BeldarBlog

From the party of the third part ...

Professor Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy — commenting on an aside from Howard Bashman of How Appealing — laments the tendency of lawyers (including judges) to overuse definitional parentheticals:

Why do lawyers think it's helpful to have obvious parentheticals like this? If there is only one Chanthasouxat in the case, people will realize that Chanthasouxat refers to that Chanthasouxat. If there is more than one, then you shouldn't call either Chanthasouxat. Likewise, there were exactly two defendants in the cases being considered in the opinion; who else would "Defendants" refer to?

Sometimes, a parenthetical like this may be helpful, for instance when one is introducing an acronym that's common enough to be worth using, but not so common that it's obvious. But often — as here — the abbreviation (whether a last name or "defendants") is so utterly obvious that I just see no reason at all to include it.

A couple of explanations spring to mind.  Basically, what it boils down to is that lawyers either write that way trying to look smart, or else under the misimpression that they have to write that way to actually be smart.

One of my great surprises in law school from 1977-1980 was how very little specific instruction was given to legal draftsmanship.  There was some small-group instruction on basic legal citation form given to first-year students by third-year students, and one could perhaps intuit some principles from studying substantive law — particularly the two-semester first-year course in contracts.  My impression is that most law schools are trying harder to address this gap nowadays.  But no one ever sat me down and said, "Here's how you avoid ambiguities when drafting contracts," for instance.

In my last two years of law school, though, I was a member, and then an editor, of the Texas Law Review, which frankly transformed my writing style — mostly, but not wholly, for the better.  After graduation, I had the honor and privilege of clerking for a year for the Hon. Carolyn Dineen King, who is now the Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.  Then, however, she was in just her second year on the bench and still relatively fresh from private practice as a business and securities lawyer.  My judicial clerkship — which amounted to a full-time writing job — greatly influenced my views on both law and legal writing.  And the third major influence has been my later career as a practicing trial lawyer.

Although I'm not a "deal lawyer," during most of my career I've handled lawsuits arising out of the transactional documents that deal lawyers write — commercial leases, employment agreements, licensing contracts, merger agreements, and so forth.  I have seen an imperfect but still very strong positive correlation between (a) the wealth and power of the client, (b) the prestige and billing rate of its lawyers, and (c) the length and complexity of its transactional documents. 

I've also observed that deal lawyers are expected to anticipate and provide for every eventuality.  They write under the working premise that if ever litigation should spring from a document they have penned, they will be exposed to the world as a fraud, an utter personal and professional failure.  This concern makes them write every word in every line in every paragraph on every page of these documents to withstand intense scrutiny — with the most hostile of motives — by a hypothetical "Judge Fiendish" who sits as the Chief Justice on the Supreme Court of No Second Chances.

Some of this spills over into litigation-related writing as well, of course.  Judge King in particular was very keen that the opinions we helped her write be buttoned up and nailed down just as tightly as the transactional documents she'd dealt with every day as a deal lawyer.  Every party to every appeal, for instance, would be specifically referenced by both name and litigant-position precisely once, and thereafter solely by a defined term intended to be the best shorthand reminder for that party.  Beyond defining parties and terms, we obsessed more generally over the possibility that something we might help Judge King write would someday be found unclear or ambiguous by a future panel of "Judge Fiendishes." 

The natural consequence of this paranoia, however, is writing that quickly tends toward being turgid, stultifying, even constipated — along with an extremely unhealthy respect for and reliance upon "forms."  To her enormous credit, however — and perhaps in aid of my literary salvation — Judge King was aware of the tendency of this kind of punctiliousness to deaden the language of what we clerks helped her write.  Her passion was to get things right and clear, but subject to those requirements, she also encouraged us to try to find dryly colorful and evocative phrases.  "Tell a story," she'd urge us clerks, "An opinion has to tell a story to be readable!"  Probably my favorite sentence in an opinion that I contributed to writing was from her dissent in a Commerce Clause case involving a state-subsidized fruit market in Georgia which went something like this:  "With due respect to the majority, these tomatoes, potatoes, and peaches do not rise to the level of constitutional significance."  I probably walked around our chambers for a week inanely singing "tomatoes, potatoes, and peaches" to myself.

Even trial lawyers tend to rely too much on forms, and they are too willing to copy that which has worked in the past without looking closely at its actual clarity or other qualities.  The silliness of this was brought home to me once in a jury trial in which one of my colleagues had drafted the original answer of our client, the defendant.  We had a very old retired judge presiding over the trial — one who believed that "opening statements" were a newfangled waste of time, and who insisted instead that to acquaint the jury with our position in the case, I read aloud the written answer my colleague had filed.  My colleague had copied from a form that probably was written in about 1890.  Imagine, if you will, me standing in front of an absolutely perplexed jury, trying my dead level best to give a dramatic and persuasive reading to the following:

"Comes now ABC Corporation, the defendant in the above-captioned and -entitled cause, who, for answer to charges asserted against it in the original petition filed by the plaintiff herein, asserts its general denial of those charges, each and all, collectively and singularly, and wherefore, premises considered, the defendant further prays that upon formal hearing thereof at trial in a court of law, said charges and allegations shall be dismissed with prejudice, that judgment shall be entered in favor of the defendant, that the plaintiff shall take nothing and be sent hence without day, and for such other and further relief, at law or in equity, to which the defendant may show itself justly and equitably entitled."

Neither Lawrence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, nor Mel Gibson could have made that soliloquy sing!  But I still see this sort of crap filed in court pleadings every day.

After that humiliation, I began writing things that, if so commanded by Judge Fiendish, I could read aloud to a jury.  "Comes now," "wherefore," and the like I've tried to banish from my vocabulary.  Today I'd write that same answer, with the exact same legal effect, as:

"ABC Corp. denies the claims asserted against it by XYZ Inc. and asks the court to enter judgment for ABC."

But to do that, you have to have confidence that your client won't freak out and say, "Hey, I could have written that!  And you're charging me how much per hour?"  In other words, you must have persuaded your client that you have something to offer in addition to your services as a shaman in, and speaker and interpreter of, the mystic received wisdom of the law.

Indeed, as I've grown into a crusty trial lawyer, I've taken more and more risks with my professional writing.  Last year I shocked some of my colleagues when I submitted a trial brief that called our opponent's brief "a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."  Yes, there was a deliberate omission from the line as Macbeth delivered it, for while I was eager to attack their work, I did not want to attack them personally — and I thought the omission actually made the allusion more interesting anyway.  (This was written, by the way, in a "meta-brief™" — one composed in .html and given to the court and opposing counsel on a CD-ROM, with promiscuous hyperlinks to the full text of all cited cases and to .pdf scans of all of the relevant exhibits.  Bill Shakespeare and Clarence Darrow meet Bill Gates.)

All of which is to say that as I've grown in confidence, my goal has increasingly become effective communication, rather than slavish adherance to tradition and formalisms in the hope that they'll make me look, or be, smarter than I really am.

