I had a sappy, treacley, saccharine blog entry here about love and how I thought I'd found it again... but instead I'm posting this dry, bitter, blistering tribute to Jerry Fallwell from Christopher Hitchens. If you haven't seen this yet, you'll thank me for it... I hope...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=52yTqMcwuQE

And just because it's the only thing I'm intimate with at the moment, I'll regale you with tales from law school. In the same way that the U.N. lost its illusion of grandeur for me when I discovered that they put the World Bank and IMF in charge of both social and economic reform goals in Mexico and other countries, I have also lost the illusion that the U.S. Supreme Court was an honorable, wise, reflective and philosophical body of thinkers. As I read their opinions over the last 200 years, I get a picture of very flawed and insecure, but also shrewd and ambitious political operators. At times they snatch power surreptitiously by merely mentioning it in an opinion about another issue entirely like Marbury v. Madison. Other times they grant unprecedented power to the other branches, based on reasoning that leaves my professor dumbfounded, like in U.S. v. Lopez and Gonzales v. Raich. He described the court by using the metaphor of a trained puppy, with Congress as the Master. I agree... when nobody's looking, it chews up the Master's new leather shoes. But its good having a puppy around... it makes the kids happy... so the Master can't take it out the back and shoot it. And sometimes it goes and fetches the paper... and its so cute when the justices sit at the Master's feet and look up adoringly at them...

Ok, maybe its not that bad, but it's a helluva lot worse than I thought it was. If this is supposed to be a triangle of powers balancing each other, the judicial corner is threatening the others with a wet noodle.