Tag: Supreme Court

ARA: The way my mind works

The hardest Presidents to remember were Taylor, Fillmore and Pierce, which sounds like a law firm

CHRIS: Ooo, what does the infinity symbol symbolize?

Gee, I thought it was a sidewards eight.

Good on you with the presidents’ thing. The three presidents in one year has happened twice and three in two years but more than one year happened once (by my count using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States), none of which I knew before the discussion came up.

Three in one year was 1841 and 1881, that’s correct. Hadn’t thought about three in two years, but that would be 1849-1850, with Polk, Taylor and Fillmore.

Which brings me to my next question: how do you learn so many random things? Did you, for example, set out to memorize all the presidents and the years? Or does your brain do that “naturally”?

After minutes of self-psychoanalysis, this is what I’ve concluded

1) As a child, I had the foolish notion that should know all the knowable things in the universe.

2) To that end, I used to read encyclopedias – the Americana as a child – dictionaries, and especially the World Almanac, which I have received for Christmas almost every year since I was nine or ten.

3) Realizing at some point that “all the knowable things in the universe” a) was impossible to know and b) was not interesting to me, I tended to concentrate on things like sports (Willie Mays hit .211 in his last season, with the New York Mets), and American history and politics.

4) My specific interest in Presidents, and the Constitution, now that I think about it, probably came from the trauma of the assassination of JFK. “Oh, no, what happens now?” Oh, they have a contingency plan for that! (I’m not sure I could have told you we HAD a Vice-President on November 21, 1963, when I was 10 and a half, let alone that Lyndon Johnson was that guy.)

5) Even more specifically, when JFK was killed, there were all these coincidences with Lincoln that showed up in the newspaper – oh, I used to read the newspaper even then:
a) Lincoln was elected in 1860, JFK in 1960
b) both had Vice-Presidents named Johnson
c) Lincoln reportedly had a secretary named Kennedy, and Kennedy a secretary named Lincoln (I never confirmed that, BTW)

6) This got me thinking about all those previous “accidental Presidents,” starting with Tyler, then Fillmore, A. Johnson, Arthur, T. Roosevelt, Coolidge, and Truman. So it was a small step to get all their dates in order. The hardest ones to remember were Taylor, Fillmore and Pierce, which sounds like a law firm. My daughter tests me regularly with weird stuff like “Who’s the 27th President?” I don’t know, but I remember Cleveland was the 22nd AND the 24th, so I get to Taft soon enough.

7) It seemed a natural progression to start reading the Constitution. (Sidebar: I got to talk to another Chinese delegation at work on the 5th of July. I just happened to come across a box of booklets with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, that I found while sorting things in the attic, so I gave them copies. I also gave a copy to a guy on the bus I know in the context of what the Supreme Court’s June decision on the Defense of Marriage Act did, and did not do.)

8) Of course, the interpretation of the Constitution came from the Supreme Court, and in the 1960s, the Court was dealing with a lot of significant issues involving freedom of the press, the rights of defendants in criminal trials, and civil rights. I could not have cited, e.g. New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) or Gideon v. Wainwright (1962) or Loving v. Virginia (1967), but I believe I was more aware of their implication than most of my classmates at the time. (Hey, speaking of Taft, which I did a couple of paragraphs back, did you know he became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court? Or that he’s the guy pictured?)

9) Conversely, there are plenty of things I DON’T know, starting with the makes and models of automobiles. I recognized a ’66 Ford Mustang recently, but in general, cars have two doors or four and are cars or those larger things (SUVs, minivans). All midsize silver-gray cars look the same to me.

 

Hyperplastic polyps, and other things

It has rained every day for the past couple weeks in Albany, NY.

This is a picture of my mother’s class (kindergarten or first grade, from the 1933 date). Can you find her? My, they all look so sullen. I mean, I know it’s the Depression and all, but dang.

