Quite apart from his rulings — which I admire a lot — you’ve got to like the style of our chief justice. Have a taste of this AP report:

The justices engaged in lively arguments over a small religious group’s efforts to place a monument in a public park that already is home to a Ten Commandments display.
The court seemed reluctant to accept the arguments put forth by the religious group known as the Summum that once a government accepts any donations for display in a public park, it must accept all.
“I mean, you have a Statue of Liberty; do we have to have a statue of despotism? Or do we have to put any president who wants to be on Mount Rushmore?” Chief Justice John Roberts asked, acknowledging his examples might go a bit far.

But not more than a bit!

‐Did you hear about the theater director in California who was forced to resign? Why? Because he put on a play that had artistic taste? No — it was discovered that he made a campaign contribution to Proposition 8: This was the prop that opposed gay marriage. The story is quite interesting, and you may find it here. (This is a New York Times piece.)

There is a sour part about the story, though: The director — from what we can tell — groveled and sniveled, instead of holding his ground or arguing his case. Oh, well — can’t have everything.

‐In Wednesday’s Impromptus, I wrote a little about our old friend, liberal media bias. A reader in L.A. wrote, “A journalist told me recently, when I brought up the problem of liberal media bias, ‘Truth has a liberal bias.’” Okay, then, that settles it!

‐Speaking of old friends — this one a good one — do you remember Radek Sikorski, who wrote so often for NR? He is now foreign minister of Poland, and he, rightly, wonders what will happen under President Barack Obama. Have a bit of an AP report:

Poland’s foreign minister said Wednesday he is trying to determine which way President-elect Barack Obama is leaning on U.S. missile defense plans in Europe.
Radek Sikorski is meeting with Democrats this week, including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Obama tapped Albright to meet foreign leaders as a representative of his transition team at last week’s global financial summit. Sikorski also plans to meet U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday.
“I think what we now need is a sense of where the new administration is going,” he said. “We think that this transition time is important for our interests because we signed with the current administration an agreement on missile defense and obviously we want to know where the wind is blowing on that.”

Yes, which way does the Obama wind blow — and is it a “righteous wind”?

‐Visit, now, the steadily communizing Hugo Chávez, down in Venezuela. He’s a very fun guy — as you can see in this other AP report:

Sunday’s elections in Venezuela will be a key test for President Hugo Chavez a year after voters defeated his effort to change the constitution, and the socialist leader isn’t missing a beat as he campaigns for his allies.
Breaking into song at rallies, Chavez draws applause and occasional laughter from his red-clad supporters. One of his favorites is a folkloric ode he sings to a 19th-century rebel leader he claims as his great-grandfather. It appears on a compact disc released last week by the ruling party titled “Songs for the Battle.”
With a cover image of a clenched fist raised in the air, the CD also includes “Militants With Chavez,” a reggae-rap track that samples the president’s speeches; and “Comrade” by Ali Alejandro Primera, the nephew of late singer-songwriter Ali Primera, a musical icon among Venezuela’s leftists in the 1960s.

As a rule, beware of clenched fists, red-clad supporters, and “Militants with Chávez.” Don’t you think?

‐They say that no one cares about the Falun Gong, and the vicious persecution they suffer at the hands of the Chinese government. But some care — and here is just one instance of persecution among thousands: “The Falun Dafa Information Center has learned that a 45-year-old farmer from northeastern China has died as a result of torture after being illegally detained for three months. His fingerprints on a fabricated confession were taken while he was unconscious for an alleged ‘crime’ of carrying 100 Falun Gong flyers.” (For a report, go here.) That man’s name was Dong Liantai, and he lived in a village called Zhengjiu. What will happen to a different person, Liu Jin? “A Shanghai court sentenced Falun Gong practitioner Ms. Liu Jin to three and a half years in prison on November 3 for downloading information about the practice from the Internet and printing it to distribute to others.” (Report here.)

Say “kooky cult” all you want as you conduct business with the PRC, but don’t you think that death-by-torture is a little much — for possessing flyers and other such “crimes”? Have one more item from our “strategic partner,” China, before we move on:

Human Rights in China (HRIC) has learned that Guo Feixiong . . ., who was tortured by prison authorities and brutally beaten by an inmate, has been denied access to his lawyer. Guo is serving a five-year sentence in Meizhou Prison, Guangdong Province, and intends to appeal his conviction and file a complaint against the prison authorities. Guo’s wife, Zhang Qing . . ., told HRIC that on October 20, Guo’s Beijing-based lawyer, Hu Xiao . . ., after traveling more than 1,000 miles to Meizhou Prison, was not permitted to see Guo.

