O'Connor, Alito, the swinging Kennedy, and the new 5-4 Court

From The New York Times:

The decision last week brought into focus the greatest hopes of conservatives and the worst fears of liberals. Is the court about to make sweeping changes in important areas of constitutional law, including in decisions expected shortly on the role of money in political campaigns and of race in the schools?

“O’Connor was the swing vote in so many cases, especially in high-profile areas like affirmative action, campaign finance and separation of church and state,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor at Duke. “Sam Alito is likely to bring about a change in all of those areas.”

Depending on Kennedy.
How can the guy who was so empathetic toward gays in Lawrence be so arrogantly paternalistic toward women in Carhart?
A new law clerk?

Barack's rock -- Profile of Michelle Obama

Barack's rock | from The Chicago Tribune:

Michelle Obama, 43, has a reputation for telling it like she thinks it is... And though she's lighthearted in her critiques, she never plays the role of the deferential political wife.

'He's a gifted man,' she tells the audience, 'but, in the end, he's just a man.'

The fact that the crowd responds with laughter and a long, warm ovation is a good sign for the Obama team....

More than just a spokeswoman, she's a crucial part of the Obama package itself, complementing and shaping her husband in ways that are both politically and personally significant.

The daughter of a tight-knit nuclear family, she's an anchor for a spouse who grew up all over the world and barely knew his own father. Her background, deeply rooted in a working-class South Side neighborhood, lends credibility to her husband, who has consistently battled questions from some African-Americans about whether the son of an African father and a white American mother is authentically black....

I heard that growing up, 'You talk like a white girl,' " Obama told the Tribune on Friday in her first solo interview since her husband announced his candidacy for president in February. "There isn't one black person who doesn't understand that dynamic. That debate is about the pain that we still struggle with in this country, and Barack knows that more than anyone.

"One of the things I hope happens through our involvement in this campaign is that this country and this world sees yet another image of what it means to be black."

Her ability to speak with authority on such tough issues is one reason the campaign thinks she will be a potent weapon in its arsenal.

Obama Addresses Question of Experience

From The New York Times:

NEW YORK (AP) -- Wooing black voters while tackling questions about his experience, Democrat Barack Obama said Saturday that his years as a community organizer and accomplishments in the Illinois state Senate have prepared him well for the presidency....

He met later in the day with leaders of the Iowa Citizen Action Network, a liberal group of community organizers, and touted his own experience as a community organizer.

''I can relate,'' said Obama as he opened a two-day visit to Iowa. ''I, too, was a community organizer. Community organizers generally look at the world a little bit differently.''

Obama's first job was working for a coalition of churches on Chicago's south side, seeking to help rescue a troubled neighborhood.

''It was that education that was seared into my brain,'' Obama said. ''It was the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School.''

[Reverend Al] Sharpton, who ran for the Democratic nomination in 2004, has also openly questioned Obama's credentials for the job. Obama, running to be the first black president, acknowledged those concerns. He also assured the largely black audience he did not believe he was automatically entitled to their support....A spokeswoman said Sharpton was not expected to endorse a candidate soon.

So, do African-Americans really need Al Sharpton to tell them whom to support in this race?

Mending Walls in Baghdad: Poetry in Motion?

From The New York Times:
By EDWARD WONG and DAVID S. CLOUD

BAGHDAD, April 20 — American military commanders in Baghdad are trying a radical new strategy to quell the widening sectarian violence by building a 12-foot-high, three-mile-long wall separating a historic Sunni enclave from Shiite neighborhoods.

Soldiers in the Adhamiya district of northern Baghdad, a Sunni Arab stronghold, began construction of the wall last week and expect to finish it within a month. Iraqi Army soldiers would then control movement through a few checkpoints. The wall has already drawn intense criticism from residents of the neighborhood, who say that it will increase sectarian tensions and that it is part of a plan by the Shiite-led Iraqi government to box in the minority Sunnis.

A doctor in Adhamiya, Abu Hassan, said the wall would transform the residents into caged animals.

********
"SOMETHING there is that doesn't love a wall...

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go...

He is all pine and I am apple-orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down!...

... I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'"
(Excerpted from Robert Frost)

************

But here my apple trees consume his cones,
And here there are sects, and they wear explosive vests.
Like old-stone savages armed, moving in darkness.

Walling in or walling out, Sunni, Shi'a, like to give offense...

They will not go behind their fathers' saying,
Sometimes only walls make neighbors of militias straying.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down, but needs it erect ...

