Thanks for everyone who tried to help me with my bleg for help on my issues transferring .mp3 files to my Treo 650.

The winning answer came from SlimGuy, who wrote:

Here’s the information from the Palm Customer Support Tech Library 

Note they talk about the files having to be in the “audio” directory.

Have a treo650 myself with a 2gb card, but I use it mostly for photos

Hope this helps.

It did.

SlimGuy noted online documentation that said other subdirectories were supported, including SD_Audio and RN-Audio. But for someone who had to create their own subdirectory, as I did, only the Audio subdirectory did the trick. Now I am typing this as I listen to randomized songs from 24 different albums — and I’m only using about 75% of my card. Awesomeness defined.

Thanks again to SlimGuy.

Armed Liberal’s oldest son is joining the Army and trying out for Special Forces. He mentioned this to me a while back, but is now publicly announcing it. Wish him and his son good luck.

Linda Greenhouse says: “Judicial liberals have been playing defense for close to 40 years . . .”

Yup. All they got in the last 40 years was Roe v. Wade (establishing a right to abortion), Casey (reaffirming Roe), Dickerson (reaffirming Miranda), Grutter (supporting affirmative action), McConnell (allowing suppression of free speech in the name of campaign finance reform), Furman (striking down the death penalty), Roper v. Simmons (banning execution of juveniles through disingenuous arguments), Atkins v. Virginia (banning execution of the retarded through disingenuous arguments), Kelo (egregiously expanding eminent domain powers), Raich (egregiously expanding the reach of the Commerce Clause), and about fifty other ridiculous decisions.

I mean, if these guys are playing defense, I’d hate to see them playing offense.

What scares me is that I may live to see exactly that.

P.S. Here’s how this neutral, fair, and balanced journalist ends her piece:

Two years ago, Professor Tribe suspended work on the third edition of his monumental treatise on constitutional law, declaring that the moment had passed for propounding a “Grand Unified Theory.” His current ambition, he says now, is to “teach to the future,” in ways that will challenge the current climate and “make a difference 20, 30 or 40 years from now.”

Now there’s a plan.

I’m all for that! I mean, I suppose liberals would be all for that!

I don’t have anything to say about Adam Cohen’s stupid piece on judicial activism that I didn’t say in this September 2006 post.

UPDATE: Ilya Somin administers a few extra kicks, as do the crowd at Bench Memos (here, here, and here.)

This is just fascinating.

That L.A. Times hit piece about Fred Thompson’s alleged lobbying for an abortion rights group had a passage that originally read as follows:

But Judith DeSarno, who was president of the family planning association in 1991, said Thompson lobbied for the group for several months.

At one of the meals, she recalled, Thompson re-enacted a cowboy death scene from one of his movies. She also remembered him telling her that Sununu had just given him tickets for a VIP tour of the White House for one of Thompson’s sons and his wife.

Jim Geraghty says that the bolded language describes an event that could not have happened. Garaghty cites to Thompson’s Internet Movie Database entry, which he says shows that Thompson hadn’t made any cowboy movies as of 1991. I don’t know if Geraghty is right about this, but nothing jumps out at me as a movie that would have contained a cowboy death scene. (If you learn something to the contrary, you know where to find me.)

Stranger still, the language I have bolded — language that (if Geraghty is right) undercuts the credibility of the witness telling the story — is now gone from the story.

The language was originally there in the first version printed on the Web. The passage was quoted, among other places, at Hot Air, Obsidian Wings, lefty blog Corrente, and many other places around the Web. And if you plug the missing sentence into Google News, you’ll even pull up links to the L.A. Times story — although when you click through, you’ll see that the sentence is gone.

It appears that the version quoted by bloggers was an early version that was later edited before making it into the print edition. A friend has confirmed for me that the passage was not included in the print edition of the paper — at least in the edition he received. This means that the removal of the passage may not be nefarious — it’s possible that it was simply an editing decision made for innocent reasons, like space issues.

