NINOMANIA

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:: Thursday, June 28, 2007 ::

The honesty factor in the discussion of Parents Involved, never likely to be very high, has started out low indeed, with the New York Times headline calling the Seattle and Louisville programs "integration plans." That assumes a fact in dispute: whether these two school districts were in fact trying to achieve integration, or whether their programs aimed instead at the related but crucially different goals of diversity or racial balancing.

As a matter of using English in an explanatory rather than an obfuscatory manner, "integration" implies a previous situation of segregation, which the school district seeks to remedy.

Justice Thomas argues that a racial balancing program is "integration" when, but only when, a state of previous segregation has been identified by a court and that court has ordered racial balancing as a remedy -- a "jealously-guarded exception" to the general rule against taking race into account in state action.

One doesn't have to agree with Thomas all the way on this -- e.g., perhaps a status quo ante may have been segregation, and the present remedy may therefore properly be called integration, even without that judicial finding and remedial order -- but at a minimum, the race-conscious remedy must be in response to past segregation by the state actor that formerly segregated. In today's two cases it is undisputed that de jure segregation was never the case in Seattle, and that in Louisville, it was the case in times past, but has been adjudicated no longer to be so.

Now if you want to argue that racial balancing is integration even without previous segregation, the Breyer dissent will give you a lot of help in doing that. But the New York Times doesn't argue this point at all: it assumes it, and writes its headline to reflect it, and to inculcate it into the many influential yet unreflective people who will read that headline (and perhaps only the headline) and assume they understand these cases because they "read it in the New York Times."

And then it gives us a photo of Breyer looking like he's praying, and Roberts looking like he's saying "Get outta here." Breyer the prophet, Roberts the "umpire" calling the prophet out. Just happened to be the best pictures available in the Times's photo library....

:: David M. Wagner 11:04 PM [+] ::
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The heavy fighting today was in Parents Involved, the schools/race cases, and the 120-inch guns are the Breyer dissent and the Thomas concurrence and Roberts plurality portion replying to it. Thomas:

Racial imbalance is not segregation, and the mere incantation of terms like resegregation and remediation cannot make up the difference.

Thomas, concurring, slip. op. at 2, then dive for cover.

To the extent this concurrence gets discussed in upcoming days, what will really frost some people's shorts is that in Part III, page after page, Thomas links Breyer's defer-to-local-authority reasoning to the reasoning of the Plessy majority and the briefs for the school districts in Brown and other desegregation cases.

:: David M. Wagner 11:43 AM [+] ::
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OK, Panetti doesn't rely on foreign law (except insofar as it relies on the Court's own precedents that do so). Much of the controversy involves trying to construe a precedent by Justice Powell, a sisyphean undertaking to begin with. Decisions like this, that give capital defendants a bite at the apple late in the process, when (according to Justice Thomas's dissent) state procedure already affords him numerous bites, have the effect of backloading and prolonging such litigation. That's not a good thing, but I can't get too fussed about it.

Some more analytic rigor in 8th Am. analysis would be most welcome, but again, "death is different," so if conservatives are going to lose one today, this was definitely the one to lose.

Now, about Leegin Creative and overruling Dr. Miles: the debate here is not only about the anticompetitive effects vel non of vertical price restraints, but also about the standards for overruling precedent. Justice Breyer in dissent embraces the idea -- more commonly associated with conservatives advocating the overruling of Roe -- that the Court should be less willing to overrule statutory precedents, as opposed to constitutional ones, because erroneous statutory precedents can easily be nullified by Congress.

Yes, says the majority, but the Sherman Act (like death?) is different, because it has always been understood by the Court as giving it a mandate to create a "common law" of antitrust, and therefore the Court properly takes account of shifting trends in the market and in scholarly opinion, both among lawyers (Robert Bork is extensively cited) and economists.

Aside from the fact that use of the term "common law" in connection with anything at the federal level of American lawmaking makes me want to scream and break things, the majority is right. I myself won't call it common law, because that's what states do, and I won't call it delegation, because that's what Congress tries to get away with doing to agencies (and almost always does). But it's pretty clear that Congress foresaw in the Sherman Act, and has since then been content with, the courts exercising wide interpretive latitude in this area.

