What hidden skeletons are prompting this? She’s been in the news a lot in the last few days — from this in-depth Vanity Fair piece to the cheesecake photos of her in Runner’s World magazine.

May this woman never get anywhere near the Oval Office. By choosing this joke of a politician as his running mate, John McCain demonstrated that he didn’t deserve to be anywhere near it, either.

(Thanks, FI.)

At some point in my life I want to read this book again, but lately I’ve been reading lots of politics and history and other stuff, so… not now.

But I feel like I’m missing out.

Shortly after DFW died last fall I reminisced about my first time reading the book.

(If you have no idea what this is.)

For the moment, there is no reason to rush. Time permits a jurisprudence of not just originalism, or textualism, but actuarialism. The sand running through this hourglass will not expire for eight years.

Later in his term, President Obama will likely replace Justice Stevens with someone else on the left. If he is reelected in 2012, he will replace Justice Ginsburg with someone on the left. Nothing changes.

It isn’t until the election of 2016 at the earliest that there is a real prospect for a significant shift to the left in the Court’s ideology. Actuarially, that election is likely to decide which President appoints the successors to Justices Scalia and Kennedy (both on the right, and both 73 now) and Justice Breyer (on the left, and 70 now). Absent an unfortunate turn of health, between now and the summer of 2017 there is no realistic prospect that the Court will turn back to the left. Over the course of that eight years, it is possible to take enough measured steps to the right to walk a marathon. Again, no need to rush.

Unless something happens to Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito, or Kennedy in the next few years, the Court is on a slow rightward trajectory.

On the issue dearest to my heart — gay rights — it probably doesn’t mean much. Kennedy has been pretty pro-gay (Romer, Lawrence), but I don’t expect the Court to take up same-sex marriage for a while. It didn’t overturn the nation’s sodomy laws until only 13 states were left with such laws; the Court is too cautious to constitutionalize same-sex marriage rights at this point, when only six states allow such marriage.

What else could the Court tackle? Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell will be history in the next few years — I’m pretty sure Obama will get around to it after health care and energy are taken care of. DOMA (full faith and credit clause) is a possibility — which would be a sidelong way to rule on same-sex marriage. But I don’t think the Court will touch that right now. Again, the issue is just too volatile, and the Court generally knows when to stay out of things. (It has learned from abortion; wuld Roe v. Wade come out the same way today? Who knows; the opinion would at least be less intrusive if it were written today.)

Of course, I could be wrong. Issues have a way of showing up on the Court’s docket unexpectedly, especially since it only takes four Justices to vote to hear a case.

But for now, things seem to be in stasis, at least where gay rights are concerned. As for everything else — drifting right.

• Walter Cronkite
• Mickey Rooney
• Robert McNamara
• Sid Caesar
• Karl Malden
• Doris Day
• Tippi Hedren
• Eva Marie Saint
• Phyllis Diller
• Miep Gies
• Kirk Douglas

More very old famous people here.

Then I walked down to Astor Place to get a haircut, and as the guy started cutting my hair, he asked an employee passing by if it was true that so-and-so had died. The place is filled with barbers cutting hair and using blowdryers, so it was too noisy for me to hear who they were talking about. But I was pretty sure I heard “Jackson.”

I swear to God the first name that popped into my head was Andrew Jackson, former U.S. president, but as that thought was rising, a neuron from the opposite side of my brain rose up and shot it down like a heat-seeking missile, since Andrew Jackson has been dead for more than 150 years.

So the first serious thought I had was that Jesse Jackson had died. Then the guy cutting my hair told me that no, the rumors were that Michael Jackson had died.

I’m a news junkie, especially when it comes to dead celebrities, so I pulled out my phone to check the news, but since the barber shop is in a basement, I didn’t get any reception.

But a radio was playing, and over the sound of the blowdryers and electric razors I strained to listen to the deejay. He confirmed in somber tones that Michael Jackson was, in fact, dead. Then “Man in the Mirror” began playing. I hadn’t heard that song in years.

After my haircut I walked up Broadway and turned onto 10th Street, reading the news on my phone as I walked. The streets were crowded with young people out and about on the first summery afternoon of the year, and Michael Jackson was dead.

