Showboat. This story is just too strange. Junior Cuomo laid into NY Governor Pataki saying:

Pataki "stood behind the leader," Cuomo said. "He held the leader's coat. He was a great assistant to the leader. But he was not a leader."

Look, I'm not a Pataki fan -- in fact, I'm very glad I don't live in NY, but this type of comment shows that the kid has no idea about really what it means to be a governor. Pataki did the right thing in his response to 9-11. The job isn't to be a showboat, it is to 'serve and protect' (to borrow a great phrase).

BTW, I worked with an attorney who went to school with Junior -- she said he was a real slacker and was incredulous when he was named director of HUD.

Update. The NY Times, in an editorial, had this to say on Friday morning:

. . . the fact that Mr. Pataki showed no jealousy about his subsidiary role seemed to be the sign of real maturity, and a perfect sense of priorities.

When voters elect a leader, they are looking for a whole panoply of useful qualities. One of them is an ability to sense when an occasion is about something greater than yourself. Mr. Pataki demonstrated that part of leadership on Sept. 11. Mr. Cuomo has yet to demonstrate it during this campaign.

Nothing much. Nothing much to say. I'm celebrating the birth of another blog -- this one by Alexander and Eugene Volokh. Eugene should be considered for the next Supreme Court opening and would probably be on my own dream team Supreme Court.

One case. The Supreme had one case today, another 6-3 decision, this one giving more power to the IRS.

Justice O'Connor, writing for the majority, overturned a lower court decision, and said the IRS can seize a family house to cover the back taxes of just one person in the family.

Justice Thomas, joined by Stevens and Scalia dissents noting the Court is essentially riding roughshod over principles of federalism (which both O'Connor and Rehnquist normally support) and property law to allow the government to seize the family house. What makes this case interesting is that the Court does, in fact, modify a common law principle that predates the formation of the United States. Initially, Don and Sandra Craft held the property as tenancy by the entirety, pursuant to Michigan law, which, as under English common law, "does not belong to either spouse, but to a single entity composed of the married persons." The Crafts then conveyed the property by quitclaim deed to Sandra Craft, which terminated the entirety estate. Thus, Sandra Craft owns the property in fee simple. Justice Thomas notes that "The District Court and Court of Appeals both held that the transfer did not constitute a fraudulent conveyance, a ruling the Government has not appealed." FN1.

Justice Scalia, who really has a bone to pick with O'Connor, writes a separate dissent which begins: "I join Justice Thomas’s dissent, which points out (to no relevant response from the Court) . . ." Scalia goes on to note:

I write separately to observe that the Court nullifies (insofar as federal taxes are concerned, at least) a form of property ownership that was of particular benefit to the stay-at-home spouse or mother. She is overwhelmingly likely to be the survivor that obtains title to the unencumbered property; and she (as opposed to her business-world husband) is overwhelmingly unlikely to be the source of the individual indebtedness against which a tenancy by the entirety protects. It is regrettable that the Court has eliminated a large part of this traditional protection retained by many States.

Pentagon. Every morning, on the way to work, I drive by the Pentagon. The road I travel is the same one that was followed by Flight 77, so when I go over the crest on Arlington ridge, I look right at the side of the Pentagon that was hit. There are two large cranes there, but it appears that most of the work on the shell of the Pentagon is done -- amazingly quick work. As you may know, the workers have vowed that this wing of the Pentagon, all rings, will be fully operational by 9/11/02. It seems to me at the rededication ceremony -- does anyone doubt that there will be one -- America needs an address from the President that will be of the same quality as the Gettysburg Address. A short, eloquent, defining address. An address of resolve and inspiration. An address that can not only be understood by schoolchildren, but one that they can memorize. Yet, it will need to have the same depth and gravity.

I think (and hope) that George Bush (and his speechwriters) are up to the task.

On the Rez. As I previously indicated, I was in Arizona last week, most of the time was spent on the White Mountain Apache Reservation. It was a productive week for work and a good learning week for me. I did get a lot out of the brief time I spent with the members of the Tribe. Most of what I want to convey sounds like cliches, but there is so much truth in those cliches.

The Apache (and the Navajo, who we also encountered) are truly strong, noble, dignified people. It grieves me to see how poorly treated they have been by the U.S. government in the past. Nevertheless, they are strongly committed Americans -- everywhere we went we saw American flags and bible verses. In talking with the few I did, I can not begin to tell you how strong the feelings of love and patriotism I heard for our country -- this is the kind of thing that makes me proud to be an American and a fellow citizen with the Apache.

A few other notes:
-the Apache language is so complex and different sounding to my ears. I've heard the various European and Asian languages, yet, this is as different from the others, to my untrained ears, as Japanese is from Spanish.

-the names of the housing areas showed the impact of popular culture on this very remote people. There were the names you might expect, like Yucca Flats and Diamond Creek. But when you got to Lonesome Dove, you began to wonder. Other names of the neighborhoods showed the impact: Knots Landing, Another World, Dark Shadows, Ben-Gay, Over the Rainbow, Smurf Village, Sixpack and Jurassic Park, among others that I remember.
-the area was beautiful -- very remote, if you ever head out that way, go through Globe, it's a little slower, but the Salt River Canyon is breath-taking.

Auroral Activity. On Monday, April 15, 2002, a full-halo coronal mass ejection emanated from the Sun. This cloud is heading toward the Earth and could ignite Northern Lights tomorrow night or even the next night. Here is a good place to check auroral activity against a map.

Conservative Catholic. Thanks to Mark Byron, I have become acquainted with the work of blogger Emily Stimpson and, more specifically, the issue of the term "conservative" being applied to theology and worship.

This has been kind of a funky issue for me in the past few years. I belong to the Episcopal church, which once stood for the establishment and therefore, by implication, was a "conservative" institution. Over the past 30 to 40 years, however, the Episcopal Church in the US has become synonymous with the more "liberal" elements of Protestantism, both politically and theologically. Yet, within the Episcopal denomination you see a broad spectrum and my church is on the more conservative end. It's almost like being a conservative Democrat.

These terms are really misleading -- I love to learn of something better.

I remember a few years ago, I passed a sermon by Martin Luther King, Jr. on to a friend who considers himself a conservative Republican and a religious fundamentalist. He seemed to humor me by taking it and I got the feeling he wasn't going to read it. A year later he came to me and said that he finally read the sermon and was delighted because he didn't realize that Dr. King was so conservative. :\

BTW, here is a small collection of some of MLK's sermons.

More TV. Also on television last week, I saw a commercial promoting some television program and the voice over said something like "you'll never know what you see next." The visual was a woman who looked like Rosie O'Donnell grabbing and squeezing the breast of a large black woman.

Don't you ever complain about Clarence Thomas and sexual harassment, Ms. O'Donnell.

Update: I received an e-mail message explaining that the other woman was Star Jones.

Begala the Liar. I don't watch much television, but will have it on in the background while I'm working in a hotel room while on travel. This was how I came across this whopper from Paul Begala last week on Crossfire. Begala did an elaborate schtick to tarnish Attorney General Ashcroft, taken straight from the CNN transcript:

[Begala:] Speaking last night with David Letterman who has given him [John Ashcroft] endless grief for spending $8,000 of taxpayer money to cover up a naked breast on the statue of justice that has graced the Justice Department for decades. Well, here's how the attorney general explained it to Dave last night.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN")

JOHN ASHCROFT, ATTORNEY GENERAL: I didn't really know much about this. Someone ordered some draperies for the statues, and I've kind of looked into it since you sort of made an issue of it. And it turns out that -- it turns out it really wasn't a covering for the statue so much as it were for a construction curtain.

DAVID LETTERMAN, HOST: Construction?

ASHCROFT: They are being remodeled.

