The word is out! It is official! Dennis Kucinich's presidential campaign has obtained the endorsements of Father Twilight and the creatures of the forest. What a coup! Here is the story, but I provide below the text of the "official" statement:

"We the creatures of the forest have a deep kind of knowing Humans call "instinct." With that we see Dennis Kucinich as uniquely qualified to stand for us and Mother Earth as well as all of Humankind. We hereby endorse him for the Presidency of the United States of America in 2004."

< rambling musings>I admit no surprise that "candidate" Kucinich is a few trees shy of a forest (although perhaps the trees will soon follow the creatures' lead and remedy this particular deficiency), but this kind of story on his official campaign website!!! just makes me wonder if there is anyone in charge of the Democratic party. Can't the DNC schedule an intervention or something? This guy is getting air time in every Democratic debate and yet Ralph Nader and Alan Keyes were both denied air time in major debates during the last presidential election season (proof that censoring some candidates in the debates is at least possible). I am not crazy about any of the Democratic candidates, but the serious candidates (and the American public which is trying to decide which, if any, of the real candidates they should vote for) ought not to be required to deal with Dennis Kucinich and Father Twilight.< /rambling musings>

Now a few words about a case being argued before the Supreme Court today. In Lee v. SCS, the issue is how to calculate the interest rate owed to a creditor under the Bankruptcy Code's "cramdown" provision. Uh, wait. I meant to talk about the other case being argued today, Locke v. Davey. Sorry about that. Locke involves a Washington state scholarship program, and whether it's constitutionally permissible to deny that scholarship to a student who wants to study theology.

First, a few links. Here is an editorial from the New York Times (free registration required). Here is NPR's Nina Totenberg if you don't like reading. Here is Tony Mauro of the Legal Times (free registration required). Here is a nutshell from Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, including a link to the Ninth Circuit decision under review today. Here is a longer summary (at what point is something too long to be a summary?) from Supreme Court lawyers Goldstein & Howe. Finally, here is Eugene Volokh on the case, back from when cert was granted. If you're only going to read one of these, read the Volokh post -- it sets up the positions well and includes many links to relevant cases.

After all that, I'm not sure what I can add that would be worthwhile. But I won't let that stop me.

Josh Davey won a scholarship run by the state of Washington and went off to college. He declared a major in Pastoral Studies, which has little to do with Beethoven symphonies, but rather is a theology program designed for would-be ministers. The state agency administering the scholarship said he couldn't use the money for that purpose, thanks to a state law (and state constitutional provision) barring the use of state funds to support religious instruction. Davey was given a choice: drop the major (note: he could still have taken theology courses), or give up the money. Davey chose the latter, but then sued the state agency and the Governor, Gary Locke, asserting that the scholarship's restrictions violated his federal constitutional rights. Davey is now a first-year student at Harvard law School, by the way. How would you like to have Con Law with a kid whose case is in the book?

This case raises a whole bunch of tricky constitutional questions. Tony Mauro summed it up by referencing the case from a couple of years ago allowing vouchers that go to religious schools: "If the establishment clause is interpreted to mean that governments could provide taxpayer dollars to religious schools, does the free exercise clause mean that they must do so?"

The district court ruled that the state couldn't discriminate on the basis of religion, but it could decide not to fund Davey's religious education. It analogized the case to older Supreme Court cases (Rust v. Sullivan and Harris v. McRae) that held that the state didn't have to fund the exercise of constitutional rights (there, abortion). Also, there are some cases saying that the state can impose a neutral law even if it incidentally makes it tougher for someone to exercise his or her religion.

The Ninth Circuit reversed, holding that Washington had created a "public forum" and couldn't deny Davey a place in it (citing Rosenberger v. UVA). That court said that Rust and Harris didn't apply because those were cases involving government speech. As such, Davey's free exercise rights trumped Washington's establishment defense. I will also note that the Ninth Circuit called the state's purported interest in not establishing religion "less than compelling." The court said the scholarship program was facially discriminatory and couldn't survive.

In the Supreme Court, I think this will go for Davey 5-4. That would mean upholding a Ninth Circuit opinion, but I think they'll do it anyway. (By the way, the Court reversed the Ninth Circuit 9-0 in a search-and-seizure case today, in an uncharacteristically biting Souter opinion.)

I think the Court won't use the forum analysis the Ninth Circuit did, though. I'm not sure how Davey's right to free speech has been infringed anyway, and even when the state creates a public forum, it doesn't have to pay for your soapbox. But at least five Justices have taken the position that states cannot discriminate in the dissemination of benefits based on religion. The voucher case is the biggest example of this.

