Palo Alto Robots, Gardens, Downtown

I went with J1 and Kona to J1's office today. He's still not going full time, but we got there in time for lunch. Sitting out in the garden patio area was a bit like having lunch in Thailand. There, I knew what the topic was but was never sure of the details. Today I understood the details, but wasn't completely sure of the topic. Lots of jargon.







Essentially, they are making robots. Fortunately for them and for me, the New York Times scooped me on this story by one day, so I can use them to explain what the company's doing.

. . . a Silicon Valley robotics research group, said that its experimental PR2 robot, which has wheels and can travel at speeds up to a mile and a quarter per hour, was able to open and pass through 10 doors and plug itself into 10 standard wall sockets in less than an hour.

When J1 told me the robot could open doors and plug itself in, I was less than impressed. I've seen enough robots on television and movies to 'know' that ain't no big deal. But, apparently it is:

But roboticists said that the Willow Garage robot was the first to integrate the ability to do a number of operations in a real-world environment.

“There are other groups that have opened doors before,” said Andrew Ng, a Stanford roboticist with several students who have gone to work for the company. But, Mr. Ng said, this seemed to be the first robot able to repeatedly and reliably open doors and plug itself in.

William L. Whittaker, a Carnegie Mellon University roboticist and the winner of a Defense Department urban challenge robot driving contest last year, said it was “unprecedented” for a robot to navigate in a building reliably and repeatedly recharge itself. “These guys are the real deal,” he said.

I did some writing after lunch and then walked round Palo Alto while J1 had a meeting.



















































A lot of the homes in the area do not
have lawns. But most look like they have pretty pricey gardeners to keep these alternative landscapes looking good.













Where the ground isn't watered, the grasses are totally dried out.



Here's Kona waiting to go home.













And apparently Anchorage is no longer the most expensive city for gas.

Anchorage - San Francisco

The plane took off about 1:50am. It is less than
two weeks from solstice, so it doesn't really get dark anymore.

Denali and Foraker a little after 2am.

The Chugach. There is snow, but much of the white is cloud.

Approaching San Francisco about four hours later, almost 7am.

Arrived at SFO.

Spinning the Supreme Court 2 - Political Stragegy Narratives

Part 1 of this post first gave some background on what I mean by narrative and then looked at a few narratives about the Supreme Court nominees and judges. Part 3 will be about race narratives. So here is part 2. 

 Political Strategy Narratives 

 The Senate is divided between members of the majority party and members of the minority party. At present, the majority party is also the party of the President. We know the majority party will support the new nominee. So what is the proper role of the minority party here? Some possible narratives: 

 1. Affirm any candidate who meets basic standards. This would call for the Republicans today to weigh Sotomayor's qualifications and confirm her nomination as long as she proves to be legally competent at some more than minimal level and if she appears to be reasonably close to the mainstream in her ideology. 

Of course, as we mentioned in Part 1, people have different narratives about what fits in the mainstream. For some, a Democratic Hispanic will never fit in. Some might add, "Just as a Republican African-American was suspect to Democrats." 

But, to switch narratives once again, if an African-American or Hispanic adds life experiences and differently nuanced narratives which enlarge the court's ability to comprehend a situation in a court case (In Part 3 I'll give an example of when Justice Thomas apparently affected a decision when he talked about the meaning of cross burning*), then it makes sense to add, all other things being equal, an African-American or Hispanic whose expressed world view is consistent with the group he or she 'represents.'  [*UPDATE 2022: Not sure I ever did Part 3.]

 I also agree that such a position gets me pretty close to stereotyping and prejudging people, not as individuals, but as interchangeable members of a group. "Give me one African-American, please, to add a little balance to the court. Now, how about another woman." But, I would also argue that to ignore race and the impact of past discrimination is to ignore the facts of American culture. (Recall, please, how white and black Americans differed in their reaction to the OJ Simpson case.) Bumper stickers - even blackboards - appealing as they might be, aren't big enough to express the complexities of the world in which we live. 

