Posts - October 2005

Shofar Idol.

On Harriet Miers: Bleah.

I’m underwhelmed. I like superstar picks, particularly federal appellate judges (despite some calls for diversity). There’s nothing to say she’ll be an awful justice, but there’s nothing to say she’ll be a great one, either.

What are her views on the Constitution? Who knows? All I’ve read is that she’s pro-life.

And with Katrina and Brownie, is this really the time for Bush to name a crony? (That word is going to get tired really soon, but it’ll do for now.) Burton and Minton, Truman’s pals, were totally forgettable. Harriet Miers was the best he could do? It’s not the case that anyone would have paled in comparison to Roberts. There were a number of good choices out there.

Harry Reid apparently mentioned to Bush recently that she’d be an acceptable choice. So I’m guessing she’ll get confirmed. Even if she turns out not to be an intellectual powerhouse, she’ll have three or four clerks helping her out.

Anyway: bleah.

This is a fun read if you want more on Miers.

I lay on the grass in the Catskills on Friday night. The sky was dotted with an infinitude of stars. I hadn’t seen so many stars in – I can’t rememember when. I saw the faint band of the Milky Way. I saw a tiny white dot move slowly across the sky – a satellite. I love seeing satellites in the night sky – they’re so eerie.

Matt and I went with Mike and his roommate/our friend Dan up to Mike’s mom’s house in the Catskills on Friday. We ate dinners cooked by Dan, who is a gourmet cook. We watched about seven episodes of Arrested Development on DVD as well as most of Sunset Boulevard on Turner Classic Movies. Other than that, I mostly read and did crossword puzzles.

I had a sense of expansion this weekend. It’s possible to have space and quiet! Some people live that way year-round. If I lived like that, I bet I’d get a lot more writing done. A little house in the middle of nowhere with a writing room with unfinished wooden walls.

I spent several moments out in the yard by myself this weekend, just being. Every few minutes a vehicle would zoom past on the neighboring road. Other than that, it was dead quiet, except for the water flowing in the stream at the edge of the yard and the occasional breeze blowing through the trees.

It was heaven.

Early yesterday afternoon I stood by the stream and just stared at the water and at the opposite bank. I can do that sometimes – I can just sit or stand somewhere for minutes on end and drift off into a reverie. “What are you doing, Jeff?” someone might ask. And the answer will be that I’m thinking. Just thinking.

I thought about nature and about Native Americans, and about what the land was like before electricity and before log cabins and any permanent settlements. I imagined how quiet and peaceful the world used to be without any people on it, without any words or language. I stared at the trees and and water and rocks and tried to imagine myself pre-verbal. Language leads to thoughts and intelligence, which make us feel separate from nature. But we and the trees and the dirt come from the same stuff.

When we die we will decompose and rejoin the earth, and we will be silent again.

I’m killing time today before going to my parents’ house later for a Rosh Hashannah meal. Today’s the second day of Rosh Hashannah. I took the day off from work (as I did yesterday) because I planned on going to services this morning, but I didn’t go. I came back to the city last night for chorus rehearsal and wound up sleeping in this morning. So I’m going back to New Jersey in a little while.

I’ve spent much of the afternoon feeling frustrated about reading/writing. I’ve had the urge today to write a novel. Or find a really good novel to read. I just finished Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, which I didn’t really get into (I liked his The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle better). I think I’m going to read Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex – it seems big and juicy and good.

I don’t know why I have an urge to write but not the motivation to do so. I can’t seem to write the kind of book I’d want to read (I would love to be able to write like Michael Chabon), so I figure, why not just read the kind of book I want to read instead of trying to write it? My writing ambitions don’t seem to match my abilities.

My other problem is that I’m horrible at scheduling time to do things. I can’t keep up routines. Well, there was my screenwriting class three years ago, when I managed to start and complete a first draft of a screenplay in ten weeks and was the only person in the class to do so, but I was in a weird place in my life then. I don’t know if I can repeat the conditions, because I’m not sure what they were, but for three months I remained celibate and went to bed early and wrote a couple of pages of my script every day. Like I said, I was in a weird place.

Maybe I need to set myself a schedule. Maybe I need to read this book Matt has (but hasn’t read) called Getting Things Done. I don’t know. It’s incredibly hard to get myself up in the morning, so I don’t know if I could do writing before work; and I don’t know if living with someone is conducive to disciplining myself to write. Maybe I just need to make this little office/closet room in our apartment more conducive to writing.

