Hey that's a pun! You say, the brief I have due on Monday is keeping me unbelievably busy, hence the paucity of blogging. Which, as you know, means roundup time!
So everyone is hating on Ahmadinejad's speech, and that's good. But why can't anyone use the "a" word (I thought we were all too trigger happy with it)?
Well, the Socialist Worker can -- but it takes great pains to distance it from Ahmadinejad himself. Indeed, as Harry's Place points out, the thrust of SW's complaint is that world leaders did repudiate Ahmadinejad while not simultaneously engaging in some wish fulfillment.
Deborah Hellman, one of the premier scholars working on the subject, has a fabulous post on the upcoming New Haven fire department civil rights case. Danielle Cintron has the skinnier version.
A guilty verdict has been handed down in the landmark Colorado case marking the first time a man has been convicted of a hate crime for killing a transgender person.
Ruling that FDA restrictions were not made in "good faith" due to (Bush admin) White House interference, a federal judge has ruled that Plan B must be made immediately available over the counter for 17 year olds.
LGM is skeptical the Supreme Court will do the right thing and say strip searching 13 year old girls based on unwarranted suspicions they might have some ibuprofen is, maybe, you know, not okay. Sandy Levinson goes a step further and remarks that this sort of shaming nudity was one of the things that shocked -- shocked -- us about Abu Gharib.
The Austrian extreme right gets in on the anti-Semitism act (not that they ever left, I suspect).
The Plan B ruling is old news; the new news that CNN covers is that the FDA has amended its regs in accordance with the ruling.
ReplyDeleteLevinson seems to be ignoring that at Abu Ghraib, the purpose of the nudity was to shame people; there was no other reason for it. In contrast, it can be difficult to do a strip search of someone without, you know, the stripping. I did heart Dahlia Lithwick's coverage of oral arguments:
But Breyer just isn't letting go. "In my experience when I was 8 or 10 or 12 years old, you know, we did take our clothes off once a day, we changed for gym, OK? And in my experience, too, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear."
Shocked silence, followed by explosive laughter. In fact, I have never seen Justice Clarence Thomas laugh harder. Breyer tries to recover: "Or not my underwear. Whatever. Whatever. I was the one who did it? I don't know. I mean, I don't think it's beyond human experience."