[Guest post by DRJ]

According to a new book about the Bin Ladens, eldest brother Salem wanted to buy America:

“The Arab millionaire is charming but determined. He has made a bet to persuade four young Christian women from four different Western countries to become his wives simultaneously in accordance with the Islamic law that allows polygamy. The girls are American, British, French and German.

The man making the collective proposal is Salem Bin Laden, eldest brother of the better-known Osama, the al Qaeda terror mastermind. The girls are not streetwalkers or run-of-the-mill gold diggers. They come from “good families.” One is even a trained medical doctor.

And yet: None reject the offer.

After all, the Saudi suitor is offering luxury villas, jewels, and expensive cars. Having won his bet, Salem dismisses the girls. He has proved that, provided you have money, you can buy anyone and anything in the West.

Steve Coll’s marvelous new book, “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century,” which relates the episode, is presented as a collective biography of the infamous family, some 50 or so sisters and brothers begotten by a single illiterate, poor, one-eyed Yemeni bricklayer, later a Saudi millionaire, from his numerous wives and concubines.”

The book is Steve Coll’s “The Bin Ladens” and it sounds interesting.

Younger brother Osama also has a goal: He wants to bankrupt America.

– DRJ

[Guest post by DRJ]

I can’t imagine putting a bumper sticker on a new car but I saw one today that caught my attention:

Brand new black SUV.

Driven by a young, very pretty (female) brunette.

Bumper sticker: “Well-behaved women rarely make history.”

I wonder if this driver is a devotee of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich? Ulrich first wrote a similar statement in 1976 as a graduate student and now she teaches at Harvard. Amazon summarizes Ulrich’s quote this way (from a Washington Post review):

“At the beginning of her career as a historian of early America, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich published an article entitled “Virtuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735.” Could anything sound more narrowly academic than that — a scholarly examination of a small subset of Puritan funeral sermons? But Ulrich’s paper was destined to have a long history. It opened this way:

“Cotton Mather called them ‘the hidden ones.’ They never preached or sat in a deacon’s bench. Nor did they vote or attend Harvard. Neither, because they were virtuous women, did they question God or the magistrates. They prayed secretly, read the Bible through at least once a year, and went to hear the minister preach even when it snowed. Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history.”

Great quote. Is it true?

UPDATE: What about men: Do well-behaved men seldom make history?

– DRJ

[Guest post by DRJ]

According to the New York Times, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has told his senior aides he is involved in a prostitution ring:

“Gov. Eliot Spitzer has informed his most senior administration officials that he had been involved in a prostitution ring, an administration official said this morning.”

The Times’ article adds these details:

“Just last week, federal prosecutors arrested four people in connection with an expensive prostitution operation. Administration officials would not say that this was the ring with which the governor had become involved. But a person with knowledge of the governor’s role said that the person believes the governor is one of the men identified as clients in court papers.

The governor’s travel records show that he was in Washington in mid-February. One of the clients described in court papers arranged to meet with a prostitute who was part of the ring, the Emperors Club VIP on the night of Feb. 13.

Mr. Spitzer appeared on a CNBC television show at 7 a.m. the next morning. Later in the morning, he testified before a Congressional committee.”

Spitzer, a former New York Attorney General, ran for Governor by pledging to “bring ethics reform and end the often seamy ways of Albany.” He is expected to issue a statement today.

Perhaps Glenn Greenwald should consider adding a few Democrats to his newest book, Great American Hypocrites. Gov. Spitzer might be available for the book tour.

UPDATE 1: Rumors abound that Spitzer will resign. Beldar weighs in here.

UPDATE 2: A suggested resignation speech from XRLQ.

– DRJ

UPDATE BY PATTERICO: DRJ suggested that Glenn Greenwald might actually be put out by Eliot Spitzer’s amazing hypocrisy in denouncing prostitution even as he sought out prostitutes.

OK, she didn’t really believe Greenwald would care about Spitzer’s hypocrisy. And, as it turns out, he does not. Spitzer’s hypocrisy is merely an inconvenient fact that Greenwald knows he must acknowledge — so he can move on to the real point, which is that what he did isn’t that bad, that the prosecution seems political, etc.

I’m sure Ellensburg would react the same way if it were a conservative who had been caught.

Jeez, what a hack that guy is.

