I prefer poems about Nantucket.

Republicans drive the empire; Democrats consolidate and rationalize what their partners have wrought. George Bush expands the global gulag; Barack Obama writes the employee handbook. The Republicans promise billions to the banks; the Democrats do the accounting. It’s not a competition; it’s a partnership.

The story itself is classic Fox: feigned objectivity while implicitly slanting the story in favor of the corporate narrative. Yes, “the numbers don’t lie”. But the numbers have a history, one that Fox and other corporate outlets persistently distort or ignore altogether.

Union membership didn’t magically shrink. The decline was the intended result of a sustained ideological, political, and economic campaign aimed at redistributing wealth and power away from workers to further enrich and empower the already wealthy and powerful, and at delegitimizing every social movement and institution–including but not limited to labor unions–that dares stand up for social justice and economic democracy.

Throughout one essay, a student from the University of Portsmouth wrote about “anus” crimes. The academic marking the paper eventually realized that he meant “heinous” crimes.

A Bowl Of Friendship Soup

By Ceejay Writer

I want to fly away with you

In a shiny spoon-shaped ship
Off to a planet made of soup
Where we can swim and sip!

We’ll loll about on a cracker shore,
Beneath the crouton moons
And gawk at creatures in broth galore
Made of noodles, singing tunes.

And when we’ve had our fun and fill
Of landscapes so enchanted
We’ll come back home and never will
Take minestrone for granted.

Meanwhile, in a twist on their argument that Ms. Kagan might be a “judicial activist” who would legislate from the bench, some Republicans expressed concern on Wednesday that she might be too hesitant to strike down acts of Congress that arguably exceed the federal government’s constitutional authority.“

I am concerned that she views the power of the federal government to be essentially without limit,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas. “She said yesterday that the courts would defer to Congress, and Congress knows no limit to its power grabs, as we’ve seen.”

Notwithstanding my view on the outcome of the case, I am delighted by the dissenting opinion of retiring Justice John Paul Stevens — specifically, Part VI of that opinion, in which Stevens lays out a sharp and devastating critique of Justice Scalia’s shoddy analytical approach. What Stevens says of Scalia’s concurring opinion in McDonald applies as well to the entire Scalia œuvre: the analysis “does not have nearly as much force as the rhetoric”.

Although JUSTICE SCALIA aspires to an “objective,” “neutral” method of substantive due process analysis, his actual method is nothing of the sort. Under the “historically focused” approach he advocates, numerous threshold questions arise before one ever gets to the history. At what level of generality should one frame the liberty interest in question? What does it mean for a right to be “‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,’”? By what standard will that proposition be tested? Which types of sources will count, and how will those sources be weighed and aggre­ gated? There is no objective, neutral answer to these questions. There is not even a theory—at least, JUSTICE SCALIA provides none—of how to go about answering them.

***

My point is not to criticize judges’ use of history in general or to suggest that it always generates indetermi­nate answers; I have already emphasized that historical study can discipline as well as enrich substantive due process analysis. My point is simply that JUSTICE SCALIA’s defense of his method, which holds out objectivity and restraint as its cardinal—and, it seems, only—virtues, is unsatisfying on its own terms. For a limitless number of subjective judgments may be smuggled into his historical analysis. Worse, they may be buried in the analysis.

Stevens is absolutely correct that Scalia’s approach “invites not only bad history, but also bad constitutional law.” The fact that Scalia managed to reach what I consider to be the correct outcome in this case doesn’t alter that assessment. It’s nice to see Justice Stevens departing, not with a whimper, but with a bang.