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She thinks Grand Fork is in the old west
''Last night he got down on one knee and asked me to be his wife, and I am typing this with a small but brilliant diamond glinting on my left hand.''But there's a problem, says Northern Belle.''I am terrified of marrying him ... .
I love him completely, and I couldn't ask for better treatment or companionship ... He is a true-blue, patriotic, poetry-writing, philosophy-debating sensitive guy who is willing to put his life on the line for America ... .
But I don't know if I can bear to leave the East Coast. He will be in the Air Force after college; it is his chosen path in life - but this means that he would be stationed in some godforsaken desert in the middle of nowhere! I want to be a book-writing, head-shrinking New York City intellectual slash devoted mother of five.''It gets worse. ''I am scared of the Midwest,'' she writes.
''I know this is such a clich?©d bias, but it is 100 percent accurate - when I visit him he is the only good thing there. It's too flat and clean, people are too polite, everyone has hard, extroverted, cheerful, cornfed Christian faces, and everything just feels so alien to me.''
Now, the view from this ''godforsaken desert in the middle of nowhere'' that's also home to Grand Forks Air Force Base is clear: Northern Belle is right. She should be worried about the path she's on. She should be fretting about the cultural and spiritual emptiness that seem certain to haunt her future. And there's only one thing she can do about it:
She should join the Air Force. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will enrich this young woman's life more than a few years' exposure to the United States military, the institution upon which her life and her country's future depend.
By patriotic, poetry-writing
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On deck for the Supreme Court.
And the Nominees Are . . .
Here's a short list of who might be on deck for the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court is shaping up as the first defining issue of a second Bush term--and that's before there's a nominee or even an opening. Consider the gauntlet thrown down last week by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist at the Federalist Society's annual conference.
Speaking of Democrats' unprecedented filibuster of 10 appeals-court nominees, Sen. Frist announced his intention to go ''nuclear'' if they try the same tactic again. Under the ''nuclear option,'' Senate rules would be reinterpreted so that 51 votes, not a supermajority of 60, would be needed to end debate on judicial nominees and move to an up-or-down vote on the floor. The Constitution requires a majority of senators to confirm a president's selection and all of the nominees filibustered in Mr. Bush's first term would have been confirmed by bipartisan majorities if the Senate had been permitted to hold a vote.
Mr. Frist has threatened to go nuclear before--but this time there's reason to believe he means it. Reinterpreting the filibuster rules would require a simple majority vote, and in a Senate with a Republican majority of 55 that should be doable--even with the anti-nuclear Sens. Lincoln Chaffee, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe voting no. Sen. Arlen Specter, who's slated to be chairman of the Judiciary Committee, is on board too.
Meanwhile, the question of the hour is, what kind of justice would Mr. Bush appoint to the Supreme Court? With Chief Justice William Rehnquist seriously ill, the betting is that Mr. Bush will get to make his first appointment before too many more gavels sound on First Street.
As of last week, the man believed to be the leading contender was taken off Court-watchers' lists (at least for now). The president instead nominated Alberto Gonzales as his next attorney general. Also absent is Federalist Society stalwart Ted Olson. Age discrimination may be against the law when the rest of us try to hire someone, but one of the unwritten requirements for the job of justice is that the candidate be young enough to serve at least 20 years. Even Mr. Olson's admirers call him ''too old and too controversial.'' The former solicitor general is 64.
Eight names--noted nearby--turn up often in speculation. Interest groups have had four years to compile, scrutinize and spin every word ever uttered or put on paper by each of the presumed candidates. If nominated, all would be attacked from the left for the usual Roe reasons--and some would face criticism from the right as well. Both sides are raring to go.