What I have not yet become, though — no surprise to those of you who've read to here! — is concise.  Concision is the hardest art; it requires the greatest effort and self-confidence.

And now I'm blogging!  Surely — for many reasons — 'nuff said, Beldar.  Hush.

Toldja so, Fox

Tonight can't be a good night for Dori Ann Hanswirth, the Hogan & Hartson partner who is lead lawyer for Fox News in its uncommonly silly lawsuit against Al Franken.

To its credit, Fox News' own story on the beating it was handed in court today is pretty fair and balanced.  This quote pretty much sums it up:

"There are hard cases and there are easy cases," the judge said. "This is an easy case. This case is wholly without merit, both factually and legally."

Trial lawyers refer to this kind of whuppin' as "getting poured out" — a somewhat vulgar short-hand for the even more vulgar, "He got poured out in court today like piss out of a boot."  Dori Ann, your client deserved to get poured out today, and if you let your client appeal to the Second Circuit, it's just gonna be a bigger boot.

Ernie the Attorney's take is about the same as mine, with some comments.

New PR campaign for Truant Texas Dems™ moves from "Stand and Fight!" to "Run Away and Tell Lies!"

One hundred and sixty-seven years ago, the Texians — the mixed Anglo and Hispanic inhabitants of what's now the Lone Star State, but was then part of the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas  — fought against a tyrannical dictator, Antonio López de Santa Anna Pérez de Lebrón.  Santa Anna had stated that "Mexico was not ready for democracy" and then set about the systematic dismantling of rights guaranteed to the Texians under the Mexican Constitution of 1824.  One hundred and eighty-nine Texians made a stand to the death against Santa Anna's vastly larger army in a small church compound, the Mission San Antonio de Valero.  The bravery of those men and the common name for that church together gave rise to one of the most famous slogans of all times, shouted by the revenging Texian soldiers at the independence-winning Battle of San Jacinto six weeks later — "Remember the Alamo!"

Just three years ago, Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore decided that his prior campaign slogan, "Practical Idealism," was losing out to Dubya's "Compassionate Conservatism," so he abandoned it for the eminently more chant-worthy "Stay and Fight!" — the motto which sustained his campaign not only through the 2000 presidential election, but also the recount fight in Florida afterwards.

Fast-forward to today:  The Truant Texas Dems™ — eleven Democratic state senators whose flight to New Mexico has stalemated the ongoing battle here over Congressional reapportionment — appeared to begin their fight with a very catchy slogan, one borrowed from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" — Run away!  Unfortunately, though, like King Arthur's friend Brave Sir Robin, the Truant Texas Dems™ found that they needed a band of bards to ... ummm ... supplement the slogan in a way that puts a better light on their brave acts. 

So the supporters of the Truant Texas Dems™ have decided to mount a new PR campaign — and they're apparently counting on their partisans' reflexive hatred of Tom DeLay to wash down the real whoppers that they have to tell in the process.  They desperately need those whoppers and that hatred to conceal the fact that just like Santa Anna, the Truant Texas Dems™ think Texas is not ready for democracy.  And worse, they think Texans can't even count to ten.

In the short history of BeldarBlog, I've already written twice about the ongoing Battle for Texas Reapportionment — "Hasta la vista for truant Texas Dems?" and "Wall Street Journal swallows truant Texas Dems' propaganda and misstates key facts about Congressional reapportionment."  I keep wishing that they'd either get one more state senator to flee the jurisdiction — Democratic state senator Ken Armbrister from Victoria has kept his dignity by refusing to flee — or that one would drop out.  "Eleven" is a hard number to coin good phrases about.  I'd much prefer either the "Truant Texas Ten" or the "Truant Texas Twelve," frankly. 

But I'll say this much for them — by enlisting some out-of-state talent, the Truant Texas Dems™ have dramatically improved on the drivel that has characterized their own whiny press conferences this summer.  Their team has been sharpening their themes and arguments — and indeed, as noted in the more recent of my two posts, they've managed to convince no less an authority than the Wall Street Journal that they "have a point" in their complaints.

Talking Points Memo's Joshua Micah Marshall finds it "truly remarkable" that MoveOn.org has raised something on the order of $600,000 — toward a desired goal of $1 million — "to defray the hotel and other expenses the pols are racking up during their sojourn in New Mexico (they're conducting state business there, essentially on their own dime) and mount a media campaign to help in their fight."  He adds his own contribution to the media campaign in the form of an article in Forward entitled "DeLay: Tammany on the Potomac." 

And predictably, the MoveOn folks themselves have put up a slick bit of pseudo-factual arguments on their own website, variously referred to as a "letter" and an "email" from Democratic state senator Rodney Ellis "from 'exile' in New Mexico," followed by "complete background information on the situation." 

Before we decide whether the Texas Truant Dems™ more resemble Col. William Barrett Travis — we can assume the Dems prefer the 1987 made-for-TV movie with Alec Baldwin in this key role — or Brave Sir Robin, let's take a closer look at their arguments.

The Marshall Plan:  "We've already redistricted once this decade" and other lies

¶   Let's start with Mr. Marshall's article from Forward, simply because in it, he is honest enough to concede the key political truth of this whole melodrama:

From a distance, the Texas redistricting battle looks like garden-variety political hardball. After all, gerrymandering — the practice of redrawing electoral districts to advantage your own political party — may be inherently unfair. But it's also as American as apple pie. Every 10 years, Congress reapportions the number of seats each state gets in the House of Representatives, and each state takes the opportunity to redraw the boundaries of its congressional districts. That makes controlling the state government just after the decadal year (1990, 2000, 2010, etc.) extremely important since whichever party is in the saddle can then stack the deck in its own favor for the next 10 years.

The key, though, is that it happens only once every 10 years. Or at least that's how it worked until this year in Texas. There's no law preventing states from redrawing their district lines before every new election. But the 10-year rule has been established practice since the late 19th century. And, with the exception of maps thrown out because of federal voting rights violations, that precedent hasn't been violated in any of the 50 states for the past 50 years.

The practical reason for keeping to this rule is obvious: Redistricting is an inherently political and highly disruptive process that pulls the political craziness of Washington down into each state. Sticking to the once-a-decade ritual provides some measure of fairness and regularity to the process.

(Emphasis added.)  Yes!  There's a man who gets the basic concepts of representative democracy and apple pie! 

¶   This makes it all the sadder, though, when Mr. Marshall immediately begins to slip into serious distortions:

In 2001, Texas had divided government. And after the House and Senate failed to agree on a map, a panel of federal judges (two Republicans and one Democrat) stepped in to decide on a map. DeLay and his allies have argued that the Legislature, and not unelected judges, should choose a map. But courts always step in when state governments reach an impasse, and those maps are never revisited before the decade is out. At least not until now.

Liar, liar, pants on fire!  Back to civics class for you, Mr. Marshall! 

It's not just "Tom DeLay and his allies" who have argued that "the Legislature, and not unelected judges, should choose a map."  Rather, it's the US Constitution which provides for that, and it's those unelected judges who have protested the most loudly when they've been forced to do so.  Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott — yes, he's a Republican, like every other statewide office-holder in Texas, but by god if you're going to quibble effectively about any of this you better come up with a case citation or two, Mr. Marshall! — summarized the Constitutional starting point very nicely in his April 23rd opinion on redistricting:

The United States Constitution provides that "Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State," U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 2, as determined by the decennial census, id. art. I, § 2, cl. 3.  The states have the primary duty and responsibility to redraw their congressional districts in compliance with the United States Constitution. See Growe v. Emison, 507 U.S. 25, 26 (1993). Article I, section 4 states explicitly that "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof ...." U.S. Const. art. I, § 4.

Attorney-General Abbott also nicely describes the reluctance of federal judges to substitute their judgments for that of state legislatures:

The United States Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that "legislative reapportionment is primarily a matter for legislative consideration and determination," Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 586 (1964), because an elected legislature is the institution best positioned to reconcile conflicting goals in the people's name. Judicial relief in this area — when courts are forced to act in a pseudo-legislative capacity — should be exceedingly rare. When, however, a state legislature fails in its constitutional responsibility to redistrict timely according to federal constitutional requisites, and state courts subsequently fail to produce a valid plan, it throws to the federal courts "the unwelcome obligation of performing in the legislature's stead, while lacking the political authoritativeness that the legislature can bring to the task." Connor v. Finch, 431 U.S. 407, 415 (1977).

As a former law clerk for a Fifth Circuit judge, I'll throw in my personal two cents here:  All three of the judges who were on the Balderas v. Texas panel in 2001 would be profoundly, personally offended by Mr. Marshall's sleazy insinuation that because two of them [ed: see important correction below*] were appointed by Republican presidents, they leaned toward the Republican Party in the court-devised district map they were compelled by statute to write.  And if Mr. Marshall would bother to read what they wrote, surely it would make him ashamed of that insinuation — because nothing could be farther from the actual truth.

The 2000 Census gave Texas two new seats in the US House of Representatives, so two new districts had to be created.  Yes, the 77th Texas Legislature failed in its constitutional duty to do that in 2001, so the Balderas three-judge panel had to step in.  But it did so with extreme reluctance, and in a way that emphatically did not favor the Republican Party.  The panel first marked as untouchable the "existing Voting-Rights-Act-protected majority-minority districts" — that is, the panel gave automatic bulletproof status to black and Hispanic Democratic incumbents.  Based on that, it then carved out the two new districts where there'd been the most population growth, in Dallas and Harris Counties.   Finally, it "maintained intact the existing districts" drawn up in the pro-Democrat 1991 gerrymander, ensuring that minority populations were "neither enhanced nor diminished."  Where small boundary changes were needed to even out the numbers, they were done with a view toward "compactness and contiguity"; thus, two "patently irrational [district] shapes" that were "widely cited as the most extreme but successful [pro-Democrat] gerrymandering in the country" were altered, even though those changes were deemed unlikely to affect any district voting outcomes. 

As a "check against the outcome of [its] neutral principles,"  the panel reassured itself that its plan was unlikely to unseat any incumbents, and that the plan was "likely to produce a congressional delegation roughly proportional to the party voting breakdown across the state."  But this was indeed only a very "rough" proportionality because, as the panel pointed out, "any [court-drawn] plan necessarily begins with a Democratic bias due to the preservation of majority-minority districts, all of which contain a high percentage of Democratic voters."  In other words, the process started off with a heavy Democratic thumb on the scales as a result of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the final result very predictably reflected that.

The bottom-line result of the 77th Legislature's stalemate in 2001 and the Balderas panel's map was thus a sort of thick inertia, still rather heavily tilted to the Democrats' favor, through which the voters of Texas had to swim in the 2002 elections.  Most of the Republicans that had been disproportionately packed into fewer districts in 1991 stayed packed into those same districts, and even the white male Democratic incumbents kept the artificial protections created by the 1991 Democratic gerrymander.  The Balderas panel expressly avoided doing the kind of "bloodfeud" gerrymandering that state legislatures do — and that Mr. Marshall correctly describes as being as American as apple pie.

But the new Republican majorities in both chambers of the 78th Texas Legislature still haven't had their once-a-decade chance to bake an apple pie yet — or maybe, to extend the analogy a bit, to switch to cherry pie to accord with the changing taste of Texas voters.  That's the whole point of this fight.  Mr. Marshall's argument that the existing district map is the result of politics as normal, or anything that remotely represents small-d Democracy, is disgustingly false.

¶   So what other arguments does Mr. Marshall have?

Alternatively and more candidly, DeLay and Co. have argued that since Texas is now a Republican state, any legislative map that doesn't yield a majority of Republican congressmen is intrinsically unfair to the GOP. But even on its own terms, that argument doesn't add up either. As Democrats repeatedly point out, there are more than enough Republican majority districts to allow the GOP to dominate the state's congressional delegation as thoroughly as it does the rest of the state's politics. What stands in the way isn't gerrymandering, so much as incumbency. A handful of long-serving conservative Democrats like Charlie Stenholm continue to be re-elected by Republican-dominated districts.

Here Mr. Marshall has simply confused cause and effect.  The "handful of long-serving conservative Democrats like Charlie Stenholm" was re-elected only because the Republican majority of state-wide voters was still diluted in their districts in 2002.  Those are the exact seats that the Truant Texas Dems™ are now trying to hold on to in their flight to New Mexico — not the Congressional seats being held by blacks or Hispanics, but the ones being held by incumbent white males whom the Balderas panel of federal judges didn't want to disturb.  It's their pro-Democrat gerrymandered protection that the Texas Republicans are now trying to undo.  If they're really that popular, then Stenholm and his (white male incumbent) buddies will continue to buck the trend and will get enough ticket-splitting cross-over Republican voters to hang on.  But let's take away their gerrymandered above-the-mean-percentage of yellow-dog Democrats, undo the purposeful dilution of Republic votes left over from 1991, and then see, shall we?

¶   In his concluding paragraph, Mr. Marshall waxes eloquent:

But the slide to all-out political war illustrates a deeper point. Constitutions and laws dictate the basic structure of government: stuff that must always happen and things that can't ever be tolerated. But if that was all there was to the machinery of the state, it would constantly break down into confrontation or paralysis, as it is now in Texas. To compensate, the body politic, like a human body, is also made up of all manner of ligaments, cushioning cartilage and connective tissue that allow the system to function smoothly and last for years. Government screeches into crisis after crisis without some respect for precedent, established usage or just some sense of limits.

