WaPo highlights a child's delight in discovering 2 males having sex.

It's horseshoe crab mating time in Delaware.

The arthropod orgy was well underway when Breanne Preisen trudged over the low dune onto the narrow beach, where tens of thousands of horseshoe crabs were getting down to the age-old business of reproduction.

“There’s a female,” Preisen said, pointing at one of the peculiar sea-things crawling along an undeveloped stretch of the Delaware Bay shoreline. “She has a male attached to her.”

Preisen inspected the cluster of horseshoe crabs more closely, then corrected herself: “Two males!” She smiled.

Of course, she smiled. The young girl has been properly educated and enlightened, and The Washington Post approves.

Many years ago, I was a young girl in Delaware, and I found 2 horseshoe crabs and was delighted that they were "attached" — the word I used — to each other. I had no idea what sex they were or, in fact, that they were having sex. If I had realized what they were doing, I wouldn't have grabbed the tail of the one in back and dragged the fucking couple along with me.

Election day in Wisconsin.

If you're here in Wisconsin, have you voted yet? What's the turnout where you are?

Who's going to win? David Blaska has his predictions:

Supreme Court: Odana Road from Midvale Boulevard to Monroe Street is a blizzard of Kloppenburg signs -- many of them homemade. Has there ever been a state supreme court race this passionate? I do love the challenger’s motto, “Elections have consequences.” Tell that to Marty Beil. No pretense here, folks. This is a “do-over” of the November 2 election that Scott Walker won by a 52-47 margin...

Yes, wish is father to the thought. But I’m knocking on wood that pro-Walker voters are just as energized as the unionistas responsible for the Siege of the Capitol 2011.

A squeaker but the good guy wins thanks to out-state disgust over bully-boy tactics: David Prosser 50.5% over JoAnne Kloppenburg. But boy, this will be close.

Will it? It seems to me it could be anything, and the interpretation of what it means after we see what it is could be anything.

***

"Out-state" doesn't mean "out-of-state." I learned that term only recently. It refers to the parts of Wisconsin beyond Madison and Milwaukee. Another term I saw for the first time is "Wisconsin nice." It was in this Wall Street Journal column 3 days ago informing us that "It seems 'Wisconsin Nice' is now gone with the wind." I've been living here since 1984 and I've never heard of "Wisconsin nice." Maybe you need to go "out-state" to hear about it, or maybe only out-of-staters look at us and say that. Maybe the truly nice people don't think of themselves as nice. It's just the way they are. I don't include myself. I didn't grow up in Wisconsin, and I don't see why I would have picked up any niceness by living in Madison as an adult. Niceness needs to be more deeply ingrained. I grew up in Delaware, where people seemed normal to me. I went back recently and was stunned by how surly people were! Proof of Wisconsin nice? Perhaps. I don't know. I'm a stranger here and in Delaware now too.

Anyway: Vote, people. Wisconsin will have the court it deserves.

Hey, I want to be in this book!

I was raised by Delaware!

"Once you understand that to the credentialed-instead-of-educated, the Constitution is a wish-fulfillment device..."

"... rather than, you know, an authoritative text, it all makes sense. And there’s no real need to know or care about the words in the text, since it means whatever you want it to mean at the moment."

Says Glenn Reynolds, linking to my post on Coons, O’Donnell, and the Separation of Church and State.

A word needs to be said about the mocking laughter that instantly erupted from the law students in the audience. Presumably, that sound meant we are smart and you are dumb. Where did they learn to treat a guest at their law school — Widener Law School — with such disrespect? They hooted O'Donnell down, and she never got a chance to explain her point. What does that say about the climate for debate in law schools? Not only did they feel energized to squelch the guest they politically opposed, but they felt sure of their own understanding of the law.

I've been studying law myself since 1978, and I still puzzle over things and try to work my way through problems. If a speaker at my school makes a statement that sounds outlandish to me — me with 32 years of studying law — I may display a puzzled expression or a smile, but I hear the person out and entertain the possibility that he has a point and that even if the point is wrong, I will have learned some new perspective on the ways of being wrong or how another human being's mind works. I try to create that atmosphere in the classroom.

What is the atmosphere at Widener? Is there no intellectual curiosity? No love of debate? No grasp of how complex constitutional law problems can be?

