NPR set Juan Williams on fire.

And it's all on Fox News.



Especially hot:

Nina Totenberg wished that Senator Jesse Helms and his grandchildren would get AIDS -- I said would get AIDS. She's still working there.

A so-called humorist on NPR said the world would be a better place if 4 million Christians evaporated. Hilarious.

And calling millions of members of the Tea Party movement a sexual pejorative, tea baggers won't get you in hot water either.

So it seems some opinions are more equal than others at NPR.

2 ways of looking at Michelle Obama.

1. She's "an incredibly graceful surrogate” for the President and inspires “warm and fuzzy” feelings.

2. "She's got this Stokely Carmichael-in-a-designer-dress thing going. If she starts talking... her instinct is to start with this blame America, you know, I'm the victim. If that stuff starts to coming out, people will go bananas and she'll go from being the new Jackie O. to being something of an albatross."

#1 is from Nina Totenberg, who still works for NPR. And #2 is from Juan Williams, who used to work for NPR. If statements like #1 are acceptable and statements like #2 get you fired, is that not viewpoint discrimination?

If NPR must now prove it is principled, what a bloodbath is coming!

NPR fired Juan Williams and justified it, via CEO Vivian Schiller, by invoking an official editorial policy:

"[A 'news analyst' has] a very different role than that of a commentator or columnist. News analysts may not take personal public positions on controversial issues; doing so undermines their credibility as analysts, and that's what’s happened in this situation. As you all well know, we offer views of all kinds on your air every day, but those views are expressed by those we interview — not our reporters and analysts....

"... NPR’s ethics code [states]: 'In appearing on TV or other media. ... NPR journalists should not express views they would not air in their role as an NPR journalist. They should not participate in shows ... that encourage punditry and speculation rather than fact-based analysis.”

"More fundamentally, 'In appearing on TV or other media including electronic Web-based forums, NPR journalists  should not express views they would not air in their role as an NPR journalist.'"

Now, NPR is in a position where it must prove that's not a pretext by applying that policy, with comparable severity, to its other on-air personalities. Lefties and righties are getting into this game. The lefties are targeting Mara Liasson. Here's Eric Boehlert at Media Matters:

[I]f you look at NPR's code of ethics, there's simply no way Liasson should be making appearances on Fox....

Liasson is part of the Fox News family. Period. For instance, Liasson appears on the Fox News website as a "Fox News contributor," not as "Fox News contributor to the sorta/kinda serious shows." The only way she'd really be able to defend her continued alliance would be to argue that Fox News in its entirely (i.e. Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity) is a serious endeavor worthy of NPR's status. But if Liasson can't defend all of Fox News, then her half-pregnant approach (i.e. she's only employed by a tiny portion of Fox News) just doesn't fly.

On the right, at the Weekly Standard, Stephen F. Hayes points at Nina Totenberg:

Over the past month, in her regular appearances on “Inside Washington,” she has: criticized a ruling of the Roberts Court as scandalous; claimed that Michelle Obama gives people “warm and fuzzy” feelings; called Bill Clinton “the most gifted politician I’ve ever seen;” and lamented that the Democratic Party is diverse enough to include moderates that want to extend all Bush tax cuts....

Her most partisan comment came when Charles Krauthammer pointed out that 31 Democrats in the House had written to Nancy Pelosi to call for extending the Bush tax cuts, Totenberg wished them out of the party. “When a party actually has a huge majority, it has a huge diversity.  And that is part of the problem that Democrats have.  But would I like it to be otherwise?  Of course.”

Hayes goes on, marshaling the evidence. You get the idea. It's open season on NPR news analysts... with 11 days to go before election day. A grisly October surprise.

If the last Protestant — Justice Stevens — leaves the Supreme Court, won't President Obama have to appoint a Protestant?

Nina Totenberg examines a topic people think they aren't supposed to talk about.

Let's face it: This is a radioactive subject. As Jeff Shesol, author of the critically acclaimed new book Supreme Power, puts it, "religion is the third rail of Supreme Court politics. It's not something that's talked about in polite company." And although Shesol notes that privately a lot of people remark about the surprising fact that there are so many Catholics on the Supreme Court, this is not a subject that people openly discuss.

I've written about it — on this blog and in the NYT.

Totenberg:

Professor Mark Scarberry at Pepperdine law school, a self-described evangelical Protestant, says there should be no religious test for appointment.

"But I don't think that that means that a president shouldn't pay at least some attention to religious diversity on the court," he said. "It does seem to me that when you have such a large part of the country that has a particular sort of religious worldview, if there is no one on the court who is able to understand that worldview in a sympathetic way, then that creates difficulties."

