The NYT’s Linda Greenhouse notices the strange bedfellows in Morse v. Frederick, a high school free speech case heard by the Supreme Court today.

Here, if you have lots of time, are all the briefs in the case. Of especial interest are those strange bedfellows--briefs from the Alliance Defense Fund, the Christian Legal Society, the American Center for Law and Justice, and the ACLU, to choose just a few.

If I had to bet, the Court will find some sort of narrow way of deciding this case, either following Ken Starr’s argument that student speech about drug abuse can be controlled (but limiting it to this particular issue) or finding against the principal because she tried to exercise authority off school grounds when the student was, in effect, on his own time. I can’t imagine a sweeping vindication of the school’s authority here. If the Court did so, the concerns expressed by the conservative religious amici would have been vindicated, and the ability of school authorities to suppress student religious exercise would be next to impossible to resist.

Update: Professor Friedman has more here and here.

I grabbed the Sunday paper on my way out of Albuquerque this morning. Two articles caught my eye.

The first, titled "Iglesias’ Tenure a Low-Key Affair," offered an extensive account of David Iglesias’ career as a federal prosecutor. It cites a memo prepared for A.G. Gonzales in 2005:

The 2005 memo provides a biography of Iglesias, a demographic breakdown of New Mexico and a list of significant pending cases. Gonzales was attending a conference in New Mexico on border issues but had to leave because of terrorist bombings in London. He returned in the summer of 2006.

Cases listed as "significant" include:

A firearm case that resulted in a 30-year prison sentence for a felon possessing a gun during a robbery. The memo doesn’t mention similar cases the U.S. Attorney’s office declined to prosecute.

An investigation into an immigrant smuggling organization that included federal wiretaps that resulted in a 30-month sentence for the ringleader and even less time for his co-defendants.

A federal tax evasion case involving attorneys and accountants in which no one so far has received any jail time.

A fraud and conspiracy case involving Los Alamos National Laboratory that resulted in sentences of six months and one year for the two defendants.

An anti-heroin initiative in the Española area that began in the late 1990s under then-U.S. Attorney John Kelly and was continuing under Iglesias.

I may be mistaken, but this doesn’t sound like a record assembled by a go-getter prosecutor. Here’s more along those lines:

But the memo provided to Gonzales gives only partial insight into how the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Mexico operated under Iglesias.

Some insiders said they considered the office "risk averse"; in other words, extremely cautious about taking on high- visibility criminal cases.

A letter addressed to Gonzales was being circulated among some federal prosecutors here last week. Some had signed it but were undecided whether to send it because of speculation Gonzales might lose his job. Others didn’t share the views expressed.

The letter address[es] the recent controversy, describing Iglesias as an absentee boss who was more interested in travel than in running the office.

It said he "abdicated his responsibility as United States Attorney, turning over virtually every important decision to his subordinates."

The letter also said that Iglesias’ "lack of leadership" resulted in a decline in the quality of work produced by his office and that the reputation of the office had suffered during his tenure.

Apparently, Iglesias’ office had increased signficantly the number of immigration cases it handled (but most involved merely pushing paper and deporting the illegal immigrant), but hadn’t really increased its workload in other respects. (I’m summarizing and quoting extensively because the article is available only by means of a "premium" trial pass.)

The second piece, titled "Iglesias Earned His Firing," was written by a guest columnist, veteran Albuquerque lawyer Robert D. Taichert. According to Taichert, Iglesias’ problem

was excessive delay in pursuing the public’s business. It is erroneous to assume that Iglesias was being asked to rush anything. He was simply being called upon to fulfill his duties to the country in a timely fashion. Congressional delegations from any state routinely check on the performance of federal prosecutors in their districts and try to help that U.S. attorney to obtain additional resources if needed.

After noting that Senate Democrats on more than one occasion inquired about prosecutors’ investigation of "Plame-gate," he continues:

The truth will out. Iglesias was fired for not doing his job.

I am sure that the theatrical and politically ambitious Iglesias "felt pressured," because his terrible performance in office was, yet again, being called to account. The facts will show that Iglesias was often missing in action as a U.S. attorney. He was often not in his office, misused senior assistant U.S. attorneys’ time and talents and failed to move prosecutions for political corruption in New Mexico in a timely fashion.

His failures of management are well known in the New Mexico legal community. He was repeatedly asked by Domenici if his office needed more resources, and didn’t respond, although he now claims otherwise. The Senate Ethics Committee will discover that calls for his removal for failure of performance began as early as 2003.

And, lest you think that this is mere partisan hackery, consider this concluding paragraph:

U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, in keeping with the Bush administration’s chronic ineptitude, finally fired eight U.S. attorneys in a fashion guaranteed to create a political firestorm.

Here; hat tip: Rick Garnett.

Catholic homeschooler Sally Thomas describes her family’s routine, which sounds familiar, when translated into the language of the Reformed tradition for the Knippenberg household.

In addition, having spoken with a couple of folks in Albuquerque, I’m thinking of introducing my son to Euclid starting next year. In the mean time, I might try the Famous Mathematicians book she mentions.

