Pun Salad

• More on the continuing drama of Senator Joe Biden vs. Citizen Jered Townsend, owner of a scary-looking Bushmaster AR-15 rifle. (If you missed part one, you can catch it here.) Senator Joe speculated in Monday's televised debate that Townsend wasn't "mentally qualified to own that gun." But he seems to have cooled down now, as seen in this story at Politico's "Crypt" blog:

  Biden said today that he emailed Townsend and gave him his phone number, saying he would be happy to get together the next time he is in Michigan.

  Biden even told The Crypt he would be happy to go hunting with Townsend, though the senator said he couldn't equal Townsend's firepower

  "All I have is a 20 gauge and a 10 gauge shot gun. It won't match his automatic weapon," Biden said.

  This via John Tabin at the American Spectator blog, who points out the AR-15 is not an "automatic weapon," and muses on yet another example of a legislator lacking understanding of an area he nevertheless confidently proposes to regulate. But, as Tom Jones pointed out long ago: it's not unusual.

• Today's NYT op-ed page contains a trial balloon for a hypothetical future where a Democratic president deals with a Democrat-controlled Senate. The author, one Jean Edward Smith, details the history of political manipulation of the composition of the Supreme Court and bottom-lines: "It requires only a majority vote in both houses to add a justice or two."

  Ah, court-packing. If FDR couldn't make it fly, what makes anyone think Hillary could? Nevertheless, Ann Althouse is succinct and devastating in her analysis:

  [Smith] starts out fretting about a Court that enters the political sphere, and he ends up worrying about the Court failing to pick up the values of the political majority. So which is it?

  Of course, I know: You want the Court to transcend politics but to transcend it in the direction that squares with your politics. I laugh at that.

  Orin Kerr at Volokh seems amused at Smith's rationale:

  This might be necessary, Smith contends, because the Roberts Court has "adopt[ed] a manifestly ideological agenda," "plung[ing] the court into the vortex of American politics" where it now decides political questions rather than the purely legal decisions of the Warren Court.

  I detect sarcasm there!

• Is New York Governor Eliot Spitzer a thug? Find out by reading Professor Bainbridge's article: Eliot Spitzer is a Thug.

• Via Instapundit: here's something to show anyone who pooh-poohs the impact of technology.

Otto Preminger directed this 1945 film noir; I've read that it was made as a result of his success with the previous year's Laura. Dana Andrews is in it, playing a down-on-his-luck hustler, tossed off a bus in the big nowhere between Los Angeles and San Francisco. He gets himself involved with a mentalist conman, then when that's done, finds himself obsessed with a seriously slutty waitress, played by Linda Darnell. This leads him to attempt a scam on the rich spinster sisters in town, one happens to fall for him, then there's a murder, and guess who gets set up for the rap?

It's pretty convoluted and ludicrous, with dialog so stilted, it could have been written in a stilt factory. But there is a kind of neat ending, worth hanging on for.