[Guest post by Jack Dunphy]

In “Love and Consequences” author Margaret B. Jones wrote of her experiences growing up in foster care in South-Central Los Angeles. She joined a gang and ran drugs, she even received a revolver for her 13th birthday. The book received great reviews in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. Jones was scheduled to begin a book tour next week.

She is now free to make other plans.

She made it all up. Jones never lived in South-Central, never sold drugs, never belonged to a gang. The revelation comes a week after another celebrated memoir, “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years” by Misha Defonseca, was also revealed as a fraud.

The first chapter of Jones’s book is available on the New York Times website, and it’s clear from reading it that the book was never vetted by anyone with a knowledge of gangs in Los Angeles. In the fourth paragraph, Jones describes an “Original Gangster” named Kraziak, who drives a “candy-red 1969 Chevy Chevelle Malibu Super Sport with two black racing stripes up the middle and a red flag (bandana) neatly folded and tied around the rearview mirror.”

One might see a gangster flying his colors like that at a gang funeral or some other setting where he is surrounded by and protected by friends, but no one, least of all someone as savvy as this Kraziak is portrayed as being, would dare drive around South-Central L.A. with his Blood rag tied to his mirror unless he had a death wish.

It’s a sad story. Jones clearly has talent as a writer, and had she submitted the book as a novel she might now be on her way to fame rather than infamy. It was her own sister who tipped off the publisher, raising the question of how she thought she would ever get away with it.

Over the Christmas vacation I read Clarence Thomas’s memoir “My Grandfather’s Son.” I recommend it highly. The people who most need to read it are the very people who never will: the leftists who have bought off on the idea that Thomas is a conservative bogeyman who is evil and never should have become a Supreme Court Justice.

I began reading Justice Thomas’s book as I waited in line to meet him at Chapman University, and my overwhelming impression of the first 20-30 pages was: “Man. This guy was poor.”

Some of the stories in the book were already familiar to me from the reviews I had read, such as the inspiring story of his training for (and running) a marathon:

A young black Marine was handing out water to the exhausted runners. “God, this is hard,” I told him. “That’s what you asked for,” he replied without a trace of sympathy. I shook off my self-pity, picked up my pace, and crossed the finish line three hours and eleven minutes after I’d started.

But many stories were new to me. For example, at Yale Law School, Thomas lost his wallet one day, and learned that it had been turned in by John Bolton. That was the beginning of a friendship with Bolton. Thomas also relates that Lani Guinier helped him get a job with a black civil-rights law firm.

Yup, Thomas wanted to work for a black civil-rights law firm. He was something of a leftist in his younger days.

That leads me to another story I hadn’t heard until I read the book: Thomas applied to and was accepted at Harvard Law School. But after visiting the school, he decided to decline the invitation to attend, even before he had received his answer from Yale. You see, after visiting Harvard, he decided it was too conservative.

Thomas also voted for McGovern — although he did so with misgivings, believing that McGovern was too conservative a candidate.

Thomas’s intellectual movement from angry black radical to conservative Republican is an important part of the book. He describes reading the words of Thomas Sowell for the first time: “I felt like a thirsty man gulping down a glass of cool water.”

One thing that people might not know about Thomas is how tight money was for him. While at Yale, he had no idea how he was going to repay his student loans, so he signed up for a “tuition postponement option” — which he clearly needed, as he was living in roach- and rat-infested surroundings even during his tenure at EEOC. This led to one of the more amazing tidbits of the book. The emphasis is mine:

I didn’t know what else to do, so I signed on the dotted line, and spent the next two decades paying off the money I’d borrowed during my last two years at Yale. I was still making payments when I joined the Supreme Court.

Wow.

Thomas has some choice words for the media. He describes how an Atlanta reporter investigated his home life during his nomination to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The reporter got a personal tour of Pinpoint from Thomas’s mother.

The reporter later told me that his doubts were laid to rest that day, but his editor refused to let him say anything favorable about me in the piece that finally ran.

The slanders against Thomas during his confirmation hearings are too numerous to list, but here is one good example. While working for the Attorney General’s Office in Missouri, Thomas wanted to make a point to a colleague about race. So, returning from one of his trips to Savannah, Thomas had brought back “a miniature Georgia flag — the same one that had been adopted in 1956, with the Confederate flag and the Georgia state seal displayed side by side — and asked him to try to imagine how he would have felt growing up under a flag like that had he been black.” When Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court, this turned into a story that he had kept a Confederate flag on his desk.

