IsThatLegal?

"Though he be a gentleman, remember, Eric Muller is also a lawyer."
-- Sparkey of "Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing"
"Relentlessly sensible and often important."
-- Michael Froomkin of "discourse.net"

We Chapel Hillians have new neighbors as of a day or two ago: John and Elizabeth Edwards. They bought 102 acres about 3 miles from my house, for a cool $1.3 million.

Kennebunkport we ain't. But we're happy ... and proud ... to have them in the neighborhood.

UPDATE: I got a couple of very funny comments to this post, riffing on Edwards's "two Americas" image:

So is he going to do unite the two Chapel Hills; the priviledged with parking permits, and the burdened, who spend every day in need of a safe and caring parking place.--Simon Spero

I thought the two Chapel Hills were the Chapel Hill that proudly lets its freak flag fly (a.k.a. Carrboro) and the Chapel Hill that is tired (from working in Raleigh and spending three hours in traffic) oppressed (by all those student homes with four cars out front) and yearning to breathe free (because as anyone who lives near the University knows, air is going to be the next thing that becomes subject to student fees).--Al Maviva

For how much longer will the New York Times continue to waste valuable Op/Ed page real estate on William Safire?
Today Safire shares with the New York Times's readership his insight that--and I hope you're sitting down as you read this, because it's powerfully insightful and radically innovative--John Kerry takes both sides of (that is, "straddles") important issues.
You read it there first, folks. Safire had the scoop.
The waste of space is doubly objectionable: not only has this been RNC Kerry Talking Point #1 and Sean Hannity mantra since Kerry locked up the nomination months ago, but it's an insipid talking point (and mantra).
Good God! Politics is, in the main, the art of "straddling." Abraham Lincoln's 1860 platform committed to stop slavery from spreading but to leave it intact where it already existed. Abraham Lincoln: The Great Straddler!

I'm sorry. This is just idiotic behavior.

This seems dangerous. Women leaving the military are being offered two bazookas to take home with them.

(Thanks to Sally for the pointer.)

The blogosphere's right wing is undoubtedly having fun with the statement by Daniel Okrent, the NY Times's "public editor" (a/k/a ombudsman), that the Times is "a liberal newspaper" in its social and cultural coverage.

Wait ... let me check; I hadn't yet bothered.

Yup.
U betcha.
Fer sure.

Even the public editor has blinders on, though. Here's the passage that amused me:

Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. doesn't think this walk through The Times is a tour of liberalism. He prefers to call the paper's viewpoint "urban." He says that the tumultuous, polyglot metropolitan environment The Times occupies means "We're less easily shocked," and that the paper reflects "a value system that recognizes the power of flexibility."

He's right; living in New York makes a lot of people think that way, and a lot of people who think that way find their way to New York (me, for one). The Times has chosen to be an unashamed product of the city whose name it bears.

An unashamed product of the city whose name it bears? Since when is the paper called "The Manhattan South of About 120th Street Times?" The notion that the Times's coverage (especially its cultural, fashion, and social coverage, which is mostly what Okrent writes about today) reflects the interests of most of the people who live in Northern Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, and damned near all of the people who live in Staten Island, is laughable. The truth is that the New York Times (in its cultural, fashion, and social coverage) is a newspaper that is an unashamed product of a segment of the city whose name it bears.

That doesn't make it a bad paper, to be sure (though occasionally it would be nice if the paper wrote about bands that I've actually heard of rather than nightclub singers who play the bar at the Algonquin). But in a confessional column like Okrent's of today, a bit more introspection would have been nice.

Possible exam question:
Company makes dog biscuits in 2 shapes--cats and letter carriers. (Thanks to John A. for catching the story.) Postal service howls in protest; cats do not. Company stops making mailman-shaped biscuits but keeps making cat-shaped ones.
Violation of Equal Protection? Or of the Due Process Claws?

Those of you who visited during my three-week absence got to know Sally Greene, who guest-blogged for me.

Sally got the blogger bug (the "blug"? No, wait, that's the word I coined a few months ago for a plug for a blog. Which I myself am doing right now. Hmmm...) during her stint here, and now has her own place.

It promises to be outstanding. For example, check out this wonderful essay on the life of federal judge Frank Johnson.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Sally!!

A 49-year-old man tries to climb eleven different mountains, each more than 11,000 feet in elevation, in one day.

If you haven't yet figured out how the story ends, click here.

