After spending about two years typing my fingers into bloody stumps about the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program, this is truly rather amazing news:
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency's program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration's effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President George W. Bush.
In a 45-page opinion, Judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled that the government had violated a 1978 federal statute requiring court approval for domestic surveillance when it intercepted phone calls of Al Haramain, a now-defunct Islamic charity in Oregon, and of two lawyers representing it in 2004. Declaring that the plaintiffs had been "subjected to unlawful surveillance," the judge said the government was liable to pay them damages.
The ruling delivered a blow to the Bush administration's claims that its surveillance program, which Mr. Bush secretly authorized shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was lawful. Under the program, the National Security Agency monitored Americans' international e-mail messages and phone calls without court approval, even though the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, required warrants.
The Justice Department said it was reviewing the decision and had made no decision about whether to appeal.
The ruling by Judge Walker, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, rejected the Justice Department's claim — first asserted by the Bush administration and continued under President Obama — that the charity's lawsuit should be dismissed without a ruling on the merits because allowing it to go forward could reveal state secrets.
The judge characterized that expansive use of the so-called state-secrets privilege as amounting to "unfettered executive-branch discretion" that had "obvious potential for governmental abuse and overreaching."
YES.
I would blub with joy about this ruling, were it not for the fact that I've already moved on to feeling pissy that the perpetrators of this vast injustice will never suffer any consequences.
Suggested by Shaker summerwing: If you could go back in time and talk to your ten-year-old self, what would you say? How do you think the entire conversation would go?
I would say: "There are going to be some tough times ahead, but I promise you that you're going to be okay."
I imagine my 10-year-old self would react pretty much the same as I would now if my 60-year-old self suddenly showed up to have a chat: "WTF? OMG. LOL! And zounds! But, you know, awesome. Totally awesome."
And we'd marvel that I apparently never grow out of spilling soup on my shirt.
See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman and a biracial queerbait telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
So Sarah Palin has this show on Fox coming up called Real American Stories, which, according to this article, is about "people who have overcome adversity" and the guests include(d):
Among the success stories Palin plans to highlight are those of country music star Toby Keith, former GE Chairman Jack Welch, and a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. LL Cool J (birth name James Todd Smith) was also included in the roster ...
They even put out a promo video showing LL Cool J's interview.
"Real American Stories features uplifting tales about overcoming adversity and we believe Mr. Smith's interview fit that criteria. However, as it appears that Mr. Smith does not want to be associated with a program that could serve as an inspiration to others, we are cutting his interview from the special and wish him the best with his fledgling acting career."
Yes, that's it. LL Cool J doesn't want to be associated with inspiration. You got him there!
And as for his "fledgling acting career," the CBS-TV show he stars in -- NCIS Los Angeles -- is only one of the most watched programs on TV, and a big hit for the network, you sanctimonious disingenuous asshats.
Well, ok, NPR did not actually say the "you sanctimonious disingenuous asshats" bit (that was a slight embellishment on my part) but they totally should have.
This post is much less positive, and I'm also much less certain, ultimately, what should be done to try to fix the problems I'm talking about.
Many of y'all probably remember previous discussion, both here (Rape For Sale, Looking for Rape Products? Try Amazon., From the Mailbag for 2009-08-17) and at many other blogs over the past several years, of a Japanese computer game called RapeLay, the genre of hentai (lit. "pervert"/"perverted") games, and the subgenre of rape-focused hentai games to which it belongs.
CNN's Connect the World program has now run a story on the game, and its continuing availability through illicit channels despite its having been pulled from production and removed from retail. The video from that link is embedded below the fold; CNN doesn't appear to have a transcript available, so I've included one at the end of the post.
CNN's Eve Bower also has a post on the Connect the World blog which brings up some additional issues, and related context from recent news in other countries — Iceland's recent vote to ban strip clubs on the grounds that they're degrading to women, and a women's rights advocate in China arguing for the repeal of laws against obscene material.
