Lots of saved links today. Here's the first batch.

* V is a hit. But is Obama an evil lizard for outer space? Acephalous reports.

* Michael Bérubé talks this year's terrible academic job market.

* North Carolina mayoral races in Charlotte and Chapel Hill are getting some national attention.

* Congratulations, Atlanta, America's most toxic city.

* What do kids call LEGO pieces? Via Kottke.

* Legal outrage of the day: The Supreme Court has indeed said that prosecutors are immune from suit for anything they do at trial. But in this case, Harrington and McGhee maintain that before anyone being charged, prosecutors gathered evidence alongside police, interviewed witnesses and knew the testimony they were assembling was false.

The prosecutors counter that there is "no freestanding constitutional right not to be framed." Stephen Sanders, the lawyer for the prosecutors, will tell the Supreme Court on Wednesday that there is no way to separate evidence gathered before trial from the trial itself. Even if a prosecutor files charges against a person knowing that there is no evidence of his guilt, says Sanders, "that's an absolutely immunized activity." These innocent men were in jail for twenty-five years; naturally, the Obama administration is backing the corrupt, lying prosecutors who put them there.

Waiting for Vu in Ann Arbor with the South Lyon blues again.

* The end of fish. Via MeFi.

* I must be getting old—it's the second day in a row I've agreed with a conservative on the Supreme Court. And this time it was Antonin Scalia!

"The cross doesn't honor non-Christians who fought in the war?" Scalia asks, stunned.

"A cross is the predominant symbol of Christianity, and it signifies that Jesus is the son of God and died to redeem mankind for our sins," replies Eliasberg, whose father and grandfather are both Jewish war veterans.

"It's erected as a war memorial!" replies Scalia. "I assume it is erected in honor of all of the war dead. The cross is the most common symbol of ... of ... of the resting place of the dead."

I think he's right about this; it seems to me to be a pretty clear (and frankly inoffensive) case of civil religion, which is historically acceptable in our legal tradition. Dissenting views from Steve Benen and Pharyngula.

* Also via MeFi: results from OKCupid data that suggests race's impact on online dating behavior.

* George Saunders lives in a tent city for GQ.

Now we see the violence inherent in the system: the Supreme Court appears ready to overturn a law banning depictions of animal cruelty. Because the right of the people to sell videos of people stomping squirrels to death shall never be infringed.

The federal law makes it illegal to make and sell commercially “any visual or auditory depiction” of the killing or serious abuse of a living animal so long as that conduct is illegal.

Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal, appealing to the Court to reinstate the law, which was struck down by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, explained that Congress intended to shut down “a robust market” for “crush videos” — images of small animals being stomped to death. The law, said Katyal, was a “narrowly targeted restriction.”

According to SCOTUSblog, only Alito, of all people, supports the law as written.

Alito suggested that the law may have accomplished, over its decade on the books, just what Congress had in mind: it had dried up the market for “crush videos,” while not causing a decrease in videos or TV shows about hunting. He told Millett she should be addressing “what’s going on in the real world,” and not focus on hypotheticals like producing foie gras with geese. She replied that, if Congress were to write laws in the First Amendment area, it had to “write with a scalpel and not with a buzz saw.”

But she seemed less sure of her argument when Alito moved on to questions about Congress’ authority, hypothetically, to try to stop human sacrifice by banning its depiction on videos and in other media. She at first said that such a law might be valid if it were “properly drawn” and “narrowly tailored.” As other members of the Court showed some interest in the human sacrifice hypothetical, Millett made further concessions even while not answering directly. First Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and then Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., insisted on a direct response to Alito’s hypothetical. She answered that Congress could legislate in this area, unless it sought to ban the content of such depictions “just because it did not like it.”

(via Washington Independent)

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.

This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually” innocent. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged “actual innocence” is constitutionally cognizable.

Great moments in American jurisprudence: Antonin Scalia says that convincing a court you're innocent doesn't mean the state can't still execute you.

Links for a Thursday without joy.

* Don't forget about him: John Hughes has died.

* Margaret Atwood, Twitterer.

* The Big Picture visits Hiroshima 64 years ago today.



* Long Vanity Fair profile of Mad Men and Matthew Weiner. Best show on TV. Via Kottke.