A macaque at the Tel Aviv Zoo has begun walking human-style, exclusively on two legs, after recovering from a severe illness.

A zoo veterinarian says that the behavior may result from brain damage caused by the illness.

So much for evolution as a big upward spiral.

Orin Kerr is making a lot of sense at Volokh about Blakely, the federal sentencing guidelines, and lower federal court judges.

I'd add one small anecdote to the discussion about whether lower federal courts judges are pursuing their own ideologies and preferences in reading Blakely broadly enough to invalidate the guidelines. The premise of the claim is of course that most federal judges don't like the guidelines and want them gone. Certainly some lower federal court judges have spoken quite critically of the guidelines; indeed, a few resigned in order to protest them, if memory serves. But I think it would be a mistake to assume that federal district judges probably don't like the guidelines enough to wish they were gone.

The judge for whom I clerked back in 1987-88 was without question one of the most stereotypically liberal on the federal bench at the time. He was thought to be a "light touch" at criminal sentencing, and I suppose he probably was. Yet I know from my own experience that he used to agonize over sentencings like no other thing he had to do as a judge. He lost sleep over every single one of them. And this was not a man who (in my estimation) lost a lot of sleep over very many things. Now mind you -- when I was clerking, the guidelines were just going into effect, so all of the sentencings he was doing were pre-guidelines sentencings. In other words, they were almost wholly discretionary.

I had lunch with my judge several years later when I was working as a federal prosecutor. At this point the guidelines had been in effect for several years. I asked him, "So judge, what do you think of the guidelines?" He thought for a moment, and said, "Well Eric, of course you know I think they're too rigid--that won't surprise you. But you know what? I sleep a whole lot better at night than I used to before the guidelines. And I like that."

I suspect that my judge's reaction was not terribly unusual among judges who worked in both the pre-guideline era and then under the guidelines.

At the time I thought to myself, "This is just the problem with the guidelines: we shouldn't be looking for a sentencing system that helps judges sleep better before sentencings." That's another issue, I suppose. But the point is this: judges are human beings, and they are not ruled entirely (or even largely, one might argue) by ideological or doctrinal commitments.

Naturally I have no idea why Sandy Berger would walk out of the National Archives with a classified report tucked in his leather portfolio.

I'll tell you what, though. I do know that the procedures the National Archives used for Berger were pretty irregular.

Much of my writing depends on archival research, and I've done research with records at National Archives branches in D.C., College Park (MD), Denver, Seattle, Laguna Niguel (CA), and San Bruno (CA).

Here are some excerpts of Berger's lawyer's statements on CNN last night:

Sandy Berger had been reviewing thousands and thousands of pages of classified documents. He did it so that he could give informed answers to the 9/11 commission. And so the very documents that have formed the basis of their report could be produced. He did that by himself because no one else could do it or would do it. So he has a table. He's working openly. There are Archives people there and there are thousands of documents. And in the course of his review it was clear to everyone he had a leather portfolio. He brought it in openly. The Archives people knew it. And anyone who has works with Sandy knows he always has that leather portfolio and there were lots of business papers that have nothing at all to do with this commission.

And perhaps . . . there was too much informality by Sandy and maybe too much informality by the Archives people. But at some point when he leaves, the memorandum got caught with his business papers and he walked out. It was inadvertent.

The lawyer makes it sound like Berger was at a table with thousands of documents all over the place. It's not supposed to work that way. When I do research, the Archives people won't give you more than a couple of boxes of documents at a time, and they even wander around to make sure you don't have more than one folder from inside a box out and open at any one time.

The lawyer says that Berger brought in his leather portfolio with him, and had it with him at the table. Another no-no. When I do research, I'm required to put all of my stuff in a locker, and may take in with me only papers that get pre-screened and stamped on the back, along with my laptop. I'm not even allowed to bring the laptop's case in with me, which is a big pain in the ass, believe you me.

The lawyer also says that Berger "inadvertently" took the classified report with him. A couple more no-nos. First, a person is ordinarily not even allowed to photocopy a classified document unless it has first been declassified. Second, and far more importantly, there's an Archives employee at the exit who carefully looks over everything a person leaves with, to make sure that there's nothing in the person's papers that shouldn't be.

So there were lots of deviations from Archives policy in this case. I understand fully that the former National Security Adviser probably gets the red carpet treatment that the Archives doesn't offer to disheveled law professors like myself. Still, it's worth noting that the Archives has numerous policies in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening. It sounds like they all failed.

