The Vatican Can Be Cool

 Metafilter people warns this is flash. My Mac laptop seems okay with it.

Joke O' Teh Day

Did you know that one of Pat Buchanan's relatives was killed in the Holocaust? He fell out of a guard tower.

 TPM commenter in response to:
Buchanan, who is Catholic and a raging bigot/anti-Semite to boot, apparently has complained in a column that there are too many Jews on the Supreme Court.
It should be noted that there are six Catholics on the Court, two Jews with the retiring Stevens the only Protestant.

Big Think

is the web site o' teh day.
Sorry, as happens so often, I have found no frivolity yet, but Big Think probably has some. If you find any, send me a link.

Poem O' Teh Day

Another good one. Looks like they've got enough money to send one a day forever.

Across a Great Wilderness without You by Keetje Kuipers The deer come out in the evening. God bless them for not judging me, I'm drunk. I stand on the porch in my bathrobe and make strange noises at them—                                                   language, if language can be a kind of crying. The tin cans scattered in the meadow glow, each bullet hole suffused with moon, like the platinum thread beyond them where the river runs the length of the valley. That's where the fish are.                                    Tomorrow I'll scoop them from the pockets of graveled stone beneath the bank, their bodies desperately alive when I hold them in my hands, the way prayers become more hopeless when uttered aloud.                             The phone's disconnected. Just as well, I've got nothing to tell you: I won't go inside where the bats dip and swarm over my bed. It's the sound of them shouldering against each other that terrifies me, as if it might hurt to brush across another being's living flesh.                 But I carry a gun now. I've cut down a tree. You wouldn't recognize me in town— my hands lost in my pockets, two disabused tools I've retired from their life of touching you.

© 2010, Academy of American Poets. All Rights Reserved.

Long Way, Baby Dept.

A little summary of the last 50 years.

When Schroeder's class graduated, fewer than 3 percent of women and all law students nationwide were women, three federal judges were women, there were few women teachers of law or law school administrators in the whole country and none at Harvard. In 2009, 47% of the Harvard Law graduating class were women. And soon, a former dean of Harvard Law will probably become the fourth female associate justice to serve on the Supreme Court, its second female graduate of Harvard Law.  

Question O' Teh Day

Q. Why is Meg Whitman, former CEO of Ebay, going to lose the Republican gubernatorial primary in California?
A. Because Meg Whitman looks like Lou Dobbs everyone hates Goldman Sachs.

This is why I love politics.

I Love America

Semi-Literate Former Gold Prospector Given Own Cable News Show

You Know Things Are Tough

when "Paul Allen Puts 10-Bedroom Mega Yacht Up For Sale."

Elena Kagan: Day Two

Josh Marshall Andrew Pincus describes today's politics in fewer than 1,000 very spot-on words. C'mon, people write books about this stuff. But I don't have time to read that much.

The scenes on television and cable yesterday were as civilized, and as choreographed, as the steps in a seventeenth century minuet: the announcement in the East Room...The trench warfare now underway is the laboratory in which lines of attack and defense are tested and refined. The attackers are trying to identify arguments that will "stick"--that are not batted down quickly enough by the nominee's defenders, and therefore begin to migrate into more mainstream media and, ultimately, into the Senate hearing. Think of it as a very specialized form of test marketing...In many ways, Supreme Court confirmations are the ultimate "dog whistle" issue--very important to the base, but virtually ignored by ordinary voters. That is why every Democratic Senator who aspired to be President voted against confirming Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito. And it is why every Republican Senator with the same aspirations for 2012, or later, will almost certainly vote against Elena Kagan.

Judge Kagan

Elena Kagan has never worn the judicial robes. As an adult.

NEW YORK — There were a lot of smart girls at Hunter College High School, but only one of them posed for the yearbook in a judge's robes, quoted a Supreme Court justice and is remembered for playing a tough attorney in an eighth-grade trial.

Yes, but is she a lesbian? The world wants to know.

Kagan: Myths And Facts

From Media Matters. A new feature, I guess. I may have to start visiting them more often.

R.I.P. Lena

"I wouldn't trade my life for anything," she said, "because being black made me understand."

Lena Horne

I always loved this.

And The Nomination Goes To...Shorty!

Thurgood Marshall's nickname for her when she was his clerk. I mean, how many times will I get to write that?

'She Will Get The Fifth Vote'

Says Spitzer. Which is the best reason for nominating Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, among a whole long list of excellent reasons.
Andrew has a compendium of back-and-forth for your selection pleasure. I like this from Ed Morrissey:

Obama wants a stealth candidate, someone who can win a relatively quick confirmation battle.  Of the names floated by the White House after Stevens’ retirement, Kagan attracted the least amount of public opposition.

Did I mention that Contrarienne's earlier posts about Kagan were viewed by the White House and ... some other official sources I can't remember? Cool.

The Big One

My old colleague updates the earthquake situation.

A bright-red splotch on a map of earthquake hazards marks the Kitsap Peninsula as one of the hottest danger zones in the United States.

I live 50 miles north.