Cultural Warfare Update, Special Edition: Dobson talks about Rove, talks with Kenneth Star.

James Dobson went on his main Focus on the Family broadcast today for the first of two shows on Harriet Miers this week. What's more interesting is less the official transcript of the show, where he talks directly about what Rove told him, but the 10 minutes of show they didn't include in the official transcription.

I have filled in the missing pieces below the official transcription. The portion covered by the official was essentially 100% accurate; there were a couple of trivial errors that changed no meaning.

The extra 10 minutes are a conversation with former special prosecutor Kenneth Starr. In the early portion of that conversation, I didn't go back to fill in missed clauses, because they weren't important. (For me to get every word, I have to play each paragraph an average of four times, and my RSI doesn't like that much typing anyway.) Later on, it got more specifically relevant, and I put my wrists through that anyway. Why should be obvious.

From my standpoint, this is the most important section of the non-transcribed broadcast time:

Dobson: Well, let me end with this question, and it's an obvious one now, you obviously think she would be a good justice on the Supreme Court as we would define it [emphasis in original] and I think you know what that means.

Starr: Yes, I think she believes in the traditional vision [emphasis in original], which we need to restore, the vision of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, and other great justices to have served, who's not trying to impose his or her views and especially his or her views on issues that so divide American society and American culture.

Dobson: And you are convinced she has a very personal faith [emphasis in original] in Jesus Christ.

Starr: That I do. She is a very, very strong Christian and that should be a source, I think, of great comfort and assurance to people in the household of faith around our country.

Official transcript begins below, followed by my rough-to-complete transcript of the missing 10 minutes.

( Full transcription, James Dobson/Focus on the Family, 12 October 2005 )

( Transcription of additional 10 minutes, by me )

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. appears to have been a legal realist, which is to say, a justice supporting concepts such as:

legal instrumentalism, the view that the law should be used as a tool to achieve social purposes and to balance competing societal interests.

and

Belief in the indeterminacy of law. Many of the legal realists believed that the law in the books (statutes, cases, etc.) did not determine the results of legal disputes.

(Both from Wikipedia.)

There are those who talk about his willingness to defer to elected bodies, but to get from that the idea that he's an icon of judicial restraint... well, that appears to be to be cherry-picking at best. However, I'm not a lawyer, and my knowledge of legal history gets a bit iffy that far back.

Still... I kind of can't see it. From what I've been reading quickly just now, he seemed perfectly willing to throw his office behind causes, and was more than willing to reject dominant social thinking of the time to make decisions favouring, for example, the union movement, when the majority social and legislative opinions stood firmly against them. So does that mean that's it for judicial restraint, then, even in name? Dobson and Starr seem to be saying that she's a judicial activist for fundamentalism, so I'm leaning towards yes.

But again, there's that question of cherry-picking. Maybe I'm doing that, too. So either way, really, it seems strange to me for Starr to have dropped his name, particularly since Holmes is generally thought of as a big defender of the First Amendment, and was Chief Justice on the court that started a habit of striking down anti-speech laws on that basis. (Except during wartime, hm. Interesting. He helped author some pretty nasty speech-restricting decisions during World War I.)

I guess I mostly think that this isn't the kind of line you'd expect out of a strict constructionist.

"A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in colour and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used." - Oliver Wendell Homes, Jr.

Or maybe I'm just overthinking the whole thing and Starr was just making a hyperbolic comparison to one of the most important justices in American history to boost enthusiasm for a fundamentalist social activist. I sure wish I knew.

It's not that I don't appreciate saving money, but...

Microsoft printed its Annual Report in black-and-white on newsprint, with no cover stock. Isn't that a bit... um... sad?

Maybe stockholders with only token numbers of shares (HI!) got the crap versions and real stockholders got real copies.

not tasty

what's funny about print preview on the mac
is that all applications get it for free
because they all print through system print manager that does it
and does it using Preview
which has a print function
and also
because it uses the system print manager
a preview function

so you can recursively preview until you're dizzy
or out of RAM
whichever comes first!

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solarbird (8:38:55 PM): does nutmeg have nuts in it?
kathrynt (8:39:14 PM): No, it's a spice.
kathrynt (8:49:18 PM): Nutmeg is one of the things that makes pumpkin pie taste like pumpkin pie, and eggnog taste like eggnog.
solarbird (8:49:42 PM): yay on one, no on two.
kathrynt (8:49:54 PM): what about eggnog don't you like?
solarbird (8:50:01 PM): the taste?
kathrynt (8:50:04 PM): (this is determinant, not questioning.)
solarbird (8:50:05 PM): also the smell.
kathrynt (8:50:10 PM): What ASPECT of the taste, silly?
solarbird (8:50:18 PM):
kathrynt (8:50:27 PM): The egginess? the aromatic thing that's kind of similar to licorice except different? The cream?
solarbird (8:50:26 PM): the part where it tastes bad
kathrynt (8:50:31 PM): NOT HELPING