The Inquiring Manatee

Sotomayor Hearings: The Court is Now in Sessions

    

     WILMINGTON, Vermont -- It is unfortunate that, in Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Alabama., Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee do not have a ranking member matching the stature and intellect of committee chairman Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont.
     TV viewers of this week's Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings are getting a lurid peek at Sessions and seeing him for what he is: a crabbed, right-wing Snopes who embodies what is wrong with today's rump, Southern-based Republican Party.
      I first saw Sessions during the 1992 presidential campaign when I was traveling with President George H. W. Bush's re-election campaign. He was making a speech -- in Birmingham, I think it was -- and I was impressed only with his ambition.
      Sessions lacks grace. He has that mean little Faulkner Yoknapatawpha County mouth, with an accompanying world outlook.
      In lecturing Sotomayor constantly this week about the need for judges (he used to be one) to hew strictly to existing law, not letting their life experiences influence their decisions, Sessions typifies the desperate fear of conservatives that judges will carve out new rights for the poor and powerless, upsetting the status quo.
      One of the many factors Sessions forgets or ignores is that the Supreme Court of the United States frequently is called upon to act in unsettled, gray areas of the law. It is at those times that the mettle and reasoning of a justice are tested. In situations without clear precedent, it is of course prudent to rule as narrowly as possible, shying from finding and grappling with cosmic constitutional questions that may not be fairly and maturely presented.
      Even in narrow rulings, however, abstract reasoning alone may not yield a satisfactory answer in the case at hand. It is then that a lifetime of broad experience that has produced, yes, the empathy of a wise Latina -- or a wise white male, or a wise black woman -- should be called into play to help produce a result that directs the law toward equity.
       Sadly, such a concept of well-rounded jurisprudence is anathema to the rigid Sessions. He is trying to nail Sotomayor into his own Procrustean bed of dead-brained, passive judicial decisionmaking. Let the world watch, and see an illustration of the kind of thinking that in apartheid South Africa was called verkrampte -- cramped, as opposed to verligte, enlightened.

Summer in Southern Vermont

     

WILMINGTON, Vermont -- Rain, endless clouds, lightning and thunder dominate the summer of 2009 in this friendly town of 2,000, midway between Bennington to the west and Brattleboro to the east.
      My wife Irma Hawkins and I arrived with our cat and two dogs on July 2. Since then, there has been but one day of unalloyed sunshine. We usually bring sunny weather with us from California for our eight-week stays here -- indeed, we are all but contractually obligated to do so, and our friends are duly grateful -- but this year, Jupiter Pluvius is the resident god in the Green Mountain State.
       Here is our lake under typical conditions this month:
        Still pretty, though, isn't it?
     This summer promises to be something short of idyllic. Aside from the problematic weather, my back hurts and I haven't been able to run my usual 5 miles on Highway 100, going north toward Canada. Carrying one of Irma's heavy steel sculptures up the stairs of our house in Venice, Calif., did me in. With luck and a few Tylenols, I hope to resume running tomorrow. Got to get ready for next April's Boston Marathon.
      Speaking of Boston, we arrived at Logan International Airport there after a red-eye flight from L.A. As we drove our rented SUV (an excellent Ford Edge) out of town on I-90, the rain was coming down in such torrents that we could barely see Fenway Park's Green Monster wall off to our left. As we moved northwest to our destination, 144 miles away, the rain let up. But new storms moved in later, and still more after that.
       Luckily, most of the Fourth of July was clear, allowing us to view the all-American small-town parade up in Wardsboro, Vt., a 25-mile drive from Wilmington, and also Wilmington's public fireworks display that night amid a bundled-up crowd. Here is a photo from the parade:
       That's the Grafton (Vermont) Cornet Band. There were antique cars, homemade floats, booths selling homemade apple pies. The real Vermont. There's no place like it.
     The price you pay for small-town life is the need to drive at least 20 miles to find goods and services that you need. As near as I can figure, for example, Wilmington has no dry cleaner. For big-box stores, there's the Walmart in Hinsdale, N.H., which I try to avoid on ideological grounds, and the giant malls of Keene, N.H., a 35-mile drive. We hit Keene yesterday and came home with a new printer, a photo tripod, clothes from Target and T. J. Maxx
      In recompense for our remoteness, we get quiet, time to read, time to think, time to catch up with old friends and help them with their troubles as they have helped us in the past.
      That's life at a summer place. Life in Vermont. It lives and thrives, rain be damned. And even in the height of a lightning storm, there is unparalleled natural beauty in how it lights up the lake.