In that TMI category, there were a couple of polyps removed from my colon in late June. They were hyperplastic, a term I had never heard/seen before. This means that not only are they BENIGN, but they also do NOT turn into cancer. Compare this with polyps that are adenoma type, also BENIGN, but need monitoring. Not to mention outcomes that could have been worse. So I won’t bore you with my colonoscopy tales for another decade.

If it wasn’t for people such as Doug Englebart, I wouldn’t be communicating with you. The tools he helped develop in computing are used today on the Internet. I started watching the lengthy video here from 1968(!). At about 19 minutes in, he’s essentially describing the hyperlink; at 30 minutes, the computer mouse; later, Google.

I knew Google RSS feed reader was going away. Now I get an e-mail from Bloglovin every day – found it easier for me than some of the others that were suggested, such as Feedly.

There was so much to write about the Supreme Court cases in June. Yet the only thing I could muster was a piece in my other blog that the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is only partially dead, i.e., Section 3, while Section 2 survives. Those widespread news reports saying otherwise were wrong.

I actually started writing a piece on how crazy Justice Antonin Scalia was in the month of June, but I just lost my mojo for it. Mark Evanier put it well: “I don’t understand a lot of the logic behind [the] rulings on Gay Marriage. Scalia’s dissent in the overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act reads to me like the rebuttal to his support the day before in the castration of the Voting Rights Act;” that’s about right. SCOTUS voted 9-0 on the gene patent case, correctly, to my mind, but Scalia’s “reasoning” was bizarre. Yet I actually agreed with the rebuttal of the Supreme Court’s support for DNA testing of arrestees.

Arthur, rightly, was complaining a few weeks ago about the immigration reform bill Marco Rubio (R-FL) co-sponsored but threatened to kill it if gave gay couples immigration rights. So I found it quite entertaining that, as a result of part of the Defense of Marriage Act being struck down, a US citizen who is married to a non-American of the same gender will be able to sponsor his or her spouse for immigration in exactly the same way that legally married opposite-gender couples can. And the first couple approved by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services is from…Florida. Was that REALLY a coincidence?

When I feel discouraged about the body politic, I realize I need to find and read this book: The American Heroes of Social Justice.

Need to wish a belated happy 25th anniversary to Denise Nesbitt, the progenitor of ABC Wednesday, and her husband Jon.

At some point, it has rained every day for the past couple of weeks in Albany, NY. It doesn’t bother me as much as it does others, based on the whining in social media, though it HAS been difficult to mow the wet grass. Now some local towns around here suffered sudden, severe flooding; THOSE people can complain. Still, I prefer it to the arid 100F+ (38C+) temperatures out in the western US.
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I’m reading The 10 nerdiest jokes of all time, and this one made me literally LOL, with the intro, “Is there ever a wrong moment to make an existential funny?”

“Jean-Paul Sartre is sitting at a French cafe, revising his draft of Being and Nothingness. He says to the waitress, ‘I’d like a cup of coffee, please, with no cream.’ The waitress replies, ‘I’m sorry, Monsieur, but we’re out of cream. How about with no milk?'”

D-Day, as in discovery

Finding myself agreeing with Scalia: “Make no mistake about it. Because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.”

There’s a blogger called Altonian, who is writing a lot about The War Years in England, most recently: “Alton received its fair share of evacuees during the war, most of which came from London.” With my life proceeding as it has, I had not sought to follow any more bloggers. But I saw him comment on the blogs of both Berowne AND Sharp Little Pencil; both of them I met on ABC Wednesday, which, BTW, you can join too.

Berowne, BTW, generally takes a movie or play, changes it up, and sees if you can recognize it. For his current entry, I must admit, I didn’t recognize the movie until he gave a vital hint. Only then was it obvious to me. (I never saw the movie, having fallen asleep watching it on video.)