ADDED: Here's the video:

O'Donnell and Coons on the separation of church and state.

Somehow, I can't escape the feeling of obligation to post about this. It's a bit annoying to me, because I cannot stand when people jump to the conclusion that someone they want to believe is stupid is being stupid when they say something that seems wrong. Think first. Is it wrong?

And I hate the converse — the assumption that the supposedly smart person has said something smart. Stop. Slow down. Read/listen closely. It's often the case that what we have is a banal political disagreement. And that's what I think this O'Donnell/Coons thing is.

I really wish I had the verbatim transcript of the colloquy, and that's the main reason I've been dragging my feet posting on this. The reporters aren't presenting the quotes in a reliable fashion. And we need to begin with stark clarity that the text of the Establishment Clause is: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."

So let's look at the reporting:

"Where in the Constitution is separation of church and state?" O'Donnell asked while Democrat Chris Coons, an attorney, sat a few feet away.

Plainly, the Constitution does not say "separation of church and state," so there's nothing stupid there. It's provocative, because many people like that gloss on the text.

Coons responded that O'Donnell's question "reveals her fundamental misunderstanding of what our Constitution is. ... The First Amendment establishes a separation."

He's talking about interpretations of the text, and she was talking about the text. What we're hearing is 2 individuals talking past each other.

She interrupted to say, "The First Amendment does? ... So you're telling me that the separation of church and state, the phrase 'separation of church and state,' is in the First Amendment?"

She's telling him to pay attention to her limited point about the text.

He noted again the First Amendment's ban on establishment of religion.

Ah, here's where I hate reporters. Give me the quote. I don't think Coons quite gets it. Ah. Here. He says: "Government shall make no establishment of religion."

O'Donnell reacts: "That's in the First Amendment?" And, in fact, it's not. The First Amendment doesn't say "government." It says "Congress." And since the discussion is about what local school boards can do, the difference is highly significant.

Also, it isn't "shall make no establishment of religion." It's "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." There's a lot one could say about the difference between those 2 phrases, and I won't belabor it here. Suffice it to say that it was not stupid for O'Donnell to say "That's in the First Amendment?" — because it's not. Coons was presenting a version of what's in the cases interpreting the text, not the text itself.

The 2 were talking past each other, trying to look good and make the other look bad. It is a disagreement about law between 2 individuals who are not running for judge. It's not detailed legal analysis. It's a political debate and this is a political disagreement. An important one, no doubt. But it can't be resolved by laughing at one person and calling her an idiot, something I find quite repellent.

In which of the states is it easiest to talk to strangers?

I haven't traveled to all the states, but I've been to most of them. And while there is a lot of variety among people in different places, you can tell that there is something of a local personality. You may not notice it when you live there, but it really stands out when you travel through. For example, a few years ago, I traveled back to Wilmington, Delaware, where I grew up (and my father grew up). I was struck by how taciturn the people were. I wanted to strike up conversations. I grew up here! I ate in this restaurant in the 1950s! But I couldn't get a response from anyone. Crazy lady from out of town thinks she can talk to me. At least it helped me understand my father better.

But what's the best state if you want to travel through and have some nice, random conversations with strangers — where they won't just be polite and pretend they like you because that's the right way to act or because they want your business, but where they truly openly and easily just go right ahead and roll right into a conversation about any number of things, not boring you with their life story or problems or anything like that, but laughing at your little observations and offering up little morsels of things they happen to know? I'm going to say: Indiana!

ADDED: All this talk of Indiana made me want to dig out this passage from Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle":

Crosby asked me what my name was and what my business was. I told him, and his wife Hazel recognized my name as an Indiana name. She was from Indiana, too.

"My God," she said, "are you a Hoosier?"

I admitted I was.

"I'm a Hoosier, too," she crowed. "Nobody has to be ashamed of being a Hoosier."

"I'm not," I said. "I never knew anybody who was."

"Hoosiers do all right. Lowe and I've been around the world twice, and everywhere we went we found Hoosiers in charge of everything.

"That's reassuring."

"You know the manager of that new hotel in Istanbul?"

"No."

"He's a Hoosier. And the military-whatever-he-is in Tokyo . . ."

