Immensely exciting morning at the Supreme Court.

Live-blogged at SCOTUSblog.

UPDATE 1: We're waiting for the University of Texas affirmative action case (Fisher), the 2 same-sex marriage cases (on Prop 8 (Hollingsworth) and DOMA (Windsor), and the Voting Rights Act case (Shelby County). I'm feeling that we're going to get a whole lot of minimalism here. Fisher will be about the peculiarities of the UT program. Prop 8 will fizzle on something technical. Windsor herself will keep her remedy, but DOMA will survive. And the Voting Rights Act will survive. If so, that will be the excitement of no excitement. Get ready.

UPDATE 2: The cert. grants have been announced, and they include review of the President's recess appointment power. The case arises out of Obama's interpretation of what counts as a congressional recess, and involves 3 appointments to the NLRB. Details on the case — NLRB v. Canning — here. More details here.

UPDATE 3: The Court affirms the 7th Circuit in Vance, 5-4, Alito writing: "a supervisor for vicarious [liability] under Title VII only if she has the power given by the employer to take tangible employment actions against the victim." The 4 dissenters are the 4 liberals.

UPDATE 4: Another opinion by Alito, Mutual Pharmaceuticals v. Bartlett. Also 5-4. Federal law about drug warnings preempts state law remedies based on "design defect."

UPDATE 5: In Vance, Ginsburg, dissenting, compares the majority's narrow reading of the statute to Ledbetter, which became a big political issue. Congress subsequently amended the statute. So Ginsburg says: "Congress has, in the recent past, intervened to correct this Court’s wayward interpretations of Title VII.... The ball is once again in Congress’ court to correct the error into which this Court has fallen, and to restore the robust protections against workplace harassment the Court weakens today." I assume the majority has no problem with that. It's statutory interpretation, and if Congress wants this greater liability for employers, it can/should amend the statute.

UPDATE 6: Breyer writes the 7-2 opinion in U.S. v. Kebodoeux: "Registration requirement under SORNA as applied to Kebodeaux falls within the scope of Congress's authority under the Necessary and Proper Clause." SORNA is the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act. The dissenters are Scalia and Thomas.

UPDATE 7: Fisher! 7-1, only Ginsburg dissenting. Vacated and remanded "because the Fifth Circuit did not hold the university to the demanding burden of strict scrutiny articulated in Grutter and Bakke, its decision afffiming the district court's grant of summary judgment was incorrect." (I'm starting a new post for Fisher and working on reading the case.)

UPDATE 8: The last opinion is UT Southwestern v. Nassar, also by Kennedy: "The Court holds that Title VII retaliation claims must be proved according to traditional principles of 'but for' causation..." This one is 5-4, split as you'd predict a 5-4 split would split. Ginsburg writes the dissent.

UPDATE 9: There will be more opinions tomorrow.

Wake up to what Drudge is saying about Hillary.

The link on "921 days to go..." goes to the cheerful Washington Post headline "Welcome to the Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential speculation sweepstakes," which is full of babble like "It’s a double-edged sword. Early hype can deter viable challenges, but it also invites the kind of scrutiny that can deflate a bubble very quickly."

"921 days to go" seems like a fair enough teaser, but subliminally, what is Drudge doing? I suspect he's saying she's got a long, long way to go, and — look — she's already 65. She'll be 69 by Election Day 2016. I think he's working the too old message.

My suspicion arises before I read the next line:



So connect that photo of Hillary to the big, old dead body of James Gandolfini. And also worry about whether the Clintons give special preference to Hollywood celebrities... and it's okay with Drudge if you merge Gandolfini with a Mafia crime boss.

If you think I'm overeager to attribute meaning to the photos and juxtapositions at The Drudge Report, remember that Drudge actively and obviously played the Hillary is too old game in December 2007. Here's the notorious photograph:



... under the headline "The Toll of a Campaign."

Is she up for another campaign, 6 years later, with 3 years of running, trying to convince us that she can labor on for 4 years after that? I don't know but I fully expect Drudge to inject those doubts into us. He'll try to do it subliminally, so listen to me, and you'll at least be able to be conscious as Dr. Matt approaches with his syringe full of doubt.

The Russians hang onto Snowden.