So let's move on to narrative number 2, recognizing how the simplicity of each of these narratives can be deceiving. 

 2. Fight against everything the other side proposes. This could be the result of people who see themselves as part of a team (party, ideology, cause) that is smaller than the people of the United States as a whole and who see the world as a zero-sum game. They are inclined to competition, no matter the odds. 

In this situation the opposition fights everything the administration proposes simply because it is the administration’s proposal. There are variations on this narrative. 

a. Battle for the sake of battle. I had a boss once who told me that his son said he was too competitive and then he proceeded to tell me that he does like to make everything a contest. He simply likes to compete and to win. And I finally understood why everything with him had to be a battle. Not my style, but there are plenty of people like that out there. 

b. Ideology. There are also politicians who are on an ideological crusade. Anything that appears from their charged up perspective as not going in their ideological direction must be attacked. They see themselves as fighting the good fight. Even if they lose, they stood up for their beliefs. 

c. Zero-Sum game. There are politicians who see everything as us v. them (rather than, say, we are all for bettering the US). So any victory for the other party is seen as a loss for oneself. This is known as a zero-sum game by game theorists. What the other person wins, I lose. So everything must be fought tooth and nail. 

Clearly, these three can overlap - and they overlap with next one - but I'm just trying to identify different narratives that play a role here. They are generally only so distinct in the abstract. In real situations they are all intertwined, and harder to see. 

One narrative that explains why things have gotten this contentious blames the creation of safe Republican and Democratic seats, where the real election takes place in the primaries. This causes candidates to pander to the more extreme members of their parties, thus producing a far more extreme and less willing to negotiate Congress than we had, say, during the Watergate hearings. During those hearings, which I listened to live on television and radio, while Republicans made sure Democrats didn't abuse their power, they didn't defend the indefensible either. As Nixon's complicity became clear, rather than obstruct the whole proceedings as tends to happen today, they carried out their roles of calling their leader to account. Today, they would be more likely to fight to defend their own, right or wrong. 

2. Ideological goals for the Supreme Court. This is slightly different from #1 in that these people see the position of a Supreme Court Justice as so important that, while they may be willing to cooperate on lesser issues, on this issue they will fight tooth and nail. Franklin Roosevelt even tried to enlarge the Supreme Court so he could appoint new, friendlier justices. 

But Republicans have taken this to a new level. In a dominant liberal narrative, they have decided that the way to get things they feel important (overturning Roe v. Wade, prevent any attempt at gun-control, etc.) they've decided on their own version of court packing. 

In a March/April 2009 Washington Monthly piece, Rachel Morris outlines this narrative about how the Federalist Society helped the Republicans develop a supply of attorneys and an ideology to fight what they saw as liberal dominance in the law.

However, it was only when Edwin Meese became attorney general in 1985 that things really began to change. . . He brought in a cadre of loyal and experienced senior staffers, and directed them to recruit smart, young, conservative lawyers in order to set them on the path to the judiciary or higher office. Thanks to the Federalist Society, his officials now had a one-stop shop for promising candidates, and they hired many of its members. When they found lawyers with senior leadership potential who lacked previous government experience, they brought them on as special assistants or advisers so that in a few years they could be assistant attorneys general. In the short term, this helped Meese gain control of the bureaucracy, but he was also planting seeds for the years ahead. One of the many lawyers he cultivated was Samuel Alito. Meese promoted the thirty-five-year-old to deputy assistant attorney general in 1985, after Alito impressed him with his work on a strategy to eviscerate Roe.

Meese’s second innovation was ideological. He wanted to keep his young staffers motivated, and create the intellectual conditions in which conservatism could thrive. His DOJ held regular seminars and lunchtime discussions—John Roberts, then at the White House Counsel’s office, also attended these gatherings. Meese asked a group of department lawyers to craft detailed constitutional arguments for the movement’s legal agenda, which remains the same today: outlawing abortion, ending affirmative action, protecting the death penalty, restricting government regulation, and expanding presidential power.