Amy at Sharp Little Pencil has been writing a string of great poems: a political rant -I don’t rant nearly so well; her manic depression, which she has dealt with; surviving sexual abuse, which she has also dealt with; and a celebration, all in this calendar month.

Appreciated LoveSong: SamuraiFrog and Rainy Days and Mondays on Splotchy’s site. Even without his obsession for Paul Williams, I got to the same place with the song.

Re: ABC Wednesday, I had to deal with a load of spam on the site, all fairly recent. It was a pain; yet its removal felt very cleansing, not as irritating as you would think.

I was struck when Melanie wrote: “It isn’t easy to be still- even when you are sick and can’t move much! That’s because stillness is also a quality of soul.”

I realized, as much as anything, the recent Supreme Court ruling, which states that police can routinely take DNA samples from people who are arrested but not yet convicted of a crime, operates the efficiency over justice model. Finding myself agreeing with Antonin Scalia: “Make no mistake about it. Because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason. But the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would not have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.” Faster – when it tramples on the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure – is not better.
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Some recent passings:

Frank Lautenberg, the Last of the New Deal Liberals. The New Jersey Democrat was the last WWII soldier left in Congress. Interesting that Governor Christie has called a special election in October, rather than saving the taxpayer dollars money, by holding it in November. Interesting political calculation.

There would be no ALL IN THE FAMILY without Jean Stapleton.

I used to love to read the syndicated column of Andrew M. Greeley: Priest, Author, Scholar, Scold.

David “Deacon” Jones was the original sackmaster of the National Football League. When I think of the original Fearsome Foursome on the LA Rams, I recall Jones, who the Hall of Fame defensive end who later had his own foundation to help kids; the late Merlin Olsen, who eventually showed up on Little House on the Prairie and other programs; and the still living Rosey Grier, who also played for the NY Giants, and liked to knit. Always seemed to forget the late Lamar Lundy, for some reason.

R is for Roger, redux

I’d been a fan of Roger Moore since I watched him as Beau Maverick on the television show Maverick.

As I’ve undoubtedly noted, the name Roger comes from the Germanic roots meaning spear bearer, specifically “famous with the spear.”

When you think of the first name Roger, who are the first people you think of? (I mean besides me, of course.) That was the question in this segment of the TV show Family Feud; I’m sorry it is incomplete.

Here’s a list of celebrities whose first names are Roger. The ones that immediately came to mind are some I mentioned three-and-a-half years ago when I last did R is for Roger, plus these that I inexplicably left off:


Roger Clemens – in 24 seasons with the Boston Red Sox, Toronto Blue Jays, New York Yankees, and Houston Astros, he won the Cy Young as the best pitcher in his baseball league a record seven times and pitched a perfect game in 1994. He would have been a lock for the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2013 except for allegations of him using performance-enhancing drugs.


Roger Federer – the tennis player from Switzerland had spent 237 consecutive, and at this writing, 302 total weeks at number 1 in the ranking and has won 17 Grand Slam singles titles. He’s considered by many to be the greatest player of all time.


Roger Staubach – in an 11-season career, all with the Dallas Cowboys, the quarterback out of the Naval Academy had a Hall of Fame career. I wasn’t much a Cowboys fan, since they were/are rivals with my New York Giants; nevertheless, I always liked him personally.


Sir Roger Moore – I’d been a fan since I watched him as Beau Maverick on the television show Maverick, then as Simon Templar in the TV series The Saint. But, of course, he’s best known as Bond, James Bond, in seven movies. See his other credits.


Roger Waters – he was a founder member of the rock band Pink Floyd, serving as bassist, vocalist, and principal songwriter. In the 1970s and 1980s, the album Dark Side of the Moon spent years on the charts; Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall were other hit albums. He has been performing The Wall all over the world without his former bandmates.


Roger B. Taney – he was the fifth Chief Justice of the United States (1836-1864), and the first Roman Catholic to sit on the Supreme Court. While he dealt with many other cases, I know him for just one: writing the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), that ruled that black people, who were considered inferior at the time the US Constitution was written, could not be considered citizens of the United States, whether slave or free.


