Freedom of speech, religion and other First Amendment issues are likely to be among the most visible during the coming Senate confirmation hearings on President Obama's nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan for the U.S. Supreme Court.

As an illustration why, consider this quote dug up by the First Amendment Center's David L. Hudson, who found it in a government brief signed by Kagan in United States v Stevens: “Whether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs.”

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This looks scary as fuck.

A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone. Which is not to say that parents are wrong to concern themselves with moral development or that their interactions with their children are a waste of time. Socialization is critically important. But this is not because babies and young children lack a sense of right and wrong; it’s because the sense of right and wrong that they naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be.

-- NYT

As chief justice, John Roberts has shown a strong pro-business tilt. On the eve of the appointment of a replacement for Justice John Paul Stevens, the stakes have never been clearer.

The Roberts court has repeatedly placed corporate interests first and the rights of individuals second, as shown by an in-depth analysis that we just completed, “Unprecedented Injustice: The Political Agenda of the Roberts Court.” In many cases, this court has disregarded precedents and long-held principles to do so.

For those who care about unchecked corporate power, personal freedoms and respect for judicial precedent, the picture revealed by our data isn’t pretty. The record shows that the Roberts court consistently protects the powerful at the expense of the rest of us.

-- Politico

Krugman makes the nice argument that one of the positive effects of the oil disaster in the gulf is that environnmentalism may be awakened, arguing that people generally respond only if a problem is visible, such that environmentalism has been relatively muted because of the past successes of environmental regulation. Of course, one could scoff at the idea that environmentalism has been muted with all the Global Warming scare that the past few years have seen, but it's still a good argument.

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NEW ORLEANS — Officials in the Obama administration began for the first time Friday to publicly chastise BP America for its handling of the spreading oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, calling the oil company’s current resources inadequate to stop what is unfolding into an environmental catastrophe.

As oil edged toward the Louisiana coast, fears continued to grow that the leak from the seabed oil well could spiral out of control. One official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in a widely distributed warning on Friday, said the oil flow could grow from the current estimate of 5,000 barrels a day to “an order of magnitude higher than that.”

-- NYT

Philip K. Dick has a body of work that is going to be published for the first time. Apparently, it was his 'mystery of the cosmos' musings dumped into notebooks. It's not a clean novel, but he has enough of a fan base who might be interested in his musings.

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Great, now the southern states are competing to see who can be the most nativist.

....

Amid a national debate over Arizona's tough new immigration law, Republican Alabama gubernatorial candidate Tim James (and son of previous Gov. Fob James) vows in a new campaign ad that if he's elected, he'll give the state driver's license exam only in English, as a cost-saving measure.

"This is Alabama; we speak English," he says in the ad. "If you want to live here, learn it."

It's not clear how James thinks the change would save the state money. Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic says Alabama could actually lose billions of dollars in federal funding if it enacts the measure, and he points to an Alabama political blog that runs down the legal history for why the exams are in multiple languages.

James says he's been attacked by the left for the ad, singling out MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. A writer on her blog called the ad "just plain mean" and argued it was simply pandering to the candidate's conservative base.

"I have come under attack and under assault by a very interesting group of far-left reporters," he said Monday, according to the Birmingham News. He said English exams are a public safety issue, to ensure drivers can read signs. Exams are currently given in Arabic, Chinese, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Thai and Vietnamese, according to AOL News.

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Though, I must say, I am surprised that that large host of languages is entertained in Alabama.