LETTERMAN: Is that right?

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BEGALA: Sure, John. Remodeled? Right, what are they going to do, plastic surgery for giant statues with brass breasts?

Coincidentally, I happened to see the Letterman show the night before and all of the above took place, except, of course it was all a set up for a big joke. What happend after Letterman asked "Is that right?" was that Ashcroft said something like, oh yeah, here let me show you what the statue will look like when it's finished and he proceeded to pull out a picture of the statue with Letterman's head -- a very large picture of it -- pasted on top of the picture of the topless statue.

Begala is a flat out liar.

Porn Win. Justice Kennedy, writing for a 6-3 split Supreme Court, struck down legislation barring some child pornography.

Specifically, the Court struck down certain provisions of the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 ("CPPA") holding these provisions are overbroad. Writing for the Court, Justice Kennedy, referring to the play Romeo and Juliet, and the movies Traffic and American Beauty (the Bard must be rolling in his grave at the comparision) struck down restrictions and prohibitions on "virtual child pornography" (pixel pixie porn) and apparent child pornography -- ('barely legal teens' may now be advertised as 13 year olds, I guess).

Justice Clarence Thomas concurred in the judgment only and issued a short opinion by way of explanation.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor concurred in part and dissented in part. Her opinions are, in my own estimation, the models of clarity; this is a good one to contrast with the majority opinion. She agreed with the majority on several points:
"Because the Government may already prohibit obscenity without violating the First Amendment . . . what the Government asks this Court to rule is that it may also prohibit youthful-adult and virtual-adult pornography that is merely indecent without violating that Amendment."
"I also agree with the Court’s decision to strike down the CPPA’s ban on material presented in a manner that 'conveys the impression' that it contains pornographic depictions of actual children ('actual-child pornography')."
"Finally, I agree with Court that that the CPPA’s ban on youthful-adult pornography is overbroad."

She disagreed "with the Court, however, that the CPPA’s prohibition of virtual-child pornography is overbroad. Before I reach that issue, there are two preliminary questions: whether the ban on virtual-child pornography fails strict scrutiny and whether that ban is unconstitutionally vague. I would answer both in the negative."

Dissenting, the Chief Justice, joined by Scalia, argues that the majority and Justice O'Connor misunderstand or misinterpret the CPPA: ". . . the CPPA bans visual depictions of youthful looking adult actors engaged in actual sexual activity; mere suggestions of sexual activity, such as youthful looking adult actors squirming under a blanket, are more akin to written descriptions than visual depictions, and thus fall outside the purview of the statute . . ." Rehnquist acknowledges that one could read the CPPA, as does O'Connor and the majority, and therefore "an individual who merely possesses protected materials (such as videocassettes of “Traffic” or “American Beauty”) might offend the CPPA regardless of whether the individual actually intended to possess materials containing unprotected images." However, "there is . . . no need or reason to construe the statute this way" When the court examined the precursor statute to the CPPA, it held that an 'actual knowledge' standard applied: ". . .so that the Government would have to prove that a person charged with possessing child pornography actually knew that the materials contained depictions of real minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct."

In short, it's a full win for the pornographers and a loss for civilization.

Update: I received a note from a reader (yay -- I love knowing that I'm actually read) asking for an explanation of Justice Thomas' opinion. It's short, which is why I didn't sumarize it. Basically, Thomas said that banning pixel pixie porn was, at this time, a speculative endeavor. If, when prosecuting child porn, the pornographer raises as a defense that it's "just pixel porn" and not pictures of the real thing, then the government may need to go back and adopt such a law.

As an additonal note, it should be pointed out that Justice SCALIA joined the Rehnquist dissent. Scalia is usually a pretty strong Free-Speecher -- he was the deciding vote in the flag burning case, for example. He has also pretty consistently voted for abortion protestors, although that's seen as more an abortion vote, for some reason. [Actually, I think it is the Ginsburgs, Breyers, Stevens, Souters et al. who tend to flip-flop on that issue just because it's abortion. I really think they believe that pornographers have more freedom of speech than do abortion protestors, just because they are so committed to abortion.] I wish Scalia had written separately on this one.

