The big "American Idol" screw-up.

Jacob at Television Without Pity gives last night's "American Idol" an F. An F! I've seen some low grades over there, but I can't remember seeing an F before. Ha, ha! Let's see. First there's this:

Some idiot in the booth screwed up the phone numbers for three singers in the bottom-third during review, so instead of results Wednesday, we're getting rehashes of tonight, with "live elements," meaning Seacrest pantsing around, and the results show will be on Thursday. My O.C. night. I kind of hope that person is executed.

Then there's the damned theme: "Billboard #1 Hits, which means the kids only had 930 songs to choose from. Harsh!" So a big criticism is the crap the contestants picked to sing when they had (theoretically) so much to choose from. Then there's Carrie's hair:

Her hair is insane. INSANE. She looks electrocuted. She doesn't sound that bad, of course, but dude, the hair is really distracting. She's at the seashore poking her face through a wooden standup of Olivia Newton-John at the end of Grease.

The movie reference I thought of was Tina Turner in "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome" -- you know, where she shaved the whole front third of her hair for that weird, receding hairline effect.

Actually, Jacob seems to like the performances -- except Constantine -- a lot more than I did. So why the F? Just the nutty hair and Scott hurling his glasses aside were entertaining enough to get the grade up to at least a D, I would think. But maybe that phone number screw-up is just so abysmal that it's got to be graded a failure.

If you're wondering where the mistake was made: at the end of the show, during the recap, where the phone number appears in large and small print, for the last three contestants, the large-print number was correct, but the small print number was a different contestant's number. The three disadvantaged contestants were Mikalah, Anwar, and Jessica. The three contestants whose numbers got an additional display were Anthony, Carrie, and Scott. Jeez, you'd think if there was one thing they'd do absolutely correctly it would be displaying the numbers. How can we trust them to count the numbers right?

UPDATE: I just had to correct my own numbers -- I'd written "two" instead of "three." How can I criticize them for getting numbers wrong when I'm getting numbers wrong?

"What am I going to do, just ramble on and on"?

So said the panicked Janeane Garafolo in the struggling early days of Air America, according to Drudge's account of the HBO documentary, which is scheduled to air on March 31st. I can't wait to see it.

UPDATE: Sorry, that quote was from Marc Maron. Janeane Garofalo just "looks suicidal in nearly ever scene which she appears." I like the quote, by the way, because it expresses what I imagine probably every radio show host thinks.

Judicial nominations and the Schiavo effect.

The NYT reports on signs that the Schiavo controversy will have an effect on the process of appointing federal judges:

The intense fight in the Terri Schiavo case is injecting another explosive element into the coming Senate showdown over President Bush's choices for federal judgeships as well as into future battles to fill Supreme Court vacancies.

The Republican-led effort to circumvent a state court order to disconnect Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube, combined with a federal judge's refusal on Tuesday morning to countermand that order, has crystallized issues in the judicial debate in a compelling and singular public way, Republicans and Democrats alike said.

Conservatives, already disdainful of the way judges have handled subjects like same-sex marriage and abortion, say the court treatment of the Schiavo case illustrates a judiciary that is willing to ignore the will of the public and elected officials.

Within a few hours of the decision by Judge James D. Whittemore of Federal District Court in Tampa, who refused to order nutrition restored to Ms. Schiavo, conservatives were expressing their outrage, accusing the judge of giving no deference to the legislation rushed through Congress.

"Judge Whittemore has engaged in a gross abuse of judicial power," said Burke J. Balch of the National Right to Life Committee.

Richard Viguerie, the strategist behind conservative direct mailings, said, "It could be the opening shot in the Supreme Court nomination battle that we expect sooner rather than later."

Mr. Viguerie added, "It is very dramatic proof of what we have been saying: that the judiciary is out of control."

Viguerie is, of course, exactly wrong. What Judge Whittemore did is very dramatic proof of the judiciary's deep commitment to the rule of law and its firm resistance to political pressure and emotional entreaties.

And what do "conservatives" really think of judges? Do they want them -- as the third paragraph in that block quote says -- not "to ignore the will of the public and elected officials"? I thought good conservatives wanted judges to set aside political preferences and faithfully follow the dictates of the law. The criticism of "activist" judges is that they abuse the law by making it into what they prefer politically, but the solution isn't that they should do more of what other people prefer politically. It's that they ought to do what the law requires.

Do Balch and Viguerie seriously think that Justice Scalia would agree with their assessment of Judge Whittemore? Obviously, they are promoting activist judges of the social conservative stripe, and there is nothing properly conservative about that at all.

"Don't you feel anything?"