:: David M. Wagner 11:02 AM [+] ::
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Gotta get me one of them "Brighton" belts from Leegin Creative. (Assuming arguendo that they make some for men.) According to the Brighton site, In addition to the belts, Leegin also makes:

• Casual and dress belts sold under the Leegin label.
• Updated contemporary and fashion forward belts sold under the Onyx and Billy Belts labels.
• Honest belts, the basic all-American belt featuring rich heavy cowhides.
• Western belts and hatbands sold under the SilverCreek, Justin, and Tony Lama labels.
• A myriad of special belts sold to other belt companies and to private label retailers (belts sold under the retailer's own label name) such as: Lands' End, L. L. Bean, Eddie Bauer, J. Crew and many more. Unique styles fashioned of materials collected from the farthest reaches of the globe under the One World label.

Go wild!

:: David M. Wagner 10:36 AM [+] ::
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The Chief has delivered the race-in-schools case. Since I quoted Lyle for the issue, allow me to quote him for the first take on the outcome:

Concluding its current Term with a historic ruling on race in public policy, the Supreme Court divided 5-4 on Thursday in striking down voluntary integration plans in the public schools of Seattle and Louisville. Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., wrote the majority opinion in the combined cases. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy did not join all of the majority opinion, but joined in the result.

:: David M. Wagner 10:21 AM [+] ::
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Whoa! Kennedy (not Stevens, as widely expected) is delivering Leegin Creative, the antitrust case, and Dr. Miles is overruled (also contrary to what the smart money had said).

This means, inter alia, that over in the chief's chair at the D.C. Circuit, I've got one happy antitrust professor!

Kennedy and the liberals also prevail in Panetti, the death penalty case, just as I and everyone else on the planet expected. The only question is the extent of the opinion's reliance on "international sources," and the decibel level of the dissent.

:: David M. Wagner 10:14 AM [+] ::
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And what is it we're waiting for?

*An antitrust opinion, testing a creaky old precedent called Dr. Miles which held that it is always a violation of the Sherman Act for manufacturers to set a minimum price for retailers to charge;

* whether the 8th Am. allows for the execution of the mentally "incompetent" under the standard used by the 5th Circuit (obviously it will turn out not to, and obviously Justice Kennedy has written the opinion; the only question is whether Justice Scalia will bother explaining UHgain why the Court is not supposed to be an ongoing constitutional convention and why a selective survey of what's done in the cooler international destinations should not determine the meaning of the U.S. Constitution);

*a decision on raced-based student allocation in public K-12s. Lyle Denniston summed up the stakes in this one as follows:

The core question is whether a public school system that is not trying to dismantle officially segregated schools may nevertheless assign some students to schools based upon their race, in order voluntarily to try to break down “racial isolation” – that is, students going to school mainly with classmates of the same race. The Court has never ruled on the use of race in K-12 schools except as a means to end official segregation.

:: David M. Wagner 10:05 AM [+] ::
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So here I am again, sitting at my viewing station, waiting for the Supreme Court to dump copy, not unlike Klingsor waiting for Parsifal to come along. (Actually, Parsifal is the "guileless fool," so he's not like the Supreme Court at all....)

I can remember when getting an early copy of a Supreme Court opinion meant having press credentials, elbowing your way to the press officer's desk through hundreds of reporters the press officer likes better than you, then tucking the opinion under your arm like a football and running for the endzone.

I Love Magic!

:: David M. Wagner 9:55 AM [+] ::
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:: Wednesday, June 27, 2007 ::

Today's Tom Toles cartoon on the Washington Post editiorial page: Supreme Court building bedecked with banner reading "BONG HITS 4 CONSERVATIVES."

Well that'll make a great decoration for my office door for a few weeks, but seriously folks, I'm not the only conservative who thinks the situation is more -- what's the word? -- nuanced than that. The Family Research Council joins me in having reservations about Morse v. Frederick:

FRC is concerned about restrictions on the free speech of students because it is often religious or conservative speech that is restricted, but in this case the Court ruled narrowly that the banner promoted illegal drug use and was therefore validly found to be disruptive.

Yes -- in fact, so narrowly that there is now a separate 1st Am. rule just for drug advocacy in public schools. Isn't there someone on the Court who usually objects to rules so narrow that they apply only to the case at issue -- and who did so, loudly, in a case decided the same day as Morse? Two, actually?

Meanwhile, Norm Ornstein is upset that CJ Roberts isn't "institution-minded" like he thought. I don't know what exactly being "institution-minded" entails, but apparently for Mr. Ornstein it rules out being vote #5 in 5-4 opinions, which, when you think about it, makes being "institution-minded" very hard to do, because you only end up being vote #5 on the other side.