In particular, Meese was determined to elevate the status of originalism, the notion that the Constitution should be understood as its authors wrote it. Championed by the Yale law professor Robert Bork, originalism enjoyed a small academic following, but Meese believed it could provide the intellectual fuel for Reagan’s goals. On the surface, it sounded nonpartisan, and there was something deceptively intuitive about it: surely judges are supposed to confine themselves to the strict meaning of the constitutional text. However, originalists tended to be selective about the norms they invoked from the Founders, and their selections usually overlapped with conservative goals—prohibiting abortion, or returning to an era of a smaller federal government. (Antonin Scalia, for instance, defends the death penalty on the grounds that it was clearly acceptable when the Constitution was written, yet he admits that it is not okay to flog people, a punishment also tolerated at the time. He also says that he would have signed on to Brown v. Board of Education, although there is no originalist way to reach it.) [Originalism sounds to me a bit like Fundamentalism.]

Meese saw that originalism could do more than just rationalize conservative policy positions. It provided a justification for overturning decisions that conservatives didn’t like, because the Constitution, not accumulated precedent, was meant to be the judge’s only guide. Most important, it represented a direct assault on the "Living Constitution"—the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted according to the evolving values of the times—which underpinned the major liberal victories of the Warren Court.

She further asserts that,

... the movement won another, more enduring victory during this period, by significantly constraining the types of liberal judges Bill Clinton could appoint. Continuing the public conversation that Meese started, conservative lawyers outside the government painted many of Clinton’s nominees as liberal extremists who were unfit for the courts. Federalist Society lawyers on the Republican staff of the Senate Judiciary threw procedural obstacles in the way. In the end, they blocked votes on more than sixty of Clinton’s nominees to the federal courts (one was Elena Kagan, the new solicitor general), and ensured that his Supreme Court appointments were moderates.

So, a judge without an ideological ax to grind, would have a voting record that wouldn't favor one particular class or group or issue consistently. Such a judge would simply weigh the facts against the law and Constitution. Perhaps in one case that judge would find for a corporation and in another case for a union or a consumer group against a corporation. After all, the corporations or the unions can't be right in every case that comes before the supreme court, can they? 

But a judge with an ideological view would find some way to interpret the law so that the decisions tend to fall for the judge's favored groups. I

In a May 25, 2009 New Yorker article, Jeffrey Toobin writes that:

In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

You can see narratives within narratives within narratives. As George Lakoff pointed out, Republicans had become much better at framing issues (creating narratives with which voters could connect) than Democrats. 

Listening to politicians talk, keeping track of the narratives being used is a little like watching the nuts being switched around and trying to keep of track of which one is covering the pea. I

I'll put up Part 3 which will discuss Narratives of Race in the near future. [Update August 1, 2022:  As I repost these, I can't seem to find Part 3.  I have some posts on how race is characterized, but nothing with the planned title.  So don't look for Part 3, but if you do and you find it, let me know.]

Headed to SF to Visit J1 - Alaska Airline Pricing Joke

Sorry, this screen shot looks so bad. You can double click it to see it clearly.



OK, so I made a last minute reservation. $656 one way to San Francisco. Steep. I check how much it would be in mileage.

12,500 miles. And $2.50 security fee. OK, that's fine. I book it. But look in the red circle. Alaska is kind enough to show me some alternative pay options.

• $656 cash.
  
• If I want to use cash AND mileage I can go with:
  $527 plus 7,500 miles or
  $398 plus 15,000 miles

Why would they offer me that last choice if I'm already getting the ticket for
$2.50 and 12,500 miles? I wonder if anyone ever takes that choice.

European Parliament Elections

Ropi sent me a link to this Guardian article on the European elections. This was his first time voting and he offered some of his thoughts about voting the other day.