Well, yes.  Most voters would include among "things that can't ever be tolerated" their elected state senators fleeing the jurisdictional boundaries of the state to avoid a voting showdown, even one they're likely to lose.  We're indeed in a state of "confrontation [and] paralysis" in Texas, but I flatly reject the notion that "go along to get along" courtesies are more important than the Constitutional duty of the Legislature — not the federal courts! — to draw Congressional district boundaries.  If you'll check with some folks off the street who haven't been poisoned already with lies like "We've already done our once-a-decade redistricting!" — most folks' "sense of limits" would keep a state senator in the state, in the capital city, and at his job.  Instead, the Truant Texas Dems™ are in a state of (choose one):  (a) New Mexico, (b) Oklahoma, or (c) denial.

The Ellis/MoveOn Manifesto

As packaged by MoveOn.org, Senator Ellis' propaganda is about as slick as, but far less honest than, Mr. Marshall's article. 

¶   Let's start with the heart-wrenching opener:

I am writing to you from a hotel room in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I and 10 of my colleagues in the Texas Senate have been forced to reside for the past 20 days. If we return to our homes, families, friends, and constituents, the Governor of Texas will have us arrested.

ARRESTED?  Oh my god!  And with what punishment, pray tell us?

You'll have to go back to Austin, Senator Ellis — Austin, still the paradise of the state, at least in the hearts of all UT grads like me, and a damn nice place to be in the opinions of about everyone who's been there.  They'll take you to the very stately and recently refurbished Texas Capitol Building, whose dome is even taller than the one over the US Capitol.  And there — you'll have to stay in  a closed room while everyone .... VOTES!  Why, you might even be punished with ... THE SOFT CUSHIONS or THE COMFY CHAIR while you're there!

Well, actually, you might also have to participate in some small-d democracy — which means you'll vote one way, and a majority of the other people in the same room will vote the other way, and your side will lose.  It's the certain knowledge of that which explains why the Truant Texas Dems™ ran away.  But it could be worse — it's likely to be more publicity for you, Senator, and far less boring for everyone else, than your average C-SPAN telecast. 

¶   What else is on your list, Senator?

The Republican redistricting effort shatters the tradition of performing redistricting only once a decade immediately after the Census — making redistricting a perpetual partisan process.

This is a bald-faced lie.  See above — the Texas Legislature has yet to complete one redistricting for the 2001-2010 decade.  There fortunately is not yet a "tradition" that ad hoc panels of three federal judges convened under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 shall excuse the Texas Legislature from ever again performing its duty under the US Constitution.

¶   Next?

It elevates partisan politics above minority voting rights, in contravention of the federal Voting Rights Act.

No, Senator, as you well know, when a redistricting plan finally does obtain a majority vote in both chambers of the Texas Legislature and the Governor's signature, that plan will still have to undergo pre-clearance with the Justice Department under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and it's also certain to face private-party court challenges.  That's precisely why every redistricting plan under serious discussion goes well out of its way to avoid any dilution of minority voting rights.  Just tell the truth, Senator, and admit to the public that the only "racial discrimination" involved is your attempt to protect white male incumbent Democrats.

¶   How about this one?

Republican efforts to force a vote on this issue by changing the rules of legislative procedure threaten to undermine the rule of law in Texas.

Senator, there's a big difference between the "rule of law" and rules of courtesy.  What you're talking about is a rule of courtesy, a "good ole boys" tradition that does indeed encourage compromise and discourage extreme partisanship.  However, you had your chance to operate under those courtesies in the 77th Legislature, the regular session of the 78th Legislature, and the first special session this summer.  And you've abused those rules of courtesy to achieve a deadlock that's blocked the Legislature from doing its duty under the US Constitution.  If you want to know about the "rule of law" Senator, I really suggest you start with the US Constitution, which tells you that your butt ought to be in Austin instead of on the golf courses of Albuquerque.

¶   He's shocked, shocked:

Now Tom Delay [sic] has made it his priority to force the Republican-controlled Legislature to enact a new redistricting plan to increase the number of Republican-leaning Congressional districts.

Yes.  This is called "gerrymandering," but it's not just Representative DeLay's priority.  It's part of what Texas voters are conclusively presumed to have intended when, in our system of representative small-d democracy, they put all the levers of state government entirely into the hands of the Republican Party in the 2002 election.  Read Mr. Marshall's article, Senator, the part about apple pie ....  Oh, wait — you ought not need to do that, Senator, you were in the Legislature in 1991 when the Democrats crammed down the gerrymandered district map you're trying to preserve today!

¶   And the sky will surely fall:

If the Republicans succeed in redrawing the Texas Congressional lines to guarantee the election of five to seven more Republicans, it will ensure that Republicans hold the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives for the entire decade and will likely result in Tom Delay [sic] becoming Speaker of the House.

"Ensure" is a bit strong — not all gerrymanders work as planned.  But yes, that's rather the point of the process (although your numbers are probably high).  You're completely wrong, though, to speak of "the entire decade" — did you forget that we've already had one of the decade's five Congressional elections under essentially the same gerrymandered plan you voted for in 1991?  There's another Census in 2010, and whatever happens this year, the Texas Legislature that convenes in 2011 will again have to deal with redistricting.  Believe it or not about your fellow Texans, Senator, but just about all of us can count to ten.

As for the prospect of Tom DeLay becoming Speaker of the House, it makes a wonderful scare tactic, Senator, for those who substitute personal fears and hatreds for principled arguments.  But we both know that's not going to happen.  Congressman DeLay has his fans, but he also has "high negatives" sufficient to ensure that regardless of how much power he wields as House Majority Leader, he'll almost certainly never be the Speaker.

¶   Time to try again to "play the race card":

The Republican advantage would be gained by removing many African American and Hispanic voters from their current Congressional districts and "packing" them into a few districts that already have Democratic majorities. The voting power of these minority voters would be dramatically diluted by the Republican plan, in contravention of the federal Voting Rights Act. If the Republicans succeed, over 1.4 million African American and Hispanic voters will be harmed. It would be the largest disenfranchisement of minority voters since the Voting Rights Act was passed.

"Disenfranchisement" means preventing someone from voting altogether.  You don't mean that — although it's a great word to use when you're telling lies about redistricting, since it sounds so much worse than "diluting."  It conjures up vivid images from the civil rights struggles in the 1950s and 1960s that the Democratic Party very much wants to keep alive.  As propaganda, it's right up there with painting a Hitler moustache on Dubya's picture, Senator.

More fundamentally, it's rather beyond the power of the Texas Legislature to repeal the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  We're all still statutorily presumed to be bigots here in Texas, so regardless of actual intentions, any plan with even the unintended effect of significantly diluting the rights of minority voters will be tossed out by a three-judge panel in the proverbial New York minute.  The one thing everyone in this argument can be absolutely certain about is that there will be no fewer minority Congressmen when we're done.  If you really believed this argument, Senator, you'd take your medicine in Austin now, and then let the federal courts ride to the rescue of the "disenfranchised minority voters."

