(And I will get back to this…)

I was tuned out for a while as Sonia Sotomayor got nominated and the political potboiling began. The theatre of how it all gets politicized seemed even worse than usual. But then a week ago I bought a copy of The Brethren, by Bob Woodward, for a quarter at the Claremont Library. The first time I read it, was right around the time I was to start working for Nina Totenberg at National Public Radio. This time, what stuck out was the negotiation among the justices. (Warren Burger tried to get his clerks to zip their lips in the clerk lunch room, so that information wouldn’t get out, a tactic that proved unpopular in the least.)

So it made me even more interested when I stumbled upon a Joan Biskupic article from last month in which Biskupic talks with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Specifically, the article started with a discussion about Safford United School District v. Redding in which a 13 year old girl had to pull out her panties and pull up her bra as school staffers searched her, investigating whether she had brought prescription medication to school against rules.

At oral argument, some other judges…oh, let’s just mention Antonin Scalia…minimized the girl’s humiliation. (“I’m trying to work out why is this a major thing to say strip down to your underclothes, which children do when they change for gym, they do fairly frequently… How bad is this, underclothes?”)

As Ginsburg told Biskupic:

“They have never been a 13-year-old girl,” she told USA TODAY later when asked about her colleagues’ comments during the arguments. “It’s a very sensitive age for a girl. I didn’t think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood.”

It’s such a simple point, such a small one, and Biskupic is smart to lead with it. Thousands of tiny experiences mark us over a lifetime; in this we are snowflakes, each different from the next. But the woman I am understands a teenage girl’s abject humiliation here, not because I was ever strip searched, but because it was in those maddening years I became aware of my body. That awareness so often comes from an external force, but it doesn’t require a strip search to produce embarrassment. That could already exist before a strip search.

That simple point of Ginsburg’s argues compellingly for the presence of another woman on the court.

A few years back I did a story about environmental impacts at the border. In part it was prompted by the Real ID act, which had a provision in it that would give Homeland Security waiver power over environmental and labor laws. The law passed with some border pilot project money, but not the provisions. The idea, however, stuck around.

Congress later gave the federal government the power to waive federal environmental – and labor, let’s not forget – laws when border security is at stake. And when the federal government has really, really wanted to, it has used it.

And now this story describes the biggest-ever waiver of laws – so that more fencing can be built. Fencing that we know will just move traffic differently over the thousands of potential miles of border crossing, but won’t end it.

I’ll be checking into who passed that law. And I’m curious about how existing fences have affected traffic patterns across national lands – especially since I believe those lands’ managers have been keeping track.

According to a press release from Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s office, the Times-Picayune is to blame for grossly misrepresenting the mayor and the chief of police, Warren Riley.

“It could have been anyone.” That’s what a guy named Sonny said, when I was standing outside Pal’s this afternoon. I had walked down there with Miz Vera — my block’s mayor — who was toting her own Miller Lite.

Nia Robertson’s friends and family were there, peering in the mail slot of Pal’s, checking to see if there was a security camera. (There was.) Maybe 10 bouquets leaned gently against the worn out doors, which were padlocked. A sign in the window says “Pal’s is closed for a family emergency; please lend us your thoughts and prayers.”

Sonny was tan, curly hair, tattoos; a bike lock and a rope snaked up his right arm. You could tell he was trying to help. He looked each of us in the eye as he told us all about the blood. He told us she said, why me, why me, why did he do this to me, until she died. He said everyone liked her, which was true. Her friends — the ones who came up with her, who knew her since she was small — couldn’t take it, and disappeared behind a big white car, and wailed in the street. But they also thanked him with great grace, and Vera embraced one woman, two, a touch on the arm from each of us, a benediction, arms around shoulders and tears and comfort. We all told each other we were sorry for the loss, and for each of us the loss was different: a friend, a bar, a neighborhood.

It’s not a bad time to remember what Mayor Nagin said recently about crime:

Do I worry about it? Somewhat. It’s not good for us, but it also keeps the New Orleans brand out there, and it keeps people thinking about our needs and what we need to bring this community back. So it is kind of a two-edged sword. Sure it hurts, but we have to keep working everyday to make the city better.

Officer…Friendly, I don’t know who — came up to Vera and me and wanted us to go to the neighborhood meeting, at the First District police station, next Tuesday. He didn’t know me, but he looked at me, not expectantly. Hopefully. Plaintively. Please come, he seemed to say, not with words, but with his voice. And I promised I would.