The media, of course, jumped all over the story, tracking down so-called experts who’d never met me and inviting them to sound off about the psychological implications of this nonevent.

The cynicism of Washington politics that Thomas describes isn’t particularly surprising, but readers may be taken aback by the cheerful openness with which some politicians admitted to him the naked political calculations that governed their decisionmaking. In interviews during the Supreme Court nomination process, Thomas says:

Bob Packwood, on the other hand, was direct: he said that he liked me, agreed with many things that I had said, and thought that I would be a fine member of the Court, but that he couldn’t vote for me because his political career depended on support from the same women’s groups that were opposing my nomination. Al Gore was equally candid when a friend of mine approached him, saying that he’d vote for me if he decided not to run for president.

You might think Thomas would be appalled by such crass political considerations, but he says he appreciated those politicians who gave such honest answers “instead of making up some transparent excuse.”

One man who didn’t pass the honesty test was lyin’ Joe Biden, who promised Thomas that he would open the hearings with some softball questions to set Thomas at ease — and then asked a blatantly dishonest question right out of the gate. (Biden ripped a Thomas quote out of context to suggest that he supported judicial activism, when the full quote in context showed Thomas making the exact opposite point.)

Thomas’s treatment at the hands of the Democrats turned his mom off of Democrats for life:

Never before had I seen her as angry as she was in the fall of 1991. All her life she’d assumed that Democrats in Washington were sensible leaders — but now she saw these men as single-issue zealots who were unwilling to treat her son fairly. “I ain’t never votin’ fo’ another Democrat long as I can draw breath,” she told me as we walked out of the Senate building on what should have been my final day of testimony. “I’d vote for a dog first.”

Heh.

I gained new respect for a couple of people besides Thomas reading this book. Larry Thompson, whose name was batted around as a possible replacement for Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General, was one of those people. Thomas relates that Thompson attended the University of Michigan Law School, but left his race off the application. Thompson proved to be a reliable friend when Thomas needed help during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Thompson was working at a law firm in Atlanta when Thomas called him for help:

“Larry, I need your help,” I said.

“I’ll be there on Monday.”

“It’ll all be over by then.”

“Then I’ll be there in the morning.” And that was that.

Now that’s a stand-up guy.

I also gained a new respect for Juan Williams, whom I had always thought of as the rather soft-headed liberal on Fox News, who regularly gets beaten up by Brit Hume for being so utterly clueless.

But it turns out that, whatever his faults, Juan Williams is an honest guy who writes accurate columns with truthful quotations. The first big splash Thomas made in Washington was when Williams reported some off-the-cuff remarks Thomas had made to Williams about race. Thomas (rather naively) hadn’t realized his statements to Williams would be printed in the paper — but when they were, he says, he saw that Williams “presented my opinions accurately and fairly.” (They still created something of a firestorm. It was not popular for blacks to publicly say what Thomas had said.)

There is some anger in the book reserved for the bigots who attacked Thomas during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. This anger makes for some of the better quotes in the book, so I’ll give you a taste of a couple of them.

The mob I now faced carried no ropes or guns. Its weapons were smooth-tongued lies spoken into microphones and printed on the front pages of America’s newspapers. It no longer sought to break the bodies of its victims. Instead it devastated their reputations and drained away their hope. But it was a mob all the same. And its purpose — to keep the black man in his place — was unchanged.

And this:

As a child in the Deep South, I’d grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult, I was starting to wonder if I’d been afraid of the wrong white people all along. My worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia but in Washington, D.C., where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony.

In case you’re thinking that Thomas is the only one who feels this way, let me quote Juan Williams, to show you why I have such new respect for him:

To listen to or read some news reports on Thomas over the past month is to discover a monster of a man, totally unlike the human being full of sincerity, confusion, and struggles whom I saw as a reporter who watched him for some 10 years. He has been conveniently transformed into a monster about whom it is fair to say anything, to whom it is fair to do anything. President Bush may be packing the court with conservatives [a joke of an argument given what we know about Souter — Patterico], but that is another argument, larger than Clarence Thomas. In pursuit of abuses by a conservative president the liberals have become the abusive monsters.

Nicely said, Juan — and as true today as it was in the early 1990s.