The article he sent certainly reminds me how little how I know about how European Parliamentary politics work. Each of these country overviews (the article is much longer) is just the makeup on the face of the politics of the countries. Anyone ready to write an equivalent paragraph describing the 2008 US election in 40 words or less? Well, at least we know about American Idol if we don't know who the Prime Minister of Spain is.

France

Two parties claimed victories in the French European elections last night: Nicolas Sarkozy's ruling centre-right UMP topped the poll, but the new green coalition, Europe Ecologie, won a surprisingly high tally, forcing climate change back onto the agenda for all French politicians.

Italy

Projections in Italy indicated Silvio ­Berlusconi had suffered a clear setback after a campaign dominated by the ­controversy surrounding him.

Spain

Spain's rightwing People's party won its first national victory for nine years, as Socialist prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero paid the price of recession. Zapatero saw his Socialists slide to a loss by 3.7 percentage points 15 months after winning a general election.

Ireland

Voters rejected both the ruling Fianna Fail-Green party coalition and the country's most famous Eurosceptic, Declan Ganley, in European, local and Dáil by­elections over the weekend.

Hungary

A fringe neofascist party, Jobbik, made a breakthrough by winning three out of 22 seats in Hungary where the main centre-right opposition party, Fidesz, has won 14 seats, the governing Socialist party four seats and the Hungarian Democratic Forum one.

Ropi, this doesn't sound good. Can you elaborate on the Hungarian neofascist party?

They cover Sweden, Austria, and Belgium as well. And there are a number of links to other stories on the election.

The Black Cockerel

We went to Out North Saturday night for their second world premiere of a play in two months. (The first was The Man in the Attic.) I'm not sure what constitutes an official world premiere. The first half was acted out. The second half the key actors had their scripts in front of them on music stands. While they knew the lines pretty well, they did peek down at and turned the pages.



Should we have different standards for a Nigerian playwright whose play is performed in Anchorage with local actors and a local director in a tiny playhouse, than we have for a Broadway play staged with well-known actors?

Maybe, but as I used to tell students when they complained my grading was too hard for a school like UAA, "Just because you're at UAA, doesn't mean you should be treated like second-rate students." And if these are serious theater folks, they need honest reactions.


And that said, I'm glad I went to see the play. I learned about African history, there was some riveting acting, some less than riveting acting, and I got to learn a bit of the process of developing a play.

But I don't want you to think the playwright is just some international student who landed in Fairbanks and writes plays to keep warm in the winter. The program notes tell us that playwright Ademola Bello

[I]n 2001...won both the Audience and Panelist Choice Awards at the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, for his play, The Blackguard Prince. His other plays have had stage readings and workshop productions in New York at Actors Studio, Lark Play Development Center, and Frederick Loewe Room.

You can learn more about the playwright, who was in the audience Saturday night from the ADN article on him .


Basically the play is about Jonas Savimbi, rebel leader of Unitas in Angola and, for a while, CIA beneficiary, and his relationship with his foreign minister, Tito Chingunji,whose family, early on, are imprisoned. We also have a CIA agent named Jack Abramoff involved as well.


I think there is a lot of promise here. There were parts near the beginning where there was too much teaching of history in the dialogue which distracted from the drama. There needs to be a better way to get the necessary information across. While Earl Smith, who played Savimbi put life into his character - I'd say he nailed Savimbi except I've never even seen clips of Savimbi, but he certainly filled my stereotypes of a post colonial African tyrant - I didn't feel an ongoing chemistry among the three key actors. Darren Williams had probably the most difficult part. He played the foreign minister who wants to end the killing and find a way to peace, but who's forced to keep working for the rebel leader who intends to keep the civil war going until he becomes president. If he hopes to see his family alive, he has to do Savimbi's bidding. But how would someone keep this up for six years? And how does one carry out a role in which he bounces back and forth from confronting his tormenter to acting compliant? I have no idea. Williams gave it a good try, but it was an extremely hard role, and there was too much repetition of the same sort of cat and mouse games between Savimbi and Chingunji in the script.

But wow! What a way to fill in gaps about African history. To have Jonas Savimbi reincarnated live in Anchorage stirred much of the audience, I think, to go back and do a little homework. And the glimpse of Abramoff scamming African rebels before he took to scamming Americans more directly was also a revelation. And being face to face with a psychopath is always a daunting experience for anyone with a conscience.

We may live in Anchorage, but we get enough of these intimate first class theater experiences, to make it pretty exciting for me. I'd much rather watch something here at Out North or at Cyrano's than in the Performing Arts Center where I'm usually far from the stage at much higher prices. The last set of pictures is from the after play Q&A.


OK, here's a map of Africa from Africamap.com but you'll have to explore the map to find Angola for yourself. It was a Portuguese colony as was Mozambique.



This (first page of a) biographical obituary of Jonas Savimbi in the Review of African Political Economy is in sharp contrast to the NY Times report. The first emphasizes how he prolonged civil war until his death, causing the deaths and suffering of countless and highlights his glory days as the darling of the Reagan administration. The latter doesn't mention his CIA connections, let alone his Reagan days, and plays down the havoc his personal ambition caused until his death.


Finally, I've put off reading the ADN's review of the play until I finished writing this. Linda Billington gives a lot more information than I do, but in the end, we're fairly close in our assessments.

Warm Lazy Sunday Shots

A lazy run in the warm weather today. Caught at the light, took a picture of this poster for the ordinance scheduled to be voted on Tuesday at the Assembly meeting. At least that was my assumption. I sent an email to one of my Assembly reps last week - Dan Coffey - asking how he planned to vote and whether he was still listening to constituents on it. Haven't heard anything back. My other rep is supporting it.
Then on to the bike trail.

This evening we biked over to meet friends for dinner and passed the fence that surrounds Mcglaughlin Youth Center. Sounds so wholesome, but if it were that wholesome, it wouldn't have this razor wire to keep the youth inside.

Enjoying the Garden

More flowers starting to bloom. There are two different plants with white geranium blossoms.














The flax looks like such a fragile flower, but it blooms all summer. Tiny blue flowers that close up at night and bounce in the wind. And they come back year after year.




We used to have generic lattice below the deck behind the planters. But it gradually broke apart over the years and I wanted something more natural. In China I saw rural fences made of small branches and twigs. I had lots of branches piled in the back - some from a tree that fell into our yard a few years ago, but also natural stuff from our own yard. I've been planning to turn it into mulch, but decided to try this instead. I think it looked better on Chinese farmland. I think they've been doing this longer than I have too. In any case, it blocks the view under the deck a bit and it will do until I can think of something better. Only the taller ones on the left are wired together (yes, they used wire in China too). The smaller ones are just sitting there until I get them wired.

I am aware that if I lived in an area vulnerable to brush fires, and even here in the middle of town, I'm not completely sure it's a good idea.

Spinning the Supreme Court 1 - Narratives About the Court

[This is Part 1 of three posts on the narratives surrounding a Supreme Court nomination. Part 2 will be on narratives about political strategy and Part 3 will be narratives about race.]

We generally understand Winston Churchill's “History is written by the victors” to mean that those who prevail, get to select which facts to highlight and how to interpret them as they tell the story of how they (now 'the good') defeated 'the evil ones.'

But who is writing the present? Well, everyone is trying. We are all competing to have our narratives accepted as official reality.

In most situations, there are an enormous number of facts and a smaller number of competing narratives (or theories or stories or interpretations) which try to organize and explain the facts. The difficulty is in figuring out which of the facts are significant and which of the narratives best fit the facts. Our inclination is to make the facts fit our own favored narratives (the stories we want to believe) rather than finding or creating narratives that more accurately explain the facts. When politicians do this - try to create the right narrative for political gain - we call it framing or spin.


So, what are the narratives around the appointment of a Supreme Court Justice these days? In our heads are all the stories we've ever heard or thought of. Outside our skulls is the world where things are happening. We talk about 'facts' as though they are 'true' events. But who filters the facts before we get them? Obviously, events we don't witness first hand, are filtered by others - friends, family, news media, bloggers, etc. And even events we witness are filtered by our brains. Physically we can't take in and record every fact we witness. (Can you describe exactly what the last person you spoke to was wearing, down to the buttons?) And those stories in our heads I mentioned above also filter in and filter out what we think is important. (The buttons probably weren't important and not special enough to have attracted your attention.)

So how do we swim through all the facts and all the spin to find the narratives that most closely mimic what's happening outside of our heads? The best way I know, and it is inadequate, is to try to become conscious of the narratives. Usually they are working without us paying any attention, like doormen deciding which facts and ideas can come in and which can't. So, if you try to be conscious of the narratives you and others are using, then you take a giant step forward in figuring out what is happening.

So what narratives are being used concerning the decision to select and then approve of a Supreme Court Justice?


Constitutional Narrative

The US Constitution, Article II, Section 2 says:

He [the President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments. [emphasis added]

Supreme Court Justice Narratives

Here's the generic narrative of a Supreme Court nominee we tend to learn in school:

The President will nominate someone who has performed exceptionally well in the field of law AND whose political leanings, while aligned with those of the president, are also not too distant from those of the population.

Bonnie Goodman at HNN offers an example of the second part of this narrative in regard to Ruth Bader Ginsburg's confirmation hearings:

Sen. William Cohen (R-Maine) stated bluntly that the nominee's ideology was rightly a matter of concern. But Cohen suggested during the hearings that judicial ideology should be used only to determine if the nominee's philosophy is "so extreme that it might call into question the usual confirmation prerequisites of competency and judicial temperament." [emphasis added]

This issue of 'so extreme' in modern times came up with the nomination of Robert Bork. One narrative says that Democrats made judicial ideology an issue by rejecting Bork. A counter narrative says Republicans made it an issue by nominating a candidate whose ideology was so extreme. (Of course, saying that he was extreme is also a narrative, an interpretation of the facts.)

As you can see this is already getting tricky. How do we know what's extreme? We do have opinion polls, but the law isn't about voting and popularity. The Constitution is supposed to protect the basic rights of all humans even if the majority doesn't support them. Judges are supposed to decide based on the law, even if the decision isn't popular. They get lifetime appointments so they can resist pressures to vote a certain way.

It would seem pretty simple to interpret "he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate . . . Judges of the supreme Court," but we're already finding problems. "Advice and consent" seems pretty straightforward. The President did talk to lots of Senators before nominating Ms. Sotomayor and soon they will be able to consent or not. But what is an appropriate basis for that consent?

That gets us back to the statement above about legal competence and political leanings. While we could debate all this, I won't spend much time on legal competence. That seems the easiest, though, if someone didn't go to Yale or Harvard, can they fit the prevailing narratives of "legally competent"? What about someone who hasn't been a judge already? Etc.

If judges are supposed to make decisions based on the law, why even mention political leanings? Well, because the President and the Senate are all politicians and because the Supreme Court is the third branch of the government. The judges aren't elected, but they are appointed and approved by elected officials. So we have to consider politics.

And also, 'political leanings' is another way to allude to the kinds of narratives people have in their heads. These political leanings are predispositions to consider some things more important than others - the right to own a gun as more important than the possibility of misusing the gun, or upholding international law about torture as more important than potential security risks.

Above I offered a generic narrative of a supreme court nominee. Let's expand that now from just the nominee's characteristics to how the nominee should behave if approved.