Update: The Friar has a bit more, focusing on some of the "vices" homeschoolers display when they end up in college. It seems to me, however, that many of the vices (grade expectations, narcissism, and slovenliness, for example) are hardly unique to homeschoolers, even if they have slightly different sources.

One of the nice things about attending a conference is that you get to visit with all sorts of people. The Albuquerque Hyatt, for example, is just lousy with smart Canadians living on both sides of the border. (There are of course smart Americans too.)

I had an interesting conversation, I can’t now remember with whom (though alcohol consumption had nothing to do with it), that prompted the following reflections growing out of a suggestion made by Jonah Goldberg in his review of the D’Souza book.

Goldberg noted D’Souza’s rhetorical play on the fairly predictable liberal query: why do they hate us? The normal answer is that we’re so crass, so vulgar, so militaristic, so imperialistic, so, so American. D’Souza of course says they hate us because we’re so decadent, so libertine, so, so European.

We have all of course noted that everyone is selective in their consultation of "global public opinion." John Kerry, for example, wanted us to consider what his friends in Davos thought about our foreign policy, but not what our friends in the Vatican thought about some of our domestic social policies (with the possible exception of the death penalty, where there’s less of a gap between Davos and the Vatican). We’re often urged to consider how folks in the Arab world thought about our support of Israel, but, until D’Souza came along, I don’t think that anyone considered urging us to think about Arab opinion about our "lifestyles." And of course very few American mainline Protestants argue that we should derive lessons about social policy from their brethren, say, in Africa.

None of this is, or ought to be, surprising. We are, for the most part, partial and strategic in putting our views to the so-called global test. When citing those views serves our purpose, we do. Otherwise, we can gaze at our collective navels with the best of them.

I want, however, to defend the practice of global testing, properly understood. It has a long and philosophically distinguished heritage, expressed in terms of the consensus gentium, which is supposed to offer us a clue to the content of the natural law. If what we’re trying to do, in other words, is engage in the process of natural law-informed discernment, consulting the consensus gentium is, shall we say, reasonable. By itself, global public opinion is, of course, not definitive; it has to show the way to a coherent and defensible argument. And we have to be able to untangle that argument from the partialities and the passions with which it is always connected on both sides of the border. The fact that people somewhere disapprove of, or even hate, us for something doesn’t mean, by itself, that we’re doing anything wrong. One or the other (or both) of us could be blinded by passions or interests. But it is, as we Southwestern (for about another 24 hours or so) Social Scientists say, a data point.

But beyond using the global test to gain insight into the consensus gentium and hence into the natural law, there’s also this: in the prudential pursuit of our policies, especially those that involve and affect others and might require their cooperation and/or acquiesence, it makes darn good sense at least to consider what they think, even if they’re (in our considered moral and prudential judgment) wrong.

In other words, the global test is not something either to be slavishly followed or to be callously dismissed. In pursuit both of the moral truth and the national interest (informed by that truth), it makes sense to have our finger on the pulse of our neighbors, near and far. But the bottom line is that what comes first is the principle, with national interest aligned with it so far as is possible, given our fallen, finite, and fallible status in a broken world.

I enjoyed a lovely and lively dinner last night here in Albuquerque, hosted by frequent NLT commenter Gary Seaton. He’s a gracious and generous host, a first-class raconteur (at least Schramm class), and an incisive interlocutor. The other dinner companions were none too shabby either.

In an effort to add some diversity to NLT and to provide a context for the brouhaha over Dinesh D’Souza’s latest tome (see here, for example, as well as these posts from earlier this week), I’m offering, in its full visual glory, John Seery’s meditation on Las Vegas, which he visited solely in pursuit of higher learning. (For a less visually arresting version, go here.)

Prove you’re not stupid. That’s the label Peter Wood has come up with to describe the efforts of the Spellings DoE (much decried here at NLT) to get a handle on (put a leash on?) American higher education. Here’s my favorite chunk:

PYNS may sound like a healthy serving of common sense if you are thinking about colleges that soak up federal student loans and graduate marginally literate lunk-heads; and it may seem good medicine for universities with transvestite studies programs and the like that merely indoctrinate students in some version of victim idolatry. But PYNS comes at a considerable cost of intellectual freedom.

That’s because genuine liberal arts education cannot easily be fit to a regime of incessant outcomes assessment. Some things in education are easily measured; some can be measured only with difficulty; and some really defy reliable measurement. We can determine a student’s proficiency in reading or math; we can estimate a student’s comprehension of Plato or the Federalist Papers. But we face a daunting challenge to measure the depth of a student’s insight into a system of philosophy; the quality of a student’s grasp of Cymbeline or Beethoven’s violin sonata in F; how well a student holds in suspension the contradictions that lie between competing disciplines such as economics and political theory; and how fully a student synthesizes the disparities that lie between great theorists who disagree, or between the same though expressed in two languages.

He’s right, of course, but that won’t stop the DoE’s attempt to turn American higher education into a massive version of the typical K-12 public system.