Posts Tagged ‘John Paul Stevens’
3/16.2
* Update from yesterday: running marathons will also kill you. Don’t do that either!
* Update from two weeks ago: a New Jersey appeals court has ruled Tea Party supporters in New Jersey can try to recall Robert Menendez despite the fact that no recall procedure exists for federal legislators under the Constitution.
* NBC polls puts health care support at 46-45. Some day, I suspect, this bill may actually pass.
* Related: By this time next week we’ll have seen huge headlines about health care. These headlines will either read “Democrats do it!”, followed by various Republicans and their apologists complaining that what the Dems did wasn’t nice, or “Democrats — losers again”, followed by Republicans going bwahahaha.
And it’s up to a handful of Democrats to decide which headlines we get. They’re out of their minds if they don’t choose door #1. (via)
* Also related, some breaking news: Major legislative breakthroughs are always controversial!
* If you ever watched the This American Life TV show, you might remember Mark Hogancamp, who built a replica World-War-II-era village in his backyard as a means of dealing with being brutally assaulted outside a bar. His story is now a feature-length documentary. (via)
* Wow: Two sources at the Science Times section of the New York Times have told me that a majority of the section’s editorial staff doubts that human-induced global warming represents a serious threat to humanity. So this is why we can’t have nice things. (via)
* More actually existing media bias: CNN hires goat f**king child molester.
* FantasySCOTUS: Who will replace Judge Stevens if he retires?
* And Greensboro in the news! An “equipment failure” caused preview clips for adult programming to appear on two channels dedicated for kids in North Carolina, a spokeswoman for Time Warner Cable Inc. said today.
Wednesday
Wednesday!
* Reports that Justice John Paul Stevens has hired fewer-than-usual clerks for the 2010 Supreme Court term are now confirmed: he’s only hired one clerk, signaling a likely retirement in the near future.
* Seinfeld nostalgia is in full effect; FlowingData has your map of character connections.
* How to Talk to a Wingnut: Decoding Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.
* Today’s must-read op-ed: Bob Hebert on Texas’s apparent execution of an innocent man. Even more striking than the fact of the terrible error is the look at the basic cognitive biases at work in the criminal justice system:
When official suspicion fell on Willingham, eyewitness testimony began to change. Whereas initially he was described by neighbors as screaming and hysterical — “My babies are burning up!” — and desperate to have the children saved, he now was described as behaving oddly, and not having made enough of an effort to get to the girls.
In short: “If he were innocent, they wouldn’t have arrested him.”
* Behind the scenes of Fantastic Mr. Fox.
* Harlan Ellison and Terminator.
* And the Hartford Courant has your photo of the day. Our public servants hard at work.
A Political History of the Supreme Court, 1937-2009
From Kottke, a political history of the supreme court, 1937-2009. A look at the right end of the chart shows how long it will take for the right-tilting Court to become more progressive through Democratic appointments, especially since the four youngest members of the Court are Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito.