BeldarBlog

At last, Beldar's blogroll

I'm not quite sure why I've resisted creating a blogroll. Certainly I've been gratified to have been added to a number of other bloggers' own blogrolls, and I certainly have long had a set of bookmarked favorites. TypePad makes it easy to create such lists and edit the items in them (although extremely difficult to reorder the entries once created, unless I'm missing something).

I suppose one reason for my reluctance has been a feeling that it's "not my place" to tell you, gentle readers, where you ought to be browsing. But heck, I've always listed the five most recent books I've read and DVD movies I've watched. I suppose, as always, you'll browse where you please, and my bloglist should be viewed not as my "recommendations" as such, but more as a reflection — for what it's worth, which to anyone but me may be almost zero — of where I regularly choose to browse.

There's a definite conservative trend to my list, with a few conspicuous exceptions (Burnt Orange, Charles Kuffner, Kevin Drum). I'm vaguely concerned that I've surely left some folks off who've been kind enough to link or blogroll me in the past; and I'm not sure what guidelines I'll follow in making additions and deletions to it, although anyone who's blogrolled me is more than welcome to suggest via email that I reciprocate.

But for what it's worth, there it is, over near the bottom of the sidebar to the right.

Update (Sun Mar 14 @2pm):   Okay, I've finally figured out how to export and import using TypePad's Lists for relatively easy updating, editing, and resequencing of my blogroll, and after cross-referencing my Favorites on another computer I've added about a dozen additional links. The alphabetizing is still a bit spotty (TypePad insists on listing "Right Wing News" before "Right on the Left Beach," for instance, apparently because it thinks all capitalized letters are earlier in the alphabet than all lower-case letters), and I haven't put surnames first for those whose blogs are named after themselves with their first name first (e.g., Roger L. Simon, Daniel Dresner). But it's functional, if not consistent or exactly pretty.

'Spain's 9/11'

I've been to Spain twice — in 1981 on the obligatory post-clerkship backpack and Eurailpass sweep, and then again for a more leisurely three weeks in 1985 on my honeymoon. I love the country and its people, and I look forward to returning again someday.

I have nothing particularly clever or insightful to say about today's terrorist attack in Madrid that has left more than 190 dead and more than 1200 wounded.

But I can't just say nothing.

I see the pictures of the blasted, the dead, the dying, the maimed. And I can't help but wonder about the waiter in a tiny Madrid bistro who took pity on my jet-lagged bride and me on our first "night on the town" after we'd ordered a local speciality, "callos," that was touted by Let's Go: Europe but that turned out to be tripe. He insisted on bringing us beef steaks that we couldn't pay for because we hadn't yet changed enough money, and waved off our promise to return with payment the next day. I remember the proud, stylish, sophisticated young men and women who were strolling the Gran Via and the smaller city streets and the tapas bars after twilight and before the proper (oh-so-late) dinner hour, who looked with bemused indulgence at my student's wardrobe and backpack. I've yet to set foot in the Prado, but I remember dozens of small experiences with ordinary Spaniards, off the beaten paths, that collectively made me feel a bond with those people, a commonality with them, a genuine affection and admiration for them. The odds are that someone I met on one of my two trips to Spain is today suddenly dead, or wounded, or has a family member or close friend who is.

Al Qaeda has claimed "credit"; indigenous terrorist group Eta has denied responsibility; time will tell where the truth lies. Regardless, the obvious, painful lesson is that the War on Terror isn't an "American war," much less "George W. Bush's war."

Spain has already been a noble ally in the Coalition of the Willing — a/k/a "the fraudulent coalition" in Sen. Kerry's incredibly offensive phrasing. Spain had long since earned the respect and gratitude of those in America and the rest of the civilized world who "get it" — who understand that the War on Terror isn't just a law enforcement and intelligence matter, or just a subject for U.N. debates and resolutions and blue-helmeted peacekeepers, or just something that diplomacy and maybe a few cruise missile strikes can "keep in its box."

Spain's shock and grief will turn to outrage and anger, and then to cold and furiously steadfast resolve. I share those emotions; I mourn and honor Spain's dead and wounded; and I dread the next such attack.

National nightmares like 9/11, or like today's brutal bombings, will at least rip the illusions from a few millions more civilized men and women. And that ultimately is why the terrorists (and the rogue states who support and shelter them) will be defeated. Some folks mocked President Bush's declaration after 9/11 that "you're either with us" — "us" meaning not America, but civilization — "or you're with the terrorists." But with each such tragedy, fewer and fewer civilized persons will still be able to mock, and deny, and delude themselves. Inaction and illusion will become universally unacceptable — and then, finally, there will be no place left for the terrorists to hide, and no hope for their escape.

Lithwick linkage re Scalia & judicial ethics

As I've explained at more length in an update I've inserted at the beginning of my original post from October 2003 entitled "Justice Scalia was right to recuse himself in the Pledge case," I didn't make, and in fact do not agree with, the "suggestion" — attributed to me via a link in Slate senior editor Dahlia Lithwick's article today entitled "Fighting Words: Leave Scalia Alone" — that "justices limit their speeches to scholarly, rather than advocacy groups."

My original post was a long one. Judicial ethics is a serious topic that deserves more than superficial treatment. I agree with the main thrust of Ms. Lithwick's article — that is, that Supreme Court Justices aren't proscribed from speaking on hot legal topics to advocacy groups on penalty of having to recuse themselves from cases involving those issues. And I agree with her that yesterday's article in the Los Angeles Times attacking Justice Scalia for having given "a keynote dinner speech in Philadelphia for an advocacy group waging a legal battle against gay rights" is misguided.

Perhaps, however, if she'd read my original post more closely — or better yet, read some of the Supreme Court ethics precedent written by Justice Scalia that I cited and quoted from at length — Ms. Lithwick's analysis would be more persuasive when she writes about judicial ethics. And perhaps she'd be right more consistently, instead of (as it seems) only occasionally and almost by accident.

Unfortunately, here as all too frequently in her writing about the Supreme Court, Ms. Lithwick is content to give only superficial legal analysis. Anything more would get in the way of her underlying conviction that everything the Supreme Court does is based on the personal whims and politics of the Justices — a conviction revealed again in her concluding lines today:

Increasingly, it seems like the worst thing anyone can say about Antonin Scalia is that he is honest and intellectually consistent. He has so many other more interesting faults, I assure you. And if we let him speak without hounding him, we're bound to find more of them.

Ah, yes — "I assure you." Such assurances only have real value if the person making them has credibility; and credibility is earned only by attention to detail. In Ms. Lithwick's case, her misattribution of a suggestion to me that I never made is unfortunately all too revealing of the attention she pays to the details. It's for that reason that I rank her credibility on matters of judicial ethics only a notch above the far more entertaining Wonkette.