I had a bizarre dream last night in which Matt and I were moving into an enormous luxury apartment on a high floor of a doorman building in the city. We walked into the apartment and it was huge. So much space. I loved it.

I feel like there’s too much to read. I want to start reading a book, but I also want to read this week’s New Yorker. Or I want to do neither. I don’t know. I’m all a-jumble right now. I cleaned the toilet and the bathroom faucet earlier today. That’s all – not the sink itself, just the faucet, because it was within reach. I also threw out a bunch of old magazines. One difference between me and Matt is that he doesn’t mind clutter while I can’t stand it. I find it keeps me from being fully functional.

Ugggggh. I hate feeling like this. My appetite is bigger than my brain.

Regarding Harriet Miers, I like this op-ed.

From The Federalist No. 76, about the Senate’s role in voting on a Supreme Court nominee:

“To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity. . . . He would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.”

(Italics are by the author of the above link.)

Harriet Miers, anyone?

I am beginning to think that I’m a social liberal but a judicial conservative, or at least not a judicial liberal. That is, I hold many viewpoints that today would be considered liberal (e.g. I support gay marriage, I am generally pro-choice on abortion), but I’m not completely comfortable with courts deciding these issues – even if I agree with the outcomes.

Roe v. Wade is a great example of a case that strengthened its opponents. So is Brown v. Board of Education; 10 years after Brown, most southern schools remained segregated, and the decision also led to a strong southern backlash against blacks. Roe and Brown were both morally correct decisions, but can anyone honestly argue that they were based on the text of the Constitution? (And Roe went into way too much trimester-by-trimester quasi-legislation.) As Nicholas Kristof wrote in the NY Times the other day, “court rulings can constitute fine justice and bad law.”

It’s a brain-versus-heart thing for me. Intellectually, I don’t like the idea of courts venturing into certain areas. The best way to accomplish social change is through legislation; when you rely exclusively on the courts, you bypass the dirty work of trying to convince society of your views, so you wind up with a good court decision and an angry populace. Not that social movements rely exclusively on the courts; they sometimes go to the courts only after the regular democratic process fails.

I guess I’d say that I’m ambivalent about what courts do with the Constitution. Sometimes I agree with what they do, and sometimes I don’t. And sometimes my view is that it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.

Of course, hardly any of us are ideologically pure, not even those who claim to be. We’re all just human, after all, and our personal views can get in the way of our intellect. In the end, there are no ultimately right or wrong answers to these questions. In the end, there is no ultimate authority and we’re all dead. But it’s interesting to think about these things anyway.

Awesome story about meeting Truman Capote.

I have no respect for any Democratic senator who finds Harriet Miers’s nomination to the Supreme Court acceptable, such as Charles Schumer, Harry Reid and others. I understand why most Republican senators would support her – despite her utter lack of qualifications, she passes their religion/abortion tests. But how can a Democratic senator support her when she lacks any evidence of the intellectual firepower necessary to sit on the Court, and probably doesn’t agree with them on substantive issues to boot? I’m flummoxed, unless they’re pretending to like her in order not to give Republicans more reasons to support her.

I loathe this nominee. It’s odd that I find myself agreeing with people like George Will and Charles Krauthammer (BTW, doesn’t he totally look like Mandy Patinkin?), but I do.

Of course, I feel some schadenfreude watching many conservatives get as angry about this nomination as I am. But that doesn’t mean I don’t agree with them, even if my reasons are slightly different than theirs:

For more than two decades, conservatives have been developing a team of potential justices for the high court in preparation for a moment such as this. They point to jurists such as Judge J. Michael Luttig of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, Judge Michael W. McConnell of the 10th Circuit and Judge Priscilla R. Owen, newly sworn in on the 5th Circuit, as examples of people who have not just paid their dues but also weathered intellectual battles in preparation for reshaping the Supreme Court….

“The feeling was after John Roberts that surely the president was going to have to go to the bench where there were all these very excellent people who are serving on the circuit court or scholars who have been grooming for this possibility for years and years,” said Paul M. Weyrich, a leading voice in the conservative movement and one who has been openly skeptical of Miers.

Luttig and McConnell are highly qualified for the Court and I could respect them. But Owen? She might be intellectually qualified (is she? I don’t know), but she’s a major radical and I find her decisions odious. It’s Miers’s lack of intellectual qualifications and experience that concern me more than her purported judicial “philosophy” (if she even has one). Although that does bother me, too.

That said, she could pull a John Kerry during her confirmation hearings. Many people were surprised by John Kerry’s first presidential debate performance because they had built up all these preconceived notions about him in a portrait painted by the Republicans. It’s possible that Miers is a lot smarter than I’m giving her credit for.

