It is a privilege to fight!

....especially when it involves the battle against the UK for Geography Knowledge Supremacy!

It only takes a few minutes of your time. The challenge is correctly identifying 13 countries in the span of 2 minutes.

Give it your best at The Geography Cup. Good luck! America! **** Yeah!

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday to our dear friend Prometheus!

To the Optimates contributors, commenters, and readers we saw Saturday at Prometheus's birthday party, it was so wonderful to finally meet you! Tacitean and I had a lovely time in New York City, so you can definitely expect to see more of us in the future.

For now, I hereby open the floor to birthday greetings for the birthday boy!

So THIS is what insane looks like!

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit is currently holding an "Iraq Symposium." The basic idea is to see if the blogosphere has any good ideas for fixing the mess. Well, I haven't had the time to look through them all, but one of them is completely off the rails. It's to be found in full at this website, and here's a taste of the madness:

"The US will back any non-aligned, Islamic forces to secure the holy cities in Saudi Arabia for ALL MUSLIMS. No muslim will be denied entry as part of this bargain. We will need 10,000 or so troops to do this and you will get aircover from the mightiest air forces on the planet. Luckily, the US owns them completely. Administration of the Cities will be done by 'Unity Councils' and supported by foreign donations. Every single sect of Islam gets ONE VOTE on the council. Size does not matter in this. It is FAITH that matters."

I think that's definitely what would solve the problems in Iraq - a war against Saudi Arabia, led from the skies by the United States and on the ground by "non-aligned, Islamic forces." Read the whole thing. Seriously, it's psychotic.

Schools and Race

That's the topic at the Supreme Court today: are school districts justified - and more importantly, within their legal boundaries - when they design programs to promote racial integration. In this particular instance, the school districts of Louisville, Kentucky and Seattle, Washington have been sued for denying children their first choice of school, a decision which their parents allege is based on their race.

Here are the specifics of the Louisvile plan (via the Washington Post) and how it led to the lawsuit:

...It requires elementary school parents to rank their preferences from among a group of schools in their geographic area. In more than 90 percent of the cases, officials say, parents and students get their first or second choice. If not, they can apply for a transfer. But the Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville, where African Americans make up 34 percent of the student body, wants to limit the black student population of each school to no less than 15 percent and no more than 50 percent. So in 2002, Joshua McDonald's kindergarten transfer was denied because it would have reduced the number of white students at the school to which he was assigned.

What do you think?

Gun Laws

Eugene Volokh has put together a very short compendium on the right to bear arms in the state governments. It can be found here.

What's very interesting to me is not only that 44 state constitutions have provisions similar to the federal Second Amendment, but that the protections vary in scope. Some states grant the individual citizen an unambiguous right to firearms, whereas others grant the right but with certain provisos. Six states grant no official rights whatsoever: California, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, and New York. Take from that what you will.

Now, Maryland

Dale Carpenter over at Volokh brings it to our attention that this week Maryland's court is going to hear oral arguments on marriage equality.

I've got little to say on the issue that I haven't already said in previous posts (not only that, but my real commentary can only take place after a decision is handed down), but I thought I would bring the matter to your attention. Feel free to look through the relevant documents here.

Comments, as always, are welcome.

More Time

Hey everybody, sorry I was out for the week with little notice. As I think I've told you, this week was my first at a new job and I wanted to make sure I was squared away there before I put up some posts here. But with the first week out of the way, I can get back into it here. Expect some posts in short order.

At least one thing you probably didn't know about Bill Clinton...

And more in this incredible GQ interview with Al Gore.

And then, if you're like me, weep a little bit for the last six years.

My favorite part:

What kind of freedom do you feel now that you didn’t feel when you were running?
You know my all time favorite Onion headline—you read The Onion?—sometime in the summer of 2001, the lead story on the front page had a picture of Tipper and me, and the headline was, “Gores Enjoying Best Sex of Their Lives.” And she said, “How did they know?”

Awesome.