"What I think is funny is that if you have the same view on gay marriage that Obama had when he was elected, now you’re an enemy of humanity or something."

"It’s some sort of, I don’t know, Liberal Fascism or something...." — says Instapundit, aptly, re Chick-Fil-A and Chicago.

And here's Eugene Volokh on the obviousness of the First Amendment violation.

"Chick-fil-A values are not Chicago values," said Rahm Emanuel, ironically demonstrating that Chicago values are not American values.

ADDED: Right now, at Drudge:



(Click image to enlarge. The small text in the upper left says: "Rahm Rejects CHICK-FIL-A: 'Not Chicago Values.'"

How did Jonathan Turley come up with 19 as the best number of Supreme Court Justices?

We're all wound up waiting for the Supreme Court to announce its new decisions this morning, so let me while away some of the remaining minutes brooding about that WaPo article we were talking about last night. Let's talk, specifically, about Turley's homing in on the number 19.

Wikipedia has an article on the number 19, which includes mathematical info like "19 is the aliquot sum of two odd discrete semiprimes, 65 and 77 and is the base of the 19-aliquot tree." And "19 is a centered triangular number, centered hexagonal number and a Heegner number" — which looks like this:



That red dot could be John Roberts.

There's also significance to the number 19 in the religions Islam and Baha'i:

The number of angels guarding Hell ("Hellfire") according to the Qur'an: "Over it is nineteen" (74:30).

The Number of Verse and Sura together in the Qur'an which announces Jesus son of Maryam's (Mary's) birth (Qur'an 19:19).

Some people have claimed that patterns of the number 19 are present an unusual number of times in the Qur'an.

In the Bábí and Bahá'í faiths, a group of 19 is called a Váhid, a Unity (Arabic: واحد wāhid, "one"). The numerical value of this word in the Abjad numeral system is 19.

The Bahá'í calendar is structured such that a year contains 19 months of 19 days each (along with the intercalary period of Ayyám-i-Há), as well as a 19-year cycle and a 361-year (19x19) supercycle.

The Báb and his disciples formed a group of 19.

There were 19 Apostles of Bahá'u'lláh.

Not at the Wikipedia, but dredged up out of my memory: At the Million Man March, back in 1995, when Louis Farrakhan gave his long speech that bizarrely drifted into numerology, the number that he found so important was 19. He observed that the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorial are both 19 feet high, then adds 3 and 16 together — because Thomas Jefferson was the 3d President and Lincoln was the 16th — gets 19 and asked "What is so deep about this number 19?" You can go to the link and read if you want to know why 19 represents a pregnant woman + a "secret that has to be unfolded."

I don't know what put the idea of 19 into Jonathan Turley's head. It could be something mystical and nutty. Maybe he loves Adele's first album.

But I assume there's nothing mystical or artistic about Turley. I think he likes the number 19 because it's the smallest odd number that's big enough to make individual Justices inconsequential — to dilute their power to the point where they don't loom large as personalities and seem like mere humans.

Turley's last sentence says it: With 19 Justices, "the power of individual judges is diluted."

Obama — trying to be "careful" — addresses the Trayvon Martin killing.

I think he handled this extremely well, stressing that we need to diligently investigate the facts and expressing empathy toward the parents of the dead young man. (I'm avoiding writing "boy," but I see many people including Obama are calling this 17-year-old a "boy," presumably out of empathy, but in my mind, there is discordance with the old problem of overusing the term "boy," and I just can't write it.)

Obama didn't bring up the topic himself:

Mr. Obama was asked about his feelings regarding the case during the announcement of a new president for the World Bank in the Rose Garden Friday morning.

The president often appears perturbed when he gets off-topic questions at ceremonial events, but on Friday, he seemed eager to address the case....

So he knew it would be asked or at least anticipated it. (At most: his people planted it.)

... which has quickly developed into an urgent cause in the African American community. He cautioned that his comments would be limited because the Justice Department is investigating. But he talked at length about his personal feelings about the case.

He said:  “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids” and “You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

He did a much better job here than he did in the Henry Louis Gates incident, where he made assumptions and blurted out "it's fair to say... that the Cambridge police acted stupidly." It wasn't fair to say.

I was struck earlier this morning by what Glenn Reynolds wrote (before Obama made his statement):

... I am puzzled by one thing: Dem groups are flogging this because they think it’s good for them, but how can it help Obama — who ran as a post-racial figure who would help America put its racial divisions to bed, a sort of anti-Al Sharpton — to have Al Sharpton leading protests and Louis Farrakhan threatening violence?

Sure, it stirs up the base, or part of it anyway — how Florida Latino voters respond may be different — but doesn’t it just add to the unfavorable contrast between Obama 2008 and Obama in 2012? Or are Sharpton, et al., basically tossing Obama’s interests aside to pursue their own? And is that some sort of indicator itself?

These are all good questions, and they explain why Obama needed to step in and try to take control of the discourse around this volatile topic. To my ear, his words have a calming, moderating effect, but we don't all hear him the same way, I've noticed time and again.

Louis Farrakhan to Barack Obama: "Be careful, brother, how you handle this situation, because it is coming to America. It has already started. Look in Wisconsin. Look in Ohio."

Farrakhan is fulminating over the bombing of Libya and the disrespect for "a man that built a country over 42 years." He asks Obama "who the hell do you think you are" to tell Qaddafi to "step down and get out." Farrakhan insists that a lot of people "gonna ask you to step out of the White House 'cause they don't want no black face in the White House." There's already an uprising going on in this country, and he's looking right at our Wisconsin protests. See the quote in the post title. He continues:

Look at what's going on in your country and remember your words, because the American people are rising against their own government. It's not Muslims. It's not black people. It's white militia that are angry with their government. And they are well armed. Are you going to tell them: 'Put your arms down, and let's talk it over peacefully'? I hope so, but if not, America will be bathed in blood, not because Farrakhan said so but because dissatisfaction in American has reached the boiling point. Be careful how you manipulate the dissatisfaction in Libya and other parts of the Muslim world."

The overwhelmingly white Wisconsin protesters would be amazed to hear that they are the well-armed, white militia. Ha. I guess white people all look alike to Farrakhan. Our Wisconsin liberals and lefties think they're the furthest thing from the righties and tea partiers.

"Curb Your Enthusiasm" gives Michael Richards his (hilarious) absolution.

Last night's new episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" — which has been working the "Seinfeld" reunion theme all season — finally got around to doing something with the painful subject of Michael Richards's disgrace over the shouting of racial epithets at some hecklers in a comedy club. Spoiler:

After learning that he suffers from the fictional Groat's disease (last mentioned in Season 2 of "Curb Your Enthusiasm"), Michael Richards once again finds himself in the line of fire for a racially fueled attack on an African American ... who just happens to be Larry's house guest Leon (the always hysterical J.B. Smoove), who posed as Groat's disease sufferer Danny Duberstein but who looked more like Louis Farrakhan from the Nation of Islam than a Jewish CPA.

Skewering Richards' brush with notoriety, Larry David has Richards angrily confront Leon in full view of several dozen camera phones, leading to him proclaiming that he wished he could call Leon a word that would make him as angry as he was right then. It's a savage parody of Richards' race-fueled rant to an African American heckler during a 2006 stand-up performance ... which happened to be captured on a cellphone.

Brilliant. Highly satisfying.

Do you notice anything about the picture of Obama that's on Drudge right now?

I know the impression it made on me. I showed it to my tablemate and, without any prompting, he said exactly what I had thought.

IN THE COMMENTS: Roger von Oech said: "Louis Farrakhan — all the way. The teleprompter makes it look like a bow tie."