I am at work this summer on an article about draft resistance at the Poston Relocation Center, one of the 10 concentration camps in which the U.S. government jailed the West Coast's ethnically Japanese population during World War II.

Poston was plopped down onto the Colorado River Indian Reservation in Arizona, over the objection of the reservation's Tribal Council.

Late in 1945, as Japanese Americans were finally permitted to leave Poston, American Indians came to occupy portions of the Relocation Center that the Japanese Americans were abandoning.

Looking through archival material, I came across this touching account of what a Hopi leader said to the departing Japanese Americans:

"Things were terrible when we [the Hopi] came here last Saturday (Sept. 1, 1945). It was hot and there were no coolers (another man interjected the remark that he had stayed up all night fanning his two small children). We've gotten coolers since then, but we weren't sure at first whether we would stay. . . .

"The Japanese have been very good to us, giving us things they don't need. A man living near me has given me a couple of pools full of fish. The other day I saw a pool with two turtles in it and I asked what was going to happen to them. The [Japanese American] man said he was going to eat them. When I asked him to save me the shells, he wondered why. When I said that they would be used in a dance, he said he hoped we would dance while the Japanese were still in camp. A lot of Japanese have said they would like to see us dance, but we are going to wait until our crops are planted. . . .

"I told the leader of the Japanese that I talked to that I thought his people had been treated pretty badly by the government. I said we had been mistreated by the government for 300 years, and had learned that the thing to do was to make the best of the help that the government gives you."

This guy hasn't yet learned that as a progressive he is required to hate Richard Posner. (Geez! A fellow progressive even told him he was required to hate Posner, and he's reading Posner's book with an open mind anyway! The nerve!)

Take this test.
Shockingly (to me), I was significantly to the red of center.

Jenny speaks!
Now if only her damn computer would listen.

I feel like I ought to be saying something funny about this story. But I'm not coming up with anything.

Sorry to leave you hanging.

A very, very small point about the blogosphere's "coverage" (as it were) of one Annie Jacobsen's recent frightening experience on a Northwest Airlines flight:
 
Why the cheap potshots at this other Annie Jacobsen?

Every now and then I still come across something on the net that makes me say quietly to myself, "this is an amazing thing."
 
I went here, and was able (from my home office desk here in Chapel Hill) to manipulate a webcam at the top of the Credit Lyonnais tower in Lyon, France.
 
Just amazing.
 
UPDATE:  link fixed, je crois.
UPDATE:  link fixed. J'en suis sur.

Doug Berman's got the go-to blog for figuring out the implications of the Supreme Court's recent Blakely decision for the federal sentencing guidelines.

I was out of the country when the Supreme Court decided the Guantanamo, Hamdi, and Padilla cases, so you were spared my musings.

I have every confidence that the blogosphere's experts said all there was to say about the decisions, and then some. Indeed, others may already have said what I'll say here. But I thought I'd mention it anyway.

One striking feature of the decisions was the Court's repudiation of the basic thesis of the Chief Justice's 1998 book on civil liberties in wartime, All the Laws But One. After reviewing certain episodes from the Civil War, World War I, and World War II, Rehnquist argued there that in times of crisis, the balance between liberty and security inevitably shifts toward security, and (more to the point) that judges do not and should not interfere with wartime actions of the Commander-in-Chief. Applying the Latin maxim "inter arma silent leges," Rehnquist argued that in times of war the laws will inevitably be silent—and that this is probably how it ought to be.

Linda Greenhouse noted a week ago that given Rehnquist's interest in the issue, one might have expected him to write an opinion in the recently decided cases, and that his silence in the cases was therefore especially notable. That's true, but I think we can say more. Whatever the Guantanamo and Hamdi cases might mean at the micro level, it's impossible to view them at the macro level as anything but a repudiation of Rehnquist's thesis. Linda Greenhouse was

Justice Scalia, in fact, went out of his way (in his Hamdi dissent, formally joined only by Justice Stevens but on a point with which many others on the Court seemingly agree) to bury the thesis of Rehnquist's book. He had the (perhaps uncharacteristic) charity not to cite the book directly, but here's what he said:

Many think it not only inevitable but entirely proper that liberty give way to security in times of national crisis–that, at the extremes of military exigency, inter arma silent leges. Whatever the general merits of the view that war silences law or modulates its voice, that view has no place in the interpretation and application of a Constitution designed precisely to confront war and, in a manner that accords with democratic principles, to accommodate it.