AJW

Leonard Cohen: Poet of the Holy Sinners

From Forward.com:

“Book of Longing,” [Leonard] Cohen’s first new book of poems in more than 20 years, is a synthesis of the worldly and the other-worldly. In it, Cohen has crafted a poetic religion of whiskey, women and cigarettes, both a typically Zen Buddhist repudiation of all forms of religious piety and one framed by the categories of Jewish sensibility. It is antinomian and reverent, deeply sexual and deeply spiritual. ...

But there are two kinds of spiritual teachers in the world: those who claim to know the answers, and those who have only questions. The first fill the self-help shelves, and the inspirational section of the bookstore; they deal in facile answers, fantasies, simplicity and certainty. The second are the poets, the storytellers and those precious few mystics who know that the simple banalities of conventional morality, be it Eastern or Western, are not only reductive and clichéd; they are actively destructive to an authentic spiritual journey. They truck not in answers but in questions, not in fantasies but in realities — in subtlety, not simplicity, and in uncompromising, honest uncertainty....

This is neither cynicism nor the lazy secularism of those who mask their insecurity with rationale. It is experience. What the “crazy wisdom” poets like Ikkyu and Cohen recognize, and what moralizers never do, is that ultimately, the paramount task of the spiritual seeker is to give up any notion of knowing the right answer, or even the right course of action. Ideals of justice and compassion remain, of course; but the pretense of piety is only an obstruction to the openness and wisdom that are the hallmarks of the liberated mind. The poet returns to where he began: knowing that we are flawed, powerful animals, even as he also knows the ineffable, the transcendent. The mystic’s embrace of the worldly is not the same as the materialist’s rejection of the spiritual. Cohen’s verse — some rhyming, some blank, some in the form of prose-poem — often evokes the numinous.

Sari Nusseibeh’s Persistent Empathy

From Forward.com

Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life
By Sari Nusseibeh, with Anthony David
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

For the past 25 years — from the moment he unwittingly entered Palestinian politics as a teacher’s union leader, to his position as Yasser Arafat’s personal representative in Jerusalem during the second intifada — [Sari] Nusseibeh has been a paragon of empathy and, by extension, of compromise. More than any other Palestinian leader, he has tried to understand the psychology of Israelis, their fears and neuroses, and address them. It’s no mystery that he’s become a darling of the Israeli left, friend to Amos Oz and Yossi Beilin. He’s also never been afraid to speak bitter truths to his own people (and risk getting his bones broken for it). In September 2001, as the rocks in Palestinians’ hands had turned into explosive belts around their waists, he wrote an article about the need for Palestinians to abandon the delusion that they would one day return to their pre-1948 homes. “We have two rights,” he wrote in Arabic. “We have the right of return, in my opinion. But we also have the right to live in freedom and independence. And very often in life, one has to forgo the implementation of one right in order to implement the other rights.” In Palestine, you don’t get more heretical than this.

Obituary: Israeli Judge Moshe Bejski

From Forward.com:

Moshe Bejski, a former Israeli Supreme Court justice and Holocaust survivor who was saved from the Nazis by Oskar Schindler, died Tuesday at the age of 86.

Bejski was born in 1920 in the Polish town of Dzialoszyce, near Krakow. After the Nazis invaded Poland, Bejski’s family was deported to the Belzec concentration camp. He and his brother Uri were saved by Schindler when the industrialist drafted them to work in his factory. Officially, the Bejski brothers were listed as a machine fitter and a draftsman, but Uri was known for his expertise in weapons and Moshe was a master document-forger. Throughout the war, Moshe Bejski created rubber stamps with the Nazi regime’s symbol on them, and forged papers and passports that Schindler used to smuggle Jews out of harm’s way.

In the 1960s, Bejski testified at Adolf Eichmann’s war crimes trial. Bejski remained close with Schindler for many years, giving him money and defending him against critics who accused the industrialist of alcoholism and womanizing. In 1974, he delivered the oration at Schindler’s funeral in Jerusalem...

Bejski was appointed to the Israeli Supreme Court in 1979, and served there until he retired in 1991.

Obituary: Will Maslow, 99, Pioneer in Fight for Civil Rights

From Forward.com:

Will Maslow, a prominent civil rights attorney who once served as executive director of the American Jewish Congress, died February 23 at his home in Manhattan. He was 99.

In an era when the Jewish community relied on largely quiet, nonconfrontational tactics in the fight against discrimination, Maslow was a pioneer in the use of the law as a tool in the struggle for equality. He was one of the people who helped shape [the strategy of] law as an instrument of social change...