There are two well articulated narratives about how a Supreme Court Justice should behave. Wikipedia, in a post on Judicial Activism offers:

Judicial activism is a philosophy advocating that judges should reach beyond the United States Constitution to achieve results that are consistent with contemporary conditions and values. Most often, it is associated with (modern) liberalism that believes in broad interpretation of the Constitution which can then be applied to specific issues.

Judicial restraint is the counterpart to judicial activism and is advocated by thsoe [sic] who believe that democracy will thrive if judges defer to the democratic process and stay out of policy debates. So, judicial activism is not necessarily an ideological concept. Some trace the history of judicial activism back to the loose constructionist approach of Alexander Hamilton, who believed that broad wording of the Constitution was meant to enable, not inhibit, various government actions.[1]

But this Wikipedia article is marked with warnings such as:

• Its neutrality is disputed. Tagged since December 2008.
• Its neutrality or factuality may be compromised by weasel words. Tagged since November 2007.
• It is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. WikiProject Law or the Law Portal may be able to help recruit one. Tagged since May 2009.
• It may contain inappropriate or misinterpreted citations which do not verify the text. Tagged since December 2008.

So we even have to consider that Wikipedia entries are also influenced by the narratives of their writers.

Adam Cohen, in a recent NY Times editorial, uses Britain's Supreme Court of Justice's decision that a Pringle is indeed a potato chip (and thus Proctor & Gamble owes $160 million in taxes) to give his own interpretation of activist judges:

Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more, while judges like Ms. Sotomayor are activists. But there is no magic right way to interpret terms like “free speech” or “due process” — or potato chip. Nor is either ideological camp wholly strict or wholly activist. Liberal judges tend to be expansive about things like equal protection, while conservatives read more into ones like “the right to bear arms.”

(Note that Cohen calls conservatives "strict constructionists" a term that seems more radical than Wikipedia's term "Judicial Restraint.")

(If someone were really a strict constructionist, could one argue that since the Constitution says "he" for President, that women can't be President?)

Let's try again for a narrative about a good nominee:

The nominee would be a person who would assume office with the goal of interpreting cases according to the law. Where the law is not completely clear, there will be some interpretation that is influenced by the new justice's life experiences. Candidates should not be coming to the court with the goal to change the direction of the court and the law. However, some cases raise issues not clearly addressed by the law or the Constitution. New technology raises questions that were often not addressed by the Constitution. Judges then must interpret how the words of the Constitution should be applied to, say, surveillance of email. Essentially new law must be created.

My 'neutral' (some might dispute its neutrality) narrative above tends to say that when possible (if the laws and Constitution are clear about the situation in the case before the court), judges should practice judicial restraint. But when the case isn't clear cut, they will need to be a bit activist. They will be required to use their own narratives, to interpret the law or Constitution. Of course if all the justices have the same narratives, they will come to similar conclusions.

And with eight males and one female, to the extent that males and females experience the world differently, we can see that female (slightly over half the US population is female) narratives are somewhat lacking on the Supreme Court.

I'm not an attorney. I don't claim any special expertise in this process of choosing a Supreme Court Justice. But I did want to step back a bit from the rhetoric and focus on the narratives that are being used in the hope that others might begin more easily to recognize them for what they are: interpretations of reality, but NOT reality.

In Part 2 I'll look at narratives about political strategies for approving or rejecting Supreme Court nominees, which will include how actors use narratives to support and oppose candidates. In Part 3 I'll look at narratives around race and Supreme Court nominees.

Hungarian High School Geography Exam

Ropi is a Hungarian high school student who blogs. (I'm not sure if his blog is still open to everyone. You can check.) He's getting close to graduation and recently posted his geography exam. Some of it seems relatively easy, some pretty hard. Some has local stuff, but most is world wide issues. AND it's in English, because he takes many of his classes in English, not Hungarian. Here are a couple of the questions. How would you do on it? The can get a pdf of the whole exam here.

If you're having trouble reading this, double click
the graphics to get bigger, clearer version.

Any US high school students want to comment on whether they are doing equivalent work? Or students from anywhere in the world?