Dellinger:

A true originalist, Souter refuses to limit individual rights to the time-bound set of liberties that the Framers of the 14th Amendment would have include had they chosen to adopt a specific list. The short answer is that the Framers did not so choose. They deliberately wrote with a broad brush and left particular applications to the future. In carrying out that mandate, Souter writes, the court must look to "widely shared understandings within the national society" that can change "as interests claimed under the rubric of liberty evolve into recognition."

Having defended the concept of evolving liberty, Souter then turns to the important question of when it would be "premature for the Judicial Branch to decide whether … a general right should be recognized."

"The beginning of wisdom," he writes, "is to go slow." Before declaring "unsympathetic state or national laws arbitrary to the point of being unconstitutional," he writes, a wise court will "recognize how much time society needs in order to work through a given issue."

His opinion then takes what seems to be an extraordinarily personal turn. He may be speaking of himself (or his rural neighbors) when his says that "[w]e can change our own inherited views just so fast, and a person is not labeled a stick-in-the-mud for refusing to endorse a new moral claim without having some time to work through it intellectually and emotionally." Sometimes, he says, "an attachment to the familiar and the limits of experience" limit "an individual's capacity to see the potential legitimacy of a moral position."

So, too, it is with the broader society, which "needs the chance to take part in the dialectic of public and political back and forth about a new liberty claim." Souter's final message to his conservative colleagues is that conceptions of liberty evolve. And his last caution to those litigators pushing the frontiers of liberty is that nations, like individuals, need time to assimilate new thinking.

Lithwick on Letterman/Palin

Will kidding about sexual predators and innocent teens ever be funny? - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine: "That's the problem with jokes. They are funny only if you accept the premise, in this case, that Palin is the slutty mother of sluts or that Letterman is a dirty old man with designs on 'tween girls. If you don't accept that premise, the jokes become cancerous hate speech. There's no middle ground here. That's why the umbrage wars invariably escalate when jokes are involved. Jokes—or more correctly, the enemies' jokes—seem to open a window on the other team's id. One side's throwaway one-liner is the other side's heart of darkness."

Revolutionary twitter

Sullivan has been tracking and compiling twits from the Iranian unrest. This is my favorite so far:

BAM! Khameni just called out Rafsanjani and his son, and passive aggressively accused them of corruption. OH SNAP! |source|

At the bus stop

They're a little hard to make out, but those little dots are our neighborhood waterfowl. The picture catches them just as they finished crossing the street. Please note that they did it properly, at an intersection, as all good citizens do.

The smart tourist knows

When vacationing in exotic locales, the smart tourist knows to carry flash cards illustrating common needs. Visual symbols form a universal language which can be used to ask for a hotel, a taxi, or even a toilet!

Letterman apologizes. Again.

CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time - Blogs from CNN.com: "David Letterman delivered another, more repentant apology for the off-color joke he made last week about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's daughter.

'It was kind of a coarse joke. There's no getting around it,' Letterman said in the opening monologue of Monday night's show."

Net cops on patrol

Rock for change

Tiananmen or Berlin?

That's the question going through my head as I read the accounts coming in from Tehran.

No friends pledge

One of the useful things about getting older is that you start to see patterns in your life and in your relationships with others. One thing that stands out for me is that all of my relationships seem to go through three stages. In stage one, my not-yet-friend thinks that I'm maybe a little annoying. In stage two, my friend thinks something like, 'sure, I can see how people might think dr is annoying, but deep down he's a sweet guy and besides he's fun/funny/interesting.' Then comes stage three, during which my soon to be former friend starts thinking that being a friend of mine is more trouble than it's worth.

I'll readily admit that all the character defects that my various associates identify are real defects. I'll even go so far as to say that I'd like to not mind that all of my various associates eventually find themselves wondering whether my friendship is worth the trouble.

At the end of the day, though, I do mind. In fact, the deep emotional truth is that I find that attitude utterly unforgivable. It's not fair, but there it is.

So no more friends for me. Ever. I'm done. Go away.

d-n-r-T-B!

...is how you say it.