IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, (free link) Gary McDowell writes on the Bork Battle’s legacy. I think he’s right that this represented a watershed of nastiness in confirmation fights, but I also think that Bork was an unsuitable nominee who deserved to be rejected. And I say this as someone who is, in fact, more of an originalist than Bork, whose originalism was of a rather dubious and frequently uninformed nature. This is given away in a passage of McDowell’s, where he writes:

In his sober constitutional jurisprudence there was no room for any airy talk about a general right of privacy, allegedly unwritten constitutions, vague notions of unenumerated rights, or what the progressive Justice Black once derided as “any mysterious and uncertain natural law concept.” For Mr. Bork, the framers said what they meant, and meant what they said.

Well, actually, here’s what the Framers said about unenumerated rights:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Denying and disparaging is pretty much what Bork did, especially with his famous characterization of the ninth amendment as an “inkblot.”

I responded to Bork’s theories on unenumerated rights at much greater length in this article, but this kind of talk, on the part of Bork and his supporters, does nothing for the cause of originalism.

DEATHS FALL IN IRAQ, TAXI DRIVERS HARDEST HIT:

Taxi driver Ahmed Khalil Baqir used to station himself outside Baghdad’s main morgue, waiting for grieving families who went there to claim their relatives’ dead bodies.

“I was totally dependent on them for my living,” Baqir, a 44-year-old father of four, said.” I never thought about picking up people in the street as I was being hired five to eight times a day by these families. But now it is a waste of time to wait there.”

Glad to see the press isn’t afraid to report the bad news from Iraq!

A LOOK AT THE NEW, IMPROVED TiVo Series 3.

ON BUGS AND BIOTERRORISM: It’s feasible. You can even do it by mail. My brother mailed me a mosquito from Nigeria once, which he had lightly slapped in order to preserve evidence of its mammoth size. When I opened the airmail envelope, it came drunkenly fluttering out and I reflexively smacked it, producing a nasty smear of probably-malaria-infested blood.

And there’s some evidence that Al Qaeda was working harder on bioweapons before the invasion of Afghanistan than anybody in the “intelligence community” had realized. Since then, it seems, they’ve had other things to worry about, but that’s no reason to get complacent.

I’M SOMEWHAT SKEPTICAL: “If elected president in 2008, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton would consider giving up some of the executive powers President Bush and Vice President Cheney have assumed since taking office.”

MOLECULAR GASTRONOMY FOR THE MASSES: An interesting look from Popular Science.

THE INDISPENSABLE portable crosswalk.

PROGRESS IN HIGHER EDUCATION: “Some professors are packing heat and maybe some students too. A class in Weber State University’s Continuing Education Program is specifically aimed at getting people on and off campus to carry guns.”

Jeff Soyer comments: “It’s about time a college started teaching about the civil right that dares not speak its name. . . .”

SAN DIEGO LAW PROFESSOR TOM SMITH REPORTS:

The family unit and I are camped out in a seedy motel in La Mesa, having been evacuated from our lovely home. It’s going to be too close for comfort. It already is. But many in SD have lost their homes already.

My older brother, a former volunteer fireman, talked me out of standing and fighting the fires, with talk of third degree burns and burn units.

When there’s that much wind, flames can move fast.

HILLARY’S ACHILLES’ HEEL: Google Ads? Okay, they’re not exactly Hillary’s Achilles’ heel.

MORE PROBLEMS AT THE ECONOMIST? Hey, once they lost Megan McArdle I figured it was all over for them.

FRED THOMPSON announces his plan on illegal immigration.

A “COLD CIVIL WAR” in America?

Maybe, but I think it’s usually been that way.

IN THE MAIL: Kenneth Timmerman’s Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender.

Plus, Jack Huberman’s The GOP-Hater’s Handbook.

BEN BARTON ARGUES THAT the business-school case method is superior to the law-school case method. Heresy!

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: The Examiner reports: Senate Republicans still slobbering over earmarks:

Democrats might want to keep in mind the old rule in politics that you never stop an opponent while he’s committing suicide. They are about to have the distinct pleasure of watching a slew of Senate Republicans jump off a political cliff. These Republican stalwarts haven’t gotten the message — that the voters who dismissed the GOP majority in November 2006 aren’t going to put the party back in control as long as it keeps voting for more of the earmarks that fueled the “culture of corruption” in Congress. It’s also going to be vastly more difficult to get those same voters to pull the lever for the party’s presidential nominee so long as pork-addicted GOP senators keep sticking their snouts in the trough.

They lack essential self-discipline.

WHEN COMPUTER RECOMMENDATIONS GO WRONG: I got this unfortunate juxtaposition when visiting the Amazon home page this morning:

STEVEN LANDSBURG on climate-change economics.

THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE: Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Bush administration has now been accused of trying to cover up good news from Iraq. They’ll stop at nothing!

UPDATE: A report from Iraq by Jeff Emanuel, who’s circumventing the coverup. But note that he’s careful to include some qualifications on the good news, suggesting that the Bush Administration has gotten to him, too . . . .

BRIAN MICKLETHWAIT ON ECONOMIC HAPPENINGS IN FRANCE: “Thus, economic decline often impinges upon an electorate not in the form of rather meaningless statistics moaned about by journalists even as life goes on happily, but rather in the form of dramatic vignettes like this one, of vulgar English people invading the formerly idyllic French countryside.”

PROTESTERS GREET HILLARY in Seattle. And they aren’t even anti-globo types. Though some of her donations may represent international currency flows, I guess . . . .

UPDATE: Here’s a Los Angeles Times discussion of Hillary’s money problems. More here from Newsday.

STEVEN COLBERT outpolls Bill Richardson. And the momentum is just beginning. Who can stop Hillary? Colbert can!

Well, no. But that will probably be his next slogan.

UPDATE: This Obama stumble could catapult Colbert ahead!

JOHN LEO: Who will stand up for campus free speech?

AT TRANSATLANTIC POLITICS, a look at the undead EU Constitution.

CAT PHOTOSHOP MADNESS: Be very afraid.