cheese it, the cops!

sheldon whitehouse doesn't seem to be the senate's brightest light. he asked her a series of incomprehensibly vague questions. "what do you think the founders thought about unilateral action by one of the branches?" er. "i see the constitution as immutable"; odd that there is an amendment process in the very document itself which has often been employed.

sotomayor is growing on me. getting all passionate about the constitution in response to feingold's questioning. feingold was magnificent with roberts and alito, by the way.

we've seen some of the brighter lights of the judiciary committee. but now we start working our way through the rest, starting with chuck ghastly.

sports and jurisprudence: good stuff from mcsweeney's. thanks, adam.

i wouldn't say she's breathtakingly impressive. there are a lot of odd formulations and odd usages. on the other hand, she's composed and reasonable.

sessions just keeps on with the idea that experience is irrelevant to the law. but you know, the questions on the ricci case was pretty sharp. her sort of bland, technical approach seems impoverished, and the decision itself disturbing, or i might say, obviously unjust. plenty of other solutions were possible than throwing out the results. they could have found otherwise; they could have re-heard the case on a different basis; they could have provided substantive reasoning for their decision, etc.

sotomayor was fine in her opening statement. remarkably succinct, for one thing.

from thoreau's journals, june 16, 1854:

I do not believe that there is a judge in this country prepared to decide by the principle that a law is immoral and therefore of no force. They put themselves, or rather are by character, exactly on a level with the marine who discharges his musket in any direction in which he is ordered. They are just as much tools, and as little men.

from the same entry, later incorporated into the essay "slavery in massachusetts": "My thoughts are murder to the state."

it's senator franken!

bizarrely, arlen specter seems to want to ask her about actual legal questions.

we're really going to miss joe biden.

what i'd ask sotomayor, if i were on the judiciary committee:
(1) have you ever posed nude?
(2) what are your views on sarah palin?
(3) you grew up in the south bronx in the 70s. i.e. you were present at the birth of hip hop. do you associate yourself with the work of public enemy? is 911 really a joke?
(4) i can't pronounce your name the way you do. is that so wrong?
(5) are you still a papist?
(6) "michael jackson was the greatest entertainer since genghis khan": agree or disagree?
(7) you've been accused of having personal opinions and feelings. i'd like to give you the opportunity to rebut this scurrilous charge.
(8) you've hinted that experience leads to wisdom. have you ever had sex with an animal?
(9) will you declare your unalterable opposition to empathy?
(10) i'd like to hear your views on the tuck rule.
(11) would charo or selena make a better judge than brad pitt or neil young?
(12) why do you hate white people?

chris matthews: "i think the question is: can she play the four-corner offense?"

guess we're gonna get al franken's first senatorial monologue.

it's kind of interesting that the understanding of jurisprudence at the moment appears to be grounded in sports metaphors. i do hope sonia is a sports fan, else she isn't even going to get what cornyn is talking about, when he says that appeals court judges are like quarterbacks, not like coaches. for that matter, though i've been watching football continuously since before i could talk, i'm not sure what he's saying. really, she'd better watch sportscenter every night this week, or she's not going to grasp the questions. umpires, refs, etc.  i want to assert that a supreme court justice is like a goalie in lacrosse, like an extreme fan whose face is painted with the team colors and who has had (so far), i think, seventeen beers at $7 a pop, like a rain delay, like mine that bird, like "big daddy" don garlitz, like a 350 lb lineman who's primarily a run-stopper, like trading your second-string point guard for future draft picks, like a color commentator, no like the play-by-play dude, like the replay booth.

graham was pretty good too: loose, interesting, articulate.

feingold is the man. one symptom of this: he's not just repeating what's already been said. i really don't understand this. each dude gets 10 minutes, and uses it to re-re-recite her resume ("you srved on the court of appeals..." really? i did?), then re-re-recite the three cliches that the dude's party has specified as the entirety of its jusicial philosophy. why in the world would anyone, including the people speaking, actually sit through this? but feingold is actually talking about something: expansion of executive power etc.

i think sessions just asserted that it was wrong to let your "experience" effect your decisions. pretty interesting epistemology involved here. i wonder how people come to know things entirely independently of their experiences. one idea might be that their opinions/decisions etc are received by direct inspiration from god, or the law (which is a god, as i've been arguing). or perhaps applying law to cases is like mathematics, simply an a priori drawing out of the implications of the meaning of terms, with no reference to the contingent, real world. you might think this is a bit strange when you end up in prison etc, which seems to be a rather contingent, empirical result.

