"Kennedy for President."

The bumper sticker, seen today:


(Enlarge.)

"Choose Life" — the license plate... the Supreme Court case.

The way Adam Liptak puts it:

Had the states not decided to make license plates a forum for a sometimes comical array of messages, the “Choose Life” cases would easy. But many states have turned their motor vehicle departments into a kind of souvenir shop. They may also have given up the right to decide what gets sold in them.

Mm... yes... it's called "free speech," and much of it is foolish and/or opinionated. Religion is one more category of expression. Deal with it.

"A 'fashion genius' ... does ghastly drawings of Paula Abdul and turns out to be named Paula: Paula Goodspeed."

I wrote that back in February 2006. Noting that she had "teeth so huge a massive set of braces cannot begin to tame them," I said, "She sings terribly, but it's not enough just to tell her that. Simon has to say: 'I don't think any artist on earth could sing with that much metal in your mouth anyway. You have so much metal in your mouth.'"

I'm rereading that after observing that I had some significant traffic today to that post on a search for the name Paula Goodspeed. I plug the name into a news search and see this in the L.A. Times:

Tonight on "Inside Edition," you can visit the scene outside Paula Abdul’s home in Sherman Oaks, Calif., where a young fan may have committed suicide.

Paula Goodspeed was a self-described fan of the “American Idol” judge. There is no known reason why she would have committed suicide outside Abdul’s home, other than to be close at the end of her life to her apparent idol. Or to have her name forever linked with Abdul's.

Goodspeed’s body was found inside her car, which was decorated with a photo of Abdul hanging from the rear-view mirror. Her personalized license plate reads “ABL LV,” which has been said to stand for Abdul Love.

"Ms. Goodspeed's mother had gone to [the sheriff's department] to report her daughter missing and advised them that she might be suicidal," Los Angeles Police Capt. James Miller tells People. Officials "determined that Ms. Goodspeed may be up in the vicinity by Paula Abdul's house. Our officers discovered her vehicle parked on the street and found her inside. She was unresponsive to officers."

Authorities say her death may have been due to drug overdose, but tests still have to be performed.

Turns out Goodspeed auditioned for “American Idol” in 2005 and admitted a lifelong fascination with Abdul.

“I really like Paula Abdul a lot. She’s really cool. ... I’m like a really big fan and I make life-size drawings of Paula. I’ve been drawing ever since I was a little kid, and my first drawing was of Paula Abdul.”

Here's the old video:



It was fun back then to laugh at those drawings (and the delusional singing), but it's sobering now. I have to think that "American Idol" screens out numerous would-be contestants who are even more obviously disturbed. Perhaps some of them get the help they need. But Paula Goodspeed made the cut and entertained us for a few minutes back then. And now, we see how serious the ridiculous really was.

So you've paid $6 million for a vanity license plate, and there's one you'd pay $20 million for?

There's one? Which one?

Yes, right, there's one.

Which one?

There's one. I'm trying to tell you.

Well, go ahead and tell me.

Accepting the death penalty.

Talk Left notes a news report that says 12% of those who receive the death penalty choose not to appeal and suggests this is rational. Interesting. Back when Gary Gilmore refused to appeal his death sentence, people found it very disturbing that a man wouldn't fight to stay alive. There was an effort to bring an appeal for him, in spite of his refusal, with his mother as the party representing him, as if his refusal to appeal was a sign that he needed someone to stand in for him. The Supreme Court said she didn't have standing.

I wrote a law review article back in 1991 about Gilmore and a later case Whitmore, in which another person given the death sentence tried (unsuccessfully) to represent a murderer who declined to appeal. (The article is not linkable, but here's the cite: Althouse, Standing, in Fluffy Slippers, 77 Va. L. Rev. 1177 (1991).)

Here's a footnote from that article, on this question of whether it's sane to accept the death penalty:

This preference for death over prison is scarcely bizarre. Gilmore's decision, as reported in The Executioner's Song, seemed entirely sane and rational, given his long experience of the reality of prison life. Popular songs have long portrayed a life sentence as worse than execution. See G. Brooks, "Send Me to the 'Lectric Chair" (Mills Music, Inc. 1927) ("Now I don't want no bondsman here agoin' on my bail,/And I don't wanna spend them nine and ninety years in jail;/So judge, judge, good kind judge,/Send me to the 'lectric chair."); M. Haggard & J. Sanders, "Life in Prison" ("I begged they'd sentence me to die/ But they wanted me to live and I know why -- My life will be a burden every day/If I could die, my pain might go away."). And Patrick Henry said, "give me liberty or give me death!" to the 2d Revolutionary Convention in Virginia, March 23, 1775 (cited in 14 Encyclopedia Americana 108 (1986)), a sentiment the state of New Hampshire compels its drivers to bear on their license plates. See Wooley v. Maynard, 430 U.S. 705 (1977) (Court straining the doctrine of Younger v. Harris, 401 U.S. 37 (1971), to bar prosecution of the nonconformist couple who took offense at the slogan "Live Free or Die" and covered it up with tape); see also Cruzan v. Director, Mo. Dep't of Health, 110 S.Ct. 2841, 2885 (1990) (Stevens, J., dissenting) (citing Patrick Henry's quote in recognizing a "right to die"). For futher discussion of the Cruzan case, see infra note 57.

