Paul Horwitz at Prawfsblawg points to an amazing live recording of the sometimes odious and usually brilliant Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. made at the conclusion of a symposium in honor of his 90th birthday.
Truly a dead voice from the past.
And as Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
[I'm in Italy until late Wednesday, so I queued up a few posts to cover while I'm away. This is one of them.]
The site got very seriously hacked some time in the last 24 hours. As I'm going to be traveling home, there may be little I can do about this if they come back for second helpings, at least until I get back to a secure connection Wednesday night.
Cute piece of Senate trivia: President for a Day:
Until the 1930s, presidential and congressional terms began at noon on March 4. In 1849, that date fell on a Sunday, causing President Zachary Taylor to delay his inauguration until the next day. For some, this raised the question of who was president from noon of March 4 to noon of March 5. Of course, we now know that Taylor automatically became president on the fourth and could have begun to execute the duties of his office after taking the oath privately, a day before the public inauguration.
In 1849, the Senate president pro tempore immediately followed the vice president in line of presidential succession. That era's ever-present threat of sudden death made it essential to keep an unbroken order of succession. To ensure that there was a president pro tempore in office during adjournment periods, the vice president customarily left the Senate chamber in an annual session's final days so that the Senate could elect this constitutional officer. Accordingly, the Senate duly elected Atchison on March 2, 1849. His supporters, to the present day, claim that the expiration of the outgoing president's and vice president's terms at noon on March 4 left Atchison with clear title to the job.
Unfortunately for Atchison's shaky claim, his Senate term also expired at noon on March 4, thereby denying him the chance to become president. When the Senate of the new Congress convened the following day to allow new senators and the vice president to take the oath of office, with no president pro tempore, the secretary of the Senate called members to order.
No one planning to attend Taylor's March fifth inauguration seems to have realized that there had been a “President Atchison” in charge. Nonetheless, for the rest of his life, Atchison enjoyed polishing this story, describing his “presidency” as “the honestest administration this country ever had.”
[I'm in Italy until late Wednesday, so I queued up a few posts to cover while I'm away. This is one of them.]
I'm very happy to be in Italy today for this interesting conference, but I'm just a little bit sorry that as a result I can't join in with any of the activities designed to Support the troops. End the war.
If you're in the US today, you can.
Juan Cole has some thoughts about Memorial Day 2007.
Q: “Tony, American deaths in Iraq have reached 2,500. Is there any response or reaction from the President on that?”
MR. SNOW: “It's a number, and every time there's one of these 500 benchmarks people want something.” — White House Press Conference, 15 June 2006
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