But there’s no reason to believe that’s true unless there’s any evidence for it.

Harriet Miers was an awful, awful choice for a nomination. She’s completely unqualified to sit on the Supreme Court and her name should be withdrawn.

Idiotic quote of the month, for a whole bunch of reasons:

“If great intellectual powerhouse is a qualification to be a member of the court and represent the American people and the wishes of the American people and to interpret the Constitution, then I think we have a court so skewed on the intellectual side that we may not be getting representation of America as a whole.”

- Former Senator Dan Coates, who is shepherding Harriet Miers through the Senate confirmation process.

Today I saw Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney’s new film about 1950s TV newsman Edward R. Murrow and his exposure of Senator Joseph McCarthy as a fraud. Great film, shot in lush black and white. There’s not much action – much (though not all) of the movie consists of Murrow, played by the excellent David Strathairn, orating from his studio chair. But those scenes are mesmerizing.

This NPR broadcast by Walter Cronkite from last year summarizes the episode and includes some great audio clips of both Murrow and McCarthy. I wasn’t familiar with Murrow’s voice, but after seeing the movie and listening to that audio clip, I can say that Strathairn gets him down pat – his intonation, his pronunciation, his cadences. He should get an Oscar nomination for this.

Great, great movie.

I’m at my parents’ house for Yom Kippur and I want a snack. But Yom Kippur is all about fasting and atoning for your sins, so I can’t have a snack.

Grumble grumble.

Anyway, last week I decided to start writing a novel.

It’s something I’ve tried to do several times in the past. One of the stories I used in my writing class this summer originally started out as the beginning of an attempted novel. (Maybe I’ll even turn it into one at some point.) And I tried National Novel Writing Month a few years back. Last week I was experiencing writer inspiration/frustration, and I finally decided to give it a shot again.

I started last Thursday, and I’m going to try to do a little bit each day, no matter how little. I think that if I lower the bar and just set a goal of a few paragraphs a day, it will be less intimidating and easier to accomplish.

I have no ideas for a plot. I just started with a sentence that seemed halfway interesting and took it from there. I don’t think I’m even going to use the sentence I started with, but it was a trigger for other stuff.

One problem (and it has been one throughout my writing life) is that I constantly second-guess what I’m doing or thinking of. “This idea has been done before, I read a book that used it,” or “This isn’t original enough,” or “Who wants to read another [xyz] story,” and so forth. But I’m trying to silence the voices and just try to write something that I would want to read.

This is not necessarily easy. I went to a book store a few days ago to find books about writing – there are a few that got good reviews on Amazon – but the ones I looked at were focused on writing what sells, as opposed to writing what you want. I put one book back on the shelf after reading a sentence that said something like, “Your main character must be likable and heroic. Nobody wants to read a book with an unlikable protagonist.” Confederacy of Dunces, anyone? I was annoyed.

I wound up picking up a book called Unstuck, about getting past writer’s block. I find that inspirational-type books on writing can really help get my juices flowing, especially since what I usually need most is confidence.

I’ve written about 2,100 words of this attempt at a book so far, which is already more than I thought I would get down. So that’s a good sign.

Anyway, you’re all forbidden to ask me about this writing project unless I say you can. I need to keep my novel-writing space private and protected from the world.

Which is totally why I’m blogging about it, of course.

The results are in, and I have won my office’s celebrity death pool (and 90 bucks). I came in first, with 384 points. Second place was a mere 22 points behind me, but she’d included on her list a criminal who had been scheduled to be put to death and she’d won a bunch of points for this (the guy was young, he was evil, it could be considered a violent death, and it was an exclusive). Despite that, I still won. All the other contestants were in the 100s or below, so it was between the two of us for most of the time.

Those whom I got right:

Peter Jennings
William Westmoreland
Ruth Hussey
Simon Wiesenthal
Peter Rodino, Jr.
James Doohan
Shelby Foote

I thought maybe there were a couple of others, but that’s all I can remember.

Sundays are depressing. No matter how much activity you squeeze into a weekend, it will always end.

It’s been a good weekend so far, though. On Friday night I went to a birthday party for my friend Bert, whose play Dog Sees God is reopening in an Off-Broadway production soon. I got to see his and his boyfriend’s swanky Williamsburg apartment, and at one point, all the party guests played this game called “Celebrity,” which I’ll have to explain sometime. (It’s basically a combination of “The $25,000 Pyramid” and charades.)