Luckily, the public mostly saw through the Democrats’ smoke and mirrors. Thomas tells the moving story of finishing his Anita Hill testimony and going to a very public dinner at Morton’s of Chicago in D.C., joined by Robert Bork and his wife, Ted Olson and his wife, and Orrin Hatch. Thomas says that “though I briefly felt exposed and uncomfortable,” he had an enjoyable dinner, capped by this:

When we rose to leave at the end of the evening, the entire restaurant erupted in a spontaneous standing ovation. We also found out later that several patrons had offered to pick up our very substantial tab, but Senator Hatch had insisted on paying.

I’m sorry I wasn’t there for that. But I recently got to participate in another standing ovation for Justice Thomas, at Chapman University. And that was pretty good.

I hope readers of this site will buy this book (or borrow it from the library) and read it. If you do, please let me know.

I have to say, Amazon’s Kindle looks pretty cool. Check out the promotional video here.

Some of what it does is nothing new. I already read blogs on my Treo — and I read the ones I want to read, not just the ones some corporate types have picked for me.

But the idea of reading books on a light portable electronic device, with a no-glare screen, sounds very cool. I’m waiting to see more reviews from people who have actually bought it, to see what people think of it. Is the screen really as readable as the video claims? Is it as user-friendly as it appears from the video? Etc.

They should have some way of allowing people who already own books to download those books for a reduced price. I can see wanting to own a hard copy, but spending a couple extra bucks per book to have the option of having the book loaded into the Kindle for when I don’t want to carry the whole book around with me.

One “downside” that doesn’t bother me in the slightest: the idea that I won’t be able to brag to others about what I read.

If you have used this device, please tell us about it.

P.S. One more thing: it shouldn’t require a “fee” for Kindle users to put their own documents on the device. You should simply be able to download them to an expansion card and put them on yourself. It would be very cool to be able to put work-related documents on this device and carry them around easily.

[Guest post by DRJ]

Two recent books have become popular with parents who reject PC childrearing and want experiences for their children that are more like their own childhoods. The first book is “The Dangerous Book for Boys” and the most recent is “The Daring Book for Girls.”

The Instapundit and his wife Dr. Helen interviewed the authors of these books in two podcasts: “The Dangerous Book for Boys” podcast link is here and “The Daring Book for Girls” link is here.

One concept behind these books is that kids don’t do many hands-on things anymore. They don’t know how to repair things, they don’t understand how things work, and they don’t experiment with things anymore - let alone experiment and fail. Modern parents (myself included) expect and often get perfection from our kids but we may not be doing them any favors if we don’t let them learn things for themselves. In other words, while it’s true kids may be inept at everyday tasks, the greater issue is that too often we encourage them not to try new things because they might fail.

I guess this must be a conservative philosophy because today’s New York Times has an editorial entitled “Childhood for Dummies” that lambastes these books and, by implication, the concepts behind them [emphasis supplied]:

“Nostalgic parents who made a best seller of a faux- 1920s rough-and-tumble manual, “The Dangerous Book for Boys,” may soon do the same with its just-published companion, “The Daring Book for Girls.”

Here are some excerpts. Try these, girls, if you dare:

Page 57: “Putting Your Hair Up With a Pencil.”

Page 82: “The Daring Girls Guide to Danger.” (“5. Wear high heels.” “7. Try sushi or another exotic food.”)

Page 47: “Throwing the Ball.” (“Start with the ball in your right hand, stretching your arm straight out behind you. Standing with your feet apart, one forward and one slightly back, point your forward foot — or, the foot on the side of your glove hand — in the direction the ball will go …”)

Hmmm. Maybe the “Dangerous” boys’ version is more adventuresome:

Page 98: “Making a Paper Hat.”

Page 180: “Wrapping a Package in Brown Paper and String.”

Guess not.

Having read both books, we can assure you that very, very little in them is remotely dangerous or daring, and that anything on the borderline, like shooting bunnies (“Dangerous,” Page 238) or climbing trees (“Daring,” Page 158), is covered by a very strict NOTE TO PARENTS: “All of these activities should be carried out under adult supervision only.”

We’re not sure if that applies to Page 171 of “Dangerous”: “Skipping Stones.”

These books are so clearly not about daredeviltry.

