Thursday is New Jobless Day

Including me. Oh, dear.

If you know of anyone in the Houston area who would be interested in a quantitative analyst with experience in health care, commodities and market research, with skills in SPSS and SQL (for example), don't hesitate to contact me at edwardbarlow at aol.com

Some of the best takes on the Supreme Court decision overturning sodomy laws can be found at the Volokh Conspiracy or Jack Balkin's site. Ana Marie Cox, however, has the funniest.

Could Anthony Scalia be any gayer? Why isn't he posting in the Corner -- he's that gay.

UPDATE: Just a thought. In the most quoted line in Scalia's dissent, he said:

Today's opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda.

But if the court had signed on to the "so-called homosexual agenda," it would have embraced the equal-rights argument, rather than simply defining a zone of privacy around consensual sexual activity. Some people are arguing that the results could be used to assert a right for same-sex marriage. That's probably true. However, a decision based on an equal-rights argument would have unambiguously opened that door. Furthermore, it could be used to force the addition of homosexuality as a protected class to anti-discriminatory laws in hiring and housing. That's the homosexual agenda. Sodomy laws are an insult and a thorn in the side, but they're rarely invoked.

It's worth pointing out that Scalia was so angry about this that he took the unusual step of reading his dissent from the bench. It's also worth pointing out that Bush has described Scalia as his ideal Supreme Court Justice.

President Bush Declares "War on Mud" As MSNBC Host Michael Savage Dragged Underground By Actual Mud People


Michael Savage Wakes in Panic After Dream About Kissing George Stephanopoulos

MSNBC TV Host Michael Savage Hate Mutie Scum

Savage, Coulter, Liddy, Limbaugh, Hannity Combine to Form Giant Robot Assholatron

Michael Savage Beats Waitress to Death, Blames 'Liberal Media'
Sidebar: Is the media too liberal?

You might be a hack if...

UPDATE: I shouldn't giggle this off just because a certain law professor's bad behavior. The buried nuclear plans are potentially a reasonably important piece of news, and if the story is still holding up in a few days I'll say something about them. My first thoughts are that these plans would not really provide support for the war as it was fought, and they wouldn't clear the Bush administration of charges of deceiving the public. I agree with Josh Marshall's assesment:

We knew the Iraqis had a pre-1991 nuclear weapons program. We knew there were probably parts from it hidden around the country in various stages of preservation or disrepair. If anything this finding seems to present some positive evidence that no effort to reconstitute the program was ever made -- though one would definitely want a lot more evidence to arrive at any conclusive judgment.

They would, on the other hand, provide support for a Kenneth Pollack-esqe argument that Iraq was eventually going to be a threat, and that a multilateral effort to take Saddam out would be in our interest. I don't think that it would provide enough evidence, especially considering what we seem to know know about the state of the Iraqi WMD program, but it would certainly strengthen the point.

I should also point out this senior administration official's quote:

(The senior administration official) said U.S. officials consider this a "significant development" that demonstrates the challenge of uncovering Iraq's weapons and programs. "We can't dig up every garden in the country," he said.

I'm making a "W" sign with my fingers right now, which signifies me saying "Whatever." Chemical and biological weapons need to be carefully climate controlled, quickly lose their potency, and have to be delivered via actual weapons. Otherwise, they're just liquids and gases of minor destruction. Nuclear weapons need an even bigger operation. We have nothing to fear from a WMD program that can be buried in a bunch of goddamn gardens.

Regardless, I blame Bugs Meany.

As you may know, Michael Savage has sued a few small independent websites to harass them for making fun of him. Neal Pollack has encouraged as many websites as possible to make fun of Michael Savage today. To that end, I'm going to post Onion-style headlines as I think of them.