There are a lot of issues involved here. In particular, I'd like to talk about not only CNN's coverage, which tries to highlight how disturbing the subject matter is but also falls into the "journalistic balance" trap of making sure to find a woman who says she's not offended by the game (as though "offense," rather than the harm to all women — indeed, all people — that the perpetuation of rape culture represents, were the issue), but also whether legislation is a viable way to address the problem games like this represent, and what the existence of games like this says about game culture and games as a medium. I'm going to sketch some of my thoughts, but I'm especially interested in having a discussion and hearing Shakers' ideas.
The content of RapeLay and other games like it is clearly indefensible. The question is, what, if anything, can effectively be done about it? Most experience seems to indicate that banning something for which there's a market, no matter how bad the thing is, doesn't really work to prevent people who want the thing from acquiring it, and in this case that also seems to be true: RapeLay isn't available for sale through any legitimate retailers, but people who want to play it can still get it easily. And I worry that it will be difficult to implement laws which target only material like RapeLay and its ilk without also potentially — depending on the views of the particular people executing the laws at whichever particular point in time — catching in the same net subject matter that has traditionally been wrongly deemed objectionable (e.g. gay characters).
The CNN report fails, I think, to make it clear that neither sexual violence nor sexual activity with female characters who look extremely young are universal features of hentai games, for example. And if outright bans not only may have overbroad effects, but also probably won't prevent dissemination of the games, what's the use of enacting them, especially when developers of rape games could simply work in another country, and distribute their products over the internet.
To make the probably-obvious analogy to illegal drugs, prohibition and cracking down on supply just hasn't worked, because demand is still present; prohibition + demand merely creates a black market.
And, unlike hentai games, illegal drugs are physical objects that need to be transported, causing logistical problems that don't exist when the product is strictly virtual and distribution is effectively both free and instantaneous. Surely prohibition on digital material won't even work as well as the prohibition on illegal drugs — a notoriously dismal failure — anyway.
Now, obviously I don't want these games to be on the shelves, or available on the Internet. Nothing about them makes the world a better place. They are a self-perpetuating component of the rape culture, which, if not demonstrably a cause of actual rapes, are nonetheless the sort of symptom that itself contributes to the exacerbation of the disease. It is only in a rape culture that anyone would think to create games like these, and anyone would want to buy them — and though the rape culture would find other avenues of expression, as it always has and still does, if these games did not exist, they, as well as those other avenues, nonetheless contribute to the continuing mainstreaming and normalization of rape culture's basic idea of women and girls as sexual objects and as things (I use the term advisedly) to be despised.
Where, then, do we start: How can we prevent dissemination of harmful games like this when the pervasiveness of rape culture means there's a continuing demand for them, or how can we work to undermine the rape culture that creates the demand for games like this, when their existence, and indeed the ubiquity of expressions of rape culture in every medium, itself perpetuates and normalizes rape culture? How many people, like Kibble and Gardner, seek out things like this because they're curious, but through exposure become desensitized and come to think of them as normal?
Another issue brought up in the CNN story and blog post is the comparison with non-sexual violence in many games. Most Americans (and probably many other cultures, but I can't speak for them) reflexively think that graphic, bloody depictions of non-sexual violence are less problematic (even, frequently, unproblematically entertaining!) than graphic depictions of sexual violence.
Many of the games I enjoy playing involve a lot of killing — some, like Gears of War, extremely graphically: One of the things many fans love about Gears is the ability to cut enemies in half with a chainsaw attached to the barrel of your gun. Extreme discomfort (to put it mildly) is, I think, self-evidently the appropriate response to something as reprehensible as RapeLay, but doesn't that throw into question the ubiquity of violence as such in our sources of entertainment?
What does it say about gamers — what does it say about me — that I'm totally comfortable with the idea that, in a game like Resident Evil 4, I can shoot my enemies in the head and see their heads explode in a spray of gore, that I only started to have a problem with it when that extreme violence was overlaid with blatant racist, colonialist, genocidal imagery? What does it say about gamer culture (and the larger society in which it's embedded) that we think detailed, interactive representations of violent, gory murder are fine, and there's controversy over whether we should draw the line at rape and genocide? Nothing good, I fear.
I don't think violent games should be banned (irrespective of whether that would ever work, anyway). But I think that gamers, whose reputation for not being very self-aware or introspective is not entirely undeserved, need to look more critically at why so many of us find vicariously committing countless murders to be so much fun.