As my first post on the Terri Schiavo case says, I avoided writing on the subject, but chose to break my silence to weigh in on the subject of federalism, an area of professional expertise for me. After that, I read the federal court complaint and decided to provide a summary of it for my readers, who I didn't think would take the time to read and understand it. I followed up yesterday with a post about the district court decision -- really a tribute to the worthy judge. I did one more post, critical of Congress for groundlessly impugning the work of the state courts, which had put so much serious, hard work into the case. I've gotten a lot of supportive links and email about my posts, but I'm not surprised to get an email like this:

I'm disappointed. Your logic is 100% legal, antiseptic, and very dummy-proof. Spoken like a true legal professor.

I'm pro-choice, conservative, republican ... but this makes me literally cry at every turn. Don't you feel anything? or has Madison finally numbed you also?

The least and the most you can do is make the case for compassionate conservatism.

Here is how I answered the emailer:

I have a lot of things I could say that I am choosing not to say, as my first post indicates. Some things I chose not to say out of pity for the parents, who have suffered.

I'm not going to fill up my blog with speculation about what has really motivated the husband and parents of Terri Schiavo over the years. There are all kinds of horrible things one could say about them. It's easy to think of those things and to write them down. As to end of life decisions and the hard realities of death and dying, thousands of painful dramas play out every day. I don't have general pronouncements to make about how these should be resolved. Terri Schiavo's drama was enacted in public because of the bitterly hardened dispute between the husband and the parents. The dispute made an occasion for people with strong moral beliefs to argue their positions in high media profile.

I am not one of those people who have fixed beliefs about "the culture of life" or "the right to die," so I don't have an automatic side to take and the desire to fight it out. I think these are difficult matters, and maybe I should write about them here and increase the proportion of moderate writing. But I pick my subjects here. When I choose to write about something serious, it's usually because I think I have something different to say or some extra value to bring to the table. When I'm silent about something, you can speculate about what I might think, but you don't know. You can try to goad me to write on a subject by emailing me your speculations about what I think (and feel), and maybe I will reveal it, but maybe I'm really quite committed to my silence.

Deeply infiltrating the gang.

Here's the story of Billy Queen, an ATF agent who infiltrated a dangerous motorcycle gang:

Retired now, Mr. Queen is supposed to be hiding in a witness protection program, but he popped up in Hollywood, in the heart of Mongols territory, swaggering around in a ball cap with A.T.F. spelled out in big white letters.

"Maybe I'm a little bit crazy," he supposed at an outdoor cafe and laughed in a sadistic little way, as if he were thinking of using his companion's eye for an ashtray just because it might be funny.

From the way he talks, Mr. Queen has not fully extricated his real life from his undercover persona of Billy St. John. He speaks fondly of those days, the parties, the camaraderie, the bullying of the Hell's Angels. He said that even though he was an undercover agent, he preferred to pal around with the Mongols on his days off because he was fond of them.

"American Idol" -- a brief and biased account.

I'm not going to say a lot about tonight's show. I'll just say I think it was really cool that Constantine Maroulis sang "I Think I Love You" -- the theme was "number 1 hits" -- and it totally worked on me. And I can see they are in the process of depriving Nadia of her phenomenal hair and that is so, so wrong. Other than that, I think Scott did a nice job. Anwar was okay. Bo is still good. Carrie was a horror and horrendously overpraised. Mikalah is in big, big trouble. And I'm bored by Jessica, Anthony, Nikko and whoever else I'm forgetting to acknowledge. Except Vonzell -- I (heart) Vonzell.

Catering to religious constituents and ignoring federalism values: the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.

The Supreme Court heard oral argument yesterday in Cutter v. Wilkinson, a case about the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. This is an important case about religious freedom and federalism. The Free Exercise clause standing alone does not require the state to give special accommodations to religious believers, but Congress has attempted to require the states, as it runs its prisons, to make those accommodations.

The government "follows the best of our traditions" when it relieves burdens on religious practice for all religions, not just "majoritarian" ones, the acting solicitor general, Paul D. Clement, told the justices....

Douglas R. Cole, Ohio's state solicitor, asked the justices: "Can Congress really say to prisoners, 'We'd like you to be religious and we'll give you a better show for getting out from the rules that apply to everyone else?' "...

He also said the law provided an "impermissible incentive" to inmates to adopt a religion as a way of obtaining favored treatment. He said the law invited "constant pressure, day after day, if you want this set of benefits, get religion."

Quite aside from whether the Establishment Clause even permits states to choose to give special treatment to prisoners who invoke religion, the federal statute is a severe intrusion into the way states run their prisons. Was that intrusion justified? Were the states really inconsiderate of the religious needs of prisoners? Or was this like the Schiavo legislation -- Congress catering to its religious constituents and ignoring federalism values?