They are about ineptitude. They seem to perfectly capture a fear, floating in the culture, that a generation of preoccupied parents has been raising a generation of children full of sophisticated knowledge that is useless when the power goes out or the batteries die. That children have superior thumb-joystick coordination and TV-plot-discernment abilities, but cannot tie their shoes. (We have Velcro for that now.)

How strange, yet telling, that parents would see a pair of $24.95 how-to manuals as the keys to a richer childhood. (Page 139: “To make a daisy chain, pick 20 or so daisies.”)

We do hope the trend dies out before the next book:

“Lying on your back in your crib, point your knees outward and draw your heels toward your stomach. Using both hands, grasp your left ankle, if you are right-handed (or right ankle, if left-handed), and slowly draw your toes into your mouth. Chew with caution!”

It is quite possible, of course, that these books are actually the driest form of satire — that their authors have pulled off a publishing coup with a deadpan earnestness worthy of Borat.

But oh, how cruel the joke, if so:

Page 247: “In one sense, hiking is just walking on a footpath that often angles up, but in the wilderness.”

Page 69: “Snowballs.” “To make a snowball, scoop up enough snow to fill your hands …”

There’s very little to say in response to this rant. The editors opt for sarcasm and contempt rather than logic and thoughtful consideration … but that’s something the New York Times seems to do more and more these days.

– DRJ

[guest post by Justin Levine] 

In terms of radical leftwing academics, I can think of very few who are both good writers and have ideas that should be taken seriously.

However, one such person that comes to mind is Mike Davis, a Southern California historian and author of the bestselling book The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster.

One provocative chapter in that book is entitled “Let Malibu Burn: A political history of the Fire Coast.”

An excerpt of that chapter can be found here. [Recommended reading in light of the fires we’ve had in the area the past few days.]

Naturally, you can challenge Davis on a number of levels, but one of his underlying points seems to be beyond debate at this juncture – wildfires in Malibu are a naturally reoccurring phenomenon that are guaranteed to return to haunt us every few years. So unless we radically rethink how that area is to be zoned and constructed, people will be indirectly subsidizing the Hollywood limousine-liberal millionaires of the area who use a disproportionate amount of state firefighting resources and disaster relief in order to keep rebuilding the area the same way and maintain their lifestyle.

Davis’s own take –

A perverse law of Pyne’s new fire regime was that fire stimulates development as well as upward social succession. By declaring Malibu a federal disaster area and offering blaze victims tax relief as well as preferential low-interest loans, the Eisenhower administration established the precedent for the public subsidization of firebelt suburbs. Each conflagration, moreover, was punctually followed by rebuilding on a larger and more exclusive scale as land-use regulations and sometimes even the fire code were relaxed to accommodate fire “victims.” As a result, renters and modest homeowners were displaced from areas like Broad Beach, Paradise Cove and Point Dume by wealthy pyrophiles encouraged by cheap fire insurance, socialized disaster relief and an expansive public commitment to “defend Malibu.”

Food for thought.

Taking a page from (Malibu resident) Rob Reiner’s own playbook, I would propose a new California proposition amending the state constitution to increase real estate taxes on Malibu homeowners with such funds being dedicated to firefighting resources in L.A. County. We need to do it for the children you understand….

Matt Welch has a book out — his first book! — about John McCain. You can buy it here. Welch really has McCain’s number, in distinct contrast to the media usual slavering over McCain’s supposed Incredible Honesty and Maverick Status. Having declared myself a mortal enemy of McCain, I would not be able to bear reading another media personality servicing McCain in prose. This book does not do that, I am pleased to report.

Matt’s writing style is very snappy and entertaining. He comes at the issues with a point of view, but discloses it up front — just like you wish journalists would do. And he really, really lets McCain have it.

You might be thinking: why would I want to buy a book by a young whippersnapper like Welch? Well, Matt and I recently discovered that we were born within minutes of each other. So although he may superficially appear to be a young punk, he’s actually a wise old fella like myself.

Go buy it.

UPDATE: I almost forgot to tell you the title. “McCain: The Myth of a Maverick.” I like it.

David Garrow on Clarence Thomas’s autobiography:

[F]atuous op-ed columnists who insistently declare that Thomas is just bitterly wallowing in self-pity have either failed to read this book or possess an undeclared bias that overwhelmed their critical faculties.

Unfortunately, there is no short of fatuous op-ed columnists.

