Whitman boys.

OMIGOD OMIGOD OMIGOD!!!!! Maybe nothing else could jar me from my no-blogging work-stressed reverie than the news that Strom Thurmond is dead. Not to speak ill of the dead, but a blight on the planet is happily removed, only about forty years late.

In other good news, we got a stirring decision (and predictable polemic Scalia dissent) from the Supremes in Lawrence v. Texas, affirmative action survives with a wink and a nod after the University of Michigan cases(Gratz and Grutter), and the Court thankfully does not further expand corporations’ “commercial speech” rights and dismisses Nike’s writ of cert as improvidently granted (couldn’t cobble together a plurality? shocking, shocking!). Note that Walter Dellinger is predicting all these decisions 24 hours ahead in the Slate “Breakfast Table” with my favorite new mom, Dahlia Lithwick.

I’ve been super busy, plus with the postwar apathy crash I felt blog-depressed. But Trina and I just got engaged (a pic of her proposing by unfurling a 15-foot banner visible from my 13th-story office window will be uploaded as soon as I figure out this technology stuff) and are looking for a house, and I’ve got trial on Monday. More soon.

I SWEAR IT WASN’T ME. Probably Trina.

I’M CONTINUING TO ADMIRE HOWARD DEAN FROM AFAR. And so, apparently, is Slate’s normally sobersided William Saletan:

“Dean is far and away the most interesting player in the race. Not since Clinton have Democrats seen a talent like this. Here’s Dean on the federal budget:

“When Ronald Reagan came into office, he cut taxes, we had big deficits, and we lost 2 million jobs. When Bill Clinton came into office, he raised taxes without a single Republican vote; we balanced the budget; we gained 6 and a half million jobs. George Bush has already lost 2 and a half million. I want a balanced budget because that’s how you get jobs in this country is to balance the books. No Republican president has balanced the budget in 34 years. …You had better elect a Democrat, because the Republicans cannot handle money. … We’re the party of responsibility, and they’re not.

“When you hear Dean talk like this, you wonder why no one else can make the party’s case so simply. If more Democrats spoke this way, maybe they’d control a branch of government.”