Community Coffee, I adore your coffee* above all others for its exceedingly high caffeine content, robust taste without a hint of burnt in the classic Medium Dark roast, chicory flavor in the smooth New Orleans blend without bitterness, but --

-- why, oh why, must you have such an incompetant shipping department?**

I specifically ordered my coffee to be shipped to the address of a friend who has a building manager to sign for packages. I didn't want it to arrive at my place because there's never anyone home during the day to sign for it. What happens? They ignore my shipping instructions and send it to my home, the billing address.

Argh... at least I know from past experience, when they sent it to the wrong street, that if I call up and point out their error to them, they'll FedEx it overnight to the right place. But it would be so much cheaper and less of a hassle if they could do it right the first time.

*They also have quite drinkable canned sweet tea, but I'm not in the habit of paying for the shipping of twelve-packs.
**Like many who move out of Louisiana, I remain addicted to this certain home brand of coffee. And, really, so long as the coffee gets to me eventually enough and my father remains reluctant to play importer for me, I will always order from them.

If you didn't have enough of the Veil of Ignorance last week, here's more . . .

William Saletan is everywhere.

Well, it's hard to argue with anybody that follows this closely in Econ-God Steven Levitt's footsteps.

Tyler Cowen thinks that there are so many good blogs out there nowadays that the most widely-read blogs will be those that "cream-skim" (that is, taking the most useful posts from a wide variety of blogs).

Pardon, but an RSS feed can do that. The reason I don't read Instapundit is that I don't particularly agree with Glenn Reynolds about what's wheat and what's chaff. Look at my blogroll, which contains a number of fairly low-circulation blogs, and you could probably guess that.

Sure, there's a place for aggregator blogs like Instapundit (or more critically How Appealling). But if you're trying to make your way in the blogosphere, it's better to offer an occasional portal to the truly obscure and a lot of original, sound, and hard-hitting analysis. At least, that's what's allowed Crescat Sententia to obtain its tenuous hold.

OK, so here's a question to ponder, one near and dear to my heart at the moment -- just what does the Republican Party think it's doing in Arkansas? That question can be rephrased as, how incompetant can you people be? It can be subtitled as: reasons why my grandmother is a life-long Democrat.

I speak of the 2004 Senate race - who is their candidate? This is a state which voted for Bush last time around (ok, by 51% points). The governor and lieutenant governor are both Republicans, although of moderate stripes. [The Republicans most distasteful to my dear grandmother are the right-wingers. That faction of the party is commonly known as Shiite Republicans. Now repeat that, only with a rural Southern accent.]

The incumbent is freshman Blanche Lincoln. Check her out, she doesn't seem to have many skeletons in her closet. A reputation as one of the nicest people in the Senate (ah, how sweet). Huge driver behind the creation of the Delta Regional Authority, a government flinging of money towards an area to try to alleviate the poverty (I don't care what you think about government intervention, do you think people in Arkansas are going to vote against her for this one?). Consistently votes the agriculture line that people there like. Successfully fought to get the child tax credit extended as a rebate to people below the income level to file taxes. About 3% points more liberal than the mean in the Senate. Why pundits were saying back in May that she faces a tough race, I don't know.

And who are the Republicans running against her, a pro-agriculture, pro-Delta candidate who will speak glowingly of the need to nuture homegrown profitable businesses like J.B. Hunt Trucking, Tyson's Foods, and Wal-Mart? The primary is in May, who is their candidate?

Freshman state representative Jim Hunt might run. uh-huh.

Well, Republican Andy "TV" Lee has declared. This fellow's the former sheriff of Benton County who loves to draw attention to himself. He got rid of hot meals, TV, and the gym in order to cut costs at the prison. He also proudly notes that he had his 10 Commandments posted in the prison before Roy Moore installed his monstrosity of a statue in the courthouse (Lee did obey a judge's order to take the 10 down).

Gunner DeLay will probably also run. He's a former state senator. I have a soft spot in my heart for him for one thing: he's actually strongly pro-labor, both in the bills he sponsored in the state legislature and in his private legal practice. The AFL-CIO endorses this Republican; the big businesses named above (in the same neck of the woods as he comes from) don't. But he's also a classic Republican on social issues. He also can't even manage to win the Republican primary for the 3rd Congressional District, and the party considers him an embarrassment on the national stage. Why? He's so rabidly anti-illegal immigration that it's hard to believe (or convince anyone) that he's not a xenophobe.

Come on, Arkansas State Republican Party, you're not going to let this one go without a fight, are you? True, Gov. Huckabee is going to fill out his term trying to reduce the inequities in the state public schools without leveling down (good luck to him), and Lt. Gov. Win Rockefeller has announced he wants the governorship once Huckabee's term-limited out.

Still, you've got a candidate waiting in the wings -- Asa Hutchinson, Under Secretary of Border & Transportation Security at the DHS. Run him. I don't care if he's says he's got a job to do at Homeland Security, it can always be his fall-back career if he loses. He said he'd run if and only if Bush asked him. Well, what are you waiting for?

This is a candidate who can run on a strong pro-business platform, but while promising to keep the farm subsidies (political suicide if you don't). Wal-Mart and other big businesses love him for watching out that the new security provisions didn't slow down commericial cargo. And while Sen. Lincoln can bring home band-aid pork, he can claim he can get the new bioterrorism research facility located at the arsenal at Pine Bluff (maybe true, maybe not, but hey, it's a campaign promise).

He's also got the born-again, right-to-life vote. That's a demographic that will vote for just about anyone, so long as it's alive and anti-abortion. Lincoln supported the (failed) Feinstein Amendment (exception of health) to the Partial Birth Abortion Ban, even if she did eventually vote for it. And she supports stricter regulations for sales and background checks at gun shows. He just has to take the contrary, states' rights position.