My own belief is that all child pornography is obscene -- and there is no first amendment protection of obscenity.

Last Update: I missed footnote 2 earlier when reading the Rehnquist dissent. Justice Scalia joined all but one paragraph of the dissent, the one where Rehnquist writes "We have looked to legislative history to limit the scope of child pornography statutes in the past and we should do so here as well." Justice Scalia has a well known, and probably well-founded, aversion to relying on legislative history in interpreting statutes.

RIP, Justice White. The AP is reporting that Byron "Whizzer" White passed away today. You will see notes like this one in the AP: "Appointed by President Kennedy in 1962, White soon became a dissenter from many of the court's liberal rulings of the 1960s." Actually, I think the AP has it wrong. Byron White was the mirror image of Robert F. Kennedy: he was strongly pro-labor and as equally opposed to corruption and organized crime within the unions and without. See, for example, RFK's service on the McClellan Committee in the late 1950's.

What else will they say about Byron White -- he was one of two dissenters in Roe v. Wade. Guess what? Bobby Kennedy (and especially his wife, Ethel) was opposed to abortion on demand.

White was anti-communist. RFK started out working for Sen. Joe McCarthy, although was opposed to McCarthy's tactics (but not his anti-communist, pro-America stance) and resigned and wrote a tough critique of McCarthy's methods and conclusions.

White was pro-civil rights, especially in the areas of voting rights and education rights, as was RFK with his move to desegregate Ole Miss. Yet, White, like RFK and others of that generation, most notably Hubert H. Humphrey, were strongly opposed to the evolution of affirmative action into goals, quotas, and reverse discrimination.

As you might have guessed, I have long admired Byron White. Nevertheless, I think he made his share of mistakes. For example, while he was not a doctrinaire absolutist (siding with the state) in the church-state cases, he dissented in the Widmer v. Vincent case which held that religious speech was entitled to the same rights as non-religious speech.

Justice White, former football star, attorney, Judge; you had a good run. May you rest in peace.

It's over. The Supreme Court today rejected, without comment, the appeal of some parents who wanted to continue the busing of students in Charlotte, NC. Some history on the Swann case, which initially upheld the judicial application of busing as a remedy to racial segregation here and here. For a good, detailed analysis, see Swann's Way: The School Busing Case and the Supreme Court by Bernard Schwartz (out of print, but available in most libraries).

Cover Watch. I would put Tiger Woods on the cover -- but the two major magazines were on the newsstands before he had even teed off. So Newsweek goes with Hepatitus C. While Time does Human Guinea Pigs. It's a push. I'm frankly surprised that neither one went with the Mid-East, which was clearly the news story of the past week.

Misses. Yes, I missed the last two weeks. On Easter, there was no way I could stomach a face-off between Time trying to make Arafat look pathetic and Newsweek trying to make Clinton look sympathetic. Then, last week, I couldn't get my ISP to work in Phoenix and after I got back from the Apache reservation, I figured it was too late.

Estrada. Mark Byron has an excellent note about DC Court nominee Miguel Estrada. It should be noted that it has been ELEVEN months since he was nominated and Leahy still hasn't held hearings.

Quote

. . . right now, all of us are enduring a time of testing, loss, and fear; a time when our vulnerability to evil and the certainty of our mortality are all too clear; a time when once again our intellect is insufficient to answer the question, "Why?" And at these times more than ever, we are reminded that it is a privilege to struggle for good against evil.

We do not choose our circumstances or trials, but we do choose how we respond to them. Too often when all is well, we slip into the false joy and satisfaction of the material and a complacent pride and faith in ourselves. Yet it is through struggle that we find redemption and self-knowledge. This is what the slaves of Exodus learned. And it is what slaves in America meant when they sang: "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen "Glory Hallelujah!"

