"I mean, suppose somebody submitted a license plate to Texas that said, 'Vote Republican,' ­­and Texas said, yes, that's fine."

"And next person submitted a license plate to Texas and it said 'Vote Democratic,' and Texas said, no, we're not going to approve that one. What about that?" asked Justice Kagan in yesterday's oral argument about whether Texas could reject the specialty license plate proposed by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. (We talked about the case yesterday here.)

The lawyer for Texas said — lamely — "Yeah, Justice Kagan, I don't think our position would necessarily allow that...." And she was all "But why... why wouldn't it allow that?"

Here's the oral argument transcript (PDF). The lawyer (Scott A. Keller) had no good answer, as far as I can tell.

I'm skeptical.

About what, I don't know. It was 60 years ago.



From the Althouse home-movie archive.

"In at least 20 incidents, taxi drivers blocked Uber cars as they attempted to pick up passengers, threw eggs and in some cases dragged passengers onto the street..."

"... Filip Nuytemans, Uber’s general manager in Belgium, said Monday."

"But the Senate Judiciary Committee is emerging as a serious buzz kill for the pro-reform set."

"The powerful panel is stacked with some of the most senior lawmakers in Congress, many of whom came to power during a tough-on-crime era of the drug wars that saw stiffer penalties for drug possession. Several of them openly gripe about what they call the Obama administration’s lack of enforcement of existing federal drug laws — and they certainly aren’t willing to send a signal that Congress is OK with the movement to liberalize pot."

ADDED: In the last couple days, my position on the legalization of marijuana has changed. Oddly enough, it's because of something I read about Ibsen! I don't have the time right now to explain my train of thought, but I can give you the passage — from Paul Johnson's "Intellectuals" — that got me started on it:

There was one aspect of Ibsen’s vanity which verged on the ludicrous... He had a lifelong passion for medals and orders. In fact, he went to embarrassing lengths to get them...

[T]here is ample evidence for Ibsen’s passion since he insisted on displaying his growing galaxy of stars on every possible occasion. As early as 1878 he is reported to have worn all of them, including one like a dog-collar round his neck, at a club dinner. The Swedish painter Georg Pauli came across Ibsen sporting his medals (not the ribbons alone but the actual stars) in a Rome street. At times he seems to have put them on virtually every evening. He defended his practice by saying that, in the presence of ‘younger friends’, it ‘reminds me that I need to keep within certain limits.’ All the same, people who had invited him to dinner were always relieved when he arrived without them, as they attracted smiles and even open laughter as the wine circulated....

"Dividing the world into males and female is such a big part of the culture that it can seem impossible, and perhaps even aggravating, to try to think outside those categories."

"This is not only a problem for squares stuck in a binary way of thinking — many of the terms associated with genderqueerness end up referring back to masculinity or femininity in some way, which is a bit tricky if the ideal is to move beyond the gender binary entirely."

If the ideal is... I find that sentence so amusing because it violates its own standards. Isn't there something square about having an ideal? Squares — we're told — are people who are stuck. But the writer of that sentence — Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart at Slate — is stuck on a way of thinking, which is that the squares are those icky people and we'd better not be squares! We'd better not be stuck! We need to move beyond the place where they are stuck, because we are the un-stuck, the non-squares, and we have an ideal, which is not being stuck where those others people are stuck.

It's tricky, you say. Yes, it is. It's tricky to get so wound up in something that most people don't bother with, especially with your fixated idea that those other people are stuck on "a binary way of thinking" — which is, ironically, a binary way of thinking. Who are those other people you're railing against? I think an awful lot of people, perhaps most people, are not in the 2 categories Vitiello Urquhart posits in her binary construct. They follow the obvious and benevolent practice of regarding individuals as individuals. That can work for the square and the hip and for the grand set of persons of mixed square/hipness.

Maybe, regarding individuals as individuals is just too simple, and Vitiello Urquhart wants something tricky to do. Whoever attempts that trick can be judged as an individual... an individual who is interested in doing that particular trick. Is it entertaining, is it enlightening, is it loving, is it beautiful, is it helpful, is it generous, is it done for the purpose of tweaking others and distancing yourself from those whom you regard as icky... ?