Yesterday, the eight days of rain finally ended in our fair city and I saw something completely alien: a blue sky. I didn’t know it came in blue! It was a beautiful sight, and Matt and I celebrated by seeing a movie indoors. Matt was interested in seeing this new film, Where the Truth Lies, based on a novel by theater composer Rupert Holmes. It was so-so, but entertaining enough.

After the movies – which we saw at the Clearview Chelsea on 23rd Street between 7th and 8th – we walked over to 6th Avenue (crossing paths with Mario Cantone) and took a leisurely stroll back home. The weather was crisp and rainless and the streets were crowded with New Yorkers enjoying the freedom of being outdoors without umbrellas. We stopped into Best Buy and Old Navy (how Manhattan of us). At Old Navy I bought a new jacket, black and lightweight, which is just the type of jacket I’d been meaning to buy for the last couple of years. It’s already my favorite jacket. We also ran into Russ and a friend of his, who had just seen a show.

We didn’t do much last night, and we haven’t done much today, but in the evening we’re going to see See What I Want to See, a new-ish musical by Michael John La Chiusa and starring Marc Kudisch and Idina Menzel. And since it’s at the Public Theater, we can walk there! I love living here.

I’ve learned that a great way to stave off the Sunday blues is to schedule something fun for Sunday night.

So anyway, even if I feel like Matt and I have spent a lot of time sitting around this weekend, I guess we’ve done a good deal of fun stuff, too. The weekend comes and goes in a flash, but it least it’s there in the first place.

Chart of New York City newspapers and their mergers, 1900-1967.

On a floppy disk in my work bag, I’ve found a 5,700-word piece of fiction that I’d completely forgotten about. I have only the vaguest memory of having written it. It’s nearly twice as long as my current attempt at a novel. It’s yet another version of the story that I turned into a screenplay a few years ago and into the beginning of a story a couple of years before that: the story of my first year of college, of making my first gay friend, of dealing with being gay.

What is it about those years? Why do I keep returning to them? Upon reflection, it’s because it’s a period of time for which I want a do-over. Didn’t date, stayed mostly closeted; came out to my parents too soon but couldn’t deal with the consequences, so buried my sexual desires. (Those were prime years I wasted!) Spent three semesters being pre-med when I could have taken other courses. Didn’t do much with my summers.

I know that it’s all water under the bridge. But a deeper part of me keeps reaching back to those years, obsessing over them, wanting to do them over. That part of me, far below the surface of my day-to-day self, doesn’t accept that it’s over. It mourns for what was lost.

But I’m tired now of writing about those years. (Though as I write the above paragraphs I see there’s some good emotional material there.) My newest attempt at a novel doesn’t mention that stuff at all so far. I want to get away from the purely autobiographical and write something more creative.

And it’s kind of depressing to find that I’d written twice as many words as are in my latest effort. It’s like climbing a mountain and being happy with your progress but suddenly realizing that you’ve already gone twice as high before.

Sections of the Sunday New York Times, Ranked in Order From Most to Least Favorite

I think this is very revealing.

Book Review

I love curling up with the Book Review. I love books, and I like reading reviews of books that I might want to read, or at least know about. The inside back cover usually has a piece on some quirky literature/publishing topic. And the letters section often features some snobby academic catfight – those are fun to read.

Magazine

First of all, it’s got the Sunday crossword and the secondary puzzle – a double-crostic every other week, alternating with a Cryptic Crossword or a Diagramless (my favorite) or something random. And I usually find at least a couple of the extended magazine pieces interesting. I almost always like the first piece in the magazine, which explores some political topic. I find Deborah Solomon’s short interviews annoying; the Ethicist is fun, Rob Walker’s “Consumed” is okay, and William Safire’s “On Language” is delightful. I’m not sure what to make of the new Funny Pages. I like Chris Ware’s comic, but I have no interest in the “humor” piece or in Elmore Leonard’s ongoing serial.

Arts & Leisure

Theater news, theater ads, TV news, classical music, film – who wouldn’t love this? I like Jesse Green’s theater pieces.

International/National News

The meat and potatoes of the paper. International is not as interesting as national, though.

Metro

Same as above. News is good.

Styles

When this section first began appearing, my dad would jokingly refer to it as “the comics.” Yeah, this section plays to the worst stereotypes of snobby Manhattanites, but it’s a fun read. In the last few years I’ve paid more attention to the wedding announcements – every so often there’s someone I remember from childhood, and I love seeing University of Virginia references. The Modern Love column is hit or miss – sometimes interesting, sometimes whiny.