One line of questioning that comes to mind is: Does shooting someone constitute the same denial of their personhood as raping someone does? How does the difference in intimacy level factor into this?
On the one hand, it seems, rationally, as though the necessary closeness and the fact that most rapists are acquainted with their victims, while a murderer with a gun can kill someone they've never seen before from far enough away not to see their face or hear their voice, would argue for killing as more depersonalizing; but on the other, if rationality entered into it we wouldn't need to have this discussion.
Certainly in some cases, serial killers do adopt a "predator" mentality, and a view of their victims as Other, subhuman, prey; but I know of few if any video games which cast the player in such a role. Another point here, of course, is that in games where the player shoots people, those people shoot back (or attack in some way): they're active opponents, a threat to the player*. In other words, they have agency, which is a sharp contrast to the victim characters in games like RapeLay, and supports the idea that casting the player as a rapist is more dehumanizing to the victim characters than casting the player as a killer.
I don't really have any conclusions, and I've left a lot of issues involved in this story unaddressed, but I'm sure they'll come up in comments. I've been doing a lot of thinking lately, both in general and in the context of this story and my experiences at PAX, about what a hypothetical society free of oppressive hierarchies would be like. I don't think we can really know, because our experience is so molded by those oppressive hierarchies, no matter where each of us stands in them; but we can see what our society is like, and perhaps extrapolate from that some things that a non-hierarchical society might not look like. And in particular, I think its forms of entertainment wouldn't look much like ours at all.
[Update: Sady Doyle, proprietor of such fine blogs as The Tiger Beatdown, also has a post on RapeLay at Broadsheet, and I always encourage everyone to read Sady's writing.]
*There was a notable exception to this recently, the "No Russian" level in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Shaker Nolittlelolita had an excellent post on it, over at Hysterical Broads, but the gist is that your character, an American agent, is undercover in a Russian terrorist cell and must participate in a terrorist attack on an airport, indiscriminately killing civilians. The level caused a great deal of controversy, possibly even more than Resident Evil 5 did.
----------------------------------------
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
[Title: This report includes graphic content. Viewer discretion is advised.]
[Shot of busy street in Akihabara]
Voiceover: The heart of Japan's electronics district. The world's games of tomorrow, on sale today.
[Shot of software boxes on shelves]
VO: On shelves in mainstream stores, plenty of what's known here as "Hentai games." Almost all feature girlish-looking characters; some are violent, depicting rape, torture and bondage in detail. It didn't take long to find a game where the object is revenge: find and rape the woman who fired the player from his imaginary job.
[Parts of screenshots from the game, depicting women in distress and/or tied up. Background sound effects of a woman moeaning as if in distress.]
VO: Most of this game we cannot show you.
[Shot of shopper holding game boxes whose covers are blurred out.]
Hentai games are not new for Japan. This country has long produced products the rest of the world would call pornographic,
[Shot of street again.]
but before the Internet shrunk the world, it stayed here.
[Shot of hands typing on a keyboard.]
VO: A quick web search generates hundreds of Japanese games.
[Shot of Google results, apparently for search terms "rape game free".]
[Shot of shopper picking up games from a store shelf.]
VO: Once a game goes on sale in Tokyo,
[Shot of Google video results, apparently for search term "rapelay".]
VO: it's digitized and shared everywhere.
[Footage from RapeLay of a woman standing on a subway platform. During the following narration some of the possible actions are demonstrated in the game footage.]
VO: This one, called RapeLay, begins with a teenage girl on a subway platform. With a click of your mouse, you can grope her, and lift her skirt. You, the player, stalk her, her sister, and her mother, following them on the train.
[Shot of reporter Kyung Lah in front of computer with RapeLay on the screen.]
Lah: What follows is a series of graphic, interactive scenes that we can't show you. Players can corner the women to rape them again and again, and it goes on from there.
[Footage from RapeLay.]
VO: The game infuriated women's rights groups.
[Shot of Taina Bien-Aime, Executive Director of Equality Now.]
Bien-Aime: These sort of games that normalize extreme sexual violence against women and girls have really no place in our communities.
[Footage from RapeLay.]