obviously, what laws we need and what their effects are is the result of a long process of empirical experience and adjustment: there is no more empirical, practical, or contingent arena of human knowledge. so i really wonder what the point is in pretending otherwise. i think it's about the practical function of the prestige of law, which seems to require a supernatural origin and supernatural applications. now the price you pay for that is that what you're saying - your concept of law - is just obviously, in-your-face false. so in lending the law its majesty, in attempting to establish its legitimacy, you make it entirely ridiculous.

well, henry, i do note that most of the senators on the judiciary committee *are* lawyers. here's what the most hostile questioners are going to ask: you're not going to attempt to think, are you? and here's what her reply will be: no, of course not. that would be incompatible with the function of a judge or the rule of law. i will behave in an entirely mechanical way. now of course that's disingenuous and impossible. but you can't have a legal system without lurching into such phantasms.

i'll try to blog the sotomayor hearings a bit. one very general remark: the thinking and discourse of lawyers and about jurisprudence is ridiculously mechanical, narrow, repetitive etc. i guess this is what comes of literally worshiping texts: the whole point is apparently to be incapable of creative or independent thought. so "activism," "outside the mainstream," "rule of law," etc. chanting cliches is a poor substitute for actual, like, thinking, but it's all these people have. we sort of direct our bright younguns toward the legal profession, but how they come out shows that they weren't bright after all, that, with dog biscuits, you can train a chihuahua to do anything, as long as it's really simple and you don't try to get them to do more than three tricks. but they'll do them a thousand times a day.

i wish congress would restrict itself entirely to legislation like this:

“Whereas Michael Jackson was labeled `The King of Pop', Jackson's music is internationally recognized and critically acclaimed...”

idiotic, you know, but not actually actively oppressive and illegitimate. i support legislative activity of all sorts, as long as it does not require appropriating funds, or entail coercion.

hey robert, i very much agree with what you're saying about "naturalness" etc being itself a performance. springsteen is a really excellent example. in fact i wrote about this for the baltimore sun some years ago . believe it or not rupaul put the piece up on his/her blog.

jeannie and royce kendall were a father/daughter duo who specialized in cheating songs, often kind of sung to each other. this was back before america was entirely urban, from maine to anchorage, and when there were still white people, such as the great, pale frank rich. ah, nostalgia! white people were pasty-faced and genocidal, but you've got to admit, they had rhythm!

been reading an obscure volume of thoreau's correspondence: familiar letters, a gift from the inimitable joan brown. there's plenty to enjoy. one passage i thought was interesting was the following, about an advertisement for firewood, which thoreau came across while he was living on staten island in 1843. the letter is to emerson:

But I am suspicious of the Brittonner, who advertises so many cords of good oak, chestnut, and maple wood for sale. Good! ay good for what? And there shall not be left a stone upon a stone. But no matter, - let them hack away. The sturdy Irish arms that do the work are of more worth than oak or maple. Methinks I could look with equanimity upon a long street of Irish cabins, and pigs and children reveling in the Concord dirt; and I should still find my Walden wood and Fair Haven in their tanned and happy faces.

obviously, thoreau is a famous nature boy and environmental hero. but what i think we're still trying to catch up with is the idea that human beings are as natural as trees. thoreau's appreciation of nature extended to irishmen. indeed the idea is profound among other things in looking at the arms of an irishmen, and their children and pigs, as transformations of trees. now no doubt thoreau would have mourned the destriction of walden woods. but he also would have seen it as a continuation of the process of walden woods. we cannot destroy nature, are not destroying it. we are it. even the destruction of ourselves would be the destruction of it, by it, a continuing transformation and preservation of its energy.

frank rich, building a tissue of vicious, irrelevant innuendo, comes up with some sort of substantive point.