Week in Review

I read the editorials, op-eds and letters every day, but Sunday also has Frank Rich; he’s so cathartic. Plus a few political cartoons and several nice articles that have more analytical takes on the week’s news and politics.

Real Estate

I like the “Living In” page, I like skimming “The Hunt.” I like seeing if Montclair is listed in the New Jersey row of the sample housing chart. I like “On the Market” and enjoy looking at the “pros” and “cons” of each listed property. The “cons” are often unintentionally funny as the writer tries to come up with some drawback about what looks like a fabulous piece of property. My favorite from last week, about a loft: “For privacy, some buyers might want to add walls inside.” Uh, it’s a loft.

The City

Nice NYC neighborhoody-type stuff. Reading this makes me feel like a real New Yorker. I much prefer this to the New Jersey section, which came with the paper when I lived in Jersey City.

Television

Now that I have TiVo, there’s no point in looking at the guide, and this section doesn’t even have feature stories anymore.

Travel

I rarely travel, even though I’d like to, so this section usually just frustrates me and leaves me feeling inadequate.

Sports

I’m not generally a sports fan, but I get somewhat interested in baseball rankings and scores as the post-season approaches. I also like reading articles about the Olympics, and I usually glance at UVA’s football ranking, out of a minimal curiosity. And there are often (ahem) nice photos.

Business

The headlines often seem promising, but then I get bored. I usually feel obliged to skim this section even though I don’t find much of it interesting. Ben Stein’s occasional column makes me feel like an indolent, irresponsible lout.

Job Market/Classified

I like skimming Lisa Belkin’s column, but career stuff in general just gives me anxiety.

T: The New York Times Style Magazine

They’ve been printing these too often lately – Men’s Fashion, Women’s Fashion, Design, etc. There are usually some nice pictures, but it’s way too long when you have the rest of the paper to read. Because I’m obsessive-compulsive about the Sunday Times, I have to flip through every page to see if there’s something interesting. What a burden.

Automobiles

Pretty much zero interest, except it’s nice to look at the front-page photos of new cars.

Here’s a graph of Bush’s approval ratings. Yup, he’s definitely fallen.

It would be nice if we could have an election or something. Oh, well. What does he care about a 39 percent rating (that is, if his advisors have even told him about it)? He’s got more than three years left in the White House.

Thirty-nine percent, and he’s untouchable.

Matt and I were crossing Sixth Avenue this evening to pick up dinner from Go Sushi when I got a phone call from the South Pole. It was my best friend Larry, who is coming to the end of his third winterover in Antarctica and his second winterover at the South Pole specifically. Yes, you can get phone calls from the South Pole. They use satellite phones, and there’s about a two-second delay, but it’s phone service. Matt and I stood outside Go Sushi at 7:30 on a Wednesday autumn night, taxis zooming up Sixth Avenue with their headlights on, while Larry talked to us from the South Pole on a Thursday afternoon.

This was the third or fourth time I’ve talked to him on the phone in Antarctica (and probably the last, as he has no plans to go back after he leaves next week). I’ll never get over the fact that we can do that.

Via Michael: Which Fantasy/SciFi Character Are You?

Samwise Gamgee

A brave and loyal associate full of optimism, you remain true to your friends and their efforts, to whatever end.

But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.

Harriet Miers doesn’t know how to use commas. Not even when answering written questions from the United States Senate.

More here and here.

For crying’ out loud already. This is beyond embarrassing. Not only can’t the woman write – she can’t even get people to write properly for her.

Does this woman really belief she’s qualified to sit on the Supreme Court? Honestly? If Bush is too stubborn to withdraw her nomination, she should withdraw it herself.

I’m simply appalled.

Not only can’t Miers write – she doesn’t even understand the Constitution.

From her response to the Senate questionnaire:

“While I was an at-large member of the Dallas City Council, I dealt with issues that involved constitutional questions. For instance, when addressing a lawsuit under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the council had to be sure to comply with the proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection Clause.”

But, from the Washington Post:

“There is no proportional representation requirement in the Equal Protection Clause,” said Cass R. Sunstein, a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago. He and several other scholars said it appeared that Miers was confusing proportional representation – which typically deals with ethnic groups having members on elected bodies – with the one-man, one-vote Supreme Court ruling that requires, for example, legislative districts to have equal populations.

I wouldn’t necessarily have caught that distinction myself. But guess what? I haven’t been nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court. She has.

Ugh.

This is good:

In the past, the fight has been worth it. Bush almost always gets his way and usually enhances his standing in the process.