If I were on the Court (dare to dream!), I would urge the Justices to take the narrower ground and say that this particular program is not narrowly tailored to meet the state's needs. Even assuming not establishing religion is a compelling state interest, only denying funds to religion majors doesn't make much sense. As the Goldstein & Howe summary notes, it is both overinclusive and underinclusive. (They say it much better than I could -- see page 3 of that document.) This would leave for another day the tougher question of which wins when the establishment clause and free exercise clause butt heads.

I know some of our readers are non-lawyers (or maybe just not-good-laywers), so if you have any questions, feel free to ask and I'll try to find someone to answer them. I am still not one hundred percent sure how I think this case should come out, but I think it will be one of the more interesting of the Term, so I wanted to post something about it. I look forward to any thoughts you might have.

I'm working on some longer stuff (not to mention my real job), but a quick word about online dating. Long-time readers will remember my first post on the matter below. Well, yesterday I created a profile on Match.com, not so much so I could put myself out there on the market, but more so I could see the full profiles of the women already on the market.

I searched for women within 25 miles of my city between the ages of, I think, 23 and 29. (I'll be 28 next month.) Those age ranges aren't absolute for me, but I thought it was more realisitc than seeking an 18-year-old ingenue (although the number of 18-year-old women seeking men between 18-35 is a little bizarre to me). And, I don't have anything against 30-year-old women as a class, but I was frankly a little afraid that women over that age would lie -- I saw plenty of women who looked a good bit older than every age range I tried there. Just searching for that, the site returns several hundred matches.

Anyway, the site also allows you to refine your search based on a host of largely meaningless details. For example, you can search for someone based on whether he or she rates "thunderstorms" a turn-on or a turn-off. I tried to be very broad-minded, and put "any" in many cases where I really had a preference. For example, are tatoos and body piercings a turn-on or turn-off? Well, they don't really do anything for me, so I wouldn't call them a turn-on, but I don't want to rule out every girl with just a belly button ring or a tiny discrete tatoo, so I wouldn't call them a turn-off either. But I don't want to date the painted lady from the circus. So, I put "any."

The point is that I don't think I was being overly picky in my criteria, but I did stick by the few things that are really important to me. For example, I don't want kids, and I don't want to date a girl who has been married.

So, I ran the search. Number of matches: Zero.

*Sigh*

So, I refined the search to broaden things a little more. I included women who "defintely" wanted kids, and I included women who called their political views "conservative," and I included women of any religion, even though I don't think I would be very compatible with a very religious woman (see church comments at the previous dating post).

This time the search returned maybe 25 or 30 matches, about half of whom seemed interesting (read: attractive) enough for me to look at the profile. Some of them had things in their profiles that made me realize why my first, more honest, search excluded them.

(An aside: allowing for "conservative" women resulted in a hit for a woman who looked like a porn star and who said the last book she read was "Treason" by Ann Coulter I link to Coulter's main site instead of directly to a "Treason" site because the front page is a must-see. The headline is "Massachusetts Supreme Court Abolishes Capitalism!" By the way, there is a link to a "find single conservatives" dating site there too.)

In the end, I would say there were maybe four or five women who interested me enough to think about engaging in whatever courtship rituals Match.com proscribes. But I'm not convinced that the effort is worth it. I can name way more than four or five women right now who interest me at least that much. And I don't have to take a picture of myself and describe, in less than 250 characters (!), what I'm looking for.

I know what you're response is: Well, then, get out there and give those women whatever the real-world equivalent of the Match.com digital "wink" is. I guess that would be an actual wink. Ah, but if I could do that, I wouldn't be going through all this mess -- and, I probably wouldn't have time to blog. I will continue to update as necessary.

One topic I wanted to write about all weekend was President Bush's trip to Iraq. Not surprisingly, there has been a lot of, well, "debate" would be too polite a word, over it. Bush-lovin' Righties say it was a genuinely nice gesture from a genuinely good guy. Bush-hatin' Lefties say it was a PR stunt that will take the place of the flight suit/"mission accomplished" photo in the campaign ads.

Anyway, I don't care anymore. My overall take is that it's a little of both, and I don't see a whole lot wrong with that. One of the positives about being President is that everything you do can be called "Presidential," but one of the negatives is that (at least during the first term) everything you do can be cast as a re-election campaign maneuver. You take the good, you take the bad....