VO: International outrage led the Japanese developer to pull the RapeLay game from stores last year.
[Shot of YouTube search results for clips from RapeLay.]
VO: But that didn't stop its spread. In fact, the controversy took it viral.
[Shot of laptop screen; Lah is video chatting with a young couple in Britain.]
VO: That's how Lucy Kibble and Jim Gardner in England heard about and downloaded the game,
[Shot of Google results, apparently for search terms "rape game free".]
[Shot of Lah sitting at laptop, talking with Kibble and Gardner.]
VO: As they told me over Skype.
[Shot of laptop screen.]
Lucy Kibble: Just the fact it was a controversial subject, and I wanted to try it, really, just to see what it was all about.
[Shots of game store and streets in Akihabara.]
VO: That global availability is why international women's rights group say Japan needs to regulate game makers better, stopping creation of certain content.
[Shot of Taina Bien-Aime, then of YouTube videos from RapeLay.]
Bien-Aime: What we are calling for, though, is that the Japanese government ban all games that promote and simulate sexual violence, sexual torture, stalking, and rape against women and girls, and there are plenty of games like that.
[Shot of Japanese flag, pulling out to show Lah walking down the street.]
Lah: How sensitive is Japan to this issue? Despite weeks of repeated calls to the government, not a single government official would speak to CNN on camera. They wouldn't even make a statement on paper. Over the phone, one official who would not allow us to use her name said that the government realizes these games are a problem, and it is checking to see whether self-policing by the gaming industry is enough.
[Screenshots and footage from games Chain Trap and RapeLay.]
VO: Sexual images are subject to censorship in Japan. For example, in the RapeLay game, genitalia are obscured. But Japan does not have laws that restrict video game themes.
[Shot of laptop screen showing Skype call with Kibble and Gardner.]
Lah: Did you feel offended, as a woman?
Kibble: No, not at all.
[Shot of YouTube videos.]
VO: Lucy and Jim point out it is easy to find shoot-'em-up games, which no one seems to worry about.
[Shot of laptop screen.]
Kibble: It's escapism, that's why people play it.
Jim Gardner: The idea of banning it, or telling people what they can and can't do, just because — on the off chance some kid might get involved in it, is just ridiculous.
[Footage of RapeLay.]
VO: But women's rights groups say the interactive games step closer and closer to reality, and no one should play a game where the only way to win, is to rape. Kyung Lah, CNN, Tokyo.
I have no opinion on Sandra Bullock's and Jesse James's marriage, or its collapse, or its survival, or any of the incidents that have led to a rumored divorce—and I will continue to have no opinion on these subjects.
However, I do feel compelled to acknowledge Jesse James' apparent fascination with (or tolerance for, or whatever description would be appropriate) white supremacy and its practitioners, just long enough that I might say: No.
Donning an SS cap while doing the Nazi salute and miming Hitler's mustache is not "a joke," it is not "funny," and it not awesome or clever or edgy to pose for a picture au Nazi for the "shock value."
"Look I eat really well and I work out, but I also indulge when I want to. I don't starve myself in an extremist way. You're not taking away my coffee or my dairy or my glass of wine because I'd be devastated. My advice: just stop eating shit every day."—Jennifer Aniston, in the May issue of Harper's Bazaar UK, on her beauty secrets. [Via.]
Leaving aside the awesome display of privilege in admonishing people just to "stop eating shit," I'd love to know how one starves oneself in a moderate way.
[Lyrics available here; description of video within post.
Above is the new video from teen bangs sensation, Justin Bieber, for his single, "Never Let You Go," which is a totes perfect song for a 16-year-old-who-looks-like-an-11-year-old to be singing, you guys, because, as everyone knows, the best age for finding your eternal soul mate is about 13 and a half.
I mean, this song is just great: Not only does it pay homage to super-creepy romantic songs about stalking love like "Every Breath You Take," but it punctuates the repeatedly uttered promise to never let an adolescent girl go with lines like "It's like an angel came by and took me to heaven" and "Don't be scared, girl; I'm here; if you didn't know, this is love," which manages to effectively combine the romance of cheesy pick-up lines used by insecure boys in shitty bars with the overbearing paternalism of aging virgin-chasers who sit too close while offering their instruction in the Ways of Love.
