Best Miers pun.

Here.

IN THE COMMENTS: We're talking about The Doors.

I oppose the Miers nomination.

I oppose the Miers nomination. Let me say that clearly, in those words, so I can be counted in N.Z. Bear's effort, described here. Must I say why here too? I've already said it so many times. You can follow the trajectory of my opinion of the nominee, which peaked on October 11th with my "Mellowing on Miers" post. I'd mellowed, mostly as a matter of contrarian instinct, upon reading a few too many emails from lawprofs who were too self-regardingly overvaluing constitutional theory. I don't require hardcore commitment to a theory -- the conservative's originalism or the liberal's "active liberty" or whatever. John Roberts -- a model nominee -- did not commit himself to any theory of interpretation.

What I do require is demonstrable analytical ability. I have seen no evidence of the level of ability that we have an obligation to demand from a Supreme Court justice. This is not a time to be nice or to give an unknown a chance. It's a lifetime appointment. President Bush made a terrible choice, and Miers did not decline. I was willing to wait for the hearings to make a final call, but the handling of the nomination has been so abysmal: the botched questionnaire, the bolstering with religion, the lack of any coherent defense in the face of weeks of criticism. It's just too much! End it, already!

Coffee vs. gun, coffee wins!

This story reminds me of some of the fight scenes in "A History of Violence":

The suspect tapped the car window Wednesday morning with a gun and motioned the driver to get out...

But the driver -- who had just bought a cup of hot coffee -- slammed the car door into the carjacker's legs, threw the coffee at his neck and face and wrestled him to the ground....

I like to order "extra hot" anyway. Now, I'll have mental pictures of wrestling villains to the ground!

By the way, I have been viciously attacked with a car door -- by a woman who incredibly stupidly believed she was protecting herself from me. I was biking in NYC in the standard bike area between the parked cars and the moving cars. She was walking toward me in the same path and somehow formed the belief that I would not go around her and suddenly grabbed the door and flung it all the way open, causing me to crash into it.

Suffice it to say, you can do a lot of damage with a car door!

Signs.

So I walked from the law school down to my favorite café on State Street. I saw a few signs.

The camera loves a juxtaposition:



There are lots of fliers for this "underwear party":



The fine print reads: "Acceptable attire includes boxers, briefs, panties, lingerie, pajamas, or your most revealing Halloween costume."

The world can't wait to drive out the Bush regime, so by all means, slap your sticker on the city's orientation map:



A rain-washed image cries out:



Another chalking:



When's the last time you thought about boko-maru?

Retreat.... reprieve!

I must be off to the retreat. Here, these look duly contemplative:





Devil's Lake. From last weekend, which was not like this weekend.

ADDED: Since I'll be in retreat, feel free to use the comments on this post to discuss whatever you'd like, subject to the usual decency standards that prevail around here. That is, talk amongst yourselves.

CORRECTION: Checking the calendar. In fact, it's next Saturday two weeks from today!

MORE: I'm trying to think if I feel better having thought I needed to do this today and then realizing I didn't than I would have felt otherwise. Considering how dreary the weather is today, I wish it was this weekend...

Self-study.

Yesterday, I said I'd been gearing up to be completely passive, and now the day has arrived. Today Next week is the law school retreat, part of our self-study, required by the ABA for reaccreditation. My role is secretarial: I'm taking notes in the room where the discussions about the curriculum will take place. There will be four sessions, two in the morning and two in the afternoon. In other rooms, there will be discussions on other topics, and most of the faculty will move from room to room, taking part in each of the four discussions. I will hear the curriculum discussion four times. Two other faculty members will have to lead this discussion four times. I will simply be taking notes on the four discussions and then compressing the notes into a summary.

I'll bring my laptop. I'm thinking it will be a lot like simulblogging -- without the jokes, without the gotchas, without the glass of wine and the TiVo-pausing.

Well, frankly, it won't feel like simulblogging at all. I'll be off the grid most of the day. But there will be some breaks. I'll be checking in here periodically. And I'll be monitoring the news sites. Because you know something might happen today.

Harriet, I'm looking at you.

Must check for news before hitting "publish."

No, not yet....

UPDATE: Still no Miers withdrawal, but I realize I've still got another week two weeks to go before the retreat. I need to look at calendars more often. Now, my gearing up to be completely passive will be so attenuated!

Did European witch-hunting kill 9 million?