“Matt wants real,” said Charlie Collier, president of AMC. For Weiner, Collier continued, “it’s not television; it’s a world.” Perhaps the only other producer as committed to the rules of his imagined universe is George Lucas. “Perfectionism” is a word the show’s writers tossed around when I asked a group of them about working with Weiner. “Fetishism” was another. Alan Taylor, who has directed four episodes of Mad Men, labeled Weiner’s attention to detail “maniacal.” Call it what they will, it is a charge that is largely embraced. “We’re all a little bit touched with the O.C.D.,” Robin Veith, one of the writers, told me, describing how she and her colleagues have researched actual street names and businesses in Ossining, the suburb where Don and Betty live; checked old commuter-train schedules, so that they know precisely which train Don would take to the city; pored over vintage maps to learn which highways he would drive on.

* Towards a four-day work week.

* And Sonia Sotomayor has been confirmed, 68-31, making her the first Latina woman racist on the Supreme Court.

Al Franken's opening statement from yesterday's Supreme Court confirmation hearing. About midway through Franken makes our terms clear when he calls out the real judicial activists. Franken oh-twelve?

Happy Canada Day. Let's celebrate with links.

* SEK considers Infinite Summer's weird morbidity (yes, it is weird), as well as the murky fluidity that constitutes literary "generations." Despite the many other projects that already threaten to consume July I've decided to halfheartedly participate in this, and may even post about once I've caught up to where I'm supposed to already be in the book.

* "Pseudo-Liveblogging Tenure Denial": just reading the headline is enough to fill me with dread.

* Richard Dawkins helps fund the world's least-fun summer camp.

* Following up on my post about Ricci and originalism from earlier in the week, in which as usual the comments are better than the post, here's Chuck Todd on MSNBC calling out the judicial activism to a speechless Joe Scarborough.

* Wal-Mart on the side of the angels? The monolith has endorsed an employer mandate in health care.

* Video games as murder simulators? The same claim can be made about just about any immersive media experience (and has been), with the existence of negative effects always taken as obvious but never actually demonstrated. (via /.)

* I have only vague memories of the original Alien Nation, though it's been in my Netflix queue for a while—so I'm glad to see rumors of a sequel series helmed by Angel's Tim Minear. More at Sci-Fi Wire.

* Sainthood in America: the Archdiocese of Baltimore may soon recommend a local 19th-century priest to the Vatican for canonization. I found it an interesting look at the balancing act that must now be played when looking for miracles in an age of science:

"Something worked very well," said Dr. Larry Fitzpatrick, chief of surgery at Mercy Medical Center, who will serve as medical expert on the archiocesan committee.

Preparing for his committee role, Fitzpatrick spoke to specialists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

"They've all got a few stories like this," he said. "Is this woman really any different from these, what I would call 'statistically improbable' cases? The outcome is very unusual, but it's not the only one."

Fitzpatrick said his role on the panel is to be the scientist, to "be the Doubting Thomas," but as a Catholic, he says, he must entertain the possibility of a supernatural cause.

What method could one possibly use to divide what is merely "statistically improbable" from what is "genuinely miraculous"?

Excitement on the SCOTUS beat as the Court overturns the lower court Ricci decision in a 5-4 vote along the usual partisan breakdown. Since Sonia Sotomayor had been part of the Second Circuit's upholding of the original decision, now overturned, this decision will undoubtedly receive a lot of attention even beyond the usual contentiousness that surrounds affirmative action. I haven't followed the case closely enough to say much of anything about it—and to be fair it sounds like an especially hard case—though my gut reaction to any 5-4 decision from the Roberts court closely matches this take from conservative columnist Ramesh Ponnuru in the New York Times:

The debates on these issues are highlighting a deep inconsistency in the way my fellow conservatives approach race and the law. Many conservatives oppose Judge Sotomayor’s nomination because she does not appear to support originalism, the notion that legal texts, including the Constitution, should be interpreted according to the meaning that the informed public assumed them to have when they became law. We argue as well that judges should try to overcome the biases of their backgrounds in the name of self-restraint. But when it comes to the race cases before the Supreme Court, too many conservatives abandon both originalism and judicial restraint.

Where Ponnuru and I differ, of course, is in his belief that originalism as a judicial philosophy has any useful content whatsoever. I don't think it does; as I've said before, it's a rhetorical strategy, not a method, deployed when convenient and passed over when not.

Thursday roundup.