Prof. Charles Fried, when he was Solicitor General, used to defend advocacy strategies that displeased conservatives with the observation, "I can count to five." Apparently this ability is not to be despised.

Yes yes yes, I know a Chief can, theoretically, craft a position so narrow that it provokes little or no controversy within the Court, as this Chief notably did in Ayotte, an abortion case of all things (written by Justice O'Connor, but issued during that interregnal period when she was still on the Court but Roberts was already Chief). But that won't always work: the conservatives aren't the only ones on the Court with some strongly held views.

Anyway, can anything be more O'Connorian than the majority opinion in Morse (written by Roberts) and the plurality opinion in Hein (joined by him)? I don't mean for conservative readers to mark me down a Roberts-hata, but re both him and Alito, the "OMG he's different from St. Sandy" rhetoric is a little overblown.

One more opinion-delivery day this season....

:: David M. Wagner 6:17 PM [+] ::
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:: Monday, June 25, 2007 ::

Turns out I was dead wrong when I said our local paper, The Virginian-Pilot, was "having a go" at Regent Law the other day. Look at this editorial. I am humbled; we are delighted.

(Note that the editorial also discusses George Mason U. Law, and its days in the former Kann's department store. Hey, I was there!)

:: David M. Wagner 3:24 PM [+] ::
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More about Thomas's Morse concurrence

The Alito concurrence, joined by Kennedy, indirectly replies to Thomas. Though without coming near Thomas's level of historical research (perhaps they will do so in the future if it become necessary; perhaps I should), they rely on a supplement to Thomas's narrative: even if public schools were originally poolings of local parental authority, they are no longer such:

The public schools are invaluable and beneficent institutions, but they are, after all, organs of the State. When public school authorities regulate student speech, they act as agents of the State; they do not stand in the shoes of the students’ parents. It is a dangerous fiction to pretend that parents simply delegate their authority—including their authority to determine what their children may say and hear—to public school authorities. It is even more dangerous to assume that such a delegation of authority somehow strips public school authorities of their status as agents of the State. Most parents, realistically, have no choice but to send their children to a public school and little ability to influence what occurs in the school. It is therefore wrong to treat public school officials, for purposes relevant to the First Amendment, as if they were private, nongovernmental actors standing in loco parentis.

(Yes, as you can see, now that the opinions are up at Cornell's extremely useful site, whence they can be cut and pasted, unlike the Court's own pdf versions, I'm getting lazy and starting to quote a lot. I'll stop now.)

:: David M. Wagner 1:33 PM [+] ::
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Thomas's Bong Hits concurrence and the Meyer-Pierce doctrine

Justice Thomas contributes a remarkable concurrence to Morse v. Frederick, the Bong Hits case, arguing that Tinker was wrongly decided. This concurrence will have to be taken seriously. It is based on history, specifically, the fact that public schools were halls of almost Dickensian teacher-authority and student-docility, even in times when states were enacting 1st-Am.-like protections in their state constitutions (so there goes the incorporation problem).

Thomas also relies on the in loco parentis doctrine, in a way that is very friendly to traditional parental rights: parents had the right (some might say the duty) to discipline their children, and so schools that acted in loco parentis had the same right.

In an important footnote, Thomas notes that Tinker's reliance on the Court's preeminent parental rights cases, Meyer v. Nebraska and Pierce v. Society of Sisters, was misplaced. Of course: these are parental rights cases, and tend to support Thomas's in loco parentis theory more than Tinker's students' rights theory. But Tinker, though written by Justice Fortas, shows the influence of Justice Douglas's career-long project to uproot Meyer and Pierce from parental rights (which he did not like: see his dissent in Yoder) and reformulate them as 1st Am cases. He tried this in Griswold, though without the Tinker trick of making Meyer and Pierce be about students' rights, when they are clearly about parents' and teachers' rights.

As my earlier posts show, I am not viscerally sympathetic to Thomas's position, nor committed to agreeing with it. But it will have to be thought about.

:: David M. Wagner 12:39 PM [+] ::
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Morse v. Frederick, aka Bong Hits: Well, from the lineup, I guess I'm a liberal today.

I fear that what we have here is a drug exception to the First Amendment.* At least if you think Tinker was bascially right about public-school students' 1st Am rights -- and the Court purports to adhere to it -- then what else can we make of the Chief's opinion placing "advocacy of use of illegal drugs" at the head of his opionion for the Court?

A few years ago the Court declined to recognize an across-the-board "drug exception" to the Fourth Amendment "knock and announce" requirement. But in myriad other ways, the war on drugs has greatly changed our law, and not necessarily for the better.

