M83 + Men At Work = City Down Under:
This week my Clarendon Cycles column touched on a topic that, over the past year, has moved from mildly annoying to outright ridiculous: the proliferation of useless bollards on area trails. Â If Arlington County had merely been slow in removing what are obviously pretty useless obstacles, I can’t say I’d be terribly moved by the issue. Â But someone in Arlington County recently decided that the problem is that we don’t have enough bollards. Â If I didn’t know better, I’d say the new installation at the East Falls Church bridge was an effort at satire, but I don’t think it came out of Arlington County’s art budget.
(Recent bollard ridiculousness isn’t limited to Arlington – the new ones in the middle of the Mount Vernon Trail at the base of the Wilson Bridge? Â Are apparently there to keep Teh Terrorists away. Â That’s right, we’re worried that terrorists just might drive over the Wilson Bridge. Â Christ.)
So it turns out there was no official photographer for the 2012 Air Force Cycling Classic Crystal Ride this year. I wasn’t out shooting it, but I did end up with hundreds of photos as I was out there looking at locations for shooting the pro races later in the day. So, in case you know anyone who was looking for photos, here’s more than a few. Simple copies from the site?  Free.  Something that requires more work from me?  Not free (but not expensive).
(I got a great interview with the fellow pictured above. Â It’ll run as one on my Clarendon Cycles columns, soon.)
Shocker. I sometimes wonder what I could have done with all that time I spent in law school trying to square Scalia’s “principles” with his outcomes, had I just realized that his outcomes were his only principles. Â To wit:
Now, within days of the historic ruling, Scalia is releasing a new book in which he finds fault with a Roosevelt-era Supreme Court decision that forms a critical part of the legal undergirding for the health care reform law. For Scalia, that’s a dramatic turnaround, because he has previously embraced the premise of that decision in an opinion he authored in 2005 that supporters of the Affordable Care Act have frequently cited.
In Scalia’s new book, a 500-page disquisition on statutory construction being published this week, he says the landmark 1942 ruling Wickard v. Filburn — which has served as the lynchpin of the federal government’s broad authority to regulate interstate economic activities under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause — was wrongly decided.
You know how people sometimes describe the embarrassment of losing their religion? Â I sometimes feel the same way about the faith I used to have in the US Supreme Court.