But it’s one thing to push a program against the will of the system. It’s another thing to push a person. A person bleeds. At some point, Bush’s refusal to scuttle Miers’ nomination may turn into an act of cruelty…

We may not be at that moment yet, but Washington is experiencing something like tissue rejection over Miers.

I love that last metaphor.

Awesome. “Kansas cannot punish illegal underage sex more severely if it involves homosexual conduct, the state’s highest court ruled unanimously Friday in a case watched by national groups on both sides of the gay rights debate.”

This is particularly poignant. The day after it decided Lawrence v. Texas in June 2003 – when we were all giddy and high on our newfound nationwide freedom – the U.S. Supreme Court, in what seemed to be an afterthought, sent a case back to Kansas in which a teenage boy had received a 17-year jail sentence for underage gay sex with another minor. If it had been heterosexual sex, the guy likely would have gotten probation or, at most, just over a year in jail. The U.S. Supreme Court sent the case back “for further reconsideration in light of Lawrence v. Texas.” In other words: Hint hint. Unfortunately, the Kansas court either didn’t get the hint or blatantly chose to ignore it, because in February 2004, that court upheld the 17-year jail sentence.

Well, finally, justice has been done, because the Kansas Supreme Court has reversed the lower court. Here’s the ruling and here’s a summary.

Took long enough. Justice sometimes does happen, given enough time.

Every week, the New York Times Magazine features a short interview with someone. This week, Deborah Solomon interviews former Florida senator Connie Mack, who is the chairman of Bush’s tax-reform panel. Here’s an appalling excerpt. The italics are Deborah Solomon.

I would vote to eliminate, as we refer to it, the death tax. I think it’s an unfair tax.

Really? I think it’s a perfect tax. The idea behind it was to allow people to postpone paying taxes until they die, at which point they presumably no longer care. Why do you call it unfair?

Well, let’s say, if you are in the farming business and you have the desire to pass this farm on to your children. The problem is that when your parents die, you have to come up with cash to pay the estate tax. One thing you don’t have is cash. You’ve got plenty of land. So I just don’t believe it’s a fair tax.

That strikes me as a red herring. The issue is not really small farms, but zillion-dollar estates made up of stocks and bonds.

I don’t know what the percentage breakdown is. I still go back to the same notion that these individuals who have accumulated these resources have paid taxes on them many times in their life, and then to say, when you die, now you pay more taxes on it? There is a limit.

Well, the U.S. government has to get money from somewhere. As a two-term former Republican senator from Florida, where do you suggest we get money from?

What money?

The money to run this country.

We’ll borrow it.

I never understand where all this money comes from. When the president says we need another $200 billion for Katrina repairs, does he just go and borrow it from the Saudis?

In a sense, we do. Maybe the Chinese.

Is that fair to our children? If we keep borrowing at this level, won’t the Arabs or the Chinese eventually own this country?

I am not worried about that. We are a huge country producing enormous assets day in and day out. We have great strength, and we have always adjusted to difficulties that faced us, and we will continue to do so.

Excuse me as I bang my head against the wall and scream.

Here’s a good legal explanation of last week’s outcome in Kansas v. Limon.

One-star Amazon.com reviews of great books. On The Lord of the Rings: “The book is not readable because of the overuse of adverbs.”

WithdrawMiers.org.

It’s run by conservatives – I disagree with the reference to “the deeply disappointing records of Justices O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter,” and I don’t see Janice Rogers Brown or Priscilla Owen as preferable nominees.

Still, strange bedfellows and all that.

Here is Lambda Legal’s New Jersey Supreme Court brief in Lewis v. Harris, that state’s same-sex marriage case. Teh brief was filed on Friday.

I learned a new way to tie a necktie the other day. For years, I’ve known only one method of tying a tie – the four-in-hand (I didn’t even know that’s what it was called until I looked at that website). But my knot would always come out asymmetrical, and I finally got tired of it and decided to see if I could learn a new knot.

I am now the proud user of the Half-Windsor. (It sort of sounds like a wrestling move, the Half Nelson, but whatever.)

Hooray for symmetrical tie knots.

OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD

(P.S. I am ecstatic and relieved.)

From Miers’s withdrawal letter:

As you know, members of the Senate have indicated their intention to seek documents about my service in the White House…

Repeatedly in the course of the process of confirmation for nominees for other positions, I have steadfastly maintained that the independence of the Executive Branch be preserved and its confidential documents and information not be released to further a confirmation process. I feel compelled to adhere to this position, especially related to my own nomination… I have decided that seeking my confirmation should yield.