Roger Williams – the theologian who left England, only to knock heads (figuratively) with the Puritans, and eventually founded the state of Rhode Island as a place of religious tolerance.


Roger Rabbit – he is the frantic, neurotic title cartoon character of the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The film also starred the live human Bob Hoskins, and Roger’s animated human wife Jessica, who is not bad; she’s just drawn that way.
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My review of the late Roger Ebert’s autobiography.

ABC Wednesday – Round 12

SCOTUS and marriage equality

I’m expecting some mishmash decision by SCOTUS in the gay marriage case that no one will love.

As an old political science major and a bit of a US Supreme Court junkie, I’ve been musing over what it means that the high tribunal has decided to review two cases testing the constitutionality of same-sex marriage. “In agreeing to examine California’s Proposition 8 (Hollingsworth v. Perry) and the federal Defense of Marriage Act (Windsor v. the United States), the court has created a defining moment, not only for its own legacy but for the country as a whole.”

Got that right. But how will they decide? I think one has to look at the specific people represented in the cases, specifically 83-year-old Edith Windsor who moved to New York State 60 years ago. “Ms. Windsor… married her partner, Thea Spyer, in 2007 [in Canada] after a 40-year engagement. [She relishes] the court’s decision to hear her case, a challenge to the 1996 law, the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibited the Internal Revenue Service from treating her as a surviving spouse after Ms. Spyer’s death in 2009, costing her more than $600,000 in state and federal estate taxes.”

The Court does not rule on abstractions. The Court will decide whether Edith Windsor has been inequitably treated by the laws of the United States and New York, denied equal protection due to all people within its jurisdiction; this would then be applicable to anyone in the same circumstances. The decision then is less about “gay marriage” as a concept, as much as whether someone in a same-sex union shall be afforded all the rights and privileges of a marriage between a man and a woman. I’ve heard bandied about that there are at least 1000 legal perks of being married, among them visitation rights to see a sick spouse in the hospital without having to draw up legal papers for that purpose.

The Proposition 8 case, merged with the Windsor case by the high court, has a more convoluted path to SCOTUS, with the surprising legal pairing of liberal attorney David Boies and conservative lawyer Ted Olson, who were on opposite sides in Bush v. Gore, on the same side, in favor of marriage equality.

The Court could vote to limit same-sex marriage. I seriously doubt it would overturn law in the nine states that have already decided to allow it, especially since three states – Maine, Maryland, and Washington – had voter-approved legalization in November 2012. And at least a plurality of Americans polled now support same-sex marriage. On the other hand, 30 states have constitutional bans against it. Pew has a great breakdown of the issue.

The Court could vote to overturn all same-sex marriage bans in the country. It would not be unprecedented: Loving v. Virginia (1967) not only negated laws against racially mixed marriages in Virginia but in more than a dozen other states. But this would be a radical move by a court that is quite conservative, not only from a political point of view but in temperament. Still, the Court tends to believe in precedent, and it has long determined that “marriage is one of the basic civil rights of man, fundamental to our very existence and survival.” It would be surprising, but not beyond belief, that the Court take this route.

I’m expecting some mishmash decision that would overturn the discrimination as it has been applied in the US tax law and other federal issues, and apply these as well to the states that have decided to allow for marriage equality, and including California, while leaving the other states to decide on it on their own timetable, something like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is now advocating. I would not at all be surprised by a split decision, with three or four voting to support anti-gay marriage laws in the land, three or four voting to limit or eliminate the laws, and one or two (Kennedy, and maybe Roberts) coming up with some grand compromise that no one will love. One could assume that Scalia is in the former group, since he has recently defended comparing homosexuality to murder, and his political clone Thomas will likely vote the same.

I’d love to hear other opinions about what the Court might do.