John Podhoretz at The Corner nails down the meaning and the effect of the Bolton vote yesterday.

Politics is about perception, and the perception among Democrats is that President Bush is on a downward slide. If the opposition to John Bolton’s nomination began as a foreign-policy critique, it has now become a simple matter of power politics. The Democrats have decided that blocking Bolton is the test case of their continuing relevance. The president will almost certainly have to make a recess appointment for Bolton, and he might as well declare publicly that the Democrats are acting in bad faith and that he is acting to fill a critical job because the opposition party is playing politics with a critical foreign-policy job. No more negotiating over the Syria documents or the names of the intelligence officers. That’s a Democratic dodge and a dangerous one where the separation of powers is concerned.

Hundreds of thousands of people marched in Spain to protest the bill in front of the parliament supporting gay marriage. The march had the full support of the Catholic Church. The bill, which will become law in July, will become the most liberal in Europe (including that in the Netherlands). This is the BBC’s report on the march.

Howard Fineman’s take on the divisions in the AFL-CIO.

The House of Labor is divided against itself, and it’s not clear it can stand. For reasons of philosophy, money and ego—the Potomac power mix—the slice of America that used to be called "Big Labor" may soon collapse. A breakup would have broad implications in the workplace, pitting one set of unions, and one vision of unionism, against another. In politics, it would create competing spheres with one of them—the renegades—more willing to work with Republicans and more focused on organizing drives than on electoral politics. "In terms of Democratic politics, it’s a disaster," says Rick Sloan, the Machinists communications director. "It would eviscerate our ground capabilities in ways Karl Rove and Tom DeLay will try to exploit."

Jackson, TN celebrates June 19, 1865 (Juneteenth), the day the slaves in Galveston, TX, learned they were free. A hundred and forty years ago today Union General Gordon Granger brought the news. He stepped off the boat, unto the beach and read this:

The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free labor.

Just returned from a quick trip up to Maryland (to help celebrate my dad’s 75th). Gave money to the Washington Post to pass the time at Reagan. There were at least a few things worth reading, among them Robert Kagan’s latest, asking us to consider what might have happened had we not invaded Iraq, this piece on Iranian intellectual life (are large audiences for Richard Rorty and Juergen Habermas, as well as best-seller status for Nietzsche, signs of hope? you be the judge), and this long front-page article on Robert Byrd’s Klannish past. Dick Durbin’s oafish present merited only an unsigned little piece buried in the front section.

When I finished with the paper (a less all-consuming chore than it once was), I polished off the last bit of this book on Christian education, by Nicholas Wolterstorff, which could profitably be read by all the Southern Baptists considering whether to leave the public schools.

Porter Goss is interviewed by Time. The first two questions and answers:

WHEN WILL WE GET OSAMA BIN LADEN? That is a question that goes far deeper than you know. In the chain that you need to successfully wrap up the war on terror, we have some weak links. And I find that until we strengthen all the links, we’re probably not going to be able to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice. We are making very good progress on it. But when you go to the very difficult question of dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states, you’re dealing with a problem of our sense of international obligation, fair play. We have to find a way to work in a conventional world in unconventional ways that are acceptable to the international community.

Mark Steyn doesn’t (at first) question Senator Durbin’s patriotism, he starts off with his sanity!

One measure of a civilized society is that words mean something: "Soviet" and "Nazi" and "Pol Pot" cannot equate to Guantanamo unless you’ve become utterly unmoored from reality. Spot the odd one out: 1) mass starvation; 2) gas chambers; 3) mountains of skulls; 4) lousy infidel pop music turned up to full volume. One of these is not the same as the others, and Durbin doesn’t have the excuse that he’s some airhead celeb or an Ivy League professor. He’s the second-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Don’t they have an insanity clause?

Of course, you have to read the whole thing. Let Steyn’s words remind us that words are not idle things, and Durbin’s grotesque words have meaning. Durbin and others like him should learn this, and failing that, should at least quiet their wild and whirling words and know that words without thoughts never to heaven go. Steyn concludes:

This isn’t a Republican vs Democrat thing; it’s about senior Democrats who are so over-invested in their hatred of a passing administration that they’ve signed on to the nuttiest slurs of the lunatic fringe. It would be heartening to think that Durbin will himself now be subjected to some serious torture. Not real torture, of course; I don’t mean using Pol Pot techniques and playing the Celine Dion Christmas album really loud to him. But he should at least be made a little uncomfortable over what he’s done -- in a time of war, make an inflammatory libel against his country’s military that has no value whatsoever except to America’s enemies. Shame on him, and shame on those fellow senators and Democrats who by their refusal to condemn him endorse his slander.

Here’s the predictably simple-minded way in which the NYT editorial board understands the role of the judiciary under our Constitution:

Since the Supreme Court decided Marbury v. Madison in 1803, it has been clearly established that the courts have the ultimate power to interpret the Constitution. But right-wing ideologues, unhappy with some of the courts’ rulings, have begun to question this principle as part of a broader war on the federal judiciary.

The genius of the American system is that the founders carefully balanced power among three coequal branches. Mr. Hostettler’s amendment would throw out this brilliant structure, and 200 years of constitutional history, and make Congress the final interpreter of the Constitution.

I guess that in 1860 this editorial board would have defended the constitutional interpretation of the Taney court against that ideologue Abraham Lincoln, who was so presumptuous as to entertain a different interpretation of the Constitution. Or perhaps not. What matters, after all, is the result. When the courts support the correct result, the NYT supports them. When they don’t, who knows?

Had a...shall we say, full day...so I took my son’s bike out for a spin around the local farms. His bike resembles some short people I have known: tough and loud and mean, needing to prove himself at every turn in the road. Great fun with that V-twin throbbing under you, but it’s tough to keep it up more than fifty miles a ride. But those fifty miles are enlivening (and loud). My ears are ringing still (ear plugs mean nothing to this bike, as it growls its strength). So, the sun is setting, and I come across this is the Los Angeles Times. A scientist named Sandra Witelson, "a raven haired Canadian psychologist with a taste for black leather and red show girl nails," has made a discovery: A women’s brain and a man’s brain are different. It’s a long story, so grab your NLT mug and enjoy. John at Powerline wonders if it’s not too late for Harvard to get its $50 million back!

Here’s a snippet:

:The last Continental statesman who grasped the historical and cultural context of European unity was Charles de Gaulle. He wanted "the Europe of the Fatherlands (L’Europe des patries)" and at one of his press conferences I recall him referring to "L’Europe de Dante, de Goethe et de Chateaubriand." I interrupted: "Et de Shakespeare, mon General?" He agreed: "Oui! Shakespeare aussi!"

No leading member of the EU elite would use such language today. The EU has no intellectual content. Great writers have no role to play in it, even indirectly, nor have great thinkers or scientists. It is not the Europe of Aquinas, Luther or Calvin--or the Europe of Galileo, Newton and Einstein. Half a century ago, Robert Schumann, first of the founding fathers, often referred in his speeches to Kant and St. Thomas More, Dante and the poet Paul Valery. To him--he said explicitly--building Europe was a "great moral issue." He spoke of "the Soul of Europe." Such thoughts and expressions strike no chord in Brussels today.

Read the whole thing.  

Update: Tom Cerber has more thoughts here, linking Johnson’s piece with this one by David Brooks. Here’s Brooks’s concluding paragraph:

Today more people go to college. They may be assigned Rimbaud or Faulkner or even Hemingway. But somehow in adulthood, they tend to have less interest in that stuff than readers 40 years ago.