After working as a trial attorney at the National Labor Relations Board, Maslow was appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1943 to be the field director of his Fair Employment Practices Committee, a group that had been created at the behest of black union leader A. Philip Randolph. Maslow filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which desegregated American schools, and in 1963 he was one of only seven members of the administrative team that organized the historic March on Washington, at which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. He forged alliances with groups like the ACLU on the theory that, at least with regard to civil rights, Jewish interests would be advanced in tandem with the general interest...

Remembering The Triangle Fire

From Forward.com:

For years, I’ve been obsessed with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. I don’t remember when I first heard about this event, which was New York City’s worst workplace disaster before 9/11. On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the factory’s eighth floor; 146 workers, most of them young Jewish and Italian girls, died. The fire department’s tallest ladders only reached the sixth floor; girls clung to the window ledges while the flames licked at them; some jumped in desperation, shattering the sidewalks. ...

We’ve forgotten the names; we’ve forgotten the strike; most of us have forgotten the fire itself. But filmmaker Ruth Sergel wants to help us remember.

For the last four years, Sergel has worked on a participatory art project called Chalk. Shortly before the anniversary of the tragedy, she emails the name and former address of a Triangle fire victim to anyone who wants to be involved. On the day itself, participants write the victim’s name in chalk in front of the building in which she lived. Beneath the name is written the person’s age, address, and “Died in the Triangle Fire, March 25, 1911.”...

But why this particular project? “I was thinking how much political activism is based on the Internet,” she said. “While it can be very powerful, it’s also highly depersonalized. The sense of being in the streets is lost. There’s something about physically, literally engaging in the New York streets. Sometimes someone stops to talk: Their great-aunt worked at Triangle, or you hear about working conditions somewhere else today. And it changes you: Once you’ve chalked in front of a building, you remember that building for the rest of time. You remember it held someone’s life. Also, chalking is a physical representation of the activist process, moving from individual to community. You start off alone and self-conscious, then you move toward the site, passing other chalkings on the way to the memorial service, and suddenly you’re with a community. We all know that the chalk will rub away or wash away in a few days, but you add your piece, and we’re all back next year. It’s like communal memory.”

Updated: Paul Soglin (and more) on Madison School Naming Controversy

From Waxing America: Madison School Named ...:

I have tremendous respect for Shwaw Vang of the Madison School Board but not his recommendations for naming a public school after a military leader with a checkered past.

What is most disturbing is that so many members of the school board supported the naming without knowledge about Pao's escapades.

Why would knowledge be relevant? This is only a school, after all...And besides, liberal Madison has yet to recognize those who stood bravely with the French colonialists at Dien Bien Phu...Next, The Battle of Algiers.

Additional resources:

Isthmus story by Marc Eisen:
Vang Pao Elementary School opening in Madison

Exchange between Dr. Gary Yia Lee, a visiting professor at the Center of Hmong Studies at Concordia University and UW History Professor Alfred McCoy, including McCoy's suggestions of alternative Hmong candidates for naming honors:
McCoy challenged on Vang Pao; he fires back:

As for Dr. Lee's allegations of anti-Hmong bias, let me state here, as I have done repeatedly in public fora, that I strongly favor naming this new Madison elementary school after a Hmong leader to honor the Hmong sacrifice in the Vietnam War and the many Hmong contributions to American society. If a Hmong soldier is deemed appropriate, then I would suggest Lee Lue, the heroic Hmong pilot who died in Laos in 1969. If a Hmong educator is deemed preferable, I would suggest Dr. Yang Dao, the first Hmong-American to earn a Ph.D. and a tireless advocate for Hmong education. If a more traditional Hmong educator were deemed advisable, I would suggest Shong Lue Yang, 'the Mother of Writing,' that brilliant religious leader who invented a non-Romanized system for Hmong writing. There are just a few of the many accomplished Hmong and Hmong-Americans appropriate for this honor.

Gonzales is merely illustrative

Glenn Greenwald - Salon:

[Gonzales] has repeatedly lied to Congress, evaded their questions, concealed wrongdoing, expressed contempt for oversight and checks, particularly when it comes to the actions of the Leader, whom -- even as Attorney General -- he still plainly sees as his client and whose interests are his paramount, really his only, priority.

That is what Alberto Gonzales is -- he is a supremely loyal servant of George Bush and he was installed as the nation's chief law enforcement officer precisely because of that attribute. There really is very little he would not do, if there is anything, in service to the White House. And that has been evident for quite some time.

Nor is there anything unique about Gonzales himself. His conduct is the conduct of this administration, and his mindset is its mindset. The U.S. Attorneys scandal is merely illustrative, not unique in any way -- except that Bush's weakened state and subpoena power in the hands of Democrats have combined to produce slightly more oversight and scrutiny than before.