"Attaché," said her husband.

"He's a Hoosier," said Hazel. "And the new Ambassador to Yugoslavia . . . "

"A Hoosier?" I asked.

"Not only him, but the Hollywood Editor of Life magazine, too, And that man in Chile . . ."

"A Hoosier, too?"

"You can't go anywhere a Hoosier hasn't made his mark," she said.

"The man who wrote Ben Hur was a Hoosier."

"And James Whitcomb Riley."

"Are you from Indiana, too?" I asked her husband.

"Nope. I'm a Prairie Stater. 'Land of Lincoln,' as they say."

"As far as that goes," said Hazel triumphantly, "Lincoln was a Hoosier, too. He grew up in Spencer County."

"Sure," I said.

"I don't know what it is about Hoosiers," said Hazel, "but they've sure got something. If somebody was to make a list, they'd be amazed."

"That's true," I said.

She grasped me firmly by the arm. "We Hoosiers got to stick together."

"Right"

"You call me 'Mom."'

"What?"

"Whenever I meet a young Hoosier, I tell them, 'You call me Mom."'

"Uh huh."

"Let me hear you say it," she urged.

"Mom?"

She smiled and let go of my arm. Some piece of clockwork had completed its cycle. My calling Hazel "Mom" had shut it off, and now Hazel was rewinding it for the next Hoosier to come along.

Hazel's obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon. Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows--and any nation, anytime, anywhere.

As Bokonon invites us to sing along with him:

If you wish to study a granfalloon,
Just remove the skin of a toy balloon.

IN THE COMMENTS: EDH says:

I'm from Massachusetts, and if you ask me, the people around here are too god damn friendly.

So, I don't know where all these bastids get the silly idea that people from Massachusetts aren't friendly.

What the fuck are you look'n at?

(A dramatization.)

What to do in Wilmington, Delaware.

I'm glad to see that, among other things, Adam went to the Charcoal Pit.

That place has been around since the 1950s, and I was around back then to go there all the time with with my grandparents (who, by the way, loved "What's My Line?")

Sending his text message at 3 a.m. — the time Hillary made emblematic — Obama picks Biden.

Here's the NYT report. I didn't stay up all night waiting to see the long-withheld news. Did you? I woke up naturally, and Obama's VP pick wasn't my first thought, but it was my third or fourth thought, and I picked up the iPhone and checked — no, not for a text message! — I wouldn't hand over my number — I checked Safari to see the news.

So it's Biden.

1. That's what we expected.

2. Why the hell did he drag it out so long?

3. Someone will be very happy and not just because I lost a bet to him.

4. Respect for Delaware, my home state, despite its piddling supply of electoral votes, instead of pandering to some better endowed, showier state.

5. Biden's a good guy, experienced.

6. Another senator, not a governor, all these senators.

7. McCain should pick a governor, and now McCain can pick Romney, because his somewhat awkward facial expressions will be fully balanced by Biden's — it's a wash, smile-wise.

8. He picked the guy who called him "clean" and "articulate," so maybe that means he's not as thin-skinned as he's seemed.

9. The man known for his orating powers has picked a man who loves to talk but is somewhat out-of-control in his speech — perhaps he sees him as some kind of counterpart, for Obama has plenty of verbal glitches when he's speaking spontaneously.

10. That 3 a.m. text-time will needle hold-out Hillary lovers.

11. What do I really think of Biden? I should go back over my old posts tagged "Biden" and see what I've said over the years. But that will be the next post. [Done here.]

The David Brooks column about Joe Biden brings back a memory of my grandfather and makes me ask a question about Wilmington, Delaware.

David Brooks has a column today called "Hoping It's Biden," and I noticed this:

Biden is a lunch-bucket Democrat. His father was rich when he was young — played polo, cavorted on yachts, drove luxury cars. But through a series of bad personal and business decisions, he was broke by the time Joe Jr. came along. They lived with their in-laws in Scranton, Pa., then moved to a dingy working-class area in Wilmington, Del. At one point, the elder Biden cleaned boilers during the week and sold pennants and knickknacks at a farmer’s market on the weekends.