From the White House statement in response:

It is clear that Senators would not be satisfied until they gained access to internal documents concerning advice provided during her tenure at the White House — disclosures that would undermine a President’s ability to receive candid counsel.

Wow. The Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer couldn’t have scripted it any better. But he didn’t have to – this is exactly how he scripted it last Friday, and the White House was listening:

Finally, a way out: irreconcilable differences over documents.

For a nominee who, unlike John Roberts, has practically no record on constitutional issues, such documentation is essential for the Senate to judge her thinking and legal acumen. But there is no way that any president would release this kind of information — “policy documents” and “legal analysis” — from such a close confidante. It would forever undermine the ability of any president to get unguarded advice.

That creates a classic conflict, not of personality, not of competence, not of ideology, but of simple constitutional prerogatives: The Senate cannot confirm her unless it has this information. And the White House cannot allow release of this information lest it jeopardize executive privilege.

Hence the perfectly honorable way to solve the conundrum: Miers withdraws out of respect for both the Senate and the executive’s prerogatives, the Senate expresses appreciation for this gracious acknowledgment of its needs and responsibilities, and the White House accepts her decision with the deepest regret and with gratitude for Miers’s putting preservation of executive prerogative above personal ambition.

Faces saved. And we start again.

Bush was clearly laying the groundwork for this the other day:

When George W. Bush was asked this morning about a report that the White House is thinking through contingency plans for the withdrawal of Harriet Miers’ nomination, he responded with what we thought was a non sequitur: Rather than confirming or denying the report, the president said that he will refuse to release documents reflecting the advice Miers has given him as a member of his White House staff.

It wasn’t an answer to the question he was asked, but… maybe it wasn’t quite the non sequitur we thought it was, either…

At his Cabinet meeting this morning, the president all but blurted out that he wouldn’t and couldn’t turn over such documents without jeopardizing the ability of future presidents to hear frank advice and “to make sound decisions.”

And like clockwork, the mainstream press is now reporting that a “document snag” is threatening to “scuttle” Miers’ nomination. Maybe this is all just coincidence. Maybe Krauthammer was tipped off to a plan already in the works. Or maybe, with Karl Rove distracted by other matters, the president is taking advice from wherever he can find it.

So, there we go – the Krauthammer Compromise. Miers is gone. Her name will never sully the Court.

I wonder who’s next.

Poor O’Connor – she was really hoping to be living it up in Arizona by now, wasn’t she?

“HARRIET MIERS’S BLOG =(

The blog of the #1 smartest President ever’s #1 pick to be the next Associate Justice of the Supreme Court…update, EXCEPT NOT ANYMORE”

Love the candle.

Both SCOTUSBlog and Confirm Them predict that the new Supreme Court nominee will be Samuel Alito of the Third Circuit, a judge whose chambers are in Newark, New Jersey – and not too far from my office! And I worked in his building one summer during law school when I interned with a federal district judge in Newark. Alito is nicknamed “Scalito” because his views apparently resemble those of Scalia, but apparently he’s not an ass like Scalia is.

Article III Groupie thinks it could be Luttig. She thinks Alito could wind up as the Edith Clement of this round to John Roberts’s Luttig. We’ll see.

I was thinking it might be McConnell, but apparently he’s not under consideration because conservatives might not be totally comfortble with him on Roe and other issues.

This could be announced Monday.

Doonesbury was planning to feature these Harriet Miers strips this coming week, but of course she wound up dropping out. They’re funny. (via Underneath Their Robes)

Ahh… this is my favorite time of year. I love the fall.

Matt and I went to New Jersey today to help my dad pick up a big curio cabinet from a store.

The store where we picked up the cabinet was in a shopping center. While my dad went inside to get the employees to bring it out, Matt and I sat in the car in the parking lot and listened to the radio. We saw middle-aged ladies push shopping carts into various stores. It was all so New Jersey – no, it was all so suburban. It’s so different out there. Matt remarked that if we lived in New Jersey, he’d probably miss the city a lot.

On the ride back, I had to squeeze myself into the back part of my parents’ SUV, wedged between the side of the vehicle and the cabinet, hoping the bungee cord that was holding the back hatch closed wouldn’t come loose and make the hatch open and make me go flying out the back of the car (along with the cabinet). Fortunately, we both survived.

The trees in front of my parents’ house were ablaze in orange. The neighbors had orange pumpkins outside and fake purple cobwebs draped on their shrubs.

After my parents and Matt and I lugged the cabinet into the house and into a good position, my parents took us out to lunch. On the drive through town, we passed house after house decorated for Halloween: pumpkins, ghosts, more fake purple cobwebs. Fake purple cobwebs must be the thing for Halloween 2005.

