President Bush will address the nation in ten minutes about the progress of the war. He is expected to elaborate on how often he thinks about Iraq. :)

Tropical Storm Bret has formed in the Bay of Campeche. Warnings are up for the Mexican coast from Tampico to Vera Cruz.

Professor Rick Garnett is quoted in this Washington Post article from this morning’s paper. (Hat tip: Sergio.) The article also includes the following statement from Supreme Court historian David Garrow:

“If there’s no announcement by Tuesday, that means every justice is expecting to return in October and believes they will be medically fit to return in October,” Garrow said.

There have been no announcements yet.

As we speak (er, as I type), I’m getting my picture taken by a South Bend Tribune photographer while blogging at Quizno’s. The photo is for a story about political blogging in Michiana that is slated to run sometime in the next week or two. (I was interviewed for it a few weeks ago.)

I don’t have time for a full lunch-break update today, but here’s an amusing story out of New Hampshire:

Could a hotel be built on the land owned by Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter? A new ruling by the Supreme Court which was supported by Justice Souter himself itself might allow it. A private developer is seeking to use this very law to build a hotel on Souter’s land. …

On Monday, June 27, Logan Darrow Clements faxed a request to Chip Meany, the code enforcement officer of the Towne of Weare, New Hampshire, seeking to start the application process to build a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road. This is the present location of Mr. Souter’s home. …

The proposed development, called “The Lost Liberty Hotel,” will feature the “Just Desserts Café” and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America. Instead of a Gideon’s Bible, each guest will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged.”

Heh.

I’m still working on (again) shoring up the MovableType blog interface. Ugh. I’m also working on setting up an alternate installation using WordPress, to see if that has fewer problems. Stay tuned, as they say.

If a Supreme Court justice retires today (or tomorrow, or whenever), we all know Matt Drudge will be first with news. He always is. (Well, except that one time.) Love him or hate him, Drudge is fast with breaking news.

So if you’re like me, you’re waiting breathlessly for the “siren” announcing the big news. But for those of us who are supposed to be, you know, working, manually reloading Drudge’s page every few seconds isn’t an option — and personally, I’m far too impatient to wait for his built-in 4-minute automatic reload. I mean, really! If I rely on that, I might find out the news more than three minutes after everyone else!!! Oh, the humanity!!!

Well, now our problem is solved, because I just created drudge-frame.html! It automatically reloads the Drudge Report every 30 seconds (give or take a few seconds). So now you can get back to work, and let your browser handle the breaking-news vigil! (A browser that supports frames is required, and a browser with the ability to block pop-up ads is highly recommended; otherwise you’ll have a whole bunch of pop-ups open after a few minutes.)

Website back up. Blog interface down. Details later.

In the mean time, the Supreme Court just concluded its term with a whole bunch of important decisions. But there have been no retirements yet:

The Supreme Court ended its term Monday with no retirement announcements from any justices. A retirement could come later, however, in a letter to the president or press release.

In court, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist struggled to talk and thanked court employees for their work over the past year before he adjourned the term.

Stay tuned. I can still manually update the homepage, and will do so if there is a retirement or other breaking news. And comments still work, so have at it. :)

UPDATE: SCOTUSblog is all over today’s rulings. Meanwhile, its sister site, the Supreme Court Nomination Blog, says (in a post written on Friday) that the fact we haven’t heard anything about retirements yet means nothing:

[T]he traditional view of the Justices [is] that the bench, itself, is not the place to announce a departure. …

If [Rehnquist] is going to retire now, that would probably come in a simple statement released by the Court’s public information office, probably after a short interval to allow the President to be notified first, perhaps by a hand-delivered letter. But that would not be likely until Monday afternoon, at the earliest. Rehnquist personally would not want to mix in his personal announcement with an official session of the Court.

If such an announcement does not come on Monday, that would not be conclusive proof that it would not happen later in the week, or some time over the summer. Rehnquist has kept his own counsel about what he may do, and even his colleagues do not seem to know.

The short piece of advice for the hordes waiting in the blogosphere and at the Court for an announcement on Monday is to wait patiently for something official; media speculation will not mean much.

Does it ever? :)

The BBC has a good article about the Moon Illusion.

In other news, NASA is planning to blow up a comet on the 4th of July.

My NHS graduation photo gallery is finally online! Here’s one of my favorite pictures, showing the grads’ caps flying through the air after the ceremony ended:

View the whole gallery!

I’ve also uploaded a movie of Kim (1.1 MB) walking across the stage. Here’s a pair of screen grabs from that movie:

And here’s a movie (612 KB) of one of the ceremony’s more amusing moments, when a beach ball landed on stage and the next grad in line triumphantly threw it back, to raucous cheers from the crowd. (There was an ongoing conflict between officials trying to confiscate the beach balls and grads trying to keep them “in play,” as it were.) Screen grabs:

Heh. :) Last but not least, here are a couple of audio clips that I attempted to post to the blog via cell phone during the ceremony. In the first one, you can hear the music and applause as the graduates walked (er, processed) into the Bushnell:

source file
MP3 File

The second one is a clip of a bunch of names being called, including Kim’s:

MP3 File

I’m back in South Bend. I’ve moved my accidental blog post, intended as an e-mail to Becky, off the homepage, but you can still see it here.

Is PM Tony Blair really the the next Margaret Thatcher?

If the Ashcroft-hates-boobies meme is totally false, as Andrew and others have repeatedly asserted (and I had begun to accept as fact), then what’s up with this? Is it just liberal bias run amok, or could there actually be two sides to this story?

Or is it just the Fog of Boobies? :)

The Washington Times thinks that Rove has caught the Democrats with no pants on.

Conservatives saw the attacks and prepared for war,” Rove said. “Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.” Pretty much sums up the last four years for us. Michael Moore, George Soros and MoveOn.org would certainly agree.
Democrats, however, are outraged. Taking the comments personally, six Democrats fired off a letter to President Bush asking for Mr. Rove’s apology. Sen. John Kerry — who last year promised to wage a “more sensitive” war on terror — sent an e-mail to supporters asking them to sign a petition admonishing Mr. Rove for his “purposeful attack on the patriotism of those who dare ask the tough questions.” Apparently, Democrats are just as determined to wage a war against terror as Republicans. Who knew? They might have a point if Mr. Rove had directed his remarks specifically at Democrats.

Ouch.

I suppose I should find UCONN’s latest degree offering reassuring.

As my unforgiving-minute-filling trip to Connecticut and New Hampshire continues, I haven’t yet had time to organize and post the rest of my pictures (as well as audio and video clips) from Thursday night’s NHS graduation, and I probably won’t until I get back to Indiana. But in the mean time, here’s the New Britain Herald’s article about the ceremony. And here, to tide you over, are two more pictures — the first of Kim and her parents, the second of Sean and his sister Stephanie:

Please note that, notwithstanding Sean’s unusual posture in that picture, he is actually considerably taller than Steph. :) By contrast, all Stones shown are actual size. :)