Michael Savage, Ann Coulter to be Crossbred to Create "Worst Pundit Ever," says Spokesman For The Initiative

New Michael Savage Book Nothing But String Of Ethnic Slurs

Hispanic Woman Who Spurned Michael Savage in 8th Grade Offers Tearful Apology To Nation

Michael Savage Cries Self To Sleep Over Photoshopped Picture of Self On FARK

J. Bowden from No Watermelons really didn't like my post about Glenn Reynolds. I've got a soft spot for J., who often has an intelligent take on (especially) environmental issues, so I take him seriously. Here's what I posted in his comments.

J.,

Since it's a UN operation in the Congo, the French government isn't running it. I don't see how it can be interpreted the way you see it. It seems to me that he is saying that the soldiers on the ground are cowards who will run in the face of danger, and he knows this because they are French. It's a childish slur on a nationality, and a disgraceful insult to soldiers who are trying to stop a bloody civil war that we're ignoring. It really made me mad.

About Galloway: if you can offer evidence other than Instapundit's phrasing that Galloway was not only opposing the war but also defending Saddam's interests, let me know. I don't trust Glenn Reynolds, because he has repeatedly defined any opposition to the war as defending Saddam's interests. Have you forgotten the dozens of posts about opponents of the war that said "They're not anti-war- they're just on the other side.." Or his accusation that opponents to the war were objectively pro-Saddam? Or that opponents of the war are "anti-liberation". Or they're racists. It goes without saying that they're appeasers. And they've "made preservation of Saddam Hussein (their) top priority."

Etc., etc. You get my point- if Glenn Reynolds says Galloway was defending Saddam's interests, that doesn't mean anything. He says stuff like that about every opponent of the war.

If Galloway was taking bribes from Iraq to oppose the war, that's treason, and he should go to jail. If he wasn't, he was expressing a political opinion that was shared by the majority of British voters. To say that either scenario proves that he should never hold office in a civilized country is absolutely ridiculous.

UPDATE: I should point out that Kevin Drum, Andrew Northrup and Matt Weiner have comments that undercut this argument somewhat. (I know the comments say "0"; I can't explain it.) Kevin and Matt argue that you could make a reasonable point that Galloway has made statements supporting Saddam, and Andrew points out that the French soldiers in the Congo are not exactly UN peacekeepers, but more of "a French-led coalition a les willing (said with a comedy French waiter accent). "

The Ted Barlow Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Pirate Humor goes to TMFTML for this:

Did you hear what Pirates of the Caribbean is going to be rated?

Arrrrgh!

A grateful nation salutes you, TMFTML!

Steve at Begging to Differ has a long, thoughtful analysis of the Supreme Court's affirmative action decision. There's a lot to chew on here. Although I disagree with Steve on the desirability of a totally race-blind admissions policy, I find myself agreeing with much of Steve's conclusion, especially this part:

While the Court shuns specific numerical goals and percentages, I wonder how else society is supposed to tell when the work of affirmative action is done. Won't we have to look at percentages to know when race preferences are no longer necessary? And if so, won't this create perverse incentives for opponents as well as advocates of race preferences to cook the books?

As I see it, this is the central problem with affirmative action jurisprudence today. Quotas are regarded as "patently unconstitutional," but we have to measure progress somehow. The Court implicitly notes that we must examine numbers and percentages by highlighting the "substantial numbers" of Asians and Jews who enroll at Michigan, thereby not requiring affirmative action.

More to come.

For the record, Dick Gephardt said an enormously stupid thing:

When I'm president, we'll do executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day.

Quite obviously, nuh uh. The President doesn't get to issue executive orders to overrule the Supreme Court, and we should be damn glad he can't. The Supreme Court is designed to be more or less insulated from political pressures, while the elected Presidency is designed to be responsive to them. Our elected representatives, much as we revere them, have a history of passing popular but unconstitutional legislation. (I think Get Your War On put it best when it said "They'd hold a bald-eagle-fucking competition if they thought it would get them more votes.")

Gephardt has been in the federal government for hundreds of years now, so he knows this. I don't know if it was an off-the-cuff pander or a planned pander or a misstatment of another point (I can't imagine what), but it's the kind of thing that savvy politicans apologize for in a hurry.