Another, more benign way to read this is that a bubble of Fraser-Kuhlmeier authority travels beyond the campus, to any "school-sanctioned event" during "normal school hours." I have no problem with Fraser or Kuhlmeier, but I'd just as soon they stayed back in the school building, or in venues where the speaker could reasonably be taken as speaking for the school.

*I trust I'm not turning into John Paul Stevens, but he says something similar in his dissent, which I had not yet read when I wrote this post: "[C]arving out pro-drug speech for uniquely harsh treatment finds no support in our case law and is inimical to the values protected by the First Amendment."

:: David M. Wagner 12:19 PM [+] ::
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"Flast in his first book wrote about, wrote about..."

The Hein plurality opinion contains some good language on the separation-of-powers importance of standing. It goes on to distinguish Flast v. Cohen by -- well, do you remember the Monty Python sketch about the "Summarizing Proust" competition? Well, as Justice Scalia's scathing concurrence (a type of opinion that I believe he invented) in this case shows, the years since Flast have seen a number of "Distinguishing Flast" competitions, won by a bewildering variety of contestants -- so bewildering that, as Scalia discusses, Judges Flaum and Easterbrook declined to take this case en banc, not because they agreed with the panel's expansion of Flast, but because Higher Authority was too inconsistent to be worth the full circuit's time in trying to apply it.

The distinction that wins today's Distinguishing Flast contest is the distinction between a specific and directive line-item in an appropriations bill, and an executive actions funded out of more general appropriations to the executive branch. Thus, I suppose, a line-item that says "the Secretary of Education shall give a speech praising religion" would give rise to Flast standing, but the speech itself, funded by an appropriation that merely allows him a salary, does not.

Interestingly, this distinction could have been based on a strict, Thomas-esque reading of the constitutional clause allegly violated: it is directed at Congress, which is told to "make no law respecting an establishment of religion." It does not prohibit executive officers from praising religion in their speeches; in fact by its terms it is not directed to executive (or judicial, or state) officers at all.

But this cannot be the plurality's meaning, because it goes on to list several hypothetical violations of the Establishment Clause by the President, so as to assure us that such conduct would not go unredressed even after today's ruling.

Scalia's concurrence is a comprehensive tour of the wanderings of the standing issue, leading to the conclusion that it would be better -- and more consistent with post-Flast cases -- to overrule Flast than to "beat[] [it] to a pulp" and then "send it out to the lower courts...more incomprehensible than ever."

Has Flast been weakened, or is it now in a "whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger" position? Of course, Roe could be sustituted for Flast in much of the Scalia concurrence....

Final note: in quoting Tocqueville, Scalia uses the Mansfield translation, which is -- wait for it! -- Straussssssssssssian!! Watch for exposes in the New York Review of Books, impeachment demands from the Larouchies -- the works!

:: David M. Wagner 11:55 AM [+] ::
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Judging from Lyle's post (which seems a bit hastily written -- but hey, he's writing off an audio feed in a press trailer so he can be the firstest with the mostest, so let's cut him a lot of slack), the election law case is only moderately great.

That's all from me until I've had a shifty at the opinions.

:: David M. Wagner 10:50 AM [+] ::
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Oooooo! The election case must be really great if Souter is reading his dissent from the bench...!

:: David M. Wagner 10:41 AM [+] ::
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Hey, Washington Post -- love ya, baby, but you're being a little narcissistic in keeping your website full of your continuing story on Cheney when the Supreme Court is busily dumping copy. CNN and Fox are laming out too. Well done, friends at SCOTUSblog!

:: David M. Wagner 10:35 AM [+] ::
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Sounds like the students lost the Bong Hits 4 Jesus Case. For the record, I was for the students here, on the assumption that the conduct was not on school property and not at an event where the reasonable observer would assume the school had approved the message. Apparently Chief Justice Roberts and at least four other Justices see it differently.

:: David M. Wagner 10:24 AM [+] ::
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Hein v. Freedom From Religion Foundation, the case on taxpayer standing to challenge in Establishment Clause cases, seems to have come down 5-4, and SCOTUSblog says Justice Alito is delivering the opinion. SCOTUSblog (Lyle Denniston reporting) says: "The Court did not overrule Flast v. Cohen, also two Justices in the majority urged it to do so." Gosh, I wonder who!