I've been under the impression that was the real number, ever since I read Gyn/Ecology about 15 years ago. But I see here, that number is entirely wrong:

"For witchcraft and sorcery between 1400 and 1800, all in all, we estimate something like 50,000 legal death penalties," writes Wolfgang Behringer in "Witches and Witch-Hunts" (Polity, 2004). He estimates that perhaps twice as many received other penalties, "like banishment, fines or church penance."

Other recent estimates range from 40,000 to 100,000 executions over those early modern centuries. These remain appalling numbers, even when put in the context of the far greater numbers killed in religious wars and the fact that resort to capital punishment was at one of its high points in European history.

No one should underestimate the cruelty these numbers represent. "Witchfinders," Malcolm Gaskill's full-blooded account, just published by Harvard University Press, of the most notorious witch hunt in English history, makes that clear in engrossing detail.

But contemporary historians bridle at the huge numbers that have become part of the witch hunt mythology-and the implicit or explicit comparisons to the Nazi campaign of genocide. Professor Behringer traced the estimate of nine million victims back to wild projections made by an 18th-century anticlerical from 20 files of witch trials. The figure worked its way into 19th-century texts, was taken up by Protestant polemicists during the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf in Germany, then adopted by the early 20th-century German neopagan movement and, eventually, by anti-Christian Nazi propagandists.

In the United States, the nine million figure appeared in the 1978 book "Gyn/Ecology" by the influential feminist theoretician Mary Daly, who picked it up from a 19th-century American feminist, Matilda Gage.

Do such unfounded myths do anyone any good? Certainly many feminists, including some identifying themselves as neopagans, agree with contemporary historians about the answer: No.

Have any of you folks read "Gyn/Ecology"? Oh, that is a rousing book!

UPDATE: Cathy Young (who also participates in the comments) expresses shock at my "rousing book" compliment to "Gyn/Ecology." (She and I also had some debate about the writings of Andrea Dworkin.) I wrote this in the comments:

I just said it was rousing, not that it was good or right. I went through a period when I read a lot of Dworkin and Daly's books. They were very stimulating, but also ultimately stimulated me into wanting to distance myself from them. There are plenty of things in the treatment of women to be outraged about, but polemical works that demand that you reach and maintain a permanent state of anger just seem sad after a while (or dangerous, if they are actually effective).

"Such is the perfect perversity of the nomination of Harriet Miers that it discredits, and even degrades, all who toil at justifying it."

George Will writes in tomorrow's WaPo:

Many of their justifications cannot be dignified as arguments. Of those that can be, some reveal a deficit of constitutional understanding commensurate with that which it is, unfortunately, reasonable to impute to Miers.

Man, that is one hoity-toity sentence. But it's true!

As I was just trying to do with my last post, Will lays down the rule that every Democratic Senator who voted against Roberts must vote against Miers or lose all credibility (as anything other than political hacks). He has a rule for Republican senators too:

[A]ny who vote for Miers will thereafter be ineligible to argue that it is important to elect Republicans because they are conscientious conservers of the judicial branch's invaluable dignity. Finally, any Republican senator who supinely acquiesces in President Bush's reckless abuse of presidential discretion -- or who does not recognize the Miers nomination as such -- can never be considered presidential material.

I concur!

"We're not discussing pulling out her nomination, but if we were to, do you have any advice as to how we should do it?"

The Washington Times reports that "White House senior staff are starting to ask outside people" that question.

A conservative political consultant with ties to the White House said the president and his political team once thought Democrats would go easy on Miss Miers, a friend of Mr. Bush's and his personal counsel. The theory was that Democrats see her as the best they could expect in the way of Bush appointments to the high court.

"But now Democrats smell blood in water," said the Republican, adding that he received a call from Miss Taylor seeking contingency advice on how to handle a possible decision by Miss Miers to withdraw her name or a decision by the president to withdraw the nomination.

"So there are some in the White House and some Republicans in the Senate who are worried the Democrats can now build a case that she is not competent enough or knowledgeable enough to be a justice on the Supreme Court," he said. "Really, that is the most damaging case you can build against a nominee."

The reason, he said, is that "non-ideologues would be responsive to that competence argument, and Republicans won't be able to argue that her defeat was ideological -- that the reason the Democrats beat her was that she was too conservative."

Well, I've been saying it's ideological of the Democrats not to oppose her. They opposed Roberts as much as they could, and he was sublimely qualified. How can you oppose him and not her? It must be that you think she's weak and will drift, surprise, or at least be uninfluential. This preference for a weak justice over a hyper-competent justice like Roberts is utterly political and in service of the Democrats ideological goals. Anyone who challenges Roberts and then turns around and gives Miers a pass can never credibly claim to be relying on the principles they will need to cite in the next case if they want to look like something more than purely political ideologues.