The most widely venerated refusal to fight the death penalty was that of Jesus: "Pilate questioned him again: 'Have you nothing to say in your defense? You see how many charges they are bringing against you.' But, to Pilate's astonishment, Jesus made no further reply." Mark 15:4-5. Like Gilmore, Jesus withdrew from the process the law afforded him and accepted execution. Why has Jesus' choice inspired reverence and Gilmore's scorn? Gilmore turned his back on a legal system we still support and view as a source of justice; Jesus turned his back on a legal process we consider corrupt and evil. Perhaps it is not that we despise the acceptance of death, but that we judge an expression of contempt of the legal system in accordance with our opinion of that system.

Socrates is also famous for accepting the death penalty. See Plato, Crito, reprinted in Plato, The Last Days of Socrates 53-70 (H. Tredennick trans. 1954). Unlike Gilmore and Jesus, however, Socrates did not refuse any available step in the legal process. He refused the extralegal step of escape and argued against violating the law in a legal system that had wronged him. Thus, he expressed the very antithesis of contempt for the legal system.

The most obvious explanation for the scorn directed at Gilmore is simply that in judging him, we cannot separate his preference for death from the fact that he was a murderer, just as we cannot separate our judgment of Jesus and Socrates from our knowledge that they committed no offense we can remotely understand as punishable by death. Whereas Jesus and Socrates were great men we would never have condemned, Gilmore was a social excrescence whose demise relieves us (judgment takes place in context, not in the abstract). Or perhaps, at least for those who support the death penalty, scorn for Gilmore's choice expresses frustration that he somehow destroyed the state's power to punish. Someone who prefers death will only be killed by execution -- not punished. Gilmore is incomparable with Jesus and Socrates for any number of reasons, but among those reasons is that only Gilmore deprived us of whatever satisfaction attaches to social vengeance.

It was hard to go through with writing a law review footnote like that, and this was an article full of unusual touches. The nice thing is that if you do write something strange and a law journal accepts it, they're not going to try to edit you into the form of the standard law review article. I wrote about that phenomenon in a little article called "Who's to Blame for Law Reviews?" And I maintain a very high opinion of the Virginia Law Review editors who accepted the "Fluffy Slippers" article -- which is full of evidence that I was dying to blog -- and who gave it such a sympathetic edit.

But back to the death penalty, what do you think of those who don't appeal? I assume these are all people who have only the hope of life in prison and who do not have a chance of going free, that is who would only be challenging the sentence not the finding that they were guilty of the crime.

Here in Wisconsin, we don't have the death penalty and haven't for over a century, but we'll be voting on the death penalty this fall. A new poll shows 54% of likely voters favor it, over 39% opposed. Check out the new "No Death Penalty" website, which is working against the Wisconsin referendum.

Imagine no SUVs... I wonder if you can...

Florida will be offering a specialty license plate with a picture John Lennon and the word "Imagine" to go along with the other special license plates like "Save the Manatee."

UPDATE: Go inside for the comments, where Doc Weasel throws down the gauntlet re Lennon. Sample: "Lennon flamed out around '65, his enduring fame is mainly because the liberals adopt any pop radical and make them a demi-god, Che, Rachel Corrie, Mumia, what have you."

ANOTHER UPDATE: Interestingly, no one went in to defend John Lennon! I wonder what that means. Who knows what more John might have done without Yoko or what portion of Paul's good and badness was a reaction to John? There was a mystical entity that was The Beatles. The amazing thing is that it came into being and existed at all, and I'm not inclined to blame any of the parts for not having been more than they were. They became The Beatles, and we'll never be able to understand how. You can pick your favorite Beatle and your favorite Beatle album and argue all you want about the way you rank these things, but the fact it, it was all so very good, and it was sad when it ended. More specifically, about John, I've always loved The White Album, and "Happiness Is a Warm Gun," in particular. Much more than the other Beatles (and even before he was killed), there was something about him that allowed people to project their own ideas and aspirations onto him. He, himself, was enigmatic. It was never even clear in "Revolution" whether he was for it or against it. That's something I like about him. I don't really think he was very political, except in an arty, emotive way. I don't really like to think of him in some endless face off against Paul. They were both great, and they were both greatest when they were able to connect with the other, and thank God they did for a few years.

God is up to His "mysterious ways" again.

In Austin, Texas, a vanity license plate reading "PS 105" makes RLC think he's found someone who went to his old school -- PS 105 (Public School 105) in the Bronx. He follows the car and finds an opportunity to ask about the plate, and it turns out to be a reference to Psalm 105. Does that mean anything? I mean, anything profound? Is reaching out to people via ambiguous vanity plates one of "His deeds among the peoples" that we are called upon to "make known"? Well, I'm doing my part making it known. How about you?