* In the Safford v. Redding case that got so much attention around the time of the Sotomayor nomination, the Supreme Court has ruled 8-1 that strip searching a thirteen-year-old girl on the word of another student in search of ibuprofen is unconstitutional. Clarence Thomas was the lone dissent, issuing a Cassandra-like warning of the plague of pills in underpants that is sure to follow. If we will not strip search our thirteen-year-olds, I ask you, who will?

* Nudism is the new Green.

* 'Seeking a tougher climate bill, green groups set eyes on the Senate.' So, giving up then.

* If anything it's amazing Tim Burton waited this long to do Alice in Wonderland.

* My "Haloscan is broken" AskMe went completely unanswered. Haloscan remains broken. Situation dire. Hope lost.

* Some screenshots of Fox News party-ID follies. From Cynical-C.

Friday links 3. [UPDATE: Comments closed on this post due to harassment from a banned commenter. Looking into solutions. Reopened.]

* How long will the MSM cover up the heroics of time-traveling Ronald Reagan?

* Another take on Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, this time from the Valve, about transnationalism and the American university.

* More on yesterday's unjust Supreme Court decision on the right to DNA evidence from Matt Yglesias, including a link to this striking observation from Jeffrey Toobin on John Roberts's governing judicial philosophy:

The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

* Peak Oil, risk, and the financial collapse: some speculative economics from Dmitry Orlov. Via MeFi.

* Mark Penn's superscience proves pessimism is the new microtrend. Via Gawker.

* Freakonomics considers vegetarianism-sharing.

* Possible outcomes in Iran from Gerry Seib in The Wall Street Journal. Via the Plank.

* People power prevails. After some period of extended protest, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is shown to be a fraud, his re-election rigged, and Mir Hossein Mousavi and his forces of moderation win a runoff. A long process of changing Iran's system in which real power lies in the hands of clerics operating behind the scenes begins, and the voices demanding an end to Iran's international isolation move to the fore. Such a simple and straightforward outcome seems unlikely, but that's what happened in Ukraine.

* Mr. Ahmadinejad survives, but only by moderating his position in order to steal the thunder of the reformers and beat them at their own game. U.S. officials think it's at least possible the erratic leader decides to survive by showing his critics that he actually is capable of what they claim he isn't, which is reducing Iran's isolation. He stays in power and regains his standing with internal critics by, among other things, showing new openness to discuss Iran's nuclear program with the rest of the world.

* The forces of repression win within Iran, but international disdain compounds, deepening world resolve to stop Iran's nuclear program and its sponsorship of extremists. In other words, Iran doesn't change, but the rest of the world does.

* The protests are simply crushed by security forces operating under the control of spiritual leader Ali Khamenei, the election results stand untouched, and Iran's veneer of democracy ultimately is shown to be totally fraudulent. That makes it clear that the only power that matters at all is the one the U.S. can't reach or reason with, the clerical establishment. There is no recount, no runoff, and the idea that "moderates" and "reformers" can change Iran from within dies forever.

* There is some legitimate recount or runoff, but Iran emerges with Mr. Ahmadinejad nominally in charge anyway. He emerges beleaguered, tense and defensive, knowing he sits atop a society with deep internal divides and knowing the whole world knows as well. His control is in constant doubt. What's the classic resort of such embattled leaders? Distract attention from internal problems with foreign mischief, and use a military buildup (in this case, a nuclear one) to create a kind of legitimacy that's been shown to be missing on the domestic front.

* Mr. Mousavi somehow prevails, perhaps through a runoff, and becomes president, but he operates as a ruler deeply at odds with the clerical establishment that controls the military and security forces, and deeply mistrusted by it. As a result, he's only partly in charge, and in no position to take chances with a real opening to the West. He has always supported Iran's nuclear program anyway and now has to do so with a vengeance to show that, while a reformer, he isn't a front for the West.

Friday links. Jaimee got her wisdom teeth out today and is pretty out of it, so that's my focus today. But between ice-pack rotation and gauze changes here are a few links:

* Via Srinivas, I see the Supreme Court has ruled in a (what else?) 5-4 decision that inmates do not have the right to DNA tests. Let Justice Stevens tell you why this makes no sense.

“For reasons the state has been unable or unwilling to articulate,” Justice Stevens wrote, “it refuses to allow Osborne to test the evidence at his own expense and to thereby ascertain the truth once and for all.”

* Elsewhere in the annals of justice: a Minnesota woman has been ordered to pay the RIAA $1.92 million for illegal filesharing. The 24 songs in question could have been downloaded for $2 each, so we can clearly see how the jury arrives at such a reasonable sum.

