In surfing some of the blogs today, I was struck by a string of interesting links at Betsy's Page. As I read down her blog, first I see her quoting from Hewitt's interview of Lileks talking about the Alito hearings:

James Lileks: Oh, where does one begin? The fantasy that comes back to me, again and again, is seeing these people grill Albert Einstein.

Hugh Hewitt: (laughing)

JL: I would love to see Biden leaning forward with that expression of deep concern, and saying you know, Doc...Doc, I've read that you believe that MC=E2, but I gotta say I'm troubled by it. And I'm puzzled as well. And weren't you a member of a country that elected Hitler?

HH: (laughing)

JL: I mean, it would be like that. It would be like engaging in a colloquy on the theory of relativity with Einstein, with these guys who had a chemistry set when they were in 4th grade, and believe that qualified to study the theoretical...

HH: Oh, you've opened up a whole can...like, what if they interviewed, or they questioned Beethoven?

JL: Well, that would be great. Well, Beethoven would just...that would be perfect, because Beethoven in the later years of his life was deaf. And if Biden's asking the question, you don't have to hear, because he's just going to talk for 28 minutes.

HH: (laughing)

JL: And at the end of it, like the end of the 9th Symphony, when Beethoven couldn't hear the applause, somebody would just turn him towards Biden, and have him make a couple of scowling Beethovenesque gestures. Ah, it's just preposterous. The one thing we have learned, at least, is that we now know for sure that the Republicans do not have an operative hidden deep in Teddy Kennedy's camp, because if they did, this would be the perfect opportunity to slip him talking points based entirely on Dr. Seuss books, and he would read them with absolutely no...with as little comprehension and recognition of the fact that he was asking Alito about whether or not he'd come out against Green Eggs and Ham. He would no more hear the absurdity of that, than the absurdity of...

Then I see her linking to an op-ed by a liberal former clerk of Samuel Alito's who is disgusted by the demogoguery of Alito's Senate attackers:

As a liberal, what scares me is not the prospect of having Sam Alito on the Supreme Court; what scares me is the way my fellow liberal Democrats are behaving in response to the nomination. I'm appalled and embarrassed by the fear mongering, the personal attacks and what I see as an irresponsible and misleading distortion of his real judicial record as well as his character. . . .

In all candor, I expect that if I did not know Judge Alito, I may have responded to the nomination with the same distrust, fear and suspicion with which I usually respond to everything the Bush administration does, so I understand the genesis of the attacks by my fellow liberals.

Then Betsy links to a very interesting Charles Krauthammer column on Munich, arguing that Speilberg treated the Israeli athletes who were murdered as mere extras, but some of the Palestinians who planned their murders were never shown doing anything wrong, just being killed by Jews. Even Chuck Jones, who made Bugs Bunny cartoons, thought that Yosemite Sam should usually be shown actually being mean first, after which Bugs would often proclaim: "Of course, you know, this means war!"

If Krauthammer's account is a fair representation of the movie, Spielberg's highly fictionalized version of the Munich murders and their aftermath should show not only that the Israelis were wronged, but why a particular terrorist should be executed. Even if the movie focused only on the aftermath, it could use flashbacks to establish personal guilt, or it could show continuing terrorist planning after Munich, if that were present.

If it's one thing Speilberg knows, it's Hollywood conventions, so I find this omission genuinely puzzling--and I don't mean "puzzling" in the way that some Senate Democrats mean puzzling; I mean I am genuinely puzzled by Speilberg's choice, since without more evidence I am not willing to chalk it up simply to moral equivalence (as Betsy seems to).

Next, I see Betsy linking a Washington Times story on Ted Kennedy's continuing membership in the Owl Club, a Harvard club kicked off campus for its anti-women policies, which were claimed to violate federal anti-discrimination laws. The story even asserts that Kennedy updated his membership information in the Owl Club last September 7.

Although all these posts point in one political direction more consistently than is customary on the Volokh Conspiracy, I thought it an interesting string of posts, worth noting more than briefly.

UPDATE: I followed Orin Kerr's link to the excellent new blog, Law Culture, a group blog that includes two law professors whose work I greatly admire and enjoy: Kim Scheppele and Jennifer Mnookin. Mnookin was quoted in the Washington Times story on the Owl Club as having criticized the club in a 1986 Harvard Crimson editorial. She notes in a blog post that while she is listed as the author in the Crimson database, it was in fact a group staff editorial, not hers alone: "This wasn't actually a personal article at all, but a staff editorial. I hadn't written it -- or if I had, it was as part of a team effort, speaking in a collective voice rather than my own." She concludes: "Problem is, then and now, that you're only as accurate as your database."