--Condoleezza Rice, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs at the 2002 National Commemoration of the Days of Remembrance
U.S. Capitol Rotunda
April 10, 2002

Homicide Bombing. Even before today's homicide bombing in Israel, the administration had made the switch from labeling these as suicide bombers. Yesterday, Ari Fleischer responding to a questioner stated:

I think what he would say to that, David, is one, he recognizes Israel's right to defend herself. Israel, of course, had been attacked in a series of suicide bombings which are really homicide bombings. I think the name "suicide bombings" is not an apt description of what Israel faced from these attacks across the border.

Today, in response to qustioning on this reference, Fleisher expanded:

But the reason I started to use that term is because it's a more accurate description. These are not suicide bombings. These are not people who just kill themselves. These are people who deliberately go to murder others, with no regard to the values of their own life. These are murderers. The President has said that in the Rose Garden. And I think that is just a more accurate description of what these people are doing. It's not suicide, it's murder.

If I remember correctly, it was a blogger that first pointed the suicide appelation was incorrect and that the intent was not primarily suicide, but homicide. Suicide is the only ancillary benefit.

Anniversary. Today, we have a guest writer, my father. This was the e-mail message he sent out to our family yesterday:

A long, long time ago in a place far, far away a young Marine Corps Officer asked a pretty little miss to be his wife. She agreed and so their story began. It was an adventure story that took them from Barstow to Kitty Hawk with side stops all over the world. It produced four great kids and nine beautiful grand children. God had blessed their marriage.

Their union was tested in many ways......by wars, separations and the stress of supporting and raising a family. They disagreed, they differed but they also loved and cared for each other. Together they cried as they lost their parents, a brother,a sister and so many good friends. Together they watched with pride as their kids succeeded spiritually and materially. They suffered when their children made mistakes, when they failed or when something or someone hurt them. They, themselves, at one time or another failed. But somehow they covered for each other. When one was weak the other was strong. Where one lacked confidence the other carried the day. And so it went....

Joanne, tomorrow - 12 April - we will have been married for forty-four years. As each year has passed I find myself loving you just a little bit more until today my heart is full... and now I think it shall burst. But if it should....therein you will find harbored...amongst my love....the shards of my imperfections. And for those times I ask your forgiveness.
But enough...I prefer, instead, to remember all the good times we have had together. We loved, we laughed and thoroughly enjoyed life. What the future holds we know not. But whatever it brings we will face it... together.......................I love you my princess.
Richard

Saudi Telethon. On Saudi television they held a telethon yesterday that raised over $55,000,000 to support the homicide bombers who live in Israel. One of the fundraisers reported that a widow said she had nothing to give except her wedding band which she was donating.

A long time ago, when I lived in Tulsa, we had friends who worked for OREA, the Oral Roberts fund-raising arm who told us a similar story. It seems that a worker opened a letter from a widow that had a wedding ring and a very sad story. The woman was sending in her ring as her pledge of faith to God. She wrote that she was in need of many miracles and explained her situation. She had heard Roberts say that a person needed to sew in faith to the Roberts ministry and, in return, would reap a hundred-fold reward.

The story was very moving and the worker brought it to the supervisor and it eventually went to Richard Roberts, Oral’s son, who ran OREA. The hope, of course, was that OREA would return the ring and would take steps to intervene directly in the lady’s life. Richard was delighted to receive this ring and was unmoved by the story. The line workers, most of whom worked at minimum wage, quietly took up a collection and sent it, anonymously, to the lady. Richard Roberts turned the ring over to the OREA liquidators. This is the difference between real religion and false religion.

On the Rez. I've been on the Rez for the past few days -- I'm back to where dialing up to my ISP is a local call. It's very late right now -- I need to get to bed, I'm taking the Judge to the airport at 5 am. More later. (I have a lot to say).

Out Borrowing a PC to let you know I'm out for awhile -- be back on Saturday.