"[W]ere it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

"But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them. I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under European governments. Among the former, public opinion is in the place of law, and restrains morals as powerfully as laws ever did any where. Among the latter, under pretence of governing they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep. I do not exaggerate. This is a true picture of Europe. Cherish therefore the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves."

Thomas Jefferson, January 16, 1787.

If the UVa frat sues Rolling Stone, "they are opening up every young man in that fraternity to scrutiny — their drinking habits, and I’m sure some of them are underage..."

"... their sexual habits, and their overall conduct....  It just seems like there’s a whole host of issues that could be there, and it would be unfair and unwise to subject these young men to that," Charles Tobin — who specializes in defamation law — told WaPo's Terrence McCoy.

In addition to that skeletons-in-the-closet problem, McCoy points out the problem of a group claiming defamation:

The Rolling Stone article doesn’t specifically name any student beyond pseudonyms and descriptions that aren’t matched by any member of the frat house....

For any group to have a justifiable claim, wrote Ellyn Tracy Marcus in the California Law Review in 1983, the group needs to be small. "As group size increases, courts become skeptical that the defamation could reasonably be understood to refer to any individual group member. … Reasonable persons do not take literally statements defaming groups of people, and understand such statements only as generalizations or exaggerations."

I'm looking at that law review article, and it's talking about, for example, a case where individual D.C. taxi drivers tried to sue The Washington Post for an article portraying D.C. cab drivers as rude louts. Rolling Stone besmirched the name of a specific frat. Anyway, McCoy also links to Eugene Volokh's analysis (from last December, before the recent news that the police investigation has found absolutely no evidence to support the rape anecdote told by Rolling Stone). Volokh discusses "defamation of a group," but then moves on to the separate topic of "Defamation of the fraternity": "Corporations and unincorporated associations that have recognized legal identities (such as unions, partnerships and the like) can also sue for defamation that causes injury to their organizational reputation, independently of whether any member was defamed."

I'm not a libel law expert, but I see the "group libel" problem as addressing whether individual frat members could successfully claim to have been defamed because their frat was defamed. If the frat sues as an entity, there's no "group libel" problem.

"According to a fresh findings announced over the weekend... the Nazis made it deeper into the Argentine jungle in search of refuge than anyone imagined."

"Hundreds of miles north, along the border with Paraguay, rises the Parque Teyú Cuare. A path winds into the nature preserve, opening to a trove of 'mysterious buildings' that are 'battered by time... What were these buildings? Who built them? For what?'"

"One of the benefits of having been right-of-center in college was that my political and philosophical views were constantly challenged."

"There was no 'safe space' — and I was better for it. I often felt that I received a better education than many of my peers precisely because I was not able to hold unchallenged assumptions or adopt unquestioned premises."

"It’s no longer a way for a working-class guy with street smarts and a huge native intelligence to make a lot of money."

"It’s now the domain of the kinds of technical specialists who are really winners in other parts of the economy as well," said the cultural anthropologist, Caitlin Zaloom, on the occasion of the closing of the futures pits in the Chicago Board of Trade.

"Regardless of the hormone replacements I’m taking, I am now in menopause," writes Angelina Jolie, who is 39...

... about her laparoscopic bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy.

Two years ago I wrote about my choice to have a preventive double mastectomy.... [This was] a less complex surgery than the mastectomy, but its effects are more severe. It puts a woman into forced menopause. So I was readying myself physically and emotionally, discussing options with doctors, researching alternative medicine....

I will not be able to have any more children.... But I feel at ease with whatever will come, not because I am strong but because this is a part of life. It is nothing to be feared.... [I]t is possible to take control and tackle head-on any health issue....

ADDED: I don't know how seriously Ms. Jolie took alternative medicine, but I think it's good that she mentioned it here the way she did. She researched it. That's all she said. That throws out a line to the many people who think, when they find themselves in similar circumstances, I want to try the "natural"/alternative approach. It's tempting to many people, including many intelligent people, notably Steve Jobs. I could name individuals in my family — people I know were intelligent and who had access to science-based medicine — who took the alternative route and missed the opportunity to address deadly medical problems at the right time. It is extremely valuable for a celebrity as big and well-loved as Ms. Jolie to call people back from that precipice with the gentle words "discussing options with doctors, researching alternative medicine" followed by the decision to have dramatically life-changing surgery. That's a memorable lesson with a stamp of celebrity authority that's really useful to the vast numbers of people who don't automatically realize that they ought to be rational and go with science.