¶   Well, how about "It's just not done that way!" as an argument?

[R]edistricting has always been conducted immediately following the U.S. Census' decennial population reports. Tom Delay [sic] now proposes a new redistricting plan two years after the Census report simply because Republicans gained control over the Texas Legislature in 2002 and now have the power to enact a much more Republican-friendly plan than the one drawn by the federal courts two years ago. This is an unprecedented approach to redistricting, one that subordinates its original purpose of ensuring the principle of "one man, one vote" to the purpose of perpetual partisan politics. Redistricting, in this model, would never be a settled matter, and districts would constantly be in flux depending on the balance of political power in the Legislature.

There's nothing normal or desirable about redistricting being done by unelected federal judges.  There's nothing unprecedented about gerrymandering (although it's true that the Republicans haven't had a shot at it in Texas since Reconstruction days).  What's unprecedented is the idea that you have the right to run away to another state when you've been elected to sit in the Legislature of this one. 

"Perpetual partisan politics" over redistricting will indeed be at an end until 2011 — just as soon as you and your truant comrades go back to Austin, Senator.

¶   Can't we just all get along?

The Texas Legislature has traditionally been defined by a spirit of bipartisanship and cooperation. This issue has polarized the legislature in a way that threatens to destroy that tradition. The Republicans have effectively exiled their Democratic counterparts in a power play that makes our state look more like a banana republic than a dignified democracy.

Actually, the Texas Legislature wasn't bipartisan at all until recently — it was mono-partisan, filled with an overwhelming majority of Democrats.  Your "exile" is what now threatens to destroy whatever tradition of cooperation and dignity has been established, but that exile is entirely self-imposed, and it will end as soon as you show up for a vote. 

I do agree that state senators who tell obvious, palpable lies and who think their constituents can't count to ten do tend to make the state look like a banana republic.

¶   Okay, back to the "I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" approach:

The deployment of state law enforcement officials to apprehend boycotting legislators erodes the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches of government, and diminishes legislators' ability to represent their constituents as they see fit. The unilateral Republican effort to penalize Democratic Senators and their staffs

Whoops, that argument ends in a sentence fragment, Senator.  You're not getting your money's worth from your propagandists if they leave sentence fragments mid-argument.  "Unilateral Republican effort" ... hmm, usually that's followed by something about Iraq.  Was your staff intending to work something about Iraq and quagmires into this piece, Senator?

Anyway, it's true enough that when you cross the border back into Texas, you're likely to have a respectful law enforcement escort.  As for their diminishing your ability to represent your constituents, though, that's just another damned lie.  Senator, quit painting an image of Sheriff Bubba standing over your desk in the Senate Chamber, ready to blow out your brains if you don't cast a vote in favor of a Republican-sponsored plan.  Every Republican in this state will be tickled to see you vote in whatever manner you think best represents your constituents — so long as you haven't fled the jurisdiction to break a quorum and prevent everyone else from voting.

Stand and fight, Senator!  Remember the Alamo!

-----------------------

*Correction (Mon Aug 25):  While reading through the "Killer D's" website, I saw this statement:  "In 2001, Texas Congressional districts were drawn by a panel of three Republican-appointed federal judges."  I'd read in Dr. Marshall's post and elsewhere, and I had repeated here, that there were two Republicans on the three-judge Balderas panel.  Actually, however, both of the district judges on the panel — John H. Hannah, Jr. and T. John Ward — were appointed by President Clinton.  Only the circuit judge, Patrick E. Higginbotham — whose vote on this panel counted no more than that of the two district judges — was appointed by a Republican President.  (Ford appointed him to the district court bench, then Reagan promoted him to the Fifth Circuit.)  I'm admitted to practice in the Eastern District of Texas, where the case was filed, and I know or know of most of the district judges there — so I have no good excuse for not noticing this sooner.

As is typical in such cases, the Balderas opinion was written "per curiam," rather than as an opinion signed by one and concurred in by two others; so we don't know who was its principal author, nor even whether there was a principal author.  There was no dissent, and by writing "per curiam" the three judges deliberately spoke with one voice. 

I stand by my original point, however, which is that it's a mistake — and very insulting, actually — to suggest that the personal politics of any of these three judges played any conscious part in this decision.  Anyone reading their written opinion will immediately conclude that these three judges were being "judicial conservatives" — meaning that they were keenly aware of their unfitness for the task thrust upon them by a political breakdown, and they were determined to do the minimum necessary to permit the 2002 elections to go forward.  They expressly recognized that their minimalist approach had a pro-Democrat effect, but that wasn't an outcome they maneuvered to create, nor frankly one they tried to avoid. 

The only reason their party affiliation is relevant at all to this discussion — and I'm guessing that their personal party affiliations match that of the Presidents who appointed them, but even that is a wild guess (and I know of examples where it wouldn't be true) — is because it's another example of the kind of factual distortions upon which the Truant Texas Dems™ and their supporters have relied.

NYT demonstrates that it's marginally less brain-dead than the UN, which vows to remain a "soft target"

After having gone out of its way yesterday to blame the Bush Administration repeatedly for failing to prevent Tuesday's truck-bomb terrorist attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad — instead largely ignoring and burying the key evidence that the UN itself is to blame for the security lapse — the New York Times was comparatively responsible and realistic today.  It finally floated a mid-section (page A13) below-the-fold article, poignantly entitled "Questions Haunt a Saddened Annan."  The Times doesn't quite get around to saying who did the asking — one would rather doubt that it was a NYT reporter — but nonetheless reports that the question of "[w]ho should take responsibility for the security breach that enabled the bombing to happen" was one that "dogged a haggard Secretary General Kofi Annan from Stockholm to the doors of the United Nations headquarters building in New York," and that "[t]he report that officials of the Baghdad mission had rejected an offer of increased security from allied forces before the bombing caused great concern here."

Key UN officials, however, appear not only to still be in a state of denial, but a state of deliberate recklessness that makes Dubya's "bring 'em on" remark of a few weeks ago seem hyperprudent by contrast.  Dubya was baiting the honeytrap because he'd rather that radical terrorists, with AK-47s blazing furiously but impotently, mostly continue to hurl themselves in their pickup trucks at our M1A2 Abrams tanks in Iraq instead of patiently plotting to destroy civilian targets in the US. 

The UN, by contrast, seems to be insisting that it will remain an easy target in Iraq just because that's just what kind of fools they really want to be.  It's the international equivalent of taping a "Kick Me, I'm Stupid!" sign to your own back.

