No La Pasadita taco would be worth its $2 without a liberal application of the roasted jalapeño salsa negra. Powerful stuff. God help you if you wander by “La Nueva” (1132 N. Ashland) when they’re roasting a batch–the airborne capsaicin particulate will drop you like a masher with a face full of pepper spray. But one look into its smoky, Stygian depths puddled in the crevasse of a salty, gnarled tortilla chip conjures up so many misty memories of late-night salvation-by-taco experiences. If I could pick my own superpower I’d shoot it from my fingertips.

North Korean counterfeiters, Filipino scamsters, religious cultists, and Ben Bernanke: the cast of characters rumored to be involved in the mystery of the $134 billion worth of Treasury bonds that two “Japanese citizens” attempted to smuggle from Italy into Switzerland a little over a week ago is growing at the speed of conspiracy theory light.

Anyone interested in seeing how a very smart judge can write the equivalent of a treatise in nine pages should read Frank Easterbrook’s opinion in National Rifle Association of America v. City of Chicago. It is a truly remarkable performance.

The ostensible (and actual) issue before the Court (a pane of Easterbrook, Posner, and Bauer) is whether Heller should be read as incorporating the Second Amendment against states (or, in this case, the City of Chicago).

Mortimer Newlin Stead Sellers (University of Baltimore – School of Law) has posted The Influence on Marcus Tullius Cicero on Modern Legal and Political Ideas (Ciceroniana, the Atti of Colloquium Tullianum Anni, MMVIII) on SSRN.

Those of us foolish enough to call ourselves “conservative” are forced to admit that culturally and politically at least we live amidst less and less worth conserving.  We can and should continue to mind our own business, and tackle daily life as cheerfully as possible, but some days one wants to take up the fight for the reformation of this bloated and addled culture of ours.  Where to find a cudgel?  With a…

And to get on with all other aspects of the restoration of America as the land of big municipal government. As the land of strong unions whose every red cent in political donations buys something specific. As the land of very high levels of co-operative membership, not least including housing co-operatives for the upper middle classes. As the land of small farmers who own their own land. As the land that pioneered Keynesianism in practice.…

Michael Sandel’s giving of the prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC (hat tip: the ever-watchful Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber) has prompted me to return to an old post of mine on communitarianism, and perhaps do some updating of what I wrote then, so as to incorporate the populist and localist ideas that I have since become more familiar with and committed to, and which I see as closely entwined with any…

I mentioned in my initial post about Caperton that it was a classic example of Scalia’s showy rhetoric concealing substantive points of highly dubious quality. To unpack this a bit, let’s consider the argument:

A Talmudic maxim instructs with respect to the Scripture: “Turn it over, and turn it over, for all is therein.” The Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Aboth, Ch. V, Mishnah 22 (I. Epstein ed. 1935). Divinely inspired text may contain the answers to all earthly…

jennpb posted a photo:

Curry lamb sausage with spinach raita and Kasseri cheese (foreground); Onion-bacon sausage with blue cheese/cheddar (background); fries!

We have never grappled with this. We tend to think about America as a country, like all other countries of that era, where slavery was legal. This is a vast understatement, it would seem. More accurately, we were a country in which half the society, the antebellum South, was a slave society. …

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why I’m not a conservative, mostly because I’ve been thinking so much about slavery and Reconstruction. It seems, to my mind, to be an authentic conservative in the 1850s is to perhaps recognize slavery as evil, but oppose doing anything about it that might upset the planters. It seems, to my mind, to be an authentic conservative in the 1960s would be to recognize that segregation was also evil, but resolve to nothing about it which might upset its supporters.

I think it’s quite possible to argue that there were no good conservative answers to slavery or Jim Crow. But I don’t think this invalidates every conservative insight into the nature of our politics and culture. If anything, it’s a simple acknowledgment that some problems really do transcend rote ideological responses, and that no interpretive framework can provide a universal set of predictive guidelines for dealing with every possible eventuality.

Chicago Tribune, June 24, 1897. That is the single greatest headline in the history of journalism. I’m going to start writing poetry just so I can use that as a title for my first collection.

Have you ever noticed that dogmatic conservatives always act like it must be the first time you’ve ever heard their ideas? It’s as though they believe that they’re so inherently convincing that the only reason anyone wouldn’t believe them is that they simply haven’t heard the good news yet.

The comments to my Anarchy in the UK post on Thursday spawned an interesting discussion surrounding the cause of polarized politics in the CA state legislature.  While I agree the damning variable that impedes compromise is the 2/3 rule for budgetary measures, I still maintain that closed primaries tend to produce candidates to the left or right of the party support writ large.…

One day back when I was living in Minneapolis, an ice-cream truck came trolling down our tree-lined street. Despite the dearth of children in the neighborhood, the squat beige van came not infrequently, usually tooting something innocuous like “Pop Goes the Weasel” to rally a small crowd. One blistering afternoon it started whistling a different song, no less bouncy but with a tad darker history. Without my wanting it to, the whose first verse played…

In a pathbreaking decision, the Supreme Court today ruled 5-4 that Due Process requires an elected judge to recuse himself when a party with a vested stake in a case spends so much campaign money to get that judge elected (apparently, either through contributions or expenditures) as to raise an objective probability that the judge will be too biased to serve. Momentous as the decision is for the future of judicial elections and disputes over…

It’s standard for countries to offer a certain amount of mandatory paid parental leave as a recognition of the special role parents play in our society (in effect, this measure lowers everyone’s wages slightly and then provides a benefit only to parents, thus enacting a small transfer of resources from non-parents to parents). In the United States, everything must surrender beneath the all-powerful God of flexible labor markets, and “pro-family” conservatives seem fine with that.

Most postmasters were also storekeepers selling liquor by the drink on the premises. The federal government mandated that post offices open every day, and this overrode whatever state and local laws might require Sunday closings. The post office thus became a conspicuous exception to general Sabbath observance in small-town America. On Sundays many men would flock to the local post office after church to pick up their mail and have a drink.

Here we were, my two television sets and I, happily growing older together. But then, with one act of Congress and one presidential signature, all three of us became obsolete. No election. No referendum. Not even a chance, as consumers, to decide whether we prefer digital to analog TV.

The NYT has a fairly mundane article on the Big Law meltdown, focusing on White & Case.

So why are big law firms suddenly shrinking? Partly, the Times says, because “in the first quarter of 2009, demand for legal services in New York decreased by nearly 10 percent over 2008, according to the Hildebrandt International Peer Monitor Index.” Demand is down.  Duh.

I don’t have my head totally wrapped around this yet, but it seems that political violence in 19th Century America was much more common than it is today. Perhaps, that’s the wrong way to put it. I’m not sure. But I just got done reading a section where Congressmen were coming to the House floor armed for a shoot-out. Why? Because of a book that slandered the South. A book. fool!

1. Clipse – Virginia (Lost Woods)

2. Dr. Dre & Snoop Dogg – Still D.R.E. (Getting Treasure)

So in the comments to this post, I received a lot of reading suggestions for good fantasy.  They are listed below with updates to follow…