Humpty Dumpty

• SCOTUSblog has been invaluable in the week since the Sotomayor nomination, and this post on the actual politics of the choice and the coming confirmation battle is worth reading. Though I must wonder, perhaps in insanely retarded fashion, as I've been wont to do--why has the press been asking Jeff Sessions if Republicans are going to mount a filibuster? I know Sotomayor needs one Republican vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee in order to come to a full up-or-down vote on the main floor, but I just don't even see any reality in which Republicans could filibuster her appointment. Even assuming Franken isn't seated by the time of confirmation (which is a huge if), Sessions still needs all 40 Republicans in the Senate to vote for a filibuster. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, sitting pretty in a state where Obama raped face, are going to actually vote for that? Laugh.
• This is a nice, lengthy case study on health care in The New Yorker by Atul Gawande.
• Harlem Shakes, "Strictly Game"--Catchy song, but the rest of the album, Technicolor Health, is even better. Seeing them in July; they seem to be relatively "light," a la Vampire Weekend, but nevertheless very apt at what they do.
  
• Handsome Furs, "Evangeline"--Proving Spencer Krug's hypothesis that Wolf Parade is a breeding ground for pervasive, all-encompassing awesomeness, Dan Boeckner created something really special with this year's Face Control. Also seeing them in July.
• A Michael Crowley piece worth reading in The New Republic about the trials and tribulations confronting those tasked with actually closing Guantanamo.
• I just read Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine, about the Rehnquist court, principally focused on the 11 years between 1994 and 2005 in which no new justice was appointed. It was pretty good, for fairly light reading. The apportionment of pages given to each judge reveals just how difficult it must have been to squeeze factoids out of Clarence Thomas--it's almost as if the court has eight justices and Scalia's votes count double.
  
• Okay, this has been pissing me off. I saw a sign today on someone's fence saying "Please close, por favor." The family living there is white, as is everyone in the neighborhood. It was clear they had Hispanics doing some landscaping, painting, or what have you. Moreover, I've seen this before. On blackboards in elementary school, when teachers didn't want their work erased by the janitors overnight, they'd often right "No erase, por favor," or something in that vein. My question is: What the fuck? Every single American person who isn't on a permanent feeding tube or living in a glass bubble knows what "por favor" means. And most of them have not taken organized Spanish classes. Who are these Mexican guys who live in America and don't know "please"? Presumably this is just the result of some hybrid blend of white guilt and over-the-top, politically-correct foolishness on the part of yuppie suburbanites, but any actual effort put into looking at this issue would reveal that translating "please" into Spanish is unnecessary. And if it's not unnecessary, then there are far larger problems looming than whether the gate is left open or someone's geometry proof is erased. I'm no Tom Tancredo, and the idea of a national language is just retarded, but come on...
• I'll recommend another Michael Crowley piece, this time from New York Magazine, on Janette Sadik-Khan, NYC's Transportation Commissioner, and her efforts to erase the stain of Robert Moses on the city's huge transit and traffic problems by closing down Broadway to automobiles and doing some other cool shit. Having walked up around Times and Herald Square a few times recently, I must say these seem to be pretty cool from a pedestrian's perspective. Although some of the arguments presented--namely, that about making Times Square safer for walkers--seem to be stretching it. Anyone getting hit by a car in Times Square deserves prime retail space on that year's Darwin Awards.
  
• I also just read David McCullough's The Great Bridge, about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. Fairly epic. Very interesting, I found, was the degree to which actual corruption (Tweed-related) and merely the aura of corruption surrounded the bridge nearly the entire time it was being constructed. But obviously the real eyeopener in this book is the methods Roebling (the bridge's chief engineer) used to sink the caissons, which hold up each bridge tower, into the depths of the East River. And to think they did this 140 years ago! Indeed, the most architecturally impressive aspect of the bridge is the part that's underwater and that virtually nobody knows about. Kind've a fucked-up legacy, when you think about it.
• Sunset Rubdown's new album, Dragonslayer, is absolutely amazing. Best to date for them for sure, and certainly one of my favorites of the year thus far--in a year that has seen It's Blitz, Fantasies, Veckatimest, Checkmate Savage, My Maudlin Career, and, yes, Relapse. Spencer Krug is god; every song on the album is just a massive cannonball being pushed out the window of a penthouse suite and absolutely refusing to ever reach terminal velocity.