Woohoo!

Becky and I are heading to a Game 4 party at the O’Neill Hall lounge, where they’ll have the game on HDTV. Alas, this being a Notre Dame dorm, they presumbly won’t have any of these:

(Hat tip: Bfloblog.) Oh, well. Go Sabres!

In one of Monday’s blog posts about the Virginia Tech massacre, commenter “4-7″ got reamed for suggesting that a Flight 93-like response was in order, that more people should have taken matters into their own hands. Now columnist Mark Steyn has weighed in with essentially the same point, saying the response to the tragedy is another example of a corrosive culture of passivity. An interesting read. (Hat tip: InstaPundit.)

Fellow 3L Jimmy Paulino, whose remarks about the NDLS faculty in the Observer have been the subject of much criticism — in blog comments here and here, as well as in letters to the editor here and here — just e-mailed me a response and asked me to put it on the blog. The full thing is printed after the jump.

Jimmy says he was quoted out of context by the Observer reporter, but also concedes: “my comments were dumb, and made me look like an ass. I…can only suggest that if understood in context, I may have looked like less of an ass.”

Again, read the whole thing — it’s after the jump.

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Despite being ranked 30 out of 32 QB’s in the NFL… despite his team’s 8-8 record… despite throwing more interceptions than touchdowns… Vince Young has been chosen as the cover athlete for Madden 08.

Then again, maybe they decided it was better not to risk a good player going down due to the curse this year. When you think about it, that’s downright thoughtful of them.

Spirit Air is having a $0.01 airfare sale for select dates, to and from select destinations, this summer. The sale only lasts until 11:59 PM tomorrow, and I’m guessing some flights will fill up before then. It isn’t useful to me, but it might be to you, especially if you live near Detroit or Fort Lauderdale.

Yesterday’s Observer article about NDLS student discontent — in particular, some quotes therein from 3L Jimmy Paulino about the faculty — has inspired a flurry of responses, both here on the blog and in print. Fellow 3L Brian Foster has a lengthy letter in today’s Observer defending the faculty and criticizing Paulino’s remarks. Also, the following letter was posted on a Facebook group (see after the jump):

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U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling upholds a law banning what some call “partial birth” abortions.

Visit CNN for the latest.

UPDATE BY BRENDAN: Oddly, CNN now has nothing about this on its homepage (as of 10:36 AM). But you can read about it on SCOTUSblog. Key excerpt:

The Court said that it was upholding the law as written — that is, its facial language. It said that the lawsuits challenging the law should not have been allowed in court “in the first instance.” The proper way to make a challenge, if an abortion ban is claimed to harm a woman’s right to abortion, is through as as-applied claim, Kennedy wrote. His opinion said that courts could consider such claims “in discrete and well-defined instances” where “a condition has or is likely to occur in which the procedure prohibited by the Act must be used.”

Kennedy said the Court was assuming that the federal ban would be unconstitutional “if it subjected women to significant health risks.” …

[The dissent, however, wrote that] “the Court’s opinion tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. For the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception protecting a woman’s health.” She said the federal ban “and the Court’s defense of it cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this Court — and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women’s lives. A decision of the character the Court makes today should not have staying power.”

Meanwhile, the Associated Press seems confused about the nature of our government and the respective roles of its three branches, characterizing this decision as “the first time the court banned a specific procedure in a case over how—not whether—to perform an abortion.” Um, yeah, okay, the Court didn’t “ban” anything, the Court upheld a ban that was passed by Congress and signed by the president. Big, huge, ginormous difference there. If the Court had “banned” late-term abortions on constitutional grounds, this would be a much, much, much bigger story. Wake up, AP.

Drudge is going ga-ga over the fact that famously acerbic American Idol judge Simon Cowell rolled his eyes after contestant Chris Richardson — fresh off a notably bad performance of the Rascal Flatts song Mayberry — offered his condolences to Virginia Tech last night. Here’s a video of the incident. Here’s another.

I didn’t notice Simon’s eye-rolling when I was watching live, but my initial reaction to Chris’s statement of condolence was: “while I have no doubt that his Virginia Tech comment was genuine, I think it will hurt him with the public. People are cynical bastards, and some of them will see that as an attempt to shore up votes by exploiting a tragedy to change the subject after a bad performance.”

Simon Cowell, of course, is the most cynical bastard of them all, and his reaction was precisely the one I anticipated, according to a Fox executive: “Simon felt Chris was cynically deflecting his criticism. It was unfortunate… he clearly was unaware the camera was on him when he rolled his eyes, and he was hardly making a rude gesture to the victims.”

Look, on the one hand, I think Simon’s cynical reaction was uncalled for. Chris is a Virginia native, and there’s no reason to believe he was being anything but genuine. Unless you’re the sort of person who always ascribes people the worst possible motives for their actions, you gotta believe that Chris’s decision to extend his condolences immediately after the judges’ criticisms wasn’t an attempt to deflect those criticisms — it was simply a consequence of the fact that that’s the only opportunity he has to speak directly into the camera during the show. (Ryan Seacrest awkwardly opened the show with a statement of condolence, and Simon added his own, equally awkward statement later — perhaps in reaction to the first wave of complaints about his eye-rolling earlier in the show — but Chris was taking advantage of his only chance to personally say something about the tragedy.)

But on the other hand, I can easily see this erupting into a massively exaggerated Imus-like controversy — Drudge is obviously pushing the story, and I expect the 24-hour news networks to pick up on it throughout the day, because Drudge moves stories and because Idol is a cultural phenomenon and this is a topical angle on today’s dominant story that’s easy to punditize about — and the fact is, it shouldn’t. Simon wasn’t rolling his eyes at the tragedy or disrespecting the victims, he was rolling his eyes at what he saw (wrongly and unjustifiably, in my view) as a cynical ploy for votes by an American Idol contestant. That’s unfortunate, but it’s also vintage Simon, and it certainly isn’t a national news story, nor worthy of the top line on the Drudge Report. Anyway, I wonder if tonight’s Idol results show will address this issue, in order to try and make it go away. And if they do, I wonder if that will just add fuel to the flames.

Some good may come of all this, though. Immediately after Chris’s performance, I thought he was doomed to be voted off tonight (in spite of Sanjaya’s bloody awful attempt at faux-karaoke) and that his condolence statement would only hurt him. Now, though, I think he’ll be saved — not so much by the statement, but by Simon’s reaction to it. If it’s true, as Drudge says, that “fans were enraged and FOX affiliates were fielding complaints” about Simon’s reaction, I suspect a fair number of those fans will have voted for Chris in defiance of Simon. So the end result of all this may be that Sanjaya actually gets voted off tonight. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

UPDATE: More from an update to the Drudge article:

Nigel Lythgoe, Executive Producer of ‘IDOL’, says Simon was not reacting to Chris.

In a statement given exclusively to the DRUDGE REPORT, Lythgoe explains:

“This is a sad time for everyone, so it is especially disheartening that a quick camera cutaway could have been misinterpreted. We’re sorry for any grief caused by this misunderstanding, but Simon was not reacting to Chris at that point. He had turned to speak to Paula and didn’t actually hear Chris’ final comments.”

Lythgoe continues: “Everyone at ‘AMERICAN IDOL’ feels compassion for those affected by this tragedy. We opened the show with those thoughts and Simon later expressed sincere condolences on behalf of the judges, recognizing the challenges we all face in dealing with this horrible event.” …

A backstage source defends Richardson: “Chris decided earlier in the day that he was going to give a shoutout to his friends.. he is hurting.”

UPDATE: Simon defends himself on the air.

Bombings in Baghdad kill 127 people, including 82 in an attack at a market, the Iraqi Interior Ministry says.

Visit CNN for the latest.

Thomas J. Miller, the Notre Dame Law School custodian who went missing in November and was found dead in March, will be honored in a memorial mass today at 5:00 PM in the NDLS lounge. Father Coughlin will celebrate the mass.

According to comments on my earlier post about Mr. Miller’s death, there was some resentment among the custodial staff about the way this tragedy was handled by the university, so it’s good that they’re doing this, though I’m not sure it will totally mend all those fences. [CORRECTION: Reportedly, the mass was arranged by SBA, not the administration. Hmm.] That said, the problem goes beyond just Notre Dame. As Sergio commented shortly after Mr. Miller’s body was found:

It turns out that the search crews were looking for the body of a South Bend woman that went missing while walking her dog a few months ago, and they just happened to stumble across Mr. Miller’s body. On the 6pm news, the fact that it wasn’t the woman’s body seemed like something of a disappointment, and very little was said about Mr. Miller, his background, or his family, and I don’t think any expressions of sympathy or condolence were offered. He was just sort of shoved aside as “the search for the woman continues…”

The woman in question is Vivian Borysiak, and in the days after Sergio’s comment, I started to notice missing-person signs for her all over town: on Transpo buses, at the grocery store, on the front door of my dry cleaners, etc. Here are a couple that I snapped pictures of:

Ms. Borysiak has been missing since February 2, and those pictures were taken on March 29 (two days after Mr. Miller’s body was found), so you could argue that there was a better chance of finding her alive than there was of finding someone who had been missing since early November. But you know what? I was riding Transpo buses and patronizing local businesses in November and December, too, and I don’t remember seeing any missing-person signs for Mr. Miller. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong about that. But it really does seem like there’s more of a concerted effort to find Ms. Borysiak than there ever was to find Mr. Miller.

I hate to make this sound like a competition, and I certainly don’t mean to cast any aspersions on Ms. Borysiak or her family — obviously I have every sympathy in the world for them, and I sincerely hope they find her safe and sound somewhere, somehow. But I can’t shake the feeling that there was a certain inequality here. This morning, Thomas Miller’s sister commented on my earlier blog post, and wrote: “I feel that this would have gotten more attention if he was a woman, dog or anyone other than a custodian.” Frankly, I understand why she feels that way.

Anyway, I hope today’s memorial mass brings some measure of comfort to Mr. Miller’s friends and family. Again, may he rest in peace.