Short Fuse

Proposition 8: The ghost of Rose Bird
It's good news that the California Supreme Court has agreed to review Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that overturned same-sex marriage rights in that state. The matter turns on whether Proposition 8 can be considered a "revision" to the state's constitution, which under Article 18 of that same constitution seems to require not just the people's majority vote but a two-thirds vote of the Legislature. Still, the real action may not be legal so much as political: In California, even the state's highest court judges are elected, and subject to recall petitions. So no matter how the court rules, it could open a Pandora's box. It's just another example of why civil rights should not be subject to popular plebiscite.

Politics: A self-aggrandizing form of denial
How do you spell "self-serving rationalization?" R-O-V-E. In 2000, Karl Rove, the strategist behind George W. Bush's political campaigns, talked of ushering in a long era of Republican rule. Eight years later, backlash against the ideological excesses of the Bush era helped elect Barack Obama and strengthen Democratic control of Congress. But asked in a recent New York Times Magazine interview whether this month's results were a repudiation of his politics, Rove claimed that Obama won "in great respect by adopting the methods of the Bush campaign and conducting a vast army of persuasion to identify and get out the vote." Coming next Sunday: Napoleon takes credit for Wellington's victory at Waterloo.

Russia: A journalist's murder is no story
Sometimes the rottenness of an entire body politic may be expressed in a single incident. So it was this week when a judge in the Moscow trial of three defendants in the 2006 assassination of investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya barred journalists from the courtroom. Chief Judge Yevgeny Zubov, who has temporarily adjourned the trial, claimed jurors feared to enter the court with members of the media present. But there had been no threats against jurors, and no cameