"...there is a hierarchy of issues,” said Charles Colson, a prominent evangelical who founded Prison Fellowship after serving time in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal. “...We’re hoping to educate them that these are the three most important issues.”

...KSM's lawyers will make all the arguments there are to make: They'll allege a violation of KSM's right to a speedy trial, claiming that the years he spent in CIA detention and Gitmo violated this constitutional right. They'll seek suppression of KSM's statements, arguing (persuasively) that the torture he endured—sleep deprivation, noise, cold, physical abuse, and, of course, 183 water-boarding sessions—make his statements involuntary. They will insist that everything stemming from those statements must be suppressed, under the Fourth Amendment, as the fruit of the wildly poisonous tree. They will demand the names of operatives and interrogators, using KSM's right to confront the witnesses against him to box the government into revealing things it would prefer to keep secret—the identities of confidential informants, the locations of secret safe houses, the names of other inmates and detainees who provided information about him, and a thousand other clever things that should make the government squirm. The defense will attack the CIA, FBI, and NSA, demanding information about wiretapping and signal intelligence and sources and methods. They'll move to dismiss the case because there is simply no venue in the United States in which KSM can get a fair trial.

“The notion that the government has a legitimate interest in restricting the quantity of speech to equalize the relative influence of speakers on elections,” Justice Kennedy wrote in the passage cited by Justice Alito, is “antithetical to the First Amendment.”*

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.**

Dear Mr. Dickinson,

I was rather puzzled by your article titled "Heartless: The disturbing glee at Mark Sanford's downfall." In discussing what you describe as "the constant flow of abuse, joke-making, and grand conclusions about his failings," you fail to link to any instances of news articles, blog posts, or even Tweets, that substantiate this assertion. In fact, the only links you provide are to pieces by William Saletan and Andrew Sullivan who don't engage in the behavior you find so troubling. If this "disturbing glee" were so prevalent, why not more than one, presumably rhetorical, unattributed quote ("[I]s there any Republican not sleeping around?") ? Failing to cite examples significantly undermines your assertion.

In addition, you seem to imply that we should think of Mark Sanford as a victim. While I certainly acknowledge that we all fail to live up to our standards at certain time, what sort of executive leaves the country for a week without alerting anyone to his whereabouts (and
indeed, lying to his staff about them) or delegating official authority? In addition, a certain level of schadenfreude is likely inevitable when a politician who has campaigned on family values is so bizarrely tripped up by them.

In his public life, Mark Sanford is the governor of South Carolina, and, as such, is accountable to the people of South Carolina. While I am sympathetic to his missteps, the facts remain that he breached his duty to the people of South Carolina (by leaving the country, not by virtue of having an affair), and that his actions reveal him to be a hypocrite. That's not a statement of glee. It's a statement of fact.

Sincerely,

1. Abortion reduction. Wendy Wright, the pro-life president of Concerned Women for America, describes one of the abortion meetings in an article in Human Events:

Two days before President Obama's commencement address at Notre Dame, I was at the White House for one of the meetings that he spoke about. About twenty of us with differing views on abortion were brought in to find "common ground." … Melody Barnes, the Director of Domestic Policy Council and a former board member of Emily's List, led the meeting. … Melody testily interrupted to state that she had to correct me. "It is not our goal to reduce the number of abortions." The room was silent. The goal, she insisted, is to "reduce the need for abortions."

Dear Ms. Barnes and other pro-choice participants in these meetings: Please give up this distinction. No ordinary person sees a difference between reducing abortions and reducing the need for abortions.

3. Extremism. The Times report includes this comment from a pro-choice participant:

Tiller's death is a "massive setback" in the search for common ground, said Cristina Page, a New York City author and abortion rights advocate. "It's sort of like having a family member murdered and then being asked to make nice with the assassin's family. It's unnatural."

Dear Ms. Page and other pro-choicers: Imagine some lunatic going to Kansas and murdering the head of a pro-life pregnancy center. Imagine reading in the newspaper that the pro-lifers you've been meeting with are now reluctant to "make nice" with you because, they say, the murderer is part of your "family." You would go ballistic, and rightly so. Please show the other side the same fairness you would expect.

Until recently, every retailer would draw up its own merchandising plan, detailing which brands to promote, how much shelf space to grant each, which products to place at eye level. These days, Wal-Mart and a growing number of other retailers ask a single supplier to serve as its “Category Captain” and to manage the shelving and marketing decisions for an entire family of products, say, dental care. Wal-Mart then requires all other producers of this class of products to cooperate with the new “Captain.” One obvious result is that a producer like Colgate-Palmolive will end up working intensely with firms it formerly competed with, such as Crest manufacturer P&G, to find the mix of products that will allow Wal-Mart to earn the most it can from its shelf space. If Wal-Mart discovers that a supplier promotes its own product at the expense of Wal-Mart's revenue, the retailer may name a new captain in its stead.

Such blatantly enforced collusion has not gone entirely unnoticed in Washington. Toward the end of its time in office, even the merger-happy Clinton Administration allowed the Federal Trade Commission to launch an investigation of these practices, and an FTC report in early 2001 identified four ways that Category Management may violate even the remarkably loose antitrust guidelines of the last generation. All four of these violations cut right to the core of the free-market system. As the FTC put it, a category captain might “(1) learn confidential information about rivals' plans; (2) hinder the expansion of rivals, (3) promote collusion among retailers; or (4) facilitate collusion among manufacturers.” In Wal-Mart's world, all four violations are present to at least some extent.***

Of course, armchair critics have also been complaining about the princess. Disney originally called her Maddy (short for Madeleine). Too much like Mammy and thus racist. A rumor surfaced on the Internet that an early script called for her to be a chambermaid to a white woman, a historically correct profession. Too much like slavery.

For years, Disney has been lambasted by some parents for not having a black princess. Now, some of those same voices are taking aim at the company without seeing the finished product.
...
The debate surrounding “The Princess and the Frog” illustrates how difficult it is to deal with race in animation, experts say. Cartoons by their nature trade in caricatures.
...
“Overly sensitive people see racial or ethnic slights in every image,” wrote Floyd Norman, whose credits span from “Sleeping Beauty” to “Mulan,” in a 2007 essay on the Web site Jim Hill Media. “And in their zeal to sanitize and pasteurize everything, they’ve taken all the fun out of cartoon making.”

...To detractors, Judge Sotomayor’s sharp-tongued and occasionally combative manner — some lawyers have described her as “difficult” and “nasty” — raises questions about her judicial temperament and willingness to listen.

In the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary, which conducts anonymous interviews with lawyers to assess judges...

Judge Guido Calabresi, a former dean of Yale Law School who taught Ms. Sotomayor there and now sits with her on the Second Circuit, said complaints that she had been unduly caustic had no basis. For a time, Judge Calabresi said, he kept track of the questions posed by Judge Sotomayor and other members of the 12-member court. “Her behavior was identical,” he said.

“Some lawyers just don’t like to be questioned by a woman,” Judge Calabresi added. “It was sexist, plain and simple.”
...
Judge Richard C. Wesley, another colleague, agreed. He said his interactions with Judge Sotomayor had been “totally antithetical to this perception that has gotten some traction that she is somehow confrontational.”
...
Mr. Cohn, the government lawyer in the Arar case, said he had not been taken aback by Judge Sotomayor’s volley of inquiries. “I thought her questions and demeanor were reasonable and fine,” he said.