* The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is the class of 2013's summer read at Duke. I just started this last night and I can confirm it's very good; it's targeted like a laser at 1990s Jersey nerds.

* Is there any company better at the PR game? 'Pixar grants girl's dying wish to see 'Up.'

* Top Republican Environmental Achievements. Actually not a joke post.

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.

As the truth about Sonia Sotomayor's David-Dukesque opinions becomes more widely known, it's worth noting that her radical Latina-separatist tendencies date back to her college days at Princeton.

Most disturbing however, is Taylor's revelation that Sotomayor was chair of a group called "Accion Puertorriquena," (Puerto Rican Action) which I assume was a SOC group devoted to the concerns of Puerto Rican students at Princeton. She was very critical of how Princeton treated its minority students in 1974, which is absurd, because America passed the Civil Rights Act only nine years earlier and Princeton had started admitting women five years earlier. Therefore, sexism and racism were then nonexistent at the university...

As a white dude from the suburbs my objective application of universal human reason is, of course, beyond reproach, and it admits to some abstract discomfort with affirmative action. It is, on the one hand, significantly under-responsive to class privilege, which seems in my experience to be more wide-ranging and pernicious than either race or gender privilege. Second, affirmative action is, I think, under-responsive to the passage of time, especially with regard to the timeline of its eventual elimination. Finally, I regret that policies that promote justice in the main across the population sometimes require arbitrary and unfair discrimination at the level of the individual, even, in boundary cases, rising themselves to the level of injustice.

Affirmative action, in other words, is not something you'd enact if you were designing a polity from scratch—but of course America was not designed from scratch. Less than fifty years from Jim Crow, we need it, at least for now, and probably for as long as any of us will be alive. But it is not uncomplicated or easy, and a subject about which reasonable people can certainly disagree.

All this is just prelude to a particular sort of outraged right-wing response to the Sonia Sotomayor appointment, the claim that she (in Michael Goldfarb's words) "has been the recipient of preferential treatment for most of her life" or that she has (in Fred Barnes's words) "benefited from affirmative action over the years tremendously." There is, it must be said, no evidence that either of these prejudiced, kneejerk assumptions is remotely accurate; it is the mere fact that Sotomayor is Latina that not only suggests the preferential treatment she must have received but, in fact, puts it beyond all possible dispute. As these pundits now cast about aimlessly looking for proof of what they assumed went without saying, it's worth wondering what else a valedictorian of her high school class who went on to graduate from Princeton summa cum laude, winning the prestigious Pyne Prize in the process, before heading off to Yale where she served as editor of the Law Review, before pursuing a distinguished career in law including high appointments from both Democratic and Republican presidents could possibly achieve before her accomplishments were allowed to speak for themselves.

Speaking of morally odious morons, convicted felon G. Gordon Liddy has some thoughts about Sonia Sotomayor.

Libertarian Will Wilkinson, who supports "libertarian judicial activism," on Sotomayor:

As far as I can tell, there is nothing especially worrying about Sotomayor. She’s obviously super-qualified. And from what I’ve read, she seems like a highly competent, fairly moderate liberal who sticks pretty close to the law (which nobody really likes when they don’t like the law!) and is perfectly willing to side with Republican-appointed judges when that seems to her the right thing to do. What are people going batshit crazy over? I don’t get it. And I really don’t get why many Republicans have taken this opportunity to reinforce the already widespread impression that they are morally odious morons. God, I hate politics.

Via Drum.

Late-night roundup.

* Senate Republicans won't fight Sotomayor.

* Gay-rights activists are balking at taking Prop 8 to federal court; they think they'll lose at the Supremes given the courts' current composition.

* 15 Sexist Vintage Ads. So glad sexism is behind us.

Here's a clip from tonight's Hardball in which the Judicial Confirmation Network's Wendy Long makes the remarkable claim that Brown v. Board of Ed was an originalist court decision. I hadn't heard this talking point before, but apparently the right has been trying to figure out some way to spin Brown as an originalist decision for some time. Keep at it, guys! I'm sure you'll crack the code someday.

On the other hand, given that "originalism" as a judicial philosophy denotes only the median conservative position on any given issue at any given moment in time, I suppose Brown is an originalist position after all...

We're gonna need a bigger meme: Clarence Thomas and empathy, Samuel Alito and empathy.

I had no idea Republicans were nominating so many activist judges.