'Culture', Law and Order, Politics

Friday Linkorama

  • Women like shopping. Gee, ya think? Next they’ll be telling us there are similarities to our mating process.
  • Take your kids to the park? $250 fine. There are a lot of people — left and right — who wants us to live like this. “Take your kids to the park or you will be punished! No, not that park or you will be punished! Take them home and read them a story! No, not that story!”
  • Vanity Fair on the batshit crazy governor of New York. Jeez Louise.
  • An outrage in Ann Arbor. What country are we living in?
  • When judicial activism is a good thing:

    It’s a powerful argument, and it may well resonate with the conservative justices who think that judges often overreach and “substitute their own policy preferences” for those of the people’s elected legislators. But I wonder if Helmke really believes that judges should respect the will of legislators and not strike down laws. Does he believe that the Warren Court should not have struck down school segregation, which was clearly the will of the people’s elected representatives–and no doubt the people–in Kansas, as well as in South Carolina and Virginia, whose similar cases were combined with Brown? Does he believe that the Supreme Court was wrong to strike down Virginia’s law against interracial marriage in 1967? The Texas law outlawing sodomy in 2003? The Communications Decency Act in 1997? Does he indeed think the John Marshall Court was wrong to invalidate a section of the Judiciary Act of 1789 in Marbury v. Madison? That’s the implication of his ringing words in defense of legislative absolutism.