Beware Spoil­ers! My sis­ter and I went to see wall·e this after­noon. After the extra­or­di­nary suc­cess of Rata­touille, I had high expec­ta­tions for Pixar. Pixar has con­sis­tently offered excel­lent films with lov­able char­ac­ters, engag­ing sto­ries, and exquis­ite imagery. When Dis­ney bought out the stu­dio, I was seri­ously wor­ried that their inde­pen­dence and cre­ativ­ity would suf­fer — Disney’s in-​​​​house ani­ma­tion projects had been famously bad up to that point. Home on the Range and Brother Bear come imme­di­ately to mind. I was wor­ried. Rata­touille started pro­duc­tion before the acqui­si­tion. I believe wall·e is the first Pixar film pro­duced fully under Dis­ney own­er­ship. When I saw the early [ . . . ]

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Via SCO­TUS­Blog: The Court has released the opin­ion in Dis­trict of Colum­bia v. Heller (07–290), on whether the District’s firearms reg­u­la­tions – which bar the pos­ses­sion of hand­guns and require shot­guns and rifles to be kept dis­as­sem­bled or under trig­ger lock – vio­late the Sec­ond Amend­ment. The rul­ing below, which struck down the pro­vi­sions in ques­tion, is affirmed. Jus­tice Scalia wrote the opin­ion. Jus­tice Breyer dis­sented, joined by Jus­tices Stevens, Souter and Gins­burg. Today’s opin­ion by Jus­tice Scalia in Dis­trict of Colum­bia v. Heller (07–290) is now avail­able here. The break­down of the dis­sent­ing Jus­tices is a bit more nuanced than [ . . . ]

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Please be advised: Meat­loaf, though unbe­liev­ably tasty, is not a low-​​​​fat food. That is all.

Cal­i­for­nia Everybody’s got their knick­ers in a twist over the Cal­i­for­nia Supreme Court’s recent rul­ing that Prop 22 (a pop­u­lar ini­tia­tive to enact a statu­tory ban on same-​​​​sex mar­riages) was uncon­sti­tu­tional under the Cal­i­for­nia State Constitution’s guar­an­tee of equal pro­tec­tion. The court declined to recon­sider, and also declined to issue a stay of its order direct­ing state offi­cials to stop deny­ing mar­riage licenses to oth­er­wise eli­gi­ble same-​​​​sex cou­ples. Appar­ently, same-​​​​sex cou­ples started get­ting mar­ried a few days ago. My posi­tion on gay mar­riage is that equal pro­tec­tion does not, in this case, jus­tify expand­ing the wel­fare state, because all (or very nearly all, more on [ . . . ]

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