His son was raised with a fierce working-class pride — no one is better than anyone else. Once, when Joe Sr. was working for a car dealership, the owner threw a Christmas party for the staff. Just as the dancing was to begin, the owner scattered silver dollars on the floor and watched from above as the mechanics and salesmen scrambled about for them. Joe Sr. quit that job on the spot.

This fascinates me. I was born in Wilmington, Delaware and lived in or near it (in Newark) until I was 12. My father grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, and his parents — my grandparents Mom and Pop — lived there until they died. That is, unlike Biden, who started out in Scranton, my family was deeply embedded in the culture of Wilmington, Delaware. And reading that Brooks column called to mind something about Pop that I hadn't thought of in decades. Now, Pop was a perfectly nice man — you know Pop, I wrote about him fondly back here — but he used to toss nickels on the floor for the fun of having us scramble for them.

Is this some kind of Delaware thing?

ADDED: Was it "fierce working-class pride" to take umbrage at the coins tossed on the floor? Or was it the old rich-man pride? In my family, no one perceived it as offensive to induce a coin scramble. It was just fun. Obviously, the activity works when the coins are much more meaningful to one person than the other. Someone is willing to toss the coins for the fun of seeing the scramble, and someone else is willing to scramble. But what kind of person is disgusted by the display? The regular Joe?

ANOTHER THING: Amazing Delaware fact about Althouse: Long ago, I demonstrated how to make a hat to Governor Boggs.

"Obama VP buzz squarely on Biden."

Says CNN.

Love the pic at the link.

Biden is looking... kind of Obamaesque.

The sunglasses say: It will be Biden!

Okay with me. I like seeing my home state of Delaware get some attention. But if it's Biden, I am going to lose a bet that I made a long time ago.

Vegetable music.

This is actually a whole YouTube genre. Music played with vegetables. I've been fascinated by music played on things other than musical instruments ever since I saw the Incredible String Band in concert in 1969 and they kicked an old trunk for a bass drum. Or maybe ever since I was a kid in Delaware playing music with a blade of grass:



No, that's not me! We didn't have videocams in the 50s. Plus, that seems to be Canada.

"The bigoted past of Ron Paul."

Look, I said it on Bloggingheads: The things Ron Paul has been saying made me suspect that his libertarianism was a cover for racism. Listen beginning at 8:07 [ADDED: You have to begin in the Ron Paul segment — here — and then go to 8:07]: "I feel like the people who are so enamored with those states' rights positions and that libertarian position... Coming from the South... an older person... who grew up in the segregated South... How do I know he's not a racist? ... I find it offensive, the positions he's taking, but maybe it's the pretty face that you put on the position that is, if not really racist, just insensitive about race?"

Now, James Kirchick has found the shocking evidence:

[L]ong before he was the darling of antiwar activists on the left and right, Paul was in the newsletter business. In the age before blogs, newsletters occupied a prominent place in right-wing political discourse. With the pages of mainstream political magazines typically off-limits to their views (National Review editor William F. Buckley having famously denounced the John Birch Society), hardline conservatives resorted to putting out their own, less glossy publications. These were often paranoid and rambling.... And a few of the most prominent bore the name of Ron Paul....

What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing--but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics....

Take, for instance, a special issue of the Ron Paul Political Report, published in June 1992, dedicated to explaining the Los Angeles riots of that year. "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began," read one typical passage. According to the newsletter, the looting was a natural byproduct of government indulging the black community with "'civil rights,' quotas, mandated hiring preferences, set-asides for government contracts, gerrymandered voting districts, black bureaucracies, black mayors, black curricula in schools, black tv shows, black tv anchors, hate crime laws, and public humiliation for anyone who dares question the black agenda." It also denounced "the media" for believing that "America's number one need is an unlimited white checking account for underclass blacks."...

Such views on race also inflected the newsletters' commentary on foreign affairs. South Africa's transition to multiracial democracy was portrayed as a "destruction of civilization" that was "the most tragic [to] ever occur on that continent, at least below the Sahara"; and, in March 1994, a month before Nelson Mandela was elected president, one item warned of an impending "South African Holocaust."

Martin Luther King Jr. earned special ire from Paul's newsletters....

While bashing King, the newsletters had kind words for the former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke....