As more details have emerged, it became increasingly clear today that the vulnerability of the Baghdad UN headquarters compound can be traced directly to conscious decisions made by the UN itself — rather than to any specific failings of the Bush administration or the US-led forces occupying Iraq.  In today's WaPo, in an article entitled "U.S., U.N. Differ on Issue of Protection: Responsibility Over Site of Blast Disputed," we read that

[a] spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, Lt. Cmdr. Steven Franzoni, said a U.S. Army platoon was present inside the U.N. compound and was guarding the front entrance at the time of the attack. A platoon typically consists of about 40 infantry soldiers. But there were no U.S. troops along the roadway on the other side of the building, where the truck bomb exploded.

"At some level, the United States offered to do more but was told by U.N. officials that they'd prefer to remain separate and distinct," a defense official said. "So the U.N. contracted with a private firm to provide additional security."

As this article goes on to explain, however, the refusal by Annan and other top UN officials to concede that the UN itself was responsible for the security failure rests on the incredible notion that the US should have overridden the UN's wishes and provided more security anyway:

"I don't know if the United Nations did turn down an offer of protection, but if it did, it was not correct, and they should not have been allowed to turn it down," [UN Secretary General Kofi] Annan told reporters after returning to U.N. headquarters in New York.

(Emphasis added.)  "They?"  Who's this "they," Kemosabe?  (He means, "we, the UN.")  Continued the Secretary General of International Rationalizations and Denial:

"We all live in this city, and nobody tells you if you want police to patrol your neighborhood. They make the assessment that patrol and protection is needed, and it is done. And that's what should be done in Iraq."

Hrmpf.  Well, was the security breach the result of a lack of "patrolling" by US occupation forces?  That hypothesis is, if you'll forgive the phrase, exploded in another article in today's WaPo, this one entitled "U.N. Will Cut Staff, Up Security In Baghdad: Bomb Attack Shatters Workers' Sense of Safety."  This article contains more specific — and frankly, damning — concessions made by one who appears to have actually been on the scene in a position to know, Baghdad-based UN spokesman Salim Lone (who was also quoted in my blog yesterday):

Lone said U.N. workers wanted to appear close to the people they had come here to serve and hoped those people would provide a shield of goodwill.

As a result, many U.N. offices here are protected by little more than metal barriers and armed guards, a sharp — and intentional — contrast to the sandbags, barbed wire, armored vehicles and heavily armed troops that surround facilities occupied by U.S. and allied forces.

"We tried to be as accessible as possible," Lone said. "You always thought your best protection was the people, not the security measures. We did not want to be behind barbed wire and tanks. We would move freely without protection, without armored cars."

At U.N. headquarters, for example, the road on which the truck bomber traveled paralleled a new wall built around the compound. The road was unguarded and at one point passed no more than 20 feet from Vieira de Mello's corner office. It was there that the truck driver detonated the bomb that caused the huge explosion.

To a security specialist, this approach seemed pure folly. "There were no checkpoints, no guards at all. This was an open driveway. No security whatsoever," said Thomas Fuentes, the special agent who heads FBI operations in Iraq and is investigating the blast.

So have any lessons been learned yet?  There are mixed signals on that question.  The "U.S., U.N. Differ" article from the WaPo linked above concludes by quoting "Fred Eckhard, the chief U.N. spokesman," thusly: 

"We did not harden our headquarters location from a security point of view, because we didn't think it was necessary," Eckhard said. "As a result of the attack of yesterday, obviously, we're going to have to rethink."

But from the AP, as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle in an article headlined U.N. says will not increase Iraq security after bomb attack, death toll rises to 23":

Even as Washington showed reluctance to give the United Nations a stronger role in Iraq, the world body made it clear it wanted to keep its distance from the U.S.-led occupation.

Despite the bombing, the United Nations will not increase the number of U.S. soldiers standing guard outside its facilities from the dozen or so it had before the attack, said Ramiro Lopes da Silva, Iraq coordinator for U.N. humanitarian programs.

"It's not that we have anything against the Coalition forces, but you do realize the presence of Coalition forces does intimidate some of the people we need to speak to and work with," he told reporters at the blast site.

"We will always remain a soft target," he said. "We are conscious of that, but that is the way we operate. We are an open organization."

And an uncommonly sad and silly one.  A declaration like "[w]e will always remain a soft target" can't help but put one in mind of the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  But he at least talked a good game.

UPDATE (Fri Aug 22):  Today's NYT shows some welcome investigative snap, given their incredibly poor start in reporting on this bombing, in a story entitled "Inquiry of U.N. Bombing Focuses on Possible Ties to Iraqi Guards."  The security lapses which led to this tragedy — far from being the fault of the American occupying forces, as first reflexively insinuated by the NYT and Kofi Annan — now appear to be even more tightly connected to the UN itself, and were very possibly the result of betrayal by the Iraqi "security forces" that the UN decided to use instead of accepting American offers for better compound security.  A "senior American official" in Baghdad is reported as saying that

all of the guards at the compound were agents of the Iraqi secret services, to whom they reported on United Nations activities before the war. The United Nations continued to employ them after the war was over, the official said.

The official said that when investigators began questioning the guards, two of them asserted that they were entitled to "diplomatic immunity" and refused to cooperate....

"We believe the U.N.'s security was seriously compromised," the official said, adding that "we have serious concerns about the placement of the vehicle" and the timing of the attack. The bomb exploded directly under the third-floor office of the United Nations coordinator for Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, while he was meeting with a prominent American human rights advocate, Arthur C. Helton. Both men were killed, along with several top aides to Mr. Vieira de Mello.

(Link via InstaPundit.)

UPDATE (Mon Aug 25):  Ralph Peters in the NY Post nailed this topic shut on Saturday.  Not only did the UN turn down repeated US offers for security, but it was a retired US special forces officer working for the UN — whose pleas had been mostly overruled — who was responsible for construction of the wall that absorbed most of the blast.  Another American officer, recognizing the UN's vulnerability and obstinacy, managed to arrange for two full-blown medevac rehearsal drills at the compound in the weeks before the bombing, so that when the tragedy struck, we were at least prepared for how to handle the aftermath:  "[W]hen the U.N.'s own people lay bleeding, they were glad enough for our help. As one U.N. employee, speaking from inside the Baghdad compound, put it to me, 'It was a proud day for the U.S. Army.'" 

Yet the NYT, and pretty much everyone else in the world who sees through those same sort of spite-colored lenses, reflexively blamed the US first.  Our forces probably know that as a rule, no good deed goes unpunished; and these particular good deeds will likely go unnoticed or be quickly forgotten by much of the American public and most of the world.  But not by those of us whose admiration for our forces serving abroad continues to swell day after day.  (Hat tip to Andrew Olmstead at Winds of Change and Prof. Reynolds at InstaPundit.)

