A Toe-tapping, Lively FRT

iTunes has decided to weight today even MORE to the Dead...jenn will probably complain about Deadheads only listening to Dead tunes. That is so unfair!
It is a little quiet this morning (not really, lots to do but I am slacking) so there are links to the Internet accessible ones :-) (annamaria inspired upgrade)
1)Me & My Uncle - The Grateful Dead
2)Truckin' - Dwight Yoakum (spelled correctly for Rich)
3)The Other One - The Grateful Dead
4) Sugar Magnolia - The Grateful Dead
5)jam - Dark Star Orchesta
6)Mama Tried The Grateful Dead
7)Cassidy - Suzanne Vega
8)Hash Pipe - Weezer
9)Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 in G Major (Bach) - Philharmonica Virtuosi
10)Welcome to the Working Week - Elvis Costello

Alrighty then. We are rolling along. I would so love to hear what you are listening to with your FRT (Friday Random Ten).

I am so, so, so married...................

I have been eligible for a phone upgrade for a couple of years now, but hadn't gotten around to it.

I have been carrying this phone for the past five or six years, I guess. I hear all the talk about picture/camera phones with mp3 players, blah, blah blah. I had convinced myself I only needed one that rang and could place calls. When I started texting, I began to see more possibilities but still....

Then 2 weekends ago, I lost my phone. Or it was stolen. That is still open to debate. I get the number suspended and begin deciding what to do. I finally decided that, after all these years, I would use this as an opportunity to upgrade/replace my missing phone. So I ordered this one -

A nice compact model with a 4X digital zoom camera. Nothing extravegant. Still reasonably priced (end cost about $40) and something that I can use. I still haven't bought a digital camera (unlike mel, who is on her 43rd...), so I thought this would be cool. The camera arrived last Monday.

After a brief visit to Customer Service Hell (I saw Leslie there!), the confusion with T-Mobile about whether a SIM card should have been sent with the phone or not was resolved, a new SIM was promised and supposedly sent. In the meantime, boy/man that I am, I HAD to see how the phone worked. Solution? I put my wife's SIM from her phone in it. She carried it two days.

The promised SIM arrived yesterday. I called T-Mobile to get my number activated again and am back in the cel phone world. Any of you with my number, call me. I lost all your numbers with the other phone.....

Oh yeah, guess what is in my pocket for a cel phone? Yeah, you knew. It is this phone -

Because I Said So

When authority is already established "Because I said so" is a legitimate rationale. That's why parents don't have to explain every decision to 2 year olds. I'm the mommy and I said so. But what about in issues of law? Why does a judge get to say that something is legal or illegal when another branch of the government says the opposite? Aren't our three branches of government equal? That's our checks and balances system. Without it we're on our way to a banana republic.

So though I cheered the decision that the NSA electronic surveillance program was ruled illegal, I wondered under what basis a judge gets to overrule the US District Attorney. In this NYT op-ed, Ann Althouse, a law professor explains how the system is designed to work:

Why should the judicial view prevail over the president’s?
This, of course, is the most basic question in constitutional law, the one addressed in Marbury v. Madison. The public may have become so used to the notion that a judge’s word is what counts that it forgets why this is true. The judges have this constitutional power only because they operate by a judicial method that restricts them to resolving concrete controversies and requires them to interpret the relevant constitutional and statutory texts and to reason within the tradition of the case law.
This system works only if the judges suppress their personal and political willfulness and take on the momentous responsibility to embody the rule of law. They should not reach out for opportunities to make announcements of law, but handle the real cases that have been filed.
This means that the judge has a constitutional duty, under the doctrine of standing, to respond only to concretely injured plaintiffs who are suing the entity that caused their injury and for the purpose of remedying that injury. We trust the judge to say what the law is because the judge “must of necessity expound and interpret” in order to decide cases, as Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in Marbury.

This system is why Roe v Wade was a set up case. It's why not just anybody could sue to stop the NSA surveillance. And it's why the judiciary can't just weigh in with its opinion on the legality of the whole thing, but has to deal only with SPECIFIC cases. When I consider how the system is designed I'm just totally in awe. We live in an amazing nation with an incredible system of governance -- a blending of the best of western tradition and classical thought. Now if we can just remember what we have and how it's supposed to work, and be patient while it does, ignoring the demogogery of the rabble rousing politicians and seeking the common good....

Unfortunately, some of those forgetting are judges. Lets hope the judges hearing other cases connected with the NSA program do a better job in delineating the legal rationale, not the political, in their rulings. And this shows why judicial temperment is possibly the single most important criteria to consider when judges are appointed. If they are truly doing their jobs under our system their personal views truly are irrelevant. Yes, I know our political view shapes our thinking, but those with the right temperment are capable of accepting opposing viewpoints. (Another reason why the MoveON crowd is bad for America, since they want to make ideology the main criteria in determining judicial worthiness).

OK. End of rant. Read the op-ed, and think about what we would want from a judge hearing OUR case whose political perspective was our polar opposite.

So this is the Devil?

Here in CT the most vocal Democrats, and who claim credit for defeating Lieberman in the primary, have denounced Bill Clinton's presidency for failing to live up to progressive principles.* He's been castigated as the example of what happens when you play nice with the GOP. Read Bill's editorial from todays NYT to see why he has become so despised by the rabid partisans who are screaming for blood.

*While no mainstream Democrats have attacked Clinton personally, the New Left here is very vocal in painting his two terms as a stab in the back for liberals who supported him. Bill Curry, a recent Democratic nominee for CT governor, has raked Clinton over the coals numerous times in editorials for selling out to the far right. Welfare reform is cited as one of the examples where Clinton is said to have caved in totally to the conservatives.