Well, if you are really psyched to read about this, I'll give you a link: this post from the very good group blog En Banc. They had several posts on the issue, and linked to some others, but I think that was the last of them, so go there and follow the links back in time if you want to. (By the way, I think I recall someone among all those posts saying that Bush was serving gravy with a fork. I don't know if that's true, or if Bush-haters will try to turn that into Quayle's potatoe. I also don't know enough about Army food to know if that might be a feasible way of serving Army gravy. But I find it funny anyway.)

This does not mean that I am getting all apathetic about posting on you. Au contraire. In fact, part of the reason I'm not too fired up about Bush's Iraq excursion anymore is that I have several other things I want to post on. So, stay tuned.

By the way, I was quite excited about the explosion in readership evinced by the many comments to my "Bubba" post immediately below, even if most of them appeared to be from someone worried about breathless nouns. I hope my final, chopped-in-half post in the comments section did not scare him or her off. I have no desire to reverse-engineer IP addresses to find out who our anonymous commenters are, even assuming it could be done. I simply wanted to make sure I knew I was talking to the right anonymous person. If the multiple anonymice in the comments section are in fact the same person, I would advise professional help. As always, thanks for reading, and I promise a return to (beginning of?) substantive posts soon.

Sorry for the light (well, non-existent) posting over the long holiday weekend. And just to prime the pump and get back in the swing of things, I present this lovely story about a man who legally changed his name to Bubba Bubba Bubba.

To answer your two most obvious questions, no, it doesn't appear that this is the only word he can spell. And he's from Illinois.

According to this article in the Richmond paper, the jurors in the John Muhammad sniper trial were unaware of Virginia law on jury deadlocks. During deliberations on Friday (early in the process), the jurors apparently reached an impasse. They asked the judge what would happen if they could not reach a verdict. The judge told them nothing.

Well, more accurately, he didn't tell them the truth: In Virginia, if the jury in the sentencing phase of a capital trial deadlocks between life (without parole) or death, the default is life (without parole). Some states don't do this, and force everyone to go through a whole new sentencing phase with a new jury, but not Virginia.

And here's the worst part -- the judge told the jury they had to be unanimous (or at least that's the impression the jury got). As for a death verdict, that's true, but the Supreme Court has been clear that the jury does not have to be unanimous for a life verdict. In other words, one juror could have hung the jury and saved Muhammad's life.

That's why the fact that the only other alternative is life without parole is so important for the jury to know. Would the jury have hung if it knew that Muhammad would never get out of jail? We'll never know. But one of the jurors said, "I do think it is deceptive. I don't think it would have changed the verdict, but it would have been less stressful knowing the facts."

Making a (literally) life-or-death decision should be stressful. But it should also be an informed decision. Based on what I've read, the judge here didn't give the jury some pretty crucial information.

My guess is, though, that this will all turn out to be academic. At most, a reviewing court might say that the judge erred, but that the error was "harmless." Maybe if the court had real qualms about the new terrorism law Muhammad was prosecuted under, it could use the jury instruction issue to punt the case back for resentencing. However, I'd say there's almost zero chance Muhammad won't be executed.

Check out this analysis of Bush's first attack ad in slate. (Note also how early it's coming.) Bush complains about Democrats "attacking the President for attacking the terrorists." There are just so many things wrong with this ad, and not enough time to list them, so just read the story.

I think the authors have an interesting point that it might be a sign of desperation on the part of Bush, because he knows he's going to be vulnerable on how he has managed the after-war in Afghanistan and Iraq, plus his reasons for going to Iraq in the first place. So, he makes up this ad essentially saying, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Iraq and al-Qaeda are the same thing, and our reason for going to Iraq was "terrorism."

Finally, I am happy to see what I think is a proper use of the term "begging the question":

This ad is a blunt instrument, but one sly element is the way it begs the question of whether the attack on Saddam Hussein is part of the campaign against terrorism.

See? The ad assumes the conclusion it hopes to prove: that the war in Iraq was necessitated, even justified, by concerns about terrorism. Nice. George Bush, question beggar.

Let me mention here that I'm not saying we might not have been justified in going to war in Iraq, or that post hoc rationalizations aren't permissible here. What I am saying is that the war wasn't sold to the American people as part of the war on al-Qaeda (in fact, there was a lot of grumbling that we were leaving that unfinished), and that even if it was, it was done without evidence. Bush's ad conflates everything, and then implies that the Democrats are as bad as the terrorists. Classy. What a noble way to run a campaign.