Like blacks, gays earn plenty of animus in Paul's newsletters....

The rhetoric when it came to Jews was little better...

Paul's newsletters didn't just contain bigotry. They also contained paranoia--specifically, the brand of anti-government paranoia that festered among right-wing militia groups during the 1980s and '90s....

What's more, Paul's connections to extremism go beyond the newsletters....

Then there is Gary North, who has worked on Paul's congressional staff. North is a central figure in Christian Reconstructionism, which advocates the implementation of Biblical law in modern society...

Read the whole thing.

No word yet from Andrew Sullivan, who endorsed Ron Paul as the Republican nominee back here, with what now looks like exquisitely bad effusion: "[T]hese are principles that made me a conservative in the first place... He's the real thing in a world of fakes and frauds."

ADDED: Based on reading the comments here, I realize I need to stress what I was talking about in that Bloggingheads episode. You can listen to the whole segment. But I'm not saying that every older person who grew up in the South should be suspected of racism. I'm saying that a person who espouses the ideas that Ron Paul does — opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, blaming Abraham Lincoln for starting the Civil War and thinking it should never have been fought — makes me want to know more, and when he is also a man of a certain age from the South, that tweaks my suspicion up a notch. I don't think all libertarians or advocates of "states' rights" are racists, but I think some of them are, and many of them are insufficiently concerned about racial inequity (or they would care to make an effort to explain, when they take these positions, why they are willing to risk unfortunate consequences). Finally, I read in the comments that I grew up in the Northeast. This is not so. I grew up in Delaware, and, while I did not think of it as North or South — it was a border state in the Civil War — every black person I have ever talked to about this has assured me — sometimes after recovering from a laughing fit — that the South starts in Delaware.

UPDATE: Matt Welch collects the Ron Paul blowback. And here's Ron Paul's response:

The quotations in The New Republic article are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts.

In fact, I have always agreed with Martin Luther King, Jr. that we should only be concerned with the content of a person's character, not the color of their skin....

This story is old news and has been rehashed for over a decade. It's once again being resurrected for obvious political reasons on the day of the New Hampshire primary.

When I was out of Congress and practicing medicine full-time, a newsletter was published under my name that I did not edit. Several writers contributed to the product. For over a decade, I have publically [sic] taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name.

I don't quite understand. Writing went out under your name, but you didn't pay much attention to it? Why not? A casual conclusion is that you generally agreed and enjoyed having your name on it. Are you saying your name was appropriated and the whole thing was a fraud? It doesn't seem so.

AND: Andrew Sullivan says: "I also want to reiterate that those of us who supported the Ron Paul movement find these sentiments despicable." Why are you speaking for others, Andrew? You are not a native American. Why do you assume you channel the beliefs of others?

"We... fully, freely, and entirely approve of, assent to, ratify, and confirm, the said Constitution."

It was 220 years ago today that Delaware — my home state — became the first state to ratify the United States Constitution:

We deputies of the people of the Delaware state, in Convention met, having taken in our serious consideration the Federal Constitution proposed and agreed upon by the deputies of the United States in a General Convention held at the city of Philadelphia, on the seventeenth day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-seven, have approved, assented to, ratified, and confirmed, and by these presents do, in virtue of the power and authority to us given, for and in behalf of ourselves and our constituents, fully, freely, and entirely approve of, assent to, ratify, and confirm, the said Constitution.

Done in Convention, at Dover, this seventh day of December, in the year aforesaid, and in the year of the independence of the United States of America the twelfth.

It is a shame that December 7th is remembered as a dark day when America was attacked, when it could be seen as a bright day in our history, the beginning of constitutional ratification.

"In the year of the independence of the United States of America the twelfth" — is an interesting phrase. Was there ever an effort to begin numbering the years beginning with the revolution (as was done for a time in France)?

ADDED: Other Delaware natives appreciate Delaware Day.

"Why should a school even bother with something like a 'Think Campaign' or a 'bias reporting mechanism'?"

Asks Wisconsin 1L Robert Phansalkar, analyzing the "Think. Respect." program at UW, which we've talked about on this blog here and here. I was critical of the program, which enlisted students to file reports on other students when they felt disrespected. What is heartening is that the students didn't go for it. They didn't file reports!