So it was gratifying, I suppose, to watch Alberto Gonzales finally be held accountable (at least rhetorically) and aggressively cornered due to his transparent evasions and untruths. But it is also difficult to avoid lamenting how many other times over the last several years he has done all of that with complete impunity. And it is far from clear whether there will be real accountablity even now.

Gonzales is a mere symbol -- really just an instrument -- of an entire Presidency guided for years by exactly these behaviors. And, at least thus far, they have engaged in that conduct with very, very few consequences.

Greenwald goes on to discuss the problems with W's excess of loyalty to his incompetent subordinates. Makes one wistful for Clinton's gutless abandonment of his highly capable once friends and supporters, such as Lani Guinier. (Some of us have long memories.)

Hmm. Maybe Alberto Gonzales was actually brilliant ...

Now this is a novel interpretation: By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine:

This record reflects either a Harvard-trained lawyer—and former state Supreme Court judge—with absolutely no command of the facts or the law, or it reveals a proponent of the unitary executive theory with absolutely nothing to prove. Gonzales' failure to even mount a defense; his posture of barely tolerating congressional inquiries; his refusal to concede that he owed the Senate any explanation or any evidence; his refusal to even accept that he bore some burden of proof—all of it tots up to a masterful display of the perfect contempt felt by the Bush executive branch for this Congress and its pretensions of oversight. In the plainest sense, Gonzales elevated the Bush legal doctrine of 'Because I said so' into a public spectacle.

Viewed in that light, Gonzales did exactly what he needed to do yesterday. He took a high, inside pitch to the head for the team (nobody wants to look like a dolt on national television) but hit a massive home run for the notion that at the end of the day, congressional oversight over the executive branch is little more than empty theatre.

If only...

The networks cancel The Cho Show.
By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine:

When a major story like Virginia Tech breaks, viewers linger, wanting to know more. There's nothing wrong with that expectation. But having committed to going wall-to-wall with the Cho murders, the networks are too cowardly to tell viewers that only 30 minutes of essential Cho story exists, and that viewers should feel free to turn their sets off after they watch that much. Instead, the networks added soy extender and sawdust to inflate 30 minutes of solid news into a six- or seven-hour marathon.

There's a path around this quandary. In his book The Language of New Media, scholar Allen Bells reports how the BBC responded in 1930 when it was confronted with a 'shortage of news deemed worthy to broadcast.' The Beeb didn't dress up yesterday's broadcast with new comments from another expert. Instead, the announcer would admit, 'There is no news tonight.'

If only today's broadcasters were as honest.

What if...?

Va. Tech Anguishes Over Missed Signals
From The New York Times:

But in three, hour-long talks that began that October day, [the teacher] tentatively edged away from the lesson plan for her class of one, moving beyond poetry and drawing the darkly troubled student, Seung-Hui Cho, into a tortured and all-too-brief conversation about the human need for friendship and the pain of being trapped inside oneself.

Looking back, it may have been the closest anyone ever came to reaching the brooding loner before he metamorphosed into the gunman responsible for the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history....

It is only now that she asks herself: What if ...?

How many such "what ifs" arise in the life of every teacher? Cho's teachers at Virginia Tech probably did more than most. Is there a better way?

On the not writing life

From The New York Times Book Review:

“What wrongs I have done to such talents as I have,” he continued. “What self-indulgence and waste.” He added, “I must stop fumbling for words here and get to work. I lack all discipline.”

But as you will discover in “The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman,” a magnificent arrangement of his unpublished memoirs and correspondence, a man can write a lot, not writing.

James Fallows on Wolfowitz and much more

James Fallows | Author and Journalist

I posted a piece by Christopher Hitchens sympathetic to Wolfowitz a few days back. Here is a more critical, and very thought-provoking, analysis by Jim Fallows [a Harvard classmate who does fabulous work]. See his full blog posting for some interesting byways and historical perspective, also relevant to Gonzales.

I was wrong to suggest that Paul Wolfowitz was like Robert McNamara. That is disrespectful to McNamara.

But in modern U.S. politics, I think the neocon/Bush comb is more “tribal” in its thinking than anyone else is. If you’re on the team, it’s very hard for you to do or say anything wrong. If not, the reverse. For instance: no organ of either the “mainstream” or the actually leftist press is as disciplined about propping up allies, no matter what, and shooting enemies on sight as are the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and most of what’s on Fox News. Democratic politicians are more disciplined than they used to be but still can’t help squabbling. By contrast there is evidently nothing Dick Cheney could do, say, exaggerate, or make up that would discredit him to his base....