But if it’s true that Thompson had never made a cowboy movie before 1991, then the L.A. Times owes readers a duty to re-examine the story in light of that fact — and to report that the witness was talking about a movie that never existed. Even if the story wasn’t reported in the print edition, it’s information tending to undercut the credibility of a key witness against Thompson. The paper should look into it and report it.

I’ll write the Readers’ Representative and ask if that’s going to happen.

By the way, I complained the other day that the editors had failed to put up the document purporting to be the minutes of a meeting discussing Thompson’s hiring. Well, whether it’s in response to my complaint or not (I assume not), they have finally posted the document. Document experts, the ball’s in your court!

UPDATE: James Joyner says:

I would note, however, that, at the time of the incident in question, Thompson had appeared in a minor role in a movie called “White Sands.” While not technically a Western, it’s certainly reasonable for it to have been construed as such from casual conversation. I haven’t seen it, so I have no clue whether Thompson’s character was shot in it.

We should all keep in mind that it hasn’t been proven that Thompson wasn’t in such a movie. Similarly, hilzoy says in comments:

One of our commenters pointed out that he was in Thunderheart, which was released in April 1992 (so presumably filming in 1991), and could easily be misremembered as a Western. Whether Thompson’s character dies in it, whether this is the right movie, etc., I have no idea.

Interesting.

UPDATE x2: Some commenters are disputing the notion that these movies fit the anecdote told by Ms. Sarno.

UPDATE x3: The L.A. Times has identified the movie in question: “Keep the Change.” Details here. Preliminarily, it sounds plausible that this is the right movie.

[posted by Justin Levine] 

Last month, I noted a devastatingly insightful piece by Jeffrey Rosen on Justice Anthony Kennedy. [I’m not naive – I doubt that Rosen would have bothered to write his piece had Kennedy voted with the liberal majority on a few key cases. But regardless of Rosen’s motivations, I found that his article pretty much nailed its subject.]

A few subsequent writings about Kennedy suggest that others were influenced by the piece as well. Slowly and subtly, it is having an impact on how the public perceives Kennedy.  I doubt that the articles linked to in the first sentence of this paragraph would have been written in the same fashion (or even at all) if it were not for Rosen’s article.

— Justin Levine

Using copyright law to squelch criticism.

[posted by Justin Levine] 

I’ve been given some new extra duties recently at KFI. I’m now in charge of collating some of the best hate mail from Bill Handel ‘fans’ and posting it to the ‘Handel Wall of Hate’ on the station’s website. Now you too can experience the joy of reading the classic missives from Handel critics that we get on a regular basis. (Though if you are accustomed to reading the ‘comments’ section of political blogs that don’t edit the feedback too often, some of this might seem familiar.)

Enjoy!   [R-rated language alert] 

The L.A. Times has a story about a brain researcher who gives advice to Democrats based on brain scan studies:

“The political brain is an emotional brain,” [Drew Westen] said. “It prefers conclusions that are emotionally satisfying rather than conclusions that match the data.”

When Westen and his Emory colleagues conducted brain scans during the 2004 presidential campaign, they found that partisans of either side, when presented with contradictory statements by their preferred candidates, would struggle for some seconds with feelings of discomfort, then resolve the matter in their candidates’ favor.

The scans showed that to do this, they used the part of their brain that controls emotion and conflict. The area that controls reasoning was inactive — “the dead zone,” Westen said.

Westen writes that it doesn’t make sense to argue an issue using facts and figures and to count on voters — particularly the swing voters who decide national elections — to make choices based on sophisticated understandings of policy differences or procedures. He says Democratic candidates must learn to do what Republicans have understood for many years — they must appeal to emotions. And (talking to you, Mr. Gore) stay away from numbing statistics.

Yeah, it’s the old problem: Democrats appeal to logic and reason, and Republicans appeal to emotion. We all know that, don’t we, Republicans?

Exit question, as Allah might say: Why are all these brain scan guys all Democrats?