:: David M. Wagner 10:11 AM [+] ::
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:: Saturday, June 23, 2007 ::

So here's what I wonder about TSAA v. Brentwood Academy (Brentwood II): why didn't Thomas join the Kennedy concurrence? If he had, it would have become the opinion of the Court: TSAA would still win; a wildly off-purpose expansion of the First Amendment would still have been avoided; but the expansion of Ohralik beyond attorney-client communications, deplored by Kennedy and the three who joined him (including Our Hero), would have been avoided.

Was it because Thomas insisted on advocating (quite rightly) the reversal of Brentwood I, which held, outrageously, that a private voluntary association, governing private and public school sports equally, is a state actor? But he could still have written separately on this point, just as he did (Scalia joining him) in Gonzalez v. Carhart, to stake out his ground that the precedents are wrong though the Court applies them correctly.

Maybe it was because he also wanted to stress his disagreement with the majority's use of Pickering. Kennedy and his concurrers agree with the controlling opinion on this one. But Kreacher wonders: this case has yielded an opinion that is partly for the Court and partly plurality. Couldn't it have yielded a Kennedy opinion, joined in full by the Chief, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, with Stevens et al. writing separately (if they insist) to apply Ohralik and Pickering?

The result we have would be explained if Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, and Alito all believe quite strongly, and in contrast with Thomas, that the relationship between Brentwood Academy and the TSAA is indistinguisable for 1st Am. purpses from the employee-employer relationships in the Pickering line of cases. But why would they think that? Just as the plurality's application of Ohralik threatens to make non-attorney-client communications as vulnerable to regulation as attorney-client communications, doesn't the majority's appication of Pickering threaten the 1st Am. rights of private schools by treating them as employees of a voluntary and organization they have joined for non-economic reasons? (Well, for reasons different in kind from the reasons people take jobs.)

Hm.

:: David M. Wagner 10:03 PM [+] ::
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:: Wednesday, June 20, 2007 ::

Scalia stands up for Jack Bauer at Canadian conference. I note that the Toronto Globe and Mail, on second and subsequent references, calls him "Judge" Scalia. But then, they speak Canadian up there.... :)

:: David M. Wagner 2:46 PM [+] ::
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:: Monday, June 18, 2007 ::

The local paper put us under the microscope this morning, and it could not help but notice our climbing average LSAT and skyrocketing bar-pass rate under our present Dean.

Should I have said the paper "had a go at us," as I was planning to? My colleagues don't think so. Well, I'm an old newspaperman as well as an old law prof, and I couldn't help noticing that a freshman House Democrat's smarmy questioning about our decade-ago bar-pass rate at the Goodling hearing appeared above the fold.

Also, who needed those quotes from Jon Stewart and Bill Maher? Stewart and Maher are -- hello? -- co-me-di-ans. In what other context is the work product of comedians cited to make a substantive point? Leno and Letterman have a go every night at whoever's in the White House, but no editor would think of citing them to help define Clinton, or even Bush.

Yet, on the jump (beloved colleagues: the "jump" is the part of the story that's further inside the paper; no need to thank me), we find some very interesting things, e.g.:

Location was key for Joe Migliozzi Jr., a 1994 graduate. Neither evangelical nor conservative, Migliozzi chose Regent as it was the law school closest to his home in Norfolk.

Migliozzi, who is the lead death penalty defense attorney in southeastern Virginia, said Regent's law education became "incredibly well-balanced" under Brauch.

As for ideology, "there are a number of people attending that school who do so strictly because of what Pat Robertson represents to them," Migliozzi said. "I don't think that is a majority anymore."

I don't know Migliozzi, but I'd like to. Then there's this:

Barry W. Lynn, a minister and lawyer who leads the liberal Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said he found Regent students eager to debate ideas when he visited the school.

"If someone walks into a courtroom and says, 'Oh, the lawyer on the other side graduated from Regent, I don't have to prepare,' they're likely to have his or her head handed to them on a platter," Lynn said.

:: David M. Wagner 7:17 PM [+] ::
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I've been arguing online today about Bowles v. Russell, where the Court, 5-4, held that a criminal defendant seeking habeas review in federal court is bound by the time limit fixed in the Fed.R.App.P., notwithstanding that the federal trial judge told him he had three extra days; the 14-day limit (itself a limit on an extensnion only available in limited circumstances that apply here) is jurisdictional, the Court says.