(Full report here.) Day-in-the-life, folks, that’s all.

‐Hang on: Have you seen Ethan Gutmann’s report on organ harvesting, published in The Weekly Standard? Don’t miss it — find it here. While I’m at it, Ethan wrote one of the best books about the PRC today, Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire and Betrayal. The Amazon link is here, and the review I wrote of the book (for NR) is here. ‐Let’s get a little light(er): I have a headline to warm the cockles of conservative hearts — it’s over this article: “Longtime Senate spending leaders departing.” (The article concerns Byrd and Stevens.) Wait a sec, is it universally acknowledged that conservatives have hearts? (Or has the government of China harvested them all?) ‐A little language — a reader writes, “I have been wondering about the relative toxicity of the N-word and the C-word. Is one substantially more toxic? If a person wore a T-shirt about Obama with the N-word on it, he would be immediately, and appropriately, confronted. But apparently some folks can wear T-shirts denouncing Palin as a C-word and get away with it. Curious.” Well, let’s leave politics aside for the moment — because you can get away with just about anything, if you oppose conservatives. (For example, I have written about the racist cartoons against Clarence Thomas and Condoleezza Rice drawn by liberal cartoonists.) For a very long time, I have thought the N-word the worst word in the English language — on American soil, that is. And the C-word the second-worst word. Why is this so? I can’t say, exactly. Once, Robert Conquest was asked an unfair question — a needless question, really. He was asked which crimes were worse, the Nazi crimes or the Communist ones. He said the Nazi. Asked to explain why, he said, “I feel it so.” In any event, crimes against humanity are crimes against humanity; toxic words are toxic words; and so it goes.

‐Shall we have a little music? Let’s have it in the form of an article, written about Menahem Pressler, the octogenarian, German-born pianist. It was sent to me by a former student of his. I’d like to highlight just a few things.

Says Pressler, “I receive all the nourishment I need from music. . . . The other night I was in New York, where I played Debussy. I was enchanted by the beauty of it, the way he opens our ears to sonorities we didn’t know we had before he showed us. It is like a delicacy, like caviar. Beethoven, on the other hand, is necessary to life; he gives me that which I need to live.”

This survivor of the Holocaust calls himself a “lucky devil”: “In my life, the piece of bread has always fallen butter-side-up.”

Once, Alma Mahler — a kind of Warren Beatty of the female sex — invited Pressler to play the piano in her house. “It was extremely hot, and I said to her, ‘Mrs Mahler, may I take my jacket off?’ She said, ‘Mr Pressler, as far as I’m concerned, you can undress completely.’”

Finally, I’d like to tell you about something in this article that amused me greatly. (Not that the Alma story didn’t amuse me greatly.) The article referred to Schubert’s piece The Shepherd on the Rock as “Shepherd on the Rocks” — sounds like a drink!

‐Heard something interesting the other day — friend was telling me about it. Her family lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and they are Republicans. Sometime in October, they were with a few families they have known for years — years. But politics, I guess, had never come up. My friend’s father informed these others that he and one of his daughters were attending a Sarah Palin rally. And the other families said — so are we.

I guess one and all were astonished. You just never know — you never know, do you?

Except for this: When a person lives in a place like the Bay Area and doesn’t open his mouth about politics — chances are, he’s a Republican.

‐In Wednesday’s Impromptus, I talked about a couple of NR cruisers — one of whom had been given a pair of roller skates by Hank Greenberg; the other of whom had been taught to play ping-pong by Lou Boudreau. A reader wrote in to say,

“Back in March 2003, I was at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., at a reception. I met this elderly woman who said that the famed aviator Wiley Post [1898-1935] was her babysitter (he was a friend of her parents). She asked how he had lost his eye. He told her, ‘Pirates!’”

Hey, aren’t pirates in the news now?

‐Finally, wanted to say something about Bernard Lewis, the great Middle East scholar who was a guest on the recent NR cruise. He was born in 1916, the same year the School of Oriental Studies was founded. (This school, part of the University of London, was later known as SOAS, or the School of Oriental and African Studies.) Lewis would grow up to study and teach in that school.

Two years ago, his friend Buntzie Churchill called another friend, Fouad Ajami, to tell him that Bernard was turning 90. Ajami said, “Bernard’s 90? Don’t tell him.”

There’s a world of wisdom in that comment. Have a great weekend, y’all.