I can understand why the Democrats have not done much of anything yet. The Republicans are fighting each other. And it looks lofty to wait for the hearings. But what will happen at those hearings? The Democratic senators will need to behave in a way that is proportional to the way they treated Roberts. If not, they'll look like hypocrites (and we bloggers will point it out). If so, it will, in all likelihood, be a humiliating experience for Miers -- and Bush will deserve all the blame for his abysmal choice.

Am I too optimistic to think that relief will come today?

Zombies.

Tomorrow. On State Street.

To add a particularly Madisonian touch, it's not just a Zombie Walk but a Zombie Protest. Fight for zombie rights by bringing a protest sign, sandwich board, or customized t-shirt....

What do we want? BRAINS! When do we want it? BRAINS!

First Butch, and now Porky.

Another Little Rascal has died. Porky, Gordon Lee, was 71.

He and Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas teamed up against older boys Spanky and Alfalfa in many of the comedies. The Porky character is credited with originating the catchphrase "otay."

In the interview, Lee recalled a warm friendship with his black costar when they were kids and praised their interracial relationship on screen, saying, "Buckwheat played an absolute equal part in the Gang."

Lee told friends his career ended when a growth spurt made him thinner. "They wanted Porky to be a chunky fellow, so they looked for someone else," [his partner, Janice] McClain said.

As an adult, Porky was a schoolteacher.

Celebs gone twee.

Oh, ick:

SARAH JESSICA PARKER has admitted that she has taken to dressing like The Beatles to please her two-year-old son James. "He wants all of us to dress like the Beatles in the Yellow Submarine era – collars with flowers, really weird haircuts and bell bottoms. He will only wear bell bottoms, which are not easy to find. So I dress in a way that makes him happy because he is the centre of our lives."

MORE:

"The only way we could get him out of pyjamas was to tell him he could dress like a Beatle!... My son has some strong feelings about what I should and shouldn't be wearing. James is like, 'Take that dress off, I don't like it.' Or, 'I'd like you to wear long pants today.' So I dress in a way that makes him happy, because he basically is the centre of our lives," she said.

Yikes!

Books I'm not reading.

Seen at a bookfair:

This year there are several entries for the Least Appealing Title of the Year. I, for one, will not be reading Easy-Gaited Horses, nor The Forgotten Half of Change, which appears to be a self-help book and not a guide to what to do with all those leftover euro coins.

On the other hand, do not be put off by The Gene that Makes You Smell Like a Fish. This pioneering work by Lisa Seachrist Chiu exposes some of nature’s most peculiar genetic quirks: the black urine gene, the werewolf gene, the gene that makes you hate broccoli and (my particular favourite) the Dracula gene, a mutation in zebra fish that causes their blood cells to explode on contact with light.

But the overall prize for The Book I Am Least Likely to Read goes to The Sex Life of Food by Bunny Crumpacker (I’m not making this up). Bunny has put food on the couch, to bring us “Food and Gender: Subconscious Symbolism” and “A Freudian Look at Flour”. Read this book, and you will never feel quite the same way about baking.

Wait a sec... I am so grossed out by the notion of a gene that makes your urine black!! I mean, I was so amused by Bunny Crumpacker, and then I just kept looking back with horror!

I wonder, what's the most ridiculously unappealing book in your home collection?

"I've been gearing up to be completely passive."

That's just something I said yesterday. I was referring to something I'm going to have to do all day tomorrow. I'd been given my role, and someone at the meeting was proposing a new way to switch off roles over the course of the day. No, no. I've already adjusted my mind around the current plan, psyching myself up for the day. I've been gearing up to be completely passive.

"Sometimes I envy people who are in prison simply because they have a lot of free time to read."

Me too. Though I go on to worry that the place is too noisy and chaotic. I'd be in women's prison, of course, so it might be okay. And if I could have high-speed internet access and permission to blog...

Bad metaphor of the day.

Maggie Gallagher is guest-blogging at Volokh Conspiracy about same-sex marriage -- "SSM."

Imagine you stand in the middle of vast, hostile desert. A camel is your only means of transversing it, your lifeline to the future. The camel is burdened-- stumbling, loaded down, tired; enfeebled-- the conditions of the modern life are clearly not favorable to it. But still it’s your only hope, because to get across that desert you need a camel.

Now, chop off its legs and order it to carry you to safety.

That’s what SSM looks like, to me.

Man, that would work as comedy writing for "The Colbert Report"!