Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Sullivan has a link to several movies remade as David Lynch films, and as always, whenever I see one of those, I think of the Gold Standard:
If you like these kinds of things, here is a website I sorta keep track of- The Trailer Mash. Every now and then there is a good one. I found this one with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off re-imagined as a horror to be amusing:
Goonies of the Caribbean was pretty solid, too.
I’m not watching the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, but I hear tell Gretta V showed up with Todd Palin. Weird!
If that’s not enough to seed an open thread, here’s a song I just heard on the radio that I always liked:
Because I care.
Also, maybe one of the greatest descriptions ever:
This latest salvo is fired by author/professor Stanley Fish, a prominent religion-peddler of the pointy-headed, turtlenecked genus, who made his case in his blog at the New York Times. Fish was mostly riffing on a recent book written by the windily pompous University of Manchester professor Terry Eagleton, a pudgily superior type, physically resembling a giant runny nose, who seems to have been raised by indulgent aunts who gave him sweets every time he corrected the grammar of other children.
That made me laugh.
Dinner was excellent, and the mushrooms turned out great. I actually made two marinades (one with lime juice and one with balsamic) as suggested in the comments below, and then ended up using neither. I just washed them, brushed them with a little olive oil, cooked them, and then tasted one to see which marinade would be better, and decided all it needed was a little sea salt and some pepper. Very good. Summer food rules, especially since so much of it is light and healthy and I’m always trying to make it so there is less of me to love. Apparently too big to fail only works for the banks.
At any rate, not much going on at the Cole homestead tonight or this weekend. I was thinking about going home to take mom out to dinner since my father is in Reno, but when I called my mom to ask, she said “That is ok, I have lacrosse games to watch.” I wish I hadn’t already mailed her a card.
Tomorrow I am renting a rototiller and plowing up the plot I have cleared for the garden, and I suppose I need to finalize what I am going to plant. I might go see Star Trek this weekend, as well.
Finally, I have been on the receiving end of a vicious assault the entire time I have been writing this:
Also, the Pens and Caps are on, and it is about to get brutal, as Ovechkin just intentionally destroyed Gonchar’s knee, and will probably be beaten to a bloody pulp.
What is on the agenda for you all?
I can’t stay away from the Sotomayor stuff and I have to warn you this may be a long post. Via the great Dahlia Lithwick (who is the only good thing about Slate) makes an excellent point about Rosen’s history with women in the judiciary (via burnspbesq):
But more troubling still, he seems to have been arguing that female jurists are by definition “mediocre” for more than a decade! Here’s a piece he did for the New York Times in 1995, arguing that President Clinton’s “single-minded pursuit of diversity, combined with an eagerness to avoid controversy, has kept him from appointing the best available legal minds to the courts.” He then names the many, many white men passed over for federal judgeships and contends that liberal judges lack the intellectual firepower to challenge brilliant conservative jurists because “nearly 60 percent of the Clinton appointments have been minority members and women.” (Read: mediocre.) His single data point to illustrate that mediocrity: Instead of appointing a serious intellectual heavyweight to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (a/k/a “The scholars Court”), Clinton tapped “Diane P. Wood, a little-known professor of antitrust law at the University of Chicago, who is currently an assistant to Deputy Attorney General Anne Bingaman.”
That same mediocre Diane Wood is not only on every shortlist for the Supreme Court today. She’s also widely regarded as one of the finest judges on the bench, to whom other brilliant judges turn for reviews of draft opinions.
Now, with all the whining about supposed de facto affirmative action for women in the judiciary, it needs to be said: there has to be an awful lot of de facto affirmative action for wingnuts in the judiciary. At this point, 38% of federal judges were appointed by George W. Bush. All indications are that the vast majority are more or less wingnuts.
Perhaps I’ve got this all wrong, but, as I see it, unless law is radically different from all other human intellectual endeavors, there is no way on earth that anything like 38% of the best legal minds in the country are staunch conservatives.
I work in an area (pure mathematics) that is infamously dominated by men. And, even so, if I went through the list of people I know of who would be suitable for some kind of Supreme Court for the area, it would be no easier to find a qualified wingnut than to find a qualified woman. Of the, say, 25 people I know relatively well who might be suited (I’m applying the standard of whether or not they’re close to the National Academy of Science level), there are no women and one borderline wingnut (a guy who voted for Bush twice but says he would have voted for Lieberman in 2004). If I go up to the level of qualified people I know more vaguely, there are about three women and two actual wingnuts (it’s possible that there’s more wingnuts in there I don’t know about, but not that likely, since the few wingnut scientists I know like everyone to know that they are wingnuts, keep blogs about being wingnuts on their departmental home pages, etc.) out of maybe 80 people. So it’s pretty much a wash.
I doubt that law is as male-dominated as math is. And I suspect that the proportion of wingnuts in law is similar to the proportion in math (though I could be wrong, I’ve never met a reputable math professor anything like Dijontard). So whatever affirmative action there is for women in the federal judiciary must surely be surpassed by the amount of affirmative action for wingnuts.
The affirmative action that dare not speak its namePost + Comments (79)
Is there anything more annoying than falling asleep, waking up a few hours later, and then staring at the ceiling for three hours? I think not.
Maybe not falling asleep at all.
Think pleasant thoughts. Something good and not irritating had to happen this week. What was it?
*** Update ***
Maddow is making fun of the music in the fearmongering commercial the Republicans released today, and it made me laugh, because I actually was writing a post this morning in which I was asking if the GOP knew any music besides Ride of the Valkyries and Carmina Burana and then just said to hell with it.