To slam Dubya for the bombing of the Baghdad UN headquarters, NYT buries the key fact on page A9, paragraph 11

The first two questions anyone asks himself upon learning of yesterday's deadly bombing of the U.N. Headquarters in Baghdad are, "How could this have happened and who's to blame?" Never fear: Our national paper of record, the stately Great Grey Lady, has the answer somewhere amidst all the news that's fit to print. But only if you're willing to really dig for it through all the rest of its anti-Administration coverage. The front page of the print version of today's New York Times offers two stories, a news piece entitled "Huge Suicide Blast Demolishes U.N. Headquarters in Baghdad; Top Aid Officials Among 17 Dead" and a "news analysis" piece entitled "Chaos as an Anti-U.S. Strategy." The first reports that

[t]he suicide bombing marked a brazen assault on the American occupation here, apparently calculated to destroy any sense of security for people charged with reviving Iraq in the aftermath of the war. If anarchy was the goal today, it was anarchy that unfolded.

It also reports that

the [U.N.] compound here is also one of the least fortified of its kind here, with neither tanks nor troops to protect it.

The latter article begins by opining that

[t]he bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad today provided grisly evidence of a new strategy by anti-American forces to depict the United States as unable to guarantee public order, as well as to frighten away relief organizations rebuilding Iraq.

Back on page A8, we find "Bush Condemns Iraq Bombing and Vows U.S. Will Persevere," which by its third paragraph reports that

[i]n political terms, the bombing provided Democrats with a new opportunity to criticize Mr. Bush for failing to anticipate the perils and difficulties of occupying and rebuilding Iraq.

This is followed immediately after by predictably condemnatory quotes from Democratic Senators Bob Graham and John Kerry. And of course when we flip back to the editorials on page A24, in "The Baghdad Bombing: A Mission Imperiled," we find this:

Terrorists aim not just at inflicting death and devastation. They also hope to poison the emotional and political climate around their targets.... The Bush administration has to commit sufficient additional resources and, if necessary, additional troops, to prevent that....

Yesterday's attack is described as "another sign that surly, chaotic postwar Iraq is becoming a magnet for terrorists," which in turn is described as "yet another consequence of the Iraq war that the Bush administration failed to anticipate." Damn dumb Dubya & Co., falling down on the job again! Idiotic cowboys! Is there any other possible conclusion you can reach from this coverage? Unless ... Unless you flip back to page A9 to the article entitled "The Scene: Amid Blood and Rubble, a Sense of Helplessness." This article is also filled with criticisms, such as the one attributed to "many" Iraqis that the bombing is "another sign of the poor job the occupation forces are doing providing security in a country they now nominally control." But there — tucked away nicely in the eleventh paragraph, without subheading or italics or boldface or sidebar ("too damn bad we don't have footnotes we could drop this into," you can almost hear the editors murmur) — we finally learn the key fact to answer the questions, "How could this have happened and who's to blame?"

After a bombing at the Jordanian Embassy last week, senior American officials warned that other soft targets might be next. But the United Nations deliberately avoided sealing itself off because it feared that such barriers would send the wrong message to Iraqis seeking help.

Also slipped into that story is an acknowledgement that "[t]he United Nations has been a target before. Three employees were killed over the last few months in various shooting attacks." But you have to leave altogether the bizarro-world of the NYT to learn from somewhere like the Associated Press, as printed in the Houston Chronicle, that

U.N. officials at the headquarters had refused heavy security — aside from the recently built concrete wall — because the United Nations "did not want a large American presence outside," said Salim Lone, the U.N. spokesman in Baghdad.

Oh. Well, about that condemnation of Dubya & Co. for failing to anticipate and guard against this attack: In the words of Emily Litella, "Never mind." UPDATE (Weds Aug 20): See my Comments below. Don't miss the "money graf" in boldface from Kofi Annan, which pretty much 'splains everything having to do with Iraqi, Iraqis, the war, the UN, the "New-" and "Old-Europeans," the UK, the US, and the whole rest of the world since 9/11. I believe we've just been treated to the Grand Unified Theory of World Politics. UPDATE (Thurs Aug 21): Also check my new post to confirm that the NYT is marginally less braindead than the UN, based on today's news reports.

When "Aren't they cute?" becomes "Aren't they hot?"

Prompted by a cover photo on Rolling Stone's September issue, Daniel W. Drezner's blog asks, with tongue I think only partly in cheek:

Why is it that some celebrities under the age of eighteen can be universally acknowledged as sexy, whereas if that adjective is assigned to other underage but physically mature stars, people start leveling accusations of perversion and lechery? Why was it so shocking for Britney Spears to start flaunting her sexuality, but everyone instantly accepted Anna Kournikova as a sex object?....

I ask because of the Olsen Twins. They're on the cover of the Rolling Stone in September. Their ever-closer 18th birthday has prompted some, er, obsessive web sites as well.

Drezner continues:

The wildly divergent reactions to the Olsens are on full display in the comments sections of [various blogs] — though, to be fair, much of the vitriol is devoted to whether Rolling Stone is now officially lame.... I fear that this issue could split the country.

Before this happens, I hope the blogosphere, using its collective, distributed nodes of intelligence, can determine why it's OK to admire the shapeliness of some 18-year olds but not others.

Reading through the links he offers, plus the various comments and trackbacks (here and here) to his own post, the "collected, distributed nodes of intelligence" of the blogosphere don't seem to have developed either a consensus or even a particularly enlightened response — although he's quite right that the reactions range from "Ewwww, this is weird!" and "Dude, I'm gonna hurl!", through "Well, they have turned out to be beautiful," and on to considerably more graphic and enthusiastic admiration.

For me, though, this is a vaguely nagging issue that I fear will get worse rather than better in the next half-dozen years.  I'm forty-five and single/divorced, but among my four kids are two preteen daughters, and I am far, far from having made the necessarily emotional adjustment to accept the inevitable fact that someday my daughters will begin dating.  In fact, I'm quite certain that the one thing that could instantly put my reptilian hindbrain in complete control would be someone, anyone, making any kind of sexual advance toward my daughters.  I say to you all — I hereby warn the world! — that I have a hard time imagining not becoming homicidal in any such scenario.  (This blog will be Prosecution Exhibit 11-B to show premeditation, probably.  Oh well.)

Yet I say this as a man who, as a teenaged boy, was once caught at a motel with his high-school girlfriend by her father — said father driving a pickup truck with the proverbial well-filled shotgun rack in the rear window.  We were not quite en flagrante delicto but were very close to it, and I only lived to tell the tale as a consequence of her brilliant improvisational acting.  It was very much a case of, "Who are you going to believe, Daddy? Me as your beloved daughter, or your own damned lying eyes?" 

It seems inevitable that at some point as a man ages, the dilemma faced by Humbert Humbert, Issac Davis (Woody Allen's character in Manhattan), and Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey's character in American Beauty) becomes less intellectual and remote.  Has there ever been a more ironic movie to rent and ponder than Manhattan, knowing what became of Woody Allen?  We're talking foreshadowing on a cosmic, embarrass-even-the-Greek-tragedians scale.  But when I rented it on DVD a few weeks ago, my reaction to the then-18-year-old (and now 41-year-old) Mariel Hemingway (who played Allen's high-school-student-turning-actress girlfriend, Tracy) was, "My god, isn't she just naturally, breathtakingly gorgeous?  How could any man of any age not be smitten with her?"  (She fully deserved her supporting-actress Academy Award nomination for that part, by the way, and it's still a great movie notwithstanding Allen's later ugly peccadillos.)