[posted by Justin Levine] 

Caught author/legal pundit Jeffrey Toobin speaking at the L.A. Library this evening, discussing his Supreme Court book “The Nine”. [Patterico’s thoughts on the book here, here, here, here, here, and here, here, and here. Recital of the one snippet I read here.]

Toobin made one bold prediction of note that stirred the audience’s attention. He said if Hillary Clinton becomes President and has the opportunity for a Supreme Court nomination, her first choice will be….Barack Obama.

He insisted that he was dead serious about this.

His reasoning?

1.  Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review before graduating with honors there.

2.  Obama was a professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago Law School.

3.  “…and in typical ‘Clinton-Machiavellian’ fashion, Hillary would be getting rid of a potential political rival with her appointment.”

I’ve been saying some pretty nasty stuff about Jeff Toobin’s book — and I have lots more on deck — so I thought I’d give the guy a break and relate some of the amusing anecdotes I learned from the book. These stories are part of the reason I managed to enjoy the book, even though I found so much of it to be inaccurate, unreliable, exaggerated, distorted, and dishonest.

I got a real chuckle out of one anecdote in which Toobin recounts the reaction of anti-Semite Richard Nixon, upon meeting the sartorially challenged William Rehnquist:

John Dean, Nixon’s White House counsel, remembered that when he first introduced Rehnquist to the president, the then-assistant attorney general “was wearing a pink shirt that clashed with an awful psychedelic necktie, and Hush Puppies.” According to the White House tapes, after Rehnquist left, Nixon asked Dean, “Is he Jewish? He looks it. . . . That’s a hell of a costume he’s wearing, just like a clown.”

Hilarious — and I’d never heard it before.

Among passages that malign Clarence Thomas, Toobin manages to include some details that truly humanize this most friendly and outgoing of the justices. Toobin describes Thomas as “universally adored” on a personal level:

Fellow justices, law clerks, police officers, cafeteria workers, janitors — all basked in Thomas’s effusive good nature. His rolling basso laughter frequently pierced the silence of the Court’s hushed corridors. Unlike the rest of his colleagues, Thomas learned the names of all the new clerks every year, including those of his ideological adversaries, and he frequently invited the young lawyers into his chambers to chat, often for two or three hours. One year Thomas became friendly with a Stevens clerk, a lesbian whose partner was a professional snowboarder; Thomas liked the two of them so much that for a while he kept a photograph of the snowboarder on his desk. When the wife of one of his former law clerks lay dying in the hospital, Thomas and his wife spent several nights comforting the couple through the ordeal.

Thomas is also a note-passer during oral argument:

Although Thomas asked almost no questions of the lawyers at oral argument, he wasn’t silent on the bench. Thomas sat to Breyer’s right, and the two of them often whispered and joked to each other, barely muffling their frequent laughter. . . . Breyer and Thomas passed notes, too, often mocking each other’s positions in good-natured ways. “States’ rights über Alles,” Breyer might write, and Thomas, in another case, would jot, “Always for the criminal, eh?” This wasn’t feigned fellowship. It was a portrait of colleagues who genuinely cared for each other.

The one time I saw a Supreme Court argument (Justice White’s last day on the bench), I saw evidence of this. Thomas and Scalia passed notes to each other, using a runner to take the notes back and forth. Each would smile upon receiving the other’s note.

Toobin also relates a couple of wonderful quotes from John Roberts’s Reagan-era memos. For example, Warren Burger apparently requested the creation of another appellate court, to sit above the Courts of Appeals, to lighten the Supreme Court’s workload. Roberts discussed the request in a memo that included this classic line:

While some of the tales of woe emanating from the Court are enough to bring tears to the eyes, it is true that only Supreme Court justices and schoolchildren are expected to and do take the entire summer off.

Heh. I also liked this line, in a memo rejecting a Democrat congressman’s proposal for a “conference on power sharing” to “iron out the duties of each branch of government”:

There already has, of course, been a “Conference on Power Sharing.” It took place in Philadelphia’s Constitution Hall in 1787, and someone should tell [Congressman] Levitas about it and the “report” it issued.”

Classic.

There is also a heartwarming story about a party Breyer threw for Alito to commemorate his ascension to the High Court’s bench, and many more.

Even if you’re a total Supreme Court junkie like myself, there are bound to be stories you haven’t read before. These stories — and not Toobin’s ludicrous leftist arguments, factual mistakes, and distortions — are the main reason I enjoyed much of this book.