Que Sarah Sarah (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)

     

When it comes to overweening ambition, no one in history can match Sarah Palin.
      Ambition for the presidency, despite her manifest lack of qualifications, accounts for Palin's bombshell announcement (dropped on the dead Friday of the July 4 holiday weekend) that she is resigning as Alaska's governor July 26. Her excuse, as near as I can understand her rambling explanation, involves the trouble and expense of defending against 15 investigations of ethical violations.
      The real reason for the strange political move is that Palin feels she's now too big to be confined to out-of-the-way Alaska when there's a 4-year national campaign to be run. Palin regards the adulation of the abortion crazies as evidence that the whole world loves her and demands her as the next president of the United States.
      There is precedent for politicians shaking off a full-time job for the freedom of unrestricted campaigning for the White House. Bob Dole resigned early from the U.S. Senate in 1996 to spend more time organizing for the run against Bill Clinton that fall. Jimmy Carter didn't start running for president in 1976 until he had left the Georgia governorship; he was literally jobless while a candidate, while many of his rivals had to hold down public positions. Ronald Reagan found as a former California governor in 1976 and 1980 that he had more leeway to run for president than when he made an abortive run for the GOP nomination while still in the governorship in 1968.
      Palin will have more time for fundraising, and she won't have to worry about hostile legislators and journalists in Alaska biting her ankles. She has launched herself into the greater political environment, for better or worse. In her case, I think it's for the worse. It's a gamble; she could have used the governorship as a springboard for a Senate try in 2010, but in resigning she is telling Alaskans that she is far above and beyond them now. Lots of luck getting them to elect her to anything again. As for the rest of us, we are stuck with her until 2012. This is good news only for supporters of the pending Tina Fey Lifetime Employment Act.
     Unluckily for Sarah, developmentally disabled little Trig will be too big and heavy by 2012 to carry around as a prop. Palin will have little going for her except her backwoods outlook, her silly winks, her spotty and scandal-plagued record in politics and a newly confirmed reputation as an unpredictable dingbat.

The Manatee's Seasonal Migration

   

As of Thursday, July 2, The Inquiring Manatee's home waters will shift for the summer from the human-made canals of Venice, Calif., to the human-made Lake Whitingham, Vermont. Let's see if this blog's perspective changes as it moves East.
    Wish the Manatee luck with the weather, please. Manatees, native to the Sunshine State of Florida, don't particularly like a lot of rain, and that is what the East, and New England in particular, has been having this year.

Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.): It's About Time

    

Class came belatedly to Norm Coleman, but at last the national Republican establishment allowed him to muster some grace on Tuesday and concede to Al Franken after suffering a 5-0 trouncing in the Supreme Court of Minnesota.
     Democrat Al Franken succeeds Coleman in the seat once held by Paul Wellstone, the Democrat killed in a plane crash. Franken and Wellstone have in common a terrific sense of humor that's generally lacking in the Senate.
      The Franken-Coleman recount controversy went on so long -- more than seven months -- that I got impatient with being begged for money from the Franken forces, and stopped taking their phone calls. I just wanted it all to end. It was an outrageous legal battle that disenfranchised Minnesotans, but the stakes were so high for Republicans -- losing the nominal ability to filibuster Democratic bills if the Democrats got a 60th Senate seat -- that I suppose they can't be blamed for fighting as tenaciously as they did.
       Some expected Republicans to take the Minnesota election case to the federal courts, ultimately ending up before the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court, friendly confines if there ever were any. I'm amazed that they didn't do it. Is there at long last a sense of shame?
       Now that it's over, let's get Franken sworn in as soon as possible so we can put this historic but unfortunate episode behind us. But we can't expect an automatic 60 Democratic votes to block any and all GOP filibusters. There are conservative Democrats like Nebraska's Ben Nelson who have an eye to the home folks. Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy are ailing and absent. Republicans may become more successful at corraling the votes of Maine's two Republican women senators.
       Still, it's good news for Democrats -- and even better news for Franken, who is bound to be more successful in the Senate than he was on Air America radio.

Michael's Big Comeback

    

When Truman Capote died, Gore Vidal, no friend of the writer, commented: "Good career move."
     So it is with Michael Jackson. His CDs, old albums and memorabilia are selling out everywhere. He is achieving success that his 50-show London comeback attempt this summer might well have missed. It's unfortunate that Michael is not around to see it happen.
     One lesson in the tragic and untimely death: It provides yet one more example of celebrities messing around with painkilling drugs, risking a fatal overdose. Drugs can kill, and in this case they killed again. Let's try to bear up under our aches and pains and not to rely on pills and injections.