Yes, I'll admit I've felt the internal conflict between "Hand me that remote, sweetheart, so I can switch off that Britney Spears video" and "Hand me that remote, sweetheart, so I can turn up the sound and make sure we see the end of that Britney Spears video."

So I suffer from this huge emotional and hormonal disconnect.  I already am zealously overprotective of my own daughters and (at this point anyway) absolutely unable to conceive of them evolving into young adults with normal sexual instincts and interests.  Yet I know I still have within me the potential to become "no fool like an old fool" — although the actual prospect of ever acting on that impulse is, fortunately, very remote.  It's a comfort, I suppose, to know that it's a common suffering among men my age and older.  One can take solace in clichés, even the pathetic ones.

As far as the answer to Drezner's original question:  My own theory is that the collective visceral reaction of pop culture to these young starlets has a great deal to do with how famous they've been as children.  I'd bet that the people who were most shocked by Britney Spears were those who were aware of her as a "Mouseketeer" on the Disney Channel.  Likewise, those who watched whatever sitcom the Olsen twins were in acquired strong and lasting mental images of them as little girls, and it's the cognitive dissonance between that remembered image and the present sexy ones that create the discomfort and even revulsion. 

By contrast, Anna Kournikova and Mena Suvari and Mariel Hemingway weren't ever child stars; I'm sure they were cute little kids, but they were already hot (albeit very young and young-looking) when they first impinged on the public consciousness.   My having never seen much of the child-star Britney or the child-star Olsen twins would thus explain my lack of parental-type projections with respect to them.

Still, I'm not quite sure how embarrassed I'm supposed to be for thinking, as I look at the cusp-of-18 Olsen twins:  "Yep, they're hot."

Pssst! Fortinbras! Now's your chance to make a move!

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Sweden's armed forces will operate only during office hours for the rest of the year to cut costs, military headquarters said.

They also will cut fighter plane patrols to a minimum, keep navy ships in port, mothball armored vehicles and stop using large caliber live ammunition during exercises.
....
A parliamentary defense commission said in a recent report that the likelihood of Sweden facing a military threat in the foreseeable future was very small.

Don't you dare threaten my outrage!

My post about the Jesus Castillo obscenity conviction from Dallas, along with comments I've left on several blogs and websites that seemed to be promulgating misinformation, have generated some interesting email.

The most gratifying have been along these lines:  "Thank you for shedding some light on this.  I feel better now that I know this isn't a terrible precedent stripping all comics of First Amendment protection."

But I've been surprised by a few emails that have almost nothing in common with each other except glowering hostility, very personally directed at me.  To these writers, it doesn't matter  that I'm a critic of Miller v. California, or that I see a silver lining through the cloud of this specific, not-very-cosmic misdemeanor prosecution.  All that matters is that I've gotten in the way of their outrage with some inconvenient facts.

I'm learning that there's no point in continuing to argue with those folks.

Wall Street Journal swallows truant Texas Dems' propaganda and misstates key facts about Congressional reapportionment

In an article misleadingly entitled "Incumbent Protection Racket" (but more aptly subtitled, and teased from the home page as, "The liberal media are shocked, shocked to find gerrymandering going on") in the Wall Street Journal's online opinion section, OpinionJournal, I read this today:

Democrats and the media are especially incensed by the GOP's current efforts to gerrymander Texas, and they have a point. The GOP is trying to redraw House seats for the second time this decade, when the tradition is only once after every Census. Angry Democrats in the legislature have now fled the state twice to prevent the quorum that Republicans need to push it through.

(Emphasis by BeldarBlog.) This just about knocked me out of my chair.  If in fact Texas Republicans were trying to complete a second gerrymandered redistricting in one decade, then yes, indeed, the Dems would have a reasonable political objection (although even that would be constitutionally permissible, and has been done in the past by the most aggressive partisan gerrymanderers).

But nothing could be farther from the actual truth. 

As recounted in a recent opinion from Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, the actual fact is that

[t]he Seventy-seventh Legislature failed to enact a redistricting plan for the United States House of Representatives, and a three-judge federal court therefore created a plan used for the 2002 general election. See Balderas v. Texas, No. 6:01-CV-158, slip op. (E.D. Tex. Nov. 14, 2002) (per curiam)[a three-judge panel under Voting Rights Act of 1965, with two district judges and one circuit judge sitting as a special trial court with original jurisdiction], aff'd mem., 122 S. Ct. 2583 (2002).

Each party blames the other for the failure to get a redistricting bill out of committee in the Texas Senate in 2001.  In 2002, however, the voters made changes that broke those deadlocks by electing — for the first time since Reconstruction — a majority of Republicans to the Texas Senate, along with a Republican Lt. Governor.  And based on undisputed caselaw quoted at more length in Attorney General Abbott's opinion,

Texas legislators are entirely free to replace the court-ordered plan in Balderas and, as the court urged in McConnell, "continue efforts to fulfill their constitutional duties" as elected representatives to enact a congressional redistricting plan that comports with section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

In fact, in the granddaddy of reapportionment cases, in discussing how often state legislatures must redraw Congressional district boundaries to avoid falling into constitutional infirmity, the US Supreme Court held that "if reapportionment were accomplished with less frequency [than every 10 years], it would assuredly be constitutionally suspect."  Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 584 (1964). 

The Balderas panel expressed clear-eyed recognition of how redistricting works in the real world:

[T]o state directly what is implicit in all that we have said:  political gerrymandering, a purely partisan exercise, is inappropriate for a federal court drawing a congressional redistricting map.  Even at the hands of a legislative body, political gerrymandering is much a bloodfeud, in which revenge is extracted by the majority against its rival.  We have left it to the political arena, as we must and wisely should.  We do so because our role is limited and not because we see gerrymandering as other than what it is:  an abuse of power that, at its core, evinces a fundamental mistrust of voters, serving the self-interest of the political parties at the expense of the public good.

(Slip op. at 10; emphasis by BeldarBlog)  That last bit is a rather wistful condemnation of politics-as-actually-practiced, and implicit in it is a suggestion that we'd be better off without gerrymandering.  That might be so, but forty-nine of the fifty states still leave reapportionment to the partisan process of state legislatures. 

Without any doubt whatsoever, what's happening now is the back-swing of a pendulum that Texas Democrats gave a huge push in 1990 with the express purpose of protecting their majority in Texas' Congressional delegation against their party's rapid erosion at the polls in Texas.  Even if you want to argue that we should stop these pendulum swings, no one can make a principled argument that the pendulum's current position is representative of the views of the majority of Texas voters.