There has to be some reason for why this program simply did not take off. Apathy seems to be the traditional culprit of this kind of botched experiment, but, alas, the program would not have even started had this been the case. Rather, the real culprit behind this newly forgotten campaign and policy’s fall from grace is that they were ill-conceived from the get-go....

[W]e simply do not rush to a computer to fill out a form online when someone has offended us — we confront the person. We do not go to counseling to discuss an offensive remark — we talk it through. And when someone’s actions are so egregious that we can’t deal with the action ourselves, we turn to others, namely, the police.

The assumption that students simply cannot take care of themselves is the root of the very kind of paternalism that the “Think Campaign” perpetuates. The campaign and reporting forms advance the mentality that we cannot deal with these problems on our own.

But, as lack of enthusiasm and disuse of these programs plainly show, we are more than capable of dealing with the racism of today on our own.

Great.

ADDED: At least Wisconsin didn't go to the crazy extreme seen at the University of Delaware:

Delaware students have been not only inculcated with the lunatic view that all white Americans are racists (and that "REVERSE RACISM" is a "term ... created and used by white people to deny their white privilege") but also:

* Told to confess their "privilege" or lament their "oppression";

* Informed that "white culture is a melting pot of greed, guys, guns, and god";

* Required to "recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society" and "recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression" (whatever that means);

* Instructed to purge male residents' "resistance to educational efforts" and "concepts of traditional male identity";

* Challenged to "change their daily habits and consumer mentality" for the sake of "sustainability";

* Pushed to display on their dorm doors politically approved decorations proclaiming support for (e.g.) "social equity" (whatever that means);

* Subjected to other "treatments" designed to alter their beliefs and behaviors and inculcate university-approved views on politics, sexuality, moral philosophy, and more;

* Ordered to attend residence-hall training sessions and submit to one-on-one sessions with RAs, who filed reports to their superiors about individual students' "level of change or acceptance" of the thought-reform program.

One such report, for example, classified a young woman as one of the "worst" students in the residence life education program for saying that she was tired of having "diversity shoved down her throat" and responding "none of your damn business" when asked "when did you discover your sexual identity?"

Oh, good lord. They've really lost all grip on common sense and ordinary decency. Why would anyone want to go to a school that treats students like that?

Things made by children for Christmas long ago.

Back in the 1950s, in the days before Barbie, my family lived in a little house in Brookside, in Newark, Delaware, and my sister and I played with "little dolls" -- Ginny Dolls. We had a dark green bookcase, and each shelf was considered a floor of the doll's house. It was elaborately furnished and decorated, and we were always making tiny things for them. I am surprised that some of the things still exist. Here are three Christmas stockings that we sewed by hand. They are only slightly larger than this picture shows them:



Did your dolls celebrate Christmas? Did you play out stories of them anticipating the day? Did you have each doll give every other doll a present? Did you make the tiny presents yourself? We did. Here's a little teddy bear that my older sister made. It's actually smaller in real life:



It's hand-sewn and stuffed, with the details painted on. Why is the paint still so clear and bright, after nearly half a century? It's oil paint. Why did little kids have oil paint? Because we had paint-by-number sets, and we realized with could use the paint for our own purposes. I, for example, painted my nose blue, because I was inspired by a rustic character on the Walt Disney TV show -- "The Adventures of Spin and Marty" -- who used to say, "Well, I'll be a blue-nosed gopher." My sister painted the features on the exquisite little bear. Do you know what it's like to have an older sister?

Kindergarten, 1957.

I just ran across this old picture from my kindergarten class. Place: Newark, Delaware.



For the full-size picture, go here.

I can't really remember who any of these kids are (other than me). I think it's cute that they got nearly all the girls to cross our legs at the ankles, which was considered the only proper way for a female to cross her legs. Note that the girls in shorts are put on one side and the girls in skirts on the other. Whatever they did to makes us smile seems to have amused the boys more than the girls. I like the way you can tell who the class clown is. Back in those days, there were no public kindergartens. This building was next to the pool that everyone joined for the summer. I like the windows. Kind of Usonian, right? What did we do in kindergarten back then? We were not taught to read. I think the only idea was to get us used to going to school. We played rhythm instruments, mostly sticks. We fooled around with clay. We were sent outside to run around. We were forced to take little naps lying on little throw rugs. I remember coming up with the theory that I could use my feet to propel myself around the room, and that if I did it slowly enough the teacher would not be able to see it. My analogy was to the minute hand on a clock. Turns out the analogy was not that accurate, and the teachers did not appreciate my scientific experimentation.