Or Snowden melts into Russia.

Mr. Snowden has not been seen publicly or photographed since his reported arrival in Moscow on Sunday afternoon from Hong Kong, and passengers on that flight interviewed at the airport could not confirm that he was on board.

The information about Snowden doesn't want to be free.

Maybe the U.S. got him.

The situation remained a confounding and undoubtedly infuriating one for American officials, who have charged Mr. Snowden with illegally disclosing classified documents about American surveillance programs.

Undoubtedly?

I doubt everything.

"I would urge [the Russians] to live by the standards of the law,” [Secretary of State John] Kerry said.

Enigmatically.

“US bullying Russia for Snowden’s rendition is counterproductive. No self-respecting state would accept such unlawful demands,” [Wikileaks] wrote. The use of “rendition” was an explicit reference to the way the United States has handled terrorism suspects....

Standards of law... must interpret...

Russia had seemed intent on allowing Mr. Snowden to transit through Moscow but at the highest levels of the Russian government, officials seemed to be pulling a page from a cold war playbook, coyly denying any knowledge about Mr. Snowden.

The Russians, the NYT openly doubts.

“Over all, we have no information about him,” Dmitri Peskov, the spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin, told Reuters early on Monday.

The pesky Peskov.

Mr. Kerry said that it was ironic that Mr. Snowden may have been seeking the cooperation of China and Russian [sic] in his flight, given their positions in restricting Internet freedom.  

Ironic ≈ verrry innnterrresting.

It was unclear how Mr. Snowden spent his time at the airport or precisely where. 

Who knows what sorts of VIP rooms they have at the Moscow airport?

The departure of the flight to Havana from Moscow came after an all-night vigil by journalists who were posted outside a hotel in the transit zone of the airport where Mr. Snowden was apparently staying. But on Monday morning, hotel staff members said that no one named Snowden was staying there.

Disappeared... despite the vigil by journalists... at a hotel that was near the airport.

Russian news services had reported that Mr. Snowden would take a Monday afternoon flight to Cuba, prompting a late rush for tickets from the horde of journalists gathered at the airport. 

Hey, journalists, stampede this way! Vigil at the hotel, stampede to the airport. It's like they're teenage girls trying to catch a glimpse of The Beatles.

As long as John Kerry brought up irony... it's ironic that the Snowden emerged to tell us about the nefarious, overwhelming, all-encompassing, and abusive surveillance powers of the United States, and the country can't find one man who made himself conspicuous.

At the Koi Café...

... dip in.

"Last Thursday, a woman in Charlestown, Indiana and her boyfriend stayed up all night, armed with a rifle, to hunt down whatever it was that had been attacking small animals in her neighborhood."

"After spotting and shooting a creature prowling in the shadows by the woman's pool, they were shocked to find that they'd just killed a leopard, an animal that's not native to North America, much less Indiana."

"A Colorado school district discriminated against a transgender first grader when it refused to let her use the girl’s bathroom..."

"... the state’s civil rights division has determined, a decision gay and transgender advocates say will have an indelible impact on how such cases are handled in the future."

Telling Coy [Mathis] “that she must disregard her identity while performing one of the most essential human functions constitutes severe and pervasive treatment, and creates an environment that is objectively and subjectively hostile, intimidating or offensive,” Steven Chavez, the division director, wrote in the decision....

It was clear, the state said, that Coy had completely integrated into society as a girl — wearing girls’ clothing, standing in the girls’ line at school and choosing to play with girls.

But the state’s ruling went even further, saying that evolving research on transgender development showed that “compartmentalizing a child as a boy or a girl solely based on their visible anatomy, is a simplistic approach to a difficult and complex issue.”

When David Gregory asked Glenn Greenwald: "To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn’t you, Mister Greenwald, be charged with a crime?"

On "Meet the Press" today. Greenwald answered (from Brazil):

I think it’s pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies. 

How did Gregory "muse about" it? He asked about it.

The assumption in your question, David, is completely without evidence, the idea that I’ve aided and abetted him in any way.

"Spain arrest over baby trapped in the drains."

"The two-day-old baby boy - who still had his umbilical cord attached - was found wrapped in plastic bags in the manhole in the building's courtyard."

