Voting representation for DC

I sometimes do serious writing too, you know. It isn't all blog all the time.

Tribute for Freddie

It's been fifteen years today since Freddie Mercury left us. As a tribute, here's me taking a ham-fisted go at Bijou, from the Innuendo album.

Notice about email

Please use my gmail account if you want to contact me in the next week or so. Some blithering idiot is using my domain name as a return address for spam e-mail, and since there's nothing I can do to stop him from doing so, I can at least prevent all the bounce messages clogging my inbox. Apropos, I've removed the MX records for the domain, so anything you send to addresses @ simondodd dot org or dot net will bounce until further notice.

Nuclear option, redux

Since the issue is apparently not going to go away unless or until McCain bows out of the '08 nomination fight, I have added some more thoughts to the ongoing saga here.

It's election day...

So here's some cute kitties to take your mind off the election.




(As coincidence would have it, today was their annual checkup with the vet).

He has "changed the terms in which constitutional issues are discussed"

A very nice two decade retrospective of Justice Scalia's tenure thusfar from the Weekly Standard. Inter alia:

Scalia has drawn criticism for his work in [ConLaw], much more than for his statutory interpretation. He has been charged with violating his own interpretive principles ... [with failing to be] originalist enough, and that if he were, he might find principles in the Constitution different from some of the ones he sees now. Yet another is that his jurisprudence is really an effort to preserve traditional moral values against legal and cultural change, and that he picks the methodology necessary to reach desired ends--that he is, in other words, a conservative judicial activist ... [Yet] [w]hat is striking about such criticism is how rarely it denies the importance of the text. Scalia's critics often accept his own strictures about the relevance of original meaning and the need for judicial restraint. Few of them argue for noninterpretive approaches of the sort popular in the academy during the years of the Burger Court, the kind that "read" the Constitution in light of various moral philosophies and theories of justice ... [Moreover,] it has not been possible for Scalia to build "a strong, lasting, and principled coalition" with justices like Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy, Reagan appointees both but not, as their decisions prove, constitutionalists.