I was eight or nine years old when the Thriller album was big. My family had it on cassette tape — it’s weird to think that my parents bought it, but they did; didn’t everyone? — and I remember us listening to it in our big early-80s portable boombox. I have memories of listening to it at Jones Beach, or on a drive to Jones Beach, or maybe during a summer vacation on Long Beach Island.

There was little red-haired white kid in my elementary school who liked to dress up as Michael Jackson and wear a single white glove. It was 1984 or 1985.

I will never understand why Michael Jackson did what he did to his face. The plastic surgeon or surgeons who turned him into a monster according to his wishes should be ashamed of themselves. How do you develop dysmorphia so extreme that you turn yourself into Skeletor? How could he ever look in the mirror? How could he find himself attractive? I look at photos and videos of him and I feel revulsion. He became an alien. I woke up in the middle of the night last night because it was too humid, and at 3:00 in the morning I had disturbing visions of him, this person who hated himself so much that he turned himself into a monster.

The odd thing is that despite all the self-erasure, he kept his given name. There was Prince and Cher and Madonna, but through everything, he kept the rather ordinary name Michael Jackson.

I don’t think I know any of his songs after the 1987 Bad album. His music on that album is catchy but hard for me to listen to, because I can’t hear the high-pitched voice without seeing the horrible face.

I feel sorry for what he became.

Case in point is this morning’s decision in Safford Unified School District #1 v. Redding. The court ruled 8-1 that school officials violated the Fourth Amendment when they made a girl lift her underwear in order to search for illegal drugs:

Romero and Schwallier directed Savana to remove her clothes down to her underwear, and then “pull out” her bra and the elastic band on her underpants…. The very fact of Savana’s pulling her underwear away from her body in the presence of the two officials who were able to see her necessarily exposed her breasts and pelvic area to some degree.

The majority split over the actual remedy, but everyone in the majority agreed it was a constitutional violation.

The lone dissenter? Justice Thomas. He argued that the school administrators should have been left alone to treat the kids however they wanted:

This deep intrusion into the administration of public schools exemplifies why the Court should return to the common-law doctrine of in loco parentis under which “the judiciary was reluctant to interfere in the routine business of school administration, allowing schools and teachers to set and enforce rules and to maintain order.”

The phrase inside quotation marks comes from his concurring opinion a few years ago in the famous “BONG HITS 4 JESUS” case, where he argued that students have zero constitutional rights, including the right to free speech.

Later, he quotes from that concurring opinion again:

If parents do not like the rules imposed by those schools, they can seek redress in school boards or legislatures; they can send their children to private schools or home school them; or they can simply move.

Yes, of course! A couple of working-class parents can somehow scrounge up the tuition for private school; or one of them can quit working, thereby reducing the family’s income, and stay home and teach the kids all day, because I’m sure the parent knows how to teach history or math or science; or better yet, the family can just move somewhere else — I’m sure they can get a fabulous price for their house these days — and the parents can both look for new jobs. Brilliant!

Thomas argues elsewhere in the opinion that because parents can do whatever they want to their children, that control passes to school administrators during the school day — the school acts in loco parentis, “in place of the parents.” But what about the situation where the parents disagree with the way the school adminstrators have treated their kids? For instance, you may think it’s okay to spank your kid but that it’s wrong for someone else to spank your kid.

I tend to see some merit in most judicial opinions, and I can sort of see where Thomas is coming from. He’s right, in theory, that not every bad thing rises to a constitutional violation. But it’s one thing to say that something does not violate a constitutional right, and it’s another to say that a particular class of people simply lacks constitutional rights. Public school is a necessity for most kids — they just don’t have another viable option for education — and it’s unconscionable to argue that kids give up all their rights when they go to these places.

Parents can simply turn to the school board or the legislature? What if a minority is involved? What if, for instance, school administrators decide they’re going to strip-search only Muslim students, because they believe all Muslim teenagers are potential terrorists? What if most of the community agrees? How do you elect a more favorable school board then? What if most of the state agrees? How do you elect a more favorable legislature?

One of the purposes of constitutional rights is to protect the minority from the majority. Thomas is blind to this concern. He’s really in a world of his own here. Not even the other conservatives on the Court agree with him.

(Oddly, he sided with the four liberals today in another case, involving the issue of punitive damages.)