The baby was found after a neighbour had heard what he thought was a meowing cat trapped in the drains and decided to alert firefighters....

That's in Spain. You remember a recent story of a baby rescued from a drain in China.

There must be many babies in drains that are not discovered.

Update on "Egypt appoints member of terror group that once massacred tourists to run tourism region."

We were talking about that headline 2 days ago.

Now: "The new governor of Egypt's Luxor province has resigned amid controversy over his links to an Islamist group that carried out a deadly attack on tourists there in 1997."

Adel Khayat's appointment infuriated many Egyptians and prompted the tourism minister to submit his resignation.

Islamist President Mohammed Morsi had defended Mr Khayat's appointment....

Mr Khayat, a member of the Construction and Development party, had denied any role in Gamaa Islamiya's militant past and pledged to protect tourists. He told a news conference on Sunday: "We will not accept that one drop of blood be spilt because of a position that I did not personally aspire to at any time."

Dog and bunny.

Recently encountered animals. The dog is a greyhound, retired from the hard life of a racing dog. The bunny has never cottoned to human needs and desires.

"If all ethnic identities are created, imagined or negotiated to some degree, American Hispanics provide an especially stark example."

"As part of an effort in the 1970s to better measure who was using what kind of social services, the federal government established the word 'Hispanic' to denote anyone with ancestry traced to Spain or Latin America, and mandated the collection of data on this group."

“The term is a U.S. invention,” explains Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center....

“There is no coherence to the term,” says Marta Tienda, a sociologist and director of Latino studies at Princeton University. For instance, even though it’s officially supposed to connote ethnicity and nationality rather than race — after all, Hispanics can be black, white or any other race — the term “has become a racialized category in the United States,” Tienda says. “Latinos have become a race by default, just by usage of the category.”...

If most Hispanics are united in something, though, it’s a belief that they don’t share a common culture. The Pew Hispanic Center finds that nearly seven in 10 Hispanics say they comprise “many different cultures” rather than a single one. “But when journalists, researchers or the federal government talk about” Latinos, Lopez acknowledges, “they talk about a single group.”

If it's an invented, created category, the questions become: Who is using this category and for what purpose? What are the alternative categories, and who has something to gain/lose from using those categories? What is the political dynamic that feeds the dominance of this political categorization and suppresses the alternatives, and what changes would cause those alternative categories to become prominent?

The Chief of Police backs up the cop after he shoots a man to death, but not when he sends email with language that might be sexist/racist.

And now the people who loved the dead man and wanted the cop punished for the shooting are out to bring down the Chief of Police for caring more about offending people with speech than killing a man.

This is happening right here in Madison, where the local citizenry can be presumed to feel twinges about tinges of sexism and racism in anybody's speech, and you can imagine why the Chief of Police wanted to cut any attachment to the utterer of the purportedly toxic words. But by chance — or not by chance — the person to be detached was previously protected when the sensitive citizens cried out about the gun violence, the police brutality visited upon the young — now dead — man.

What specifics do you need to unravel this complicated problem in Madison politics? Why was the man shot? Details here, but the short answer is that — in the police version of the story — the man grabbed for the police officer's gun. What did the email say? From the first link, quoting Madison Police Chief Noble Wray's complaint to the Police and Fire Commission, the police officer (Steven Heimsness) sent a message to another officer that read: "Sometimes they forget they are not in Africa anymore. The social mores are not the same." (Heimsness said he was writing about someone who was from Africa.) And, referring to "a Latina woman on the force," he wrote — to male officers — "Ay caramba" and "Jesus Christo."

There were also some references to violence:

"I should have blasted that guy with the knife through my window the other day. At least I would have got the weekend off" (from September 8, 2012)...

The shooting that killed the man happened Nov. 9, 2012, take note.

... and "I'm ready to go on a shooting spree up in dispatch."

"Where are the great tags that if clicked on would produce a store of raw material that would enable me to write a book?"

I say, when asked "And how does Mrs Secord qualify as 'women in the military'?"

Women in the military is a long-standing tag on this blog, and, I say, "I didn't want to create a new tag. It's just broad interpretation of existing tags to avoid creating new tags."