Tierney on the “Beyond Bias and Barriers" report.

John Tierney is shocked -- TimesSelect link -- by how "cynical" it was for the National Academy of Sciences to publish its "political tract" about discrimination against female scientists and engineers. There was, he notes, only one man on the 18-person committee, and "he was already on record agreeing with the report’s pre-ordained conclusion: academia must stop favoring male scientists and engineers."

He mocks Donna Shalala (the committee chair) for beginning the report with the story of how she was denied tenure three decades ago and then burying the news that women in science and engineering today are just as likely to get tenure as men.

You can get a sense of its spirit of inquiry from “findings” like this one: “The academic success of girls now equals or exceeds that of boys at the high school and college levels, rendering moot all discussions of the biological and social factors that once produced sex differences in achievement at these levels.”

It may seem moot to the Shalala committee, composed mainly of university administrators and scientists who don’t study sex differences (or are hostile to the idea that they exist). But it’s not moot to the scientists who’ve documented persistent differences.

I consulted half a dozen of these experts about the report, and they all dismissed it as a triumph of politics over science. It’s classic rent-seeking by a special-interest group that stands to get more money and jobs if the recommendations are adopted.

“I am embarrassed,” said Linda Gottfredson of the University of Delaware, “that this female-dominated panel of scientists would ignore decades of scientific evidence to justify an already disproved conclusion, namely, that the sexes do not differ in career-relevant interests and abilities.”

There's a really obvious joke -- just asking to be made -- attributing the lack of scientific rigor to the fact that the panel had so many women on it. But that's just a bad joke. The serious point is that it never was a scientific project. That they let that show is also a joke, but a good one. It saves us the trouble of taking the report seriously, which really isn't a joke at all. There may very well be a real problem in the way women are treated in science and engineering, and they've just encouraged us to shrug it off.

"Life on an appellate court tends to be isolating, and for me, one of the bright spots was always when Ed called."

Said Samuel Alito at the funeral of Judge Edward R. Becker.

Alito recalled one incident while he and Becker were hearing cases in the Virgin Islands - part of the territory, along with Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, that makes up the Third Circuit. After one busy court day, Alito and Becker took a sightseeing boat trip.

"I looked around for Eddie, and Ed was sitting along the side of the boat with an enormous stack of papers on his lap," Alito said. He called Becker a "tireless worker - but for him, it was a labor of love. He absolutely loved his work."

Justices Scalia and Souter were also at the funeral.

Good federalism?

States respond to the Supreme Court's eminent domain case, which left them a lot of leeway in seizing private property, by limiting the power of eminent domain as a matter of state law:

The reaction from the states was swift and heated. Within weeks of the court's decision, Texas, Alabama and Delaware passed bills by overwhelming bipartisan margins limiting the right of local governments to seize property and turn it over to private developers. Since then, lawmakers in three dozen other states have proposed similar restrictions and more are on the way, according to experts who track the issue.

Isn't this federalism at its best? People express outrage over the Court's narrow definition of a right, and the state legislatures supply the missing protection for the individual through state statutory law. But there's a bit of a political dysfunction. The state legislatures can appease their constituents and reap the political gains without paying to price of sacrificing their own power. The city governments must bear the burden:

The National League of Cities, which supports the use of eminent domain as what it calls a necessary tool of urban development, has identified the issue as the most crucial facing local governments this year. The league has called upon mayors and other local officials to lobby Congress and state legislators to try to stop the avalanche of bills to limit the power of government to take private property for presumed public good....

More neutral observers expressed concern that state officials, in their zeal to protect homeowners and small businesses, would handcuff local governments that are trying to revitalize dying cities and fill in blighted areas with projects that produce tax revenues and jobs.