The Short List 10
Possible Bush nominees for the Supreme Court
Samuel Alito Jr., 54 Third Circuit
Janice Rogers Brown, 55 Calif. Supreme Court
Miguel Estrada, 43 Washington Attorney
Emilio Garza, 57 Fifth Circuit
Edith Jones, 55 Fifth Circuit
J. Michael Luttig, 50 Fourth Circuit
John Roberts, 49 D.C. Circuit
J. Harvie Wilkinson, 60 Fourth Circuit
Two men mentioned for chief justice are J. Harvie Wilkinson and John Roberts. Both have the intellectual firepower, writing skills and temperament for the job; both are well-respected in liberal legal circles. ''They are to the right what Justice (Stephen) Breyer and Justice (Ruth Bader) Ginsburg are to the left,'' says a source close to the White House. Judge Roberts was confirmed unanimously to the appeals bench last year.
By the Federalist Society's annual
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Condi Rice to State.
You want to discuss the appointment of Condi Rice to State.
She is a good person; she has experience and accomplishments; she is stable, hardworking and sophisticated. She is also--this is breathtaking, still--a young black woman raised to the position first held by Thomas Jefferson. It is considered corny to point this out. But corny's not all bad. Look at it this way. In every U.S. embassy and consulate in the world very soon, non-Americans will walk in to see two things: a picture of the American president and next to it a picture of the young black woman who is this nation's secretary of state. They will notice this, and consciously or not they will think: This truly must be some kind of country.
By first held by Thomas Jefferson.
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lesson ,art of civility,
Justice Scalia gives few critics a lesson in art of civility, civics
The woman beside me, a law school professor's wife, whispered, ''It's like inviting the enemy to come to speak.'' Into the lion's den of Ann Arbor liberalism, then, strode Antonin Scalia, the associate Supreme Court justice and intellectual gladiator.
Theoretically, it might have been yet another one of those culture clashes -- conservative versus liberal, red state versus blue state -- that nobody is, post-Nov. 2, in the immediate need of.
It was Scalia, you see, whose pointed disdain for affirmative action policies led him to ask, during U-M's Supreme Court fight, why the law school didn't simply lower its elite standards if it wanted more diversity.
Perhaps, he'd mused, a state law school didn't need to be so elite. (That work might be left to Harvard, the law school he attended, or other private colleges.)
On campus, Scalia -- with his reputation for intellectual rigor and contempt for those lacking it -- was perhaps the one Supreme Court justice who might be considered, as law professor Richard Friedman put it, ''anathema,'' to those who hold dear the idea of a living, breathing U.S. Constitution. This very idea is what riles Scalia. ''We have become addicted to, inordinately fond of, the idea of a living Constitution,'' he said, with a sarcastic edge in his voice. ''Oh, how I hate that phrase.''
Want to change the law of the land? ''There are provisions for that. ... Pass a law, amend the Constitution.'' Heck, he might as well have said: ''Stick a fork in it.'' His point was: Don't let nine lawyers adapt the meaning of the Constitution to these times. Either the Founding Fathers mentioned abortion or female suffrage or they didn't. ''But don't come to me and ask me to do it,'' he said.
The sitting Supreme Court judge on public view, bandying bon mots and challenging questioners, is rare enough that nobody at the University of Michigan recalls another instance of such an appearance. And Scalia drew a standing-room only crowd of skeptics and admirers, including a number of U-M law professors who admire his intellectual prowess and rigor, if not, necessarily, his point of view. If judges are expected to exhibit temperance and tolerance and a kind of even-handedness, well, Scalia defied expectations and flaunted -- in the heart of politically correct territory -- his lack of interest in those rules.
''I don't like sandal-wearing bearded weirdos ... who go around burning flags,'' he observed, in a room that contained more than a few who might match the description.
He stared down second-year law student Megan Roberts, as she bravely questioned him on a technical legal point and struggled to keep going, beneath his withering gaze. ''I admit, I was intimidated,'' Roberts told me later, mentioning his ''sarcastic and dismissive'' approach. Even the obligatory public demonstration -- a few students carrying construction paper signs silently through the room -- was staged politely. Maybe even the noisemakers are tired.
But in these harsh and hostile times, the reaction to Scalia's appearance struck me as a triumph for civility and freedom. We really needed one of those.
By Justice Scalia
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