Most important, she stands for a genuine movement: a dwindling white nonurban America that is aflame with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the 21st century and leaves it behind.

ok, so, i guess by the end of the 21st century, america will be one gigantic city from sea to shining sea. the idea that there could be a nonurban america is i guess just entirely alien. or: living outside nyc is plainly wrong. he slams palin for her income. perhaps he should report his own. take this in: "she winks literally and figuratively at her own daughter’s flagrant disregard of abstinence and marriage." i suppose rich was concealed in the corner when bristol broke the news of her pregnancy. and i suppose rich thinks she should have merely disowned her daughter. (what rich thinks is in fact that she should have driven her immediately to the abortion clinic.)

what i want you to take in is that rich doesn't deal with any of palin's positions, and doesn't really try to deal with her cultural meaning, such as it is: he just utters slanders and innuendos, while his mindless readers nod along like a line of bobbleheads. if someone did to al gore or barack obama what he does to palin in this piece - you know, fuck with their families, impugn them on the grounds that they made $x last year (and i want to note that if you compared palin's $211,000 to any major liberal political figure, all of whom are speaking for the poor, you'd see that her income is relatively modest; it's less than the mere salary of the president, much less his royalties etc) - frank rich would bellow about the unfairness or sheer irrelevance of it all.

what if it turns out that cheney was running, you know, personal death squads out the of the vice president's office, like "team america, world police," only at once funnier and more fatal? ok, well, obviously, and putting it mildly, this does not comport with the constitution etc. but what i want to know is: who did he kill wrongly, accidentally? and were the victims the enemies of our sacred way of life, or merely the enemies of haliburton? it's shocking that patrick fitzgerald is still alive. if this really is the case, then there can be no "leave the past in the past and move on." if it is the case, i want to see cheney dangling from a noose, twitching.

the idea of an an op-ed column by the president of the united states is a reductio ad absurdum of the idea of opinion journalism. it's idiotically redundant: obama's opinions are represented in the post every day. and of course it's not a statement of opinion at all but a a bath of rhetoric: it's strategic, not verific. and, like this, it shows you where the washington post has been for many years: just laying there like a slab of meat, tanning on the bed of political power.

suggest we forget the king of pop and recall the queen of country.

well i love tammy wynette, and as i watch these videos, i swear, i shiver. my hair stands on end. she's almost unbelievably emotional, and the impassive performance style just intensifies the unbelievable pathos. now, it may be when i first started listening to tammy, and doing things like putting on "stand by your man" when i was djing "new wave night" at the one flight up, i was drawn to the kitsch aspect, which is immense. also it's hard to resist a singer who, when you put her on, actually makes people start yelling or howling in pain, or pisses off every woman you ever knew. on the other hand, you can appreciate something as kitsch and, at the same time, as art. and that is in part the heart of country music. you think "that's doofy," but then you realize that it's actually, truly, about your own experience, about the human condition. i loved tammy before my various splits and divorces, each of which was in its own way a shattering experience, sometimes with children in them. but i really, really loved her during and after those experiences.

just a brief defense of "stand by your man," or her overall kind of passive, shattered pose (the very opposite of her great contemporary and rival loretta lynn). i think "stand by your man" is about learning to let go by fully experiencing the insane pain of hanging on. this reading would be borne out by the fact that most of her hits (including of course the masterpiece "d-i-v-o-r-c-e") are actually about the subsequent split. but what it's really borne out by is just the hyper-intense emotionality of the delivery; it's not an anthem of affirmation; it's a complete embodiment of pain. and obviously, it also asserts that men are incomprehensible and pitiful, which it would be silly to deny.

i might remark, in correspondence to this, that no pop singer has ever made more extreme use of dynamics, which has to be also set down to her songwiter/producer billy sherrill; obviously it's not only the voice but the whole band and the whole idea that suddenly swells.

so, what are the ways to love a man? is this about oral sex, or doggystyle? or cooking a good dinner? or what?

oops, this classic song ("the ways to love a man") can't be embedded. 

tammy was genuinely a kind of naive or untutored genius, and after her first burst of amazing music, she never really sounded good again. i remember her saying, when "new traditionalism" and specifically dwight yoakam hit, that "that's the kind of stuff we've been trying to get away from for twenty years." so there was album after album of pseudo-sophisticated, smoothed-over crap. she didn't understand the source or nature of her own power, which is sad, but also what you might expect when you promote a hairdresser from tupelo to queen: she begins to express in her music the aspiration and the reality of her upward mobility, like sarah palin on a shopping spree.

for purposes of comparison:

i'm sorta back to work on nathaniel rogers , and just posted a very substantive essay from 1838: constitutionality of slavery. if you're into that bizarre prodigy, lysander spooner, you'll recognize the basic arguments from his book on the unconstitutionality of slavery - including the basic account of constitutional interpretation - though rogers' essay came seven years earlier.