Ted Cruz goes all John Lennon... [AND: I'm sorry I started out like this!]

ADDED: Here's the full video of the announcement:



AND: I'm watching. And right at the beginning — at 1:38 — he says "Imagine a little girl, growing up in Wilmington, Delaware." Whoa! You had me at little girl, growing up in Wilmington, Delaware... I was a little girl, growing up in Wilmington, Delaware!

ADDED: Let the record show, that at 4:58, I cried.

AND: I'm sorry I led off with the joke on "Imagine." This is a truly powerful speech. Just brilliant.

ALSO: Here's the full transcript.

I see that Think Progress has an article titled "Ted Cruz Just Laid Out The Most Anti-Woman Agenda Yet." I've listened to the whole speech and I can't imagine what it refers to. I've read the article at the link, and I really don't know. Seems to be that Cruz supports policies that, in the opinion of Think Progress, would not serve the interests of women.

The Supreme Court refuses to hear the Wisconsin voter ID case, which will now go into effect.

"The Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the case was a surprise, as the court last year temporarily blocked the law for the November election, and voters were not required to show photo identifications in order to vote," writes Adam Liptak in the NYT.

A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, upheld the law, reasoning that it was similar to one from Indiana that the Supreme Court had sustained in 2008 in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board.

The full Seventh Circuit deadlocked 5 to 5 on a request to rehear the Wisconsin case, drawing a sharp dissent from Judge Richard A. Posner, who had written the 2007 appeals court opinion upholding the Indiana law, later affirmed by the Supreme Court.

Civil rights groups had hoped the Supreme Court would use the Wisconsin case, Frank v. Walker, No. 14-803, to reconsider its 2008 decision....

"Why is it that prosecutors and prison administrators are among the first to understand that extreme religious liberty is dangerous and antithetical to core American values?"

"The answer is that many religiously motivated criminals appear in their courts and jail cells. Accordingly, they understand through experience that religious liberty sits atop a slippery slope that lands in the criminal code and a well of human suffering."

Writes lawprof Marci Hamilton in a tribute to the recently deceased. David Frohnmayer, former Oregon Attorney General, Dean of the University of Oregon Law School, and President of the University of Oregon.

Thankfully, Frohnmayer was the Attorney General of Oregon when Employment Div. v. Smith was litigated, because he had the knowledge and wisdom to argue that the drug counselors in that case – who had signed an agreement not to use illegal drugs or they would lose their jobs, and then used peyote as part of a religious ceremony – did not have a First Amendment free exercise right to break Oregon’s criminal laws or to receive unemployment compensation.

Unfairly maligned then and still by those who are so blinded by ideology they refuse to see the facts, history will lionize him for his role in Smith....

Smith is the reason why statutes like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act were passed. It said that there's no right under the Free Exercise Clause to exemptions from the neutral, generally applicable actions of government.

Back in the 1950s, when everyone smoked, grandfathers taught toddlers the skill of taking a cigarette out of the pack and putting it in the mouth.

Quite a few of you commented on the smoking in the old home movies I'm editing — here and here — and I'm actually working on a little video that's all about the smoking. The foundational clip for that edit is these 9 seconds of Pop (my father's father) showing me how to take a cigarette out of the pack and put it in his mouth. He seems to be encouraging me to take a cigarette for myself before Mom intervenes.

"Initially, I began with the intention to soundly roast UW’s diversity initiatives."

"Armed with my frustration, I was prepared to call the Office of the Vice Provost on Diversity and Climate and demand what progress had been made with their lengthy, complex resolutions that, as of yet, have not seemed to make waves of any kind in a long-stagnant sea of overwhelming whiteness.... I can’t commend them for their success, but I also cannot condemn them for what I thought was an apathetic and ignorant attitude toward minority experiences on campus.... However, we need tangible evidence that progress is being made...."

Writes a University of Wisconsin—Madison freshman in the student newspaper.