And, ZOMG, howsabout that awesome video, in which Bieber (a white boy) and his love interest (played by Paige Hurd, a young woman of color) fall in love while frolicking "in the catacombs of Bahamian aquariums … sharing near-kisses, touching and nuzzling…. Shots of the pair in silhouette holding hands play into the video's plot of two young teens falling in love in a very exotic locale."
You know what the best place to shoot a video of a white boy and a brown girl falling in love is…? An exotic locale.
I also appreciate how the video never really lingers on the girl's face, or gives us a glimpse of her emotional spectrum beyond "gazing admiringly and/or mysteriously" at her new white boyfriend. The denial of her autonomy and personhood really lets me reimagine colonialist rape as a romance picture myself in a sexual situation with someone below the age of consent in many states as a teen again, being stalked never let go by Justin Bieber.
If Bieber Fever means repeatedly vomiting until you get an urge to hit yourself in the head with a tack hammer, I've got it! BIG TIME.
[Commenting Guidelines: Please note that the critique in this post does not include condemnation of Bieber as a person or an artist. Comments that present an argument based on an erroneous assertion that the post is criticizing Bieber personally, or his talent, will be considered off-topic. Comments that do criticize Bieber personally, or his talent, will also be considered off-topic. Also unwelcome is apologia that seeks to dismiss concerns about the problematic elements in this video by pointing out Bieber is not the only artist whose videos use these elements, or by ignoring that videos in which a female singer has a genericized love interest who's male, or a singer of color has a genericized love interest who's white, don't play into the same narratives that this video does.]
In John Steinbeck's The Wayward Bus, bus driver and mechanic Juan Chicoy muses on the longevity of his contentious marriage:
Besides Alice was the only woman he had ever found outside of Mexico who could cook beans. A funny thing. Every little Indian in Mexico could cook beans properly and no one up here except Alice—just enough juice, just the right flavor of the bean without another flavor mixed up with it. Here they put tomatoes and chili and garlic and such things in the beans, and a bean should be cooked for itself, with itself, alone. Juan chuckled. "Because she can cook beans", he said to himself.
(page 114 of the Penguin Twentieth Century Classics edition)
I could write a whole post about how Steinbeck's love of Darwin (possibly gained from his buddy Ed Ricketts) emerges in The Wayward Bus as speculations in pop evolutionary psychology, and maybe someday I will. For now, though, I'll say that besides the vividness and economy of the writing, there are two great things about this book: the women are actual characters, not merely symbolic links between men. And Juan Chicoy is 100% right about beans. My parents are natural born Texans. They raised me in Steinbeck country (Santa Clara County, right next to Steinbeck's native San Benito County). My mother also spent the '60s living and teaching in Colombia. So throughout my childhood the big pressure-cooker my folks got as a wedding present was usually full of beans. Beans in our house meant pinto beans cooked for themselves, with themselves, alone. When I was hungry I would eat some cold straight out of the pot. My mother preferred her signature creation, the bean "foldover": a single piece of bread folded around a scoop of beans, plain or refried.
Steve Sando, founder of Rancho Gordo New World Specialty Food, says that "[y]ou can tell where someone is from by their attitude about beans," adding that "Californians and Southwesterners understand that you have a pot of beans like any other veg[.]" That is certainly true for me, and over the past few months, I've cooked Sando's beans according to his simple directions with nothing added but perhaps a bay leaf, a bit of sauteed onion and carrot, and a splash of vinegar at the very end.
I discovered Rancho Gordo on a search for dried posole for my sister. Now, posole is worthy of a whole other post, and I doubt I could write about it better than Calvin Trillin did in Gourmet in 2002. I will report, though, that Rancho Gordo's dried posole has a rich heady flavor and addictively chewy texture entirely unlike the waxy lumps you get in cans.
Rancho Gordo offers $8.95 flat rate shipping by UPS no matter how many pounds of food you buy, so when I got TheLadyEve's posole I added a bunch of beans too: Good Mother Stallard, Vaquero, Yellow Indian Woman, and Cargamanto. All I have left is the handful of vaqueros pictured above. Rancho Gordo is not cheap, but rest assured, these are no ordinary beans.