Plus, I'd rather bet on a Winger revival than a Gephardt presidency. Andrew Northrup has more.

Ogged at Unfogged is Iranian, with strong ties to Iran, and he has some things to say about what's going on. We'd do well to read them. For example:

Do not support the Iran Democracy Act. The people lined up for the money this bill promises are the Monarchists and the MKO. If someone proposes a bill to fund NITV and other Iranian stations, support that. If someone proposes a bill to fund human rights groups in Iran, support that. But Iran doesn't need external opposition groups. There are good and brave people aplenty in Iran. There are the ones you can see, in the streets. And there are the ones you can't see, who have been fighting the mullahs while the rest of us were going about our business. They are in the jails and this is their revolution.

There's a bunch of good stuff up at This Modern World, including two items that I'd like to think would drive libertarians away from the Republican party for a good while.

About the recent shift of a criminal suspect to "enemy combatant" status:

"You shouldn't be allowed to switch tracks like they're doing," Mr. Dunham said in an interview. "That's how you get into the abuse of threatening criminal defendants, suggesting that 'if you don't pleaded guilty to this charge or that charge, we're going to declare you an enemy combatant and lock you up forever.' " [Italics mine.]

The criminal justice system is good enough for Eric Rudolph. It's good enough for Iyman Faris. It was good enough for the Rosenbergs, Earl Pitts, Robert Hansson, "the Falcon and the Snowman," Aldrich Ames, Brian Patrick Regan, and five freshly-convicted Cuban spies just a few months ago, among others. We got this far just fine without destroying the basic precepts of the U.S. Constitution.

The dangers of the Bush adminstrations's invented policy of entirely extrajudicial, legally-fuzzed-over, non-criminal, non-POW, variably-defined "enemy combatant" status should be obvious.

About "free speech zones":

By definition, such enclosures make the rest of any such important gathering a non-free-speech zone. Protest that no one can see or hear is meaningless. (Just try to imagine the Civil Rights movement or Martin Luther King's speech outside the UN in an era of "free speech zones.") This cannot by any conceivable argument be the purpose of the First Amendment.

Horrifying enough, right? But at least in 2000, when I personally got hassled by police at both conventions for doing little more than walking past the "free speech" areas with a mic and a video camera in my hands, you weren't prosecuted for federal offenses merely for speaking your mind. You got a dirty look. Maybe, in a few cases, you spent a few nights in jail or even caught a rubber bullet or two. All plenty objectionable enough. But you didn't get charged with a federal f***ing offense.

That has changed...

If a guilty verdict gets upheld through the courts (I think hell will be raised first, but who knows), then -- seriously, this is the logical consequence, the line being drawn here -- anyone protesting Bush within his sight (if the Secret Service so chooses) could be imprisoned on federal charges for doing so outside whatever arbitrary zone they're supposed to be in.

And this is America? Unfreakinbelievable.

I'm still getting re-adjusted to your Earth "gravity" and "sunlight". Back to regular posting soon, I'm sure.

I've got to say, Instapundit genuinely used to be better than this:

If Galloway was defending Saddam's interests because he was being paid off, or if he was doing so out of genuine sympathy for a mass-murdering dictator. Either way, Galloway seems unfit to hold office in a civilized country, and it surprises me that anyone on the left would feel moved to defend him.

You see, Galloway opposed the war on Iraq. So either he was bribed, or he feels sympathy for mass-murdering dictators, or.... yep, I guess Glenn's pretty well exhausted the possibilities!

You're eyeball-deep in The Way Things Ought To Be when you can say something like that with a straight face. Even if Galloway is completely innocent of any charges, the fact that he opposed the war means that he's "unfit to hold office in a civilized country." What touching faith he holds in representative democracy.

The Mighty Reason Man sums it up:

It Must Be Nice To Be The InstaPundit

Calling the French troops in the Congo cowards on his deck via wireless, while sipping a Redhook IPA and grilling steaks.

Wow. Just... wow.