I know I said I wouldn't post today, and this is the only one, but:

(1) He's right, but I already grilled up a steak for that;

(2) He's right, too, that I shouldn't rejoice in others' toasty time in Asmodeus's House of Barbed Sodomy and Dismemberment, and I'd like to say I don't, and that I was only explicitly talking about death, not about the consequence thereof, but I don't want to compund my sin with lying on top of it;

(2a) I should note that the linked information in that post is correct insofar as a Lexis-Nexis search shows. Ms. Child, for example, only does live cooking at Smith College and Planned Murder events. However, I could be mistaken; if I am, I invite corrections.

and

(3) 62.13018% - Extreme Geek. I know what THAC0 is. And I can calculate it -- in my head, with an AC of -14, a fighter of 15th level wearing a girdle of Storm Giant Strength, and a long sword +1, +6 against the creature with the AC -14. Nuff said.

Happy Fourth, all.

Proof #489,254,121 that I'm going to Hell:

Aw.

I will not be posting tomorrow; therefore, Happy Fourth of July, folks.

God Bless America.

Dammit: Dammit, dammit, dammit, DAMMIT: That SOB Rick Reilly wrote something worth reading.

Why in creation did Joe Delaney jump into that pit full of water that day?

Why in the world would the AFC's best young running back try to save three drowning boys when he himself couldn't swim?

Nobody -- not his wife, not his mother -- had ever seen him so much as dog-paddle. A year and a half earlier, when he went to the Pro Bowl in Hawaii as the AFC's starting halfback and Rookie of the Year, he never set even a pinkie toe in the ocean or the pool. "Never had," says his wife, Carolyn, who'd known Joe since they were both seven. "In all my years, I never had seen him swim."

So why? Why did the 24-year-old Kansas City Chief try to save three boys he didn't know with a skill he didn't have?

He'd been sitting in the cool shade of a tree on a tar-bubbling afternoon at Chennault Park, a public recreation area in Monroe, La., when he heard voices calling, "Help! Help!" He popped up like a Bobo doll and sprinted toward the pit.

Every day from this day forward, I pray to God that I can be such a man. Most of us like to think we'd be like Delaney, or the men who raced into those burning towers without a second thought; if we're honest, few of us are.

RIP, Mr. Delaney.

Via Orrin Judd.

And, on a related note, Ramesh Ponnuru rocks:

If you share Scalia's view of such decisions as Casey, Romer, Dickerson, Stenberg, Lawrence, et al, then it is altogether rational to deploy a rhetoric that exposes the essential fraudulence of the Court's claim to be interpreting the Constitution. (One assumes that the justices themselves are part of the audience to which he means to expose it.) What Justice Scalia is trying to do, in other words, is to demystify the Court; to suggest that it is engaged in exercises of raw judicial power. (Part of that power consists of our ignorance of the fact.)

Justice Scalia is not alone in seeing things this way. From time to time, the liberal justices accuse conservative majorities of raw politics as well, with heated rhetoric. (Pick a federalism case and read the dissents.) And Scalia's aspersions against the legitimacy of the Court's "constitutional law" reflect a half-century of conservative rhetoric on the judiciary. That rhetoric still underlies the Republican party's position. Every Republican senator who says he wants a judge who will "apply" rather than "make" the law is implicitly accusing some judges of exceeding their legitimate powers.

To reject the Broder-Sullivan critique of Justice Scalia, in short, is to begin to see something important about modern judicial politics — something to which the good justice is trying to awaken us.

Someday, if I eat all my veggies and pray very hard, I might be that good a writer. Probably not, but I can dream, can't I?

Y'know, Andrew Sullivan was off and racing the other day on Constitutional law, a subject about which he knows little, and Bill Pryor and Nino Scalia, subjects about which he apparently knows less. I thought about saying something; then Feddie said it better here and here and, indeed, in other spots too.

Helluva blog, that one.

Blogging promises to be light the next week or two; those who know why, will know why, and the rest of humanity will do what it usually does and disregard this blog.

Anyway, before I sorta go, a brief note to my wife on why it would be bad for me to seek electoral office, especially as I am now:

Katherine Hepburn is dead, and I owe myself a pizza.

You see, it is my habit to order a pizza in celebration whenever an ardent fan of slaughtering infants in utero kicks the bucket. Thurgood Marshall did some serious good in his time, but his me-tooism to Brennan with Roe and the descendent decisions, to my mind, voided all the good he did (hint: you advocate murderering one group of people, it overwhelms helping free another). So -- especially after all of his unseemly Reagan-bashing, I felt Domino's was in order.

And when Blackmun died, let's just say I was stuffed for a day, and the local Pizza Hut delivery guy was significantly richer. Teddy Kennedy's death in a drunken orgy in a van at the bottom of a cold New England river will bring the same result.

So, in tribute to an old bitch who felt life was just too good a thing to share with millions of babies, I'm thinking Godfather's some time this week.

Oh, and one thing: Don't hand me that "she just supported Planned Parenthood for the birth control" crap. Putting every other argument to the side, if that's what she really wanted, she could've lobbied for Merck.

Talk about this.

Ben Domenech marvels that John McCain didn't mention Bush in his paean to John Kerry. I marvel that he didn't mention himself more.

Damn, but this is funny.