Because Rancho Gordo beans are never stored for more than a year, they are very fresh and require only a short soaking (4-6 hours); over-soaking can cause them to split during cooking. The varieties I tried all cooked in 1.5 to 2.5 hours, and all were dense, velvety, and fragrant.
Sando's Yellow Indian Woman beans impressed me so much that I went looking for a place that sells this heirloom variety in units larger than one pound. That's how I found Purcell Mountain Farms in Moyie Springs, Idaho. Purcell Mountain Farms partners with other farms to offer a wide selection of beans, lentils, dried fruit, and much more. Some of their beans are heirloom strains and some are organic; everything is clearly labeled. And you can buy many of their beans in 1-, 3-, 5-, or 10-lb quantities. The Yellow Indian Woman beans I got from Purcell Mountain farms are darker in color than Rancho Gordo's, and I have not cooked any yet, so I cannot compare the quality. However, the heirloom Rio Zape beans from PMF are absolutely the best beans I have ever made or tasted. (Rancho Gordo offers this variety as well.)
Purcell Mountain Farms ships in USPS flat-rate boxes; orders up to $25 ship for $9.99. So while PMF's prices are a bit lower than Rancho Gordo's, the shipping may be more, depending on how much you buy.
What I would recommend is to get a few friends together, put in a big order to Rancho Gordo or PMF (or both), and divide the goodies.
5-dollar-a-pound beans are steep compared with grocery store brands, but there is no comparison in flavor and texture. A pound of beans is about 10 servings, and they are a complete meal with a bit of rice, bread, or cornbread. You could dress them up with a sofrito/mirepoix cooked in bacon grease, or with a bit of sausage or roast chicken, but it's really not necessary. These beans make for luxurious vegan meals.
Share your recommendations and warnings in comments, folks. Your links need not be legume-related!
The Obama administration is proposing to open vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling, much of it for the first time, officials said Tuesday.
The proposal — a compromise that will please oil companies and domestic drilling advocates but anger some residents of affected states and many environmental organizations — would end a longstanding moratorium on oil exploration along the East Coast from the northern tip of Delaware to the central coast of Florida, covering 167 million acres of ocean.
...[T]he Interior Department will spend several years conducting geologic and environmental studies along the rest of the southern and central Atlantic Seaboard. If a tract is deemed suitable for development, it is listed for sale in a competitive bidding system. The next lease sales — if any are authorized by the Interior Department — would not be held before 2012.
The article notes that Obama has "staked out middle ground" on the environment with support for other bipartisan, ahem, energy policy, such as expanding nuclear power, and did use the occasion of his State of the Union address in January to prepare people for his support for offshore drilling, but nonetheless "the sheer breadth of the offshore drilling decision will take some of his supporters aback."
Unintentionally hilarious understatement FTW!
Given that Obama did campaign on an openness to an energy policy that incorporated conservative/corporate preferences, and has already conceded to expand both nuclear power and offshore drilling, Steve notes that the real mystery here is "the administration's negotiating tactics. ... Obama has already effectively given Republicans what they wanted on energy. What is he getting in return?"
Excellent question. And here's another one: What are we getting in return?
We, the people, are trading some measure of safety for nuclear power, and we are trading some measure of environmental security for offshore drilling—and potentially delaying indefinitely the sustainability that our current energy infrastructure lacks. We, the people, might be better served if those government contracts were offered, say, to people wanting to put wind turbines offshore, instead of drills, and people whose technology could update our crumbling energy infrastructure and turn the US into a global leader in green power.
Obama needs to be orchestrating the energy equivalent of packing us all into the Apollo 11 and shooting for the moon. But he's packing us all into the backseat of an Edsel and driving us to Poopsburg.
I've already been to Poopsburg! I wanna go to the moooooooooon!
Following up on my post from yesterday, Shaker chef007c informs us (as in Melissa who passed it on to me) via the comments that Bill O'Reilly has paid the legal costs for Mr. Snyder. Good for him, and I mean that sincerely.
As the commenter noted, Mr. Snyder will still have other legal costs to pay as he proceeds towards the Supreme Court, so I'm sure he'll continue to need our support.
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