This brings us back to Paul Wolfowitz. A natural extension of the in-group/tribal approach to life is the inability to ask or wonder: how would this look if the other side did it? How will it look to people who mistrust us or don’t automatically believe that everything we do is for a higher cause? This is a kind of political autism — an inability to sense or imagine other people’s reactions — and it runs the gamut. How would we feel about someone else “water boarding” our prisoners? How would we feel about the other political party intercepting our phone calls or emails? How would we like it if there were no right of habeus corpus? What would the world be like if everyone did what we are doing now?

The question Wolfowitz apparently failed to ask, is: given that I am basing my entire tenure at the World Bank on a crusade against corruption, how will it look if I extend special favors to a handful of political confidantes plus my girlfriend? Considering how many speeches I have given about those who use public office to do private favors, can I afford to dole out favors this way? Do the words “Caesar’s wife” ring any kind of bell?...

And that’s why cozy self-dealing is such a problem for Paul Wolfowitz. He has said he is sorry, which is more than Cheney, or Rove, or Rumsfeld, or Gonzales has managed to choke out. But — already in a complicated position at the Bank, because of what he calls “my previous job” — he has guaranteed that no subsequent speech on his central topic, the evil of self-dealing, will ever be taken seriously by anyone he hopes to convince. Say this for Robert McNamara: he has lived his post-Vietnam life with an awareness of what he can and cannot say or do. Paul Wolfowitz, you’re no Robert McNamara.

"This American Life" Completes Documentation Of Liberal, Upper-Middle-Class Existence

From The Onion:

'We've done it,' said senior producer Julie Snyder, who was personally interviewed for a 2003 This American Life episode, 'Going Eclectic,' in which she described what it's like to be a bilingual member of the ACLU trained in kite-making by a Japanese stepfather. 'There is not a single existential crisis or self-congratulatory epiphany that has been or could be experienced by a left-leaning agnostic that we have not exhaustively documented and grouped by theme.'

Added Snyder, 'We here at public radio couldn't be more pleased with ourselves.'

A close reading of Skymall

By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine:

I think it was the SnacDaddy® chicken-wing tray that may have done it. Convinced me there is something to be learned about America from Skymall culture.

When I say Skymall culture, I mean the gadget-fetishizing, techno-porn culture of the ads in airline magazines. Most of you are familiar with the ads in airline magazines, and I'm sure at one bored, tarmac-sitting moment or another you must have wondered why a certain kind of product is featured in their pages. Well, Skymall is an airline magazine that features nothing but airline magazine ads.

I read Skymall on planes. I bring other, better stuff to read, but somehow these grab me. (Rosenbaum has an elaborate psychological theory.) Sometimes, when travelling with my wife, I remark on particularly preposterous products, some of which I momentarily crave. (Never bought one yet, at least not via Skymall.) But one stood out on a recent trip as truly, uniquely, transcendently ridiculous. It was, indeed, the very chicken wing tray that captured Rosenbaum's imagination. (See link for illustration.) It was so ridiculous that even I didn't want it--except for a brief moment.

Explaining the inexplicable

What kind of haircut did John Edwards get for $400? - By Christopher Beam - Slate Magazine
How does a bright guy let these things happen?
Cut the hair, John. Off.
**********
I don't want to devote multiple postings to John Edwards' hair. Maybe to his ideas, not to his hair. But a couple of links are de riguer at this point:


Maureen Dowd: Running With Scissors - From The New York Times

Here it is: John Edwards, feeling pretty. Oy!

And while we're at it

Some hopeful signs in the Middle East?

Diplomacy on the horizon - From Haaretz :
By Aluf Benn (Jerusalem) and Shmuel Rosner (Washington)

Something is moving in the diplomatic process. Fact: Close associates of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas have told friends on the Israeli left that this time they emerged satisfied from their meeting, on Sunday of this week, with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Fact: On the day after the meeting, intra-Palestinian agreement was achieved for the suspension of the shooting of Qassam rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel, and by Wednesday only four mortar shell hits were registered. Fact: Olmert has for the first time agreed to discuss 'the diplomatic horizon' with Abbas and to start talks on the security and economic arrangements that will prevail between Israel and the future Palestinian state. Fact: The Arab League has appointed, for the first time in its history, a delegation to advance its peace initiative with Israel. Fact: The Karni crossing point for goods, the main artery of Gaza's economic life, reopened this week in an expanded format. Fact: The U.S. army general Keith Dayton has received a budget for the training and equipping of Abbas' presidential guard and for the bureau of his national security advisor Mohammed Dahlan.