Via Hei Lun Chan: Chief Justice of the United States William Rehnquist is dead at the age of 80.

The interesting open question is whether Democrats on Capitol Hill will attempt to play games with the court’s composition (currently, there are four “liberals” and three “conservatives” on the Court) by delaying the Roberts vote into the Court’s October Term; presumably, the president could counter with recess appointments (or Republican senators could invoke the “nuclear option”). One hopes that both sides will resist the urge to further escalate the conflict over the court’s composition.

Randy Barnett explaining why faith in government is a dangerous thing:

[G]overnment at all levels has obviously not lived up to its promise of being able to anticipate and react to disasters and other social calamities better than nongovernmental institutions. This should not be surprising. Governments are comprised of ordinary human beings with the same limitations of vision and self-interests as those in the private sector (and often, but not always, with far worse incentives)—that is, these human beings confront pervasive problems of knowledge, interest, and power. I have the same reaction every time there are calls for increased government oversight in the aftermath of some failure in the private sector. What gives anyone confidence that government institutions will act with any more prescience? Moreover, it seems often the case that the core functions that are most often used to justify the existence of governments—such as public safety, national defense, and public infrastructure—are often the very tasks that are given short shrift by real world politicians in search of more “elevated,” seemingly less pedestrian goals than these. This seems especially the case when the failure to provide these “essential social services” can so often be obscured from public view or, when revealed, responsibility for failure can be shifted to others.

Incidentally, anyone who can’t acknowledge that the fuck-ups that led to tens of thousands of New Orleans residents are the combined fault of a Republican-controlled federal government and Democrat-controlled state and local governments is responding in a fundamentally unserious manner. See, for example, Eric Muller and Glenn Reynolds, two smart men who (a) I didn’t previously believe were fundamentally unserious (hence why I am not calling out nitwits like Kos and Atrios—their behavior is par for the course) and (b) should know better.

Oh, and brava to Sela Ward for laying the smackdown on Kanye West’s idiotic "FEMA hates blacks" meme (speaking of the fundamentally unserious) on Larry King Live tonight.

You know, a year ago the statement “Brandon Cox is no Jason Campbell” wouldn’t have been an insult.

Congratulations to the U.S. mens’ soccer team on qualifying for the 2006 World Cup Finals in Germany as a result of their 2–0 victory over Mexico in Columbus this evening. This is the fifth consecutive World Cup that the U.S. has qualified for, suggesting that the American squad is rapidly becoming a serious contender on the international scene.