"It's fair to say that many states are on the verge of seriously overreacting to the Kelo decision," said John D. Echeverria, executive director of the Georgetown Environmental Law and Policy Institute and an authority on land-use policy. "The danger is that some legislators are going to attempt to destroy what is a significant and sometimes painful but essential government power. The extremist position is a prescription for economic decline for many metropolitan areas around the county."

Should the constituents of the entire state determine the scope of a government power that is most significant in the cities? The majority within a city is going to have a different outlook. Presumably, when a city wants to undertake a project, the people in the city support it, so we shouldn't expect that circumscribed majority to be as enthusiastic about protecting property rights. And a city in need of development will probably have greater concentrations of liberal voters, who are less enthusiastic about property rights than the citizens of whole states.

"Glum Democrats Can't See Halting Bush on Courts."

That's the headline on the front-page NYT analysis following the Alito hearings. (On the paper NYT, it's: "Democrats See Wide Bush Stamp on Court System.") Adam Nagourney, Richard W. Stevenson, and Neil A. Lewis write:

Disheartened by the administration's success with the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., Democratic leaders say that President Bush is putting an enduring conservative ideological imprint on the nation's judiciary, and that they see little hope of holding off the tide without winning back control of the Senate or the White House.

In interviews, Democrats said the lesson of the Alito hearings was that this White House could put on the bench almost any qualified candidate, even one whom Democrats consider to be ideologically out of step with the country.

That conclusion amounts to a repudiation of a central part of a strategy Senate Democrats settled on years ago in a private retreat where they discussed how to fight a Bush White House effort to recast the judiciary: to argue against otherwise qualified candidates by saying they would take the courts too far to the right.

Even though Democrats thought from the beginning that they had little hope of defeating the nomination, they were dismayed that a nominee with such clear conservative views - in particular a written record of opposition to abortion rights - appeared to be stirring little opposition.

This is a tremendously important lesson. I have heard so many liberals say that they only want to talk about ideology. They want to rely on the portrayal of judging as ideological, but then deny the President his choice of ideology. This doesn't work, and it shouldn't work. If we accept the foundation of the argument -- that judging is ideological -- then there is no trump to the President's appointment power when his party controls the Senate. Your unhappiness with the President's choice of ideology has one answer: Win elections. By declining to frame arguments in terms of legal analysis, the Democrats empowered the nominee to win by simply explaining a lot of legal arguments.

Several Democrats expressed frustration over what they saw as the Republicans outmaneuvering them by drawing attention to an episode Wednesday when Judge Alito's wife, Martha-Ann, began crying as her husband was being questioned. That evening, senior Democratic senate aides convened at the Dirksen Senate Office Building, stunned at the realization that the pictures of a weeping Mrs. Alito were being broadcast across the nation - as opposed to, for example, images of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, pressing Judge Alito about his membership in an alumni club that resisted affirmative action efforts.

"Had she not cried, we would have won that day," said one Senate strategist involved in the hearings, who did not want to be quoted by name discussing the Democrats' problems. "It got front-page attention. It was on every local news show."

Beyond that, Democrats said Judge Alito had turned out to be a more skillful witness than they had expected. They said Democrats on the Judiciary Committee had been outflanked in their efforts to pin down Judge Alito on any issues, and that some of the questioners - notably Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware - devoted more time to talking than to pressing the nominee for answers.

We'll never hear the end of the wife's crying. It's becoming mythic. If only that hadn't happened, we could have gotten some footing out of Kennedy badgering him about the alumni club. But the crying resonated because we experienced the questions as unfair and because we too were exasperated by what we could see was political posturing.

We hear a lot about the crying, but there is at least as much talk about how long the Senators spoke. They seemed to be making political speeches, which really was consistent with their own bad decision to portray judging as a political enterprise. If we'd believed that portrayal, their expressions of political preferences would have seemed quite relevant. But people aren't buying that portrayal, and they shouldn't. What judges do is different from what Senators do, and they need arguments that make sense as a criticism of judging.

"[W]hat has happened is that this has turned into a political campaign," [Senator Kennedy] said. "The whole process has become so politicized that I think the American people walk away more confused about the way these people stand."

How are people confused? If it's political, the winners of the elections should prevail. If you want to say it's not political, then why did you portray it as political, throughout the hearings and as part of a strategy devised years ago at your retreat?