Conservatives, especially Christian ones, have to hate cases like this, because the rule-of-law principle is pitted against justice itself. Bowles is "only" facing a 15-year term, but nothing in the Court's opinion turned on its not being a capital case. Indeed, the case has prompted memories of that of Roger Keith Coleman, who was in fact executed. His federal appeal from his Virginia conviction was likewise jurisdictionally barred, and in turning it aside, Justice O'Connor -- not Justice Scalia, mind you, but Justice O'Connor, the one who was willing to devise a new legal rule for almost every fact pattern she saw -- began the opinion: "This is a case about federalism."

Coleman's guilt has since been sustained by DNA tests long sought by his supporters, but there was enough that was hasty about his trial that, even if it was "a case about federalism" in the posture in which it reached the Court, one has to wince.

And yet -- and yet -- do we declare all procedural deadlines merely advisory in criminal cases? Would that be itself the rule of law, and if so, would the rule of law be well served by the consequences? No one should be happy about the Bowles case, but I'm not yet persuaded it's wrong.

:: David M. Wagner 7:00 PM [+] ::
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:: Wednesday, June 06, 2007 ::

Festive day on the Wall Street Journal editorial page!

First, the lead editorial traces (in light of a possible Murdoch takeover) the admirable history of the Journal's independent "free men and free markets" editorial page. Sort of thing that makes me remember with fondness my own days as a cub editorial writer (for a different paper). I love teaching law, and I worked hard to get here; but if I were ever to stop, I could happily imagine being an editorial page editor, or even just senior editorial writer. I'll tell you this: the space pressure in editorial writing (and in blogging) makes for much better writing than the bloated, sycophantic genre known as law-review writing.

Then, Holman Jenkins Jr. has a piece likewise inspired by MOAS (Murdoch-originated angst syndrome). Main point: entrepreneurs who make their money primarily in the news business make the best newspaper owners. In illustrating this point, Jenkins spots the particular virtues of both the Murdoch-owned (but Alexander Hamilton-founded) New York Post and the Graham-family-owned Washington Post:

What makes the New York Post such a delight is partly the entertaining suspicion (most of the time probably unwarranted) that hidden agendas and childish rivalries are behind the decision to bash this muckety-muck and spare that. Not for nothing is the Post the favorite read of New York's catty media, social and business elite....

As for the Washington Post:

...[I]t's an exceptionally brainy newspaper.

Intelligence as a quality is hit or miss in most newspaper writing and editing. At the [Washington] Post, they seem to have instituitionalized it. You rarely find the collapses of critical judgment that seem to be routine at other papers when, say, a trial lawyer appears claiming evidence of racism in the auto dealership industry or at an oil company.

Absent too are the excesses of billboard journalism -- the habit of editors casually intruding a noisy paragraph that oversells and distorts the story below, leaving an unsatisfying jumble of facts that don't live up to the assertions at the top.

We don't love everything in the Post or all its reporters, and it has certainly benefited from conservative competition from the Washington Times....

Amen to that. The Washington Times, which of course has issues of its own, will probably never overtake the Post -- but it long ago established itself as what Washingtonians call a "necessary second paper." The capital's new giveaway tabloids are also a breath of fresh air; it's a scandal for Washington to be a one-paper town, as it was from the demise of the Star in 1980 to the birth of the Times in '82. Jenkins continues, re the competition-improved Post:

...[T]he Post's editorial page has become remarkably more sensible in recent years.... The company itself is principally in the news business....

Do WSJ reporters fear that Murdoch will insist (as he should) on tighter writing? Says Jenkins:

He's not the only one. Washington Post Executive Editor Len Downie has instructed his crew to write shorter too -- and the Post already strikes me as a very well-written paper: News stories are rounded, complete but not overwritten. They also have a semblance of being written by somebody with a living mind, not just re-executing the media's general template on a given news event....

And last but not least, Brian M. Carney writes about the differences between American and European approaches to global warming.

:: David M. Wagner 9:44 PM [+] ::
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:: Monday, June 04, 2007 ::

SCOTUS nomination this summer?

Jan Crawford Greenburg reports:

The White House is not expecting a retirement, but it wants to be ready if a surprise announcement occurs, sources said.

And so:

The White House is developing a short list of possible Supreme Court nominees so President Bush can move swiftly if a justice retires at the end of June....

Who? Women and minorities first. There are some outstanding ones, especially JRB, and she's on the list:

[A]dvisers are focusing on possible nominees who are believed to be solid
judicial conservatives and would galvanize the base at a time when Bush
desperately needs its support....

In that camp are federal appeals court Judges Priscilla Owen and Janice
Rogers Brown....

Galvanize me!

:: David M. Wagner 4:52 PM [+] ::
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