So why is he still hanging out in DC -- where's the pressure upon him to run?

A side theoretical question: why are the Republicans in Arkansas so short on anyone reputable?

[I should note that I don't have any good reason for hoping that the Republicans run a strong candidate -- I want Lincoln to win re-election.]

We're flattered (at least I am). We also hope non Chicago-esque readers are enlightened.

Will the Marlins win?

And should a Chicago Cubs fan want the Marlins to win so that we can at least say "we lost to the winners" and take the sting out of our wounds, or should a Cubs fan want the Marlins to be painfully, gruesomely, soul-wrenchingly crushed by the Yankees out of some immature principle of revenge?

Update;

Answer to the first question is yes. What about the second?

Assuming you don't have to walk by the Saturday Guardian to get to your daily cappucino, you might have missed the following Seamus Heaney/Ted Hughes article in the Guardian.

What do pro-gun-control folks think about target practice, in general principle? Does it make them uncomfortable for all of the reasons that easily available guns do? Any pro-gun-control readers are invited to write in.

From my maths/theory professor, Doctor Rupert Gatti:

Too few people understand the difference between wealthand money.

Well, Matthew Yglesias and I agree on one thing-- the "mainstreamness" of Bush's judges is pretty immaterial. As it happens, he and I disagree about what would make a good judge (personally, I'd take a court made of equal parts Justice Thomas (in my originalist moods) and Justice Kennedy (in my Libertarian ones). I suspect he wouldn't.)

In any case, I think it should be clear to anybody who watched the hearing that Justice Brown (for example!) is to the left of Scalia, Thomas, and Rehnquist. That's almost as mainstream as they get. As Yglesias rightly points out, the New York Times just doesn't like the mainstream. They'd be more convincing if they admitted as much.

1: Trinity needs a Sorting Hat.

2: Okay, so the port wasn't actually from the year of my birth (my year is 1982, the port was 1983), but it was good.

3: It takes a whole lot of guts to wear a kilt to a black-tie dinner.

4: God, my Director of Studies has guts.

There's a story in today's NYT on a recent raid 21-state of illegal immigrants working as contracted janitors at Wal-Mart. Immigration officials rounded up 250 such illegal immigrants. They came from:

Mexico: 90
Czech Republic: 35
Mongolia: 22
Brazil: 20
Uzbekistan, Poland, Russia, Georgia & Lithuania: ~12 a piece

Mongolia? I don't know if this is only a measure of legal emmigration and immigration, but according to the CIA World Factbook, the country's net annual migration is 0 per 1,000 residents, and there are only 2.7 million of them to start with. Granted, people could be moving into Mongolia at the same rate they are moving out, but I'd like to know in what numbers. I don't think I've heard of so many Mongolians in the same place in the US since the Smithsonian Institution's Folklife Festival on the mall a summer ago, when Mongolia was one of the featured countries.

The New York Times has the predictable editorial opposing Justice Janice Brown. I was going to fisk it, but I can't, because so much of what it says is just unproven assertion. A few things to remember:

Justice Brown doesn't praise Lochner. She criticizes Justice Holmes's Lochner dissent, but it isn't the same thing, which she made clear at her hearing. She thinks substantive due process is wrong, but she also thinks that economic regulations should be subjected to the same scrutiny that other regulations are, within the bounds of the text of the Constitution. Of course, after she finished criticizing Lochner, Senator Schumer declared that she defended Lochner. Then she said that Lochner was justly criticized, justly discredited, for using substantive due process to read the political philosophy of its authors into the Constitution. Then somebody declared that she had defended Lochner. It makes you wonder whether people are confused or malicious, sometimes.

Yes, Justice Brown argued that imposing a prior restraint against racial epithets violated the First Amendment. As I recall, her argument in the hearing was that since the court has found prior restraints unacceptable even in the case of national security, that it couldn't do them here either.

As we've covered before, it's not clear how much the rating from the ABA should prove, given that Miguel Estrada had a very well qualified rating from the ABA, and judges like Richard Posner and Alex Kozinski have gotten the same mixed rating as Brown.

But mostly I just can't understand why democrats would want to filibuster her. She seems so much more reasonable, so much more judicially neutral, then many other Bush nominees. I mean, sure, she's made some conservative rulings, but that seems to be a unifying theme among Bush's picks. When she served as an intermediate appellate judge, she only ever penned three dissenting opinions, because-- she says-- she just followed all the laws laid down. I'm pretty sure everybody knows that she'd do that on the D.C. Circuit too.

Now, the only thing I can think of is that Democrats are (rightly) afraid of the thought of her on the Supreme Court, because she'd be a plausible replacement for O'Connor but Brown's jurisprudence would be more dependably originalist than hers. And if that's what they're afraid of, it's understandable that they'll fight her here, where they can still get her, because if she goes onto the DC Circuit she'll rack up a track record of unexceptional unideological opinions that squarely respect precedent and so on.

I don't mind the filibustering of judges so much, I just wish that when one read the New York Times editorial, one got the sense they had watched the hearing, rather than just listening to the Schumer opening statement or the Totenberg summary.

AFTERTHOUGHT:

Oh, and I assume the Democratic Senators don't really care, but it's also worth remembering that if they do filibuster a relatively mainstream conservative judge after she was extremely forthright and helpful at her confirmation hearing, that certainly doesn't set up an incentive for future judicial nominees to be forthright or helpful. Again, presumably Democratic Senators don't mind, because if the nominees aren't forthright they can still use that as an excuse to filibuster them, but I like watching Senate Judiciary Hearings, so I care.

Why has no one ever told me that Pejman Yousefzadeh has the coolest blogroll ever?