In a review of Rehnquist's book (.pdf file) that I published in the University of Chicago Law Review several years ago, I worried that the book might take on the status of quasi-precedent because it was from the pen of the Chief Justice. I'm very happy to see that, at least in the context of the post-9/11 world, I have turned out to be wrong.

One of the biggest surprises of our trip awaited us when we walked out of the Santa Maria la Blanca synagogue into the narrow streets of the old Jewish "Call" (or neighborhood). It was a Judaica shop, called "Casa de Jacob."

Below is its owner, a charming and outgoing woman with the very Jewish name of Maria Teresa. She explained that her family (some 500 years ago!) were "conversos"--Jews who chose to convert to Christianity rather than face expulsion. She has taken a strong interest in Judaism and lived in Israel for several years. She opened the shop a few years ago, and boasts that Casa de Jacob is the first Judaica shop opened in Spain in more than 500 years.

Sadly, in the relatively short time the store has been open, they've had eight or nine incidents of anti-semitic graffiti scrawled on their wall, as this photo attests.


Casa de Jacob has a website. Check it out!

This lovely structure is the other surviving Toledo synagogue, charmlingly called "Santa Maria la Blanca." (Yes, you guessed it. After 1492 it became a church.)

The architecture is decidedly Moorish; this, it was explained to us, was because the best architects and builders in Toledo at the time of the synagogue's construction were Muslims.
Tour guides in Toledo like to brag that the city was a model of tolerance, with Christians, Jews, and Muslims coexisting peacefully for centuries. This building, I think, demonstrates that ... and it also demonstrates (most obviously in the name that it carries) that this era of harmony came to an end more than half a millenium ago.

Before the late fifteenth century, the Spanish city of Toledo was the leading city of Sephardic Judaism. Two former synagogues remain. This one is the Sinagoga del Transito.

It was built in the 1330's on the orders of Samuel Ha-Levi, who was King Peter I's treasurer. After the Jews were kicked out of Spain, the synagogue was taken over by the church and used for various purposes, including the stabling of horses.

One wonders: is this piece in the "Arts & Ideas" Section of today's Times a spoof?

It's a puff-piece about some guy named Robert W. Fuller and a book he wrote called "Somebodies and Nobodies." The thesis of the book is, I think (it's hard to tell, even though the article about it goes on for 26 paragraphs), that our society is "rankist," which means that it privileges "bullying behavior of people who think they are superior."

Although the article tells us nothing more about Fuller's idea than that, the article does note that the book was blurbed by Betty Friedan, Bill Moyers, Frances Fukuyama, and Studs Terkel. And that the book has sold 33,000 copies and that the author's website gets 2,000 to 3,000 visits per week, and that Fuller has lived off the largesse of a patron, Robert Cabot, "a novelist and diplomat . . . and heir to a family fortune" for the last 15 years." It also tells us a lot about how brilliant Fuller was as a "student wunderkind."

This is just precious: a rant against rank and elitism, penned and plugged by the ranked elite, maxes out on the rankist and elitist scale by scoring an intellectually empty p.r. piece in the "Arts & Ideas" section of the New York Times.

Oh, one other thing. The article does mention that Mr. Fuller has, in his itinerant career, twice left a wife and two children for another woman. This is obviously a person to consult on "the bullying behavior of people who think they are superior."

This is Cadaques, the town along the Costa Brava about 10 miles or so south of the French border where Dali did a lot of his painting. It's a gorgeous spot, if you can tolerate its touristy-ness (which we easily could). The light and the scenery in this village appear in various ways throughout Dali's work.

Of course, Heironymous Bosch was also a wacked-out dude, and he preceded Dali by several hundred years. This is from the Prado in Madrid.

We visited the Salvador Dali Theater-Museum in Figueras, Spain. He was a very wacked-out man, to be sure, but his painting was often superb. This one's actually a bit gimmicky -- a trompe l'oeil -- but it was the best photo I came away with.

There's a great line in the Marc Cohn song "Walking in Memphis," in which Cohn, having attended an inspiring revival meeting and been invited to play one of his tunes, is asked whether he's a Christian. "Ma'am, I am tonight," he responds.

This Rogier van der Weyden painting of Christ being taken from the Cross isn't enough to make me convert, but it comes close. It's just an unbelievable achievement. The depictions of grief in the Virgin Mary and in the dude with the funky robe (St. John, maybe?) holding Christ's legs are just staggering. The depiction of emotion in this painting was a quantum leap beyond where all painting of that era had been.