This story from the Big Fork Eagle is truly strange. Horse owners near Big Fork, Montana have been encouraged by local authorities to keep a close eye on their animals after two recent incidents of horse theft and "victimization." The perpetrator is apparently still at large but he is missing his cowboy boots.

Maybe he should look into the online dating scene instead of running around northern Montana naked in the middle of November "victimizing" horses. Thanks (?) to the Corner for the lead.

I was reading a case today about sanctions against an attorney for continued rude conduct against the judge and other attorneys. She was accused of using "gutter language" during depositions, and she wrote a letter to the local paper attacking the judge for incompetence and bias. Then, she asked the judge to recuse himself because he would naturally be biased against her because of this pretty vicious letter. The judge, properly, said that a lawyer can't manufacture a bias claim like that.

But the part that really got to me was that she had served subpoenas on all of the judge's colleagues, and all of the law clerks to all those judges. I'm not exactly sure what my reaction to getting a subpoena would be, but I’m afraid I might need these. The case I was reading is here. The subpoena story is from a case cited therein. Thanks to Howard Bashman at How Appealing for the lead.

We're working on building the blogroll in the right column. Clearly, we like more than those few sites. Also, we're going to get around to writing a bit more about ourselves soon. As for substantive content, I've been thinking about a couple of things. One is this whole mess involving electronic voting machines. I'm really worried that these things will fail miserably in 2004, leading to all kinds of headaches and litigation (there's already been some). Conspiracy theorists will be pleased to know that the CEO of Diebold, the leading producer of touch-screen voting machines (they’re big in ATMs now), is a huge George Bush supporter. I'll try to get more on that out soon. Finally, I'll try to answer the question whether Democrats really want the economy to tank (in order to ferment opposition to Bush), which, as far as I'm concerned, is like asking if Republicans really want another big terrorist attack (in order to promote support for Bush, like we had after Sept. 11).

I'll admit I've given some thought to online dating from time to time. I haven't had a date in a while, and online dating has certainly become more socially acceptable. This is a really good article about the whole online dating "scene" from Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

One reason I don't do it is simply that I don't have a digital camera, and to do well on these sites, you have to have a picture posted. Another is that it seems like "resorting" to going online is a move of desperation. It's kind of the same reason I have never been to the movies in the theater alone (for me, it’s a social event, and going alone says I don't have any friends), or why I've never worn sweatpants out in public in a situation where normal people wear pants (to me, once you do that, you’ve given up).

In fact, the author notes that several people told her they saw "the bar scene" as the only possible alternative to online dating. I'll leave for another time what that says about our society, if there really aren't any ways for young(ish) single people to interact outside of smelly, loud bars. But apparently these people see online dating as something of a last resort, or at least a next-to-last resort. But on the other hand, the author talks to people who have met "soulmates" and people who have so many dates they have to keep track of them on a spreadsheet.

I think another problem is that I don't think I make the best first impression on women. Or perhaps more accurately, I move quickly into "the friend zone" and we all know there's no escape from there. And computer dating, to me, is really the illusion of intimacy. I'm not much of an impulse buyer, and I don't think an online commercial for a person could sell me either.

However, there comes a point where biology trumps philosophy. So, if someone can help me out with the picture, I may take the leap. I'll keep you posted on my progress.

According to this post in National Review Online’s The Corner, a FOX News poll says that 45% of Americans would rather spend Thanksgiving with George Bush, as opposed to 35% with Hillary Clinton. The Cornerite expresses surprise that the margin isn’t wider.

I think Republicans make the same mistake about Hillary (I’ll use her first name to distinguish her from her husband) that Democrats do about Bush. (Of course, I’m generalizing terribly here.) They think that everyone hates her/him as much as they do. The big mistake the Democrats appear to be making in the 2004 race is giving the nomination to someone based on anger at Bush instead of sound policies. I can very easily see the Republicans doing the same thing in 2008 – assuming that people will feel the same visceral hatred of Hillary that they do.

In fact, Hillary has a pretty good shot at winning, given the Electoral College system. She has proven she can win New York. Does anyone think she would lose California? Add in a few other states Clinton and Gore won, and pretty soon it gets close to 270 votes. And just as Howard Dean’s “I’m mad at Bush” campaign won’t win, neither will a “Hillary’s a bitch” campaign in 2008. Republicans underestimate her at their own peril.

Now, the really fascinating question is how Hillary feels about the 2004 race, whether she would accept a draft, whether she would serve as a running mate, or whether she (not so) secretly wants the Democratic nominee to lose, making her the “titular head” of the party. Well, who else would it be? Tom Daschle? Nancy Pelosi?