I think that since we talk about the race/ethnicity and sex of the Supreme Court nominees, we should talk about religious affiliation. Religion is an even more important aspect of diversity, since it resides in the human mind, and it is the mind that will be making the decisions that bind us. (Is it Protestant of me to think that religion resides in the human mind?)

It's odd how the problem has gone without notice until we are at the point where the Supreme Court will be composed entirely of Catholic and Jewish Justices. It does seem quite wrong to look at the short list of potential nominees and disqualify the very impressive candidates who are not Protestant. That seems like outright discrimination. But why is giving preference to a Protestant any different from going after  a female/Hispanic candidate, as President Obama did with the last appointment?

Nina Totenberg thinks Ted Stevens will be convicted.

Listen to the last line of her report.

"Is there no policy of protecting the home owner a little bit and the sanctity of the home from this immediate entry?"

Worried Justice O'Connor at oral argument in Hudson v. Michigan last Janauary. The case was reargued after Alito replaced O'Connor, and now, with Alito's vote, the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the state, permitting the use of evidence where the police failed to follow the "knock-and-announce" rule established in Fourth Amendment law.

Justice Scalia wrote the opinion:

When the knock-and-announce rule does apply, it is not easy to determine precisely what officers must do. How many seconds’ wait are too few?...

Happily, these issues do not confront us here. From the trial level onward, Michigan has conceded that the entry was a knock-and-announce violation. The issue here is remedy....

Suppression of evidence... has always been our last resort, not our first impulse. The exclusionary rule generates “substantial social costs,” ... which sometimes include setting the guilty free and the dangerous at large...

What the knock-and-announce rule has never protected, however, is one’s interest in preventing the government from seeing or taking evidence described in a warrant. Since the interests that were violated in this case have nothing to do with the seizure of the evidence, the exclusionary rule is inapplicable.

Justice Kennedy's vote was needed for the majority, and he wrote a separate opinion, denying that "violations of the [knock-and-announce] requirement are trivial or beyond the law’s concern" and that "the continued operation of the exclusionary rule, as settled and defined by our precedents, is not in doubt."

That's not how the dissenters saw it. Justice Breyer worried about letting the "police know that they can ignore the Constitution’s requirements without risking suppression of evidence discovered after an unreasonable entry." For a spirited defense of the exclusionary rule, read the whole thing.

UPDATE: The press is doing a bad job of reporting this case! I keep hearing and reading assertions that the Court said the police didn't commit a violation, when the government conceded that they did! This case was about what remedy was available for the violation.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Nina Totenberg gets it right.

"There's loads of room for judgment. The judges do judge."

Justice Breyer talks to Nina Totenberg about his new book, "Active Liberty." Totenberg does a nice job of challenging him -- after he's emphasized the democratic process over constitutional limitations -- by citing laws against abortion and laws regulating homosexual behavior, which the majority tries to enact and the Court insists on striking down. Breyer responds, conceding, as he must, that it's not all about the majority, that there are also constitutional rights for individuals and minorities, and that the judge still must do the hard work of drawing the lines: "There's loads of room for judgment. The judges do judge."

He doesn't talk about it in the interview, but presumably in the book, he uses the principle of democracy to define the scope of countermajoritarian rights. That's the real test of his theory, and that's where all the problems arise.

"There were very few women in law school."

So said Nina Totenberg on "Meet the Press" last Sunday. She was talking about 1981, the year Ronald Reagan appointed Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court. A lot of people have gone soft in the head over the O'Connor retirement. Can we please get a grip?

I graduated from law school in 1981. Law School was full of women then. The editor-in-chief of the Law Review was a woman both years I was on. The top three students in the class were women. It wasn't like: Wow, there's a woman on the Supreme Court -- now, I see that women can go into the field of law!

I remember in 1981 saying to one of my many women lawprofs that I was interested in going into law teaching. One of the things she told me was that it used to help to be a woman, because law schools needed to increase the number of women on their faculties, but unfortunately I'd already missed that boat. That was too cynical, of course, but my point is that it was something you could say with a straight face in 1981, so let's not pretend O'Connor was a lone pioneer.

Here's the whole Totenberg quote for reference:

[A]s the first woman--you know, young women today may not remember, but I was there and it was an incredibly moving moment when she was named to the court. And I covered the court back then and I was amazed at myself, at how emotionally caught up I was in it. At that point in the profession, there were almost no women judges. There were very few. There were almost no women lawyers. There were very few women in law school. Today, there are women all over the federal and state bench, lots of chief judges and state chief justices. The majority of law students in major American laws schools are women. So she essentially became the symbol, the opening of the doors, as she said to me in an interview last year. It sort of threw open the doors and the profession that was once an almost exclusively male club is now a totally integrated club.

This is, in fact, ridiculous.