I'm a big fan of pre-18th century Netherlandish art, and I got to go to both the Prado in Madrid and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. For a fan of Netherlandish art, this is rather like dying and going to heaven.

A few examples will follow.

The city of Gerona, in Cataluña, ain't bad either.

Toledo is a beautiful city.

Many thanks to Eric for staging my introduction to a strange and wonderful world, and thanks to all of you who put up with my ramblings in his absence.

Jenny, thanks for your collaboration--I think we had fun, didn't we?

One more redneck haiku to leave you with:

Beauty

Naked in repose
Silvery silhouette girls
Adorn my mudflaps

Well, folks, I'm back from a three-week European adventure. I'll be posting some photos and such over the next few days, I hope.

Many, many thanks to my guest-bloggers, Sally Greene and Jenny Foreit. Jenny's got her own blog, so drop by her place. Sally doesn't -- yet -- but she is such a natural that I have to hope she'll be settling into her own little niche in the blogosphere sometime very soon.

It was a superb trip -- 2 1/2 weeks in Spain (Toledo, Madrid, Barcelona, and Catalunya (hey Jenny, how do I add accents and circumflexes and tildes and such? I was impressed by your post in Portuguese!)) followed by 4 days in Vienna.

One highlight of the trip (out of many!) was a visit to the Stadttempel on Seitenstettengasse in Vienna -- the only synagogue not burned or destroyed by the Nazis in November 1938. The reason they didn't torch the place is that it was the central synagogue that maintained all of the records on Vienna's Jews -- marriage records, birthdates, addresses, and the like -- and the Nazis wanted the information for their own nefarious purposes. As a result, though, all of the records survived, and so we were able to break open marvelous old books and find (in the highly stylized script writing of the day) pre-war birth records, bar mitzvah records, and marriage records of various family members.

More soon. It's nice to be home, but the trip was so wonderful that I've got a strong case of the "Back to Ordinary Life" blues today.

Thanks Jenny!

It's by far the best choice. He's the only thing close to a personality and presence that can take the steam out of Bush--that is, if the VP choice matters at all.

Lessig was right.

UPDATE: Wonkette on who scooped whom--and on the NY Post's amusing gaffe.

FURTHER UPDATE: I think this Slate piece is just right: Kerry needs Edwards to sell Kerry.

AND MOREOVER (07/07): Nicholas Kristof beautifully explains why Edwards is Kerry's only hope (or prayer) of winning over working-class church-going voters.

...it's john edwards (according to AP, via air america radio).

i was thoroughly unimpressed with him at the annual NARAL roe v. wade dinner last year, and i haven't seen anything about him since that would make me change my mind.

UPDATE: here's a real story on the pick, so you don't have to trust my word. even if i did beat 'em by four minutes.

FURTHER UPDATE:
the new york post reported this morning that the pick was gephardt (i've got the image up on baggage carousel 4). once again i'm forced to wonder what world they're living in...

Dookies breathe a sigh of relief.

ainda 'tou aqui. more or less.

sally's musing on "gone missing" reminded me of one of my favorite verbs -- sumir. it's portuguese, and can probably best be translated as... well, you guessed it, "gone missing."

as in,

cadê o meu chapeu?
sei la. sumiu!

which brings me to another favorite word. "cadê."

it's the end of a holiday weekend, and my brain's pretty dead. the fireworks, as seen from a law firm office across the street from the new executive office building, were very nice. the weather inside the office, unlike that outside, was even nicer. nicest yet was the spread.

Have the guest-bloggers gone missing this holiday weekend? Why not? Everyone else has, it seems.

"Gone missing" sneaked up on me. I hadn't noticed it until William Safire pointed it out--then suddenly it is everywhere. ("Gone missing!" said the shoe clerk at REI when the match to a shoe was not in the box.)

I'm not sure what I think of this one. Undeniably it has entered the lexicon of idioms, as Safire notes. It's hard to argue with the point that it beats "disappear" and "vanish," which "suggest dematerialization, which is rare."

For it's true, I haven't vanished (and I'll bet Jenny hasn't either).

Life is very good for Carolyn Porco, head of the imaging team for the Cassini project. "Step aside, Captain Kirk. This one belongs to us," she writes in her captain's log.

These images are likely to stand much of what was known about Saturn (and Titan, its major moon) on its end.



The next mission briefing is set for 1 p.m. today.

