philosopher whose father she had had an affair with, it would take more than an appearance on “The View” to sweeten her image.

It’s hard to imagine the decibel level on Fox News if Michelle Obama put out a CD this summer, as Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is, with songs featuring lyrics like “I am a child/despite my 40 years/despite my 30 lovers/a child”; and this song, “Ma came”: “You are my junk/more deadly than Afghan heroin/more dangerous than Colombian white. .../My guy, I roll him up and smoke him.”

Why aren't Americans more like the French? But, really, the complaints you hear about Michelle Obama are not about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. They're about patriotism and racism.

Is it really the case that the French would shrug it off if Bruni's lyrics were "God damn France" and a rant against the nonwhite French? The Obama campaign has to respond to the interpretation of things Michelle Obama has said — "for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country" — and rumors about what she is purported to have said — "whitey" — or condoned — Jeremiah Wright's "God damn America."

It makes no sense to suggest that we could just be more like the French. Imagine how the French would react if Bruni's songs had racist and anti-patriotic lines that were exactly strong as those sex and drugs lines. And if they did just smirk and tolerate it, would you think it a good example of sophistication for Americans?

And by the way, it's not good feminism to think that a President's spouse is a fluffy, silly decoration whose words don't matter. She is a human being who should be taken seriously, and she will be in a position to influence and advise the President. We should care what she thinks.

Now, we could have a Carla Bruni type First Lady, whose interests are fashion and music. That might be great fun. But Michelle Obama has not defined and presented herself that way. She is a Harvard-trained lawyer who has given long speeches on substantive issues. To respond to her the way French respond to Carla Bruni would be to insult her.