There are various theories of tagging. When I first started doing tags on this blog, I tried to keep them as general as possible. I had a politics tag! Sometimes, I leaned — overleaned — toward specificity, making a new tag every time I named a person — or a plant or animal or city or food or body part or item of clothing —  but tag proliferation seems mostly wrong.

I say mostly, because I regret all the names of human individuals that end up only appearing once. I'll call that the Ashley Dupre problem. But I do not regret having a parrot tag. And I do not regret having breasts and nipples. I do regret not having a tag for commenter thinks he's making the joke that I already made.

My personal history of tagging — generally, then specifically — explains why there's only one tag for George W. Bush — Bush — and over 70 tags for Barack Obama. There are 10 tags that are in the form "Obama is like X" (not counting the "Obama is not like X" tag). Example: Obama is like Bush (which is on 61 posts!) There are 7 tags in the "Obama the X" form. Example: Obama the boyfriend (which is on 47 posts!).

Ultimately, I arrived at the idea that the best tags are the ones that pull up a set of posts, going back over a nice stretch of time, that I could imagine mining for material to write a book. Women in the military has some potential to be a tag like that.

What are the best tags, in my view, using that standard? Maybe that's a trade secret. If I told you, you could do your research in my archive, but — to give some obvious examples — here are some: racial politics, gender politics, gender difference, lightweight religion, religion substitutes, single-earner household, etiquette, apologies, suicide, prostitution. To suggest some of the weird potential: There are 30 posts with the tag bathtub, 94 with excrement, 67 with snakes, 40 with phallic symbol.

Then there are the tags that might have been. Only 1 post has female appetite diseases. That should have gone on many posts, but I forgot I started it. Only 1 has personal innovation lifestyle. What even is that? Some trend that never trended?

Of all the missed opportunities, as I complete this post, I see I don't have a tag for tags. I'll have to go with the old school tag blogging, which dates back to my days of over-generalization and resistance to specificity. I need a tag for I'm resistant or something. Ah, the stubbornness tag. And the ultimate perfect tag — previously used 3 times — I'm not making a tag for this.

"On the evening of 21 June, Laura Secord learned of plans for a surprise American attack on British troops..."

"... led by Lieutenant James FitzGibbon at Beaver Dams, which would have furthered American control in the Niagara Peninsula. It is unclear how she became aware of these plans. According to tradition she overheard a conversation amongst the billeted Americans as they ate dinner. As her husband was still recovering from his October injuries, Secord set out herself early the next morning to warn the Lieutenant. She reportedly walked 20 miles (32 km) from present-day Queenston through St. Davids, Homer, Shipman's Corners and Short Hills at the Niagara Escarpment before she arrived at the camp of allied Mohawk warriors who led her the rest of the way to FitzGibbon's headquarters at the DeCew House. A small British force and a larger contingent of Mohawk warriors were then readied for the American attack. Most of the American forces were casualties or taken prisoner in the Battle of Beaver Dams on 24 June. No mention of Secord was made in reports that immediately followed the battle."

200 years ago, in the War of 1812.

"Radio Digs Its Own Grave as Cultural Currents Shift."

"Stolid biz loses a generation; Wi-Fi in cars could deliver a crushing blow."

Most people under age 20 have never experienced good radio. So when baby boomers and Gen X’ers start waxing rhapsodically about their old-time favorites, wanting them to come back, it’s the equivalent of wishing that musicvideos would come back to MTV.

Insiders believe that there’s no revolution in terrestrial radio because the owners know it’s headed into the dumper. They’re just milking it for all they can before it falls off a cliff....

"Snowden has ticket to Cuba, may go to Venezuela: Russian reports."

Put that into your conspiracy theory.

UPDATE: Email from CNN: "Edward Snowden, the man wanted on U.S. espionage charges, has arrived in Moscow, WikiLeaks said in a Twitter post on Sunday. The organization has said it helped Snowden leave Hong Kong, but it has not revealed what country could be his final destination."

May I recommend — for publicity purposes — hopping across the steppingstones of the world, hitting each traditional or present Enemy of America?

ADDED:

Flew in from Hong Kong thanks to Wikileaks
Didn't get to bed last night
In my head I heard conspiracy theory freaks
Man, I had a dreadful flight
I'm back in the USSR
You don't know how lucky you are, boy
Back in the USSR, yeah