Thanks to TalkLeft for noticing this story in our back yard:

Court Orders "God" Into Oath

"RALEIGH, N.C., June 29--North Carolina's Supreme Court ordered a judge Tuesday to restore references to God used when he enters the courtroom and when witnesses swear to tell the truth.

"The high court sided with angry officials from two counties who complained that District Judge James M. Honeycutt had taken it upon himself to change courtroom procedures.

"Justices ordered Honeycutt to stop using a revised oath missing the phrase 'so help you God' and to administer the oath as spelled out in state law. The court also ordered the judge to allow bailiffs to begin court sessions with a proclamation that includes 'God save the state and this honorable court.'"

What's interesting is that the Supreme Court dealt with this case so fast. It came up just last week as a complaint with the N.C. Judicial Standards Commission. That process could have taken a year. But the court dealt with the case on writ of mandamus. Clearly this was something that had to be settled posthaste! we can't have godless courtrooms.

Judge Honeycutt is a Roger Williams-style Baptist. His sensible logic is that although any witness can choose to "affirm" rather than swear to God, if the jury is full of Christians you look kind of suspect if you don't go along.

Surprisingly, the state ACLU supports the status quo. Managing attorney Seth Jaffee "said the oaths are constitutional as long as witnesses and defendants have a choice." But see the vigorous dissent in pagan circles.

I wonder if Mr. Newdow could have argued for a better result.

Part of Judge Honeycutt's district includes Davidson County (Lexington), N.C., where two lawyers recently lost a federal suit arguing that a sign saying "In God We Trust" outside a county court building was unconstitutional.

Must be something in the barbeque.

the day after news outlets were all over the story of marlon brando's reported $20m debt, bloomberg is reporting that the actor is dead.

if there was ever a movie tailor-made for an old-style BFS bulletin review, this is it. alas, the movie promoters got to it first:

starring....

"that asian guy.... from american pie!"
"that indian guy.... from van wilder!"

and directed by....

"that white guy.... from dude, where's my car?!"

it also has neil patrick harris, in an absolutely hysterical turn as himself, flying high on x and coke, looking for strippers to fall for his doogie howser line. i can't remember the last time i laughed so hard in a movie. i haven't seen any trailers for it on the telly, but you can watch one over at the apple quicktime site.

A cool page that gives you a different quote from Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture every time you click.

More books, etc., are available at onfocus from Paul Bausch, who--among other things--helped to create the Blogger software that powers this web site.

From smudged columns of 19th-century newspapers on my desk, up floats a domestic tragedy.

Natchez Daily Democrat, March 19, 1886, p. 1

"Cincinnati, March 18--A short time ago, Esquire Bohrman, of Avondale, a suburb of Cincinnati, lost a suit involving $500. This so preyed upon the mind of his wife that it is supposed she became deranged. This morning Mr. Bohrman heard a noise in his wife's bedroom in which his two sons also slept and attempted to enter, but found the door locked. Everything becoming still he did not at once force an entrance, but when he did get into the room he found his wife dead with her throat cut with a razor, his son Albert, 14 years old also dead, with his throat cut, and another son, Arthur, severly, if not fatally wounded by a blow on the head with a hammer. Arthur was able to say that his mother came to him sometime in the night and told him to go to sleep; that he did fall asleep and was awakened by a blow on the head. He ran to the door and found it locked. He tried to remove the lock but she struck him again. Then he heard his father at the door, but could give no alarm, and then his mother killed herself."

Perhaps a novelist could make something of this. All I can do is sit and stare, unsettled and distracted.

Barbara Ehrenreich's column in today's Times is related to the issue I raised on June 24 in "Bush and the common whitemale." The right wing leadership tells the working class that the Democratic party is dominated by the "liberal elite." But is it really?

"Like the notion of social class itself, the idea of a liberal elite originated on the left, among early 20th-century anarchists and Trotskyites who noted, correctly, that the Soviet Union was spawning a 'new class' of power-mad bureaucrats. The Trotskyites brought this theory along with them when they mutated into neocons in the 60s, and it was perhaps their most precious contribution to the emerging American right. Backed up by the concept of a 'liberal elite,' right-wingers could crony around with their corporate patrons in luxuriously appointed think tanks and boardrooms--all the while purporting to represent the average overworked Joe."

Ehrenreich thinks "it's time to retire the 'liberal elite' label, which, for the past 25 years, has been deployed to denounce anyone to the left of Colin Powell."