Memories of Michael

    

From the time of the Santa Barbara County sheriff's raid on Neverland in 2003 to Michael Jackson's acquittal at his Santa Maria, Calif., child molestation trial in June 2005, the eccentric singer took up a good portion of my life as I reported his troubles with the criminal law.
     Though I never could pierce his phalanx of guarding lawyers and flacks to go one on one with him, I did ask him a question or two as he left court on many days of the 15-week trial, and received a carefully monosyllabic answer. Otherwise, I can't say I knew the guy. But I was able to observe his lifestyle: his supportive family, his entourage, his frailty and pain, his fiercely loyal fans who came to the trial from Spain, Japan, Germany and other distant points.
      Jackson's defense lawyers did a fabulous job of raising reasonable doubt about the child molestation charges brought by members of the Arvizo family. The complaining mom in particular was a piece of work with the least credibility I have ever seen in a courtroom witness -- and I'm a lawyer, myself. So Jackson, who may or may not have acted inappropriately with the boy and his brother, was off the hook. But he went off to Dubai with his reputation in tatters over what I still consider his highly reprehensible practices with young boys in his bed.
       He was a tragic figure, the product of too much celebrity and no perspective about it. I'd describe him as a former African-American. He tried to erase his black identity, and went to at least one too many plastic surgeons in the process. By the time of the trial, he was simply grotesque-looking, his onetime beauty transformed into painted-on ugliness and an imposed bone structure.
       Jackson lived too high, took too many pills, blew through his money, amassed a mountain of debt. Who knows if his comeback try in London would have worked? What was promising was that his 50 shows had sold out. Overseas if no longer in his homeland, he remained beloved.
       His tumultuous life is over now, and his talents are a matter for history. May he rest in peace.

Negative Emotions About 10 Best-Picture Oscar Nominees

     

I'm wrestling with my reactions to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' announcement Wednesday that they are expanding the iconic Best Picture category from five to 10 nominees -- a return to a practice of the 1930s and 1940s.
      The Academy's motives in making the change were hardly artistic. In fact, they were pretty crass: Seeking higher TV ratings for the ABC broadcast, and thus higher license fees from the network that are the financial lifeblood of the Hollywood organization. The clear implication of the move is that big-budget summer popcorn movies like "The Dark Knight" will have a better shot at getting nominated, drawing TV viewers who identify with the mass-market blockbusters and not at all with excellent little independent or foreign films like "La Vie En Rose." It's a populist ploy.
       I've got to admit that I generally avoid the big-studio summer blockbusters, finding these comic-book action films (and most animated features) pitched to an audience about 50 years younger than I am, and to a double-digit IQ level. I'm a snob about movies like "The Dark Knight." Maybe they're better than average for the kind of films they are, but I find it hard to believe that they're Best Picture material except by accident.
       It might have been a better idea to keep the Best Picture category at five while adding a new category for mass-market, youth-oriented films. Maybe it could be called Best Lowest Common Denominator Picture.
       I told you I was an elitist pig.
      

Cry For Me, Argentina: Adios to Another 2012 GOP Hopeful

     

Sarah Palin, for all her countless faults, is a near-certainty to obtain the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. That's because she will be the only candidate still standing, barring some new misstep.
      The Republicans are snake-bit. First it was Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, who, after making strategic first appearances in Iowa, suddenly announced a 2007-08 extramarital affair with the wife of a campaign aide, resigned his Senate leadership post and was written off for 2012.
      Today's casualty is South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. Once considered a possible nominee, he sneaked off to pursue a belatedly admitted affair in Argentina. He left his post without telling the lieutenant governor, his staff or even his wife, leaving his staff to lie and tell the news media that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail to "clear his head" after an exhausting legislative session.
      The session was so exhausting because Sanford, looking like a fool all the way, was on the losing end of a battle to refuse $700 million in federal stimulus money on ideological grounds despite his state's unemployment woes in this Great Recession.
      As if Sanford's stand on the federal money were not reason enough to doubt his mental stability, his bizarre trip to spend seven days with La Otra Senora cements his image as a dingbat -- and gives the world another picture of a family-values hypocrite. This is yet more bad news for the Republican Party. Who is left for 2012? Newt Gingrich cannot be taken seriously. Mitt Romney's attempts to reinvent himself for the 190th time may fall short of appeasing the far-righters and the Mormon-haters who don't trust him.
       It's all good news for Sarah Palin, who yesterday reimbursed Alaska for $8,100 for the trip expenses of her daughters whom she took to nine far-flung events of questionable relevance to her job as governor. But what's good news for Palin is bad news for those of us who mourn for the days when, every now and then, the GOP put forward a candidate of intelligence, common sense and, for all we ever found out, personal probity.
       

Not Looking Good in Iran

   

It now looks as if the brutes and killers will have their way in Iran. Annulment of the rigged election and the achievement of real democracy in that historic old country was always a long shot.
    In any country, and especially in a traditional society such as Iran's, there are always a lot more stupid and uneducated people, and more thugs, than there are educated, intelligent and decent people.
     In Iran, as in Burma, the oppressed people have lost out to unprincipled power.

Mama Took Our Kodachrome Away

     Digital photography, one of the greatest inventions ever, has done in Kodak's famous old Kodachrome slide color film. It's been years since I used that vibrant film, but I still treasure some of the old slides, long since scanned into my computers and enhanced with one of the excellent programs that can turn any amateur photographer into a virtual Ansel Adams.
     Progress has its painful casualties, but progress marches on.