In the late afternoon, Matt and I took the bus back into the city and went home. A while later I went book shopping: I went to the Strand, Barnes & Noble, and Shakespeare & Company. (I didn’t buy anything.) By the time I was finished browsing, it was dark outside. The streets around Broadway were packed with pedestrians – shoppers, promenaders, NYU students.

As I said, this is my favorite time of year – the fall, especially the time around Halloween. The air is crisp and everything feels alive. Too bad it’s so fleeting; then again, that’s probably why I love it so much.

It’s Alito.

Get used to saying “Scalia, Alito” rapidly, as in, “Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Thomas,” who will be voting closely together in lots of cases.

Fortunately, there are still five pretty solid votes on the Court for the area I care most about, gay rights – Stevens, Kennedy (who wrote Lawrence and Romer), Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer. Now that O’Connor’s presumably gone, I think Kennedy’s going to become the new swing vote. Also interesting and still semi-applicable: this SCOTUSblog article from June about a possible “gang of three” – just replace “Rehnquist” with “Alito” in the following excerpt:

On a Court somewhat more conservative without O’Connor, Kennedy’s influence seems sure to grow. He has a chance to become the new balance wheel, a role that was filled so routinely by O’Connor. (Even if there were to form a solid Rehnquist-Scalia-Thomas-Roberts phalanx, they would still need Kennedy to prevail, and he would not be with such a quartet automatically.) Kennedy also has more influence than is sometimes credited to him. He has a store of common sense that saves him from ideological rigidity, and that steers him away from agenda-driven voting. He has an even deeper sense of what history asks of the few who become members of the Court. Those are summonses to the use of sound judgment.

As I’ve said recently, despite my relatively liberal social views, my judicial views have been in flux lately. Alito seems not be an ideologue or an asshole like Scalia, which is good. I prefer him to someone like Janice Rogers Brown or Priscilla Owen. (And hey – go, New Jersey, with two out of nine seats!)

The Harriet Miers nomination was bad for the Court as an institution. The Alito nomination is good for the Court, regardless of how good or bad it turns out to be for the country.

I decided I would look at Alito with an open mind. Well, I’ve just a read a Third Circuit case from just last year, Doe v. Groody, in which Alito wrote the dissenting opinion, and his dissent bothers me.

The case was about four police officers who had a warrant to search a suspect and his house for drugs. The affidavit they used to apply for the warrant requested permission to search “all occupants of the residence” for drugs, but the warrant signed by the magistrate granted permission only to search the suspect and nobody else. When the officers went to the house with the warrant, they found the suspect, his wife, and their ten-year-old daughter. A female officer brought the wife and daughter to an upstairs bathroom:

They were instructed to empty their pockets and lift their shirts. The female officer patted their pockets. She then told Jane and Mary Doe to drop their pants and turn around. No contraband was found.

The Does later filed a complaint against the officers, alleging that the officers illegally strip-searched the wife and daughter.

The judges voted 2-1 against the officers, concluding:

Searching Jane and Mary Doe for evidence beyond the scope of the warrant and without probable cause violated their clearly established Fourth Amendment rights.

Alito dissented. He listed several reasons why the officers could have reasonably concluded that they were allowed to strip-search the wife and daughter, against the face of the warrant.

Here’s what really bothers me. After listing his reasons, he writes:

I believe that the majority’s analysis is flawed. First and most important, the majority employs a technical and legalistic method of interpretation that is the antithesis of the “commonsense and realistic” approach that is appropriate.

“Technical and legalistic”? Shouldn’t those be the guiding principles of judicial restraint? Aren’t “commonsense and realistic” another way of saying that a judge should use his discretion, i.e. be a judicial activist? Isn’t judicial activism supposed to be really really bad? So much for principles.

Alito spent three years as U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey and four years as an assistant U.S. attorney. If this case is any indication, I guess we know where he stands on criminal law.

Oh, you know one of the more interesting parts of this case? The majority opinion – from which Alito dissented – was written by none other than Michael Chertoff, formerly a Third Circuit judge and now U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security.

I think Judge Alito’s cute son, Philip, is a recent transfer student to UVA. If my Googling/detective skills are working properly, he’s transferred to UVA this year from Colgate, and he lives in a dorm right near the dorm I lived in for two years, Long. He probably hangs out in the Brown College quad like I used to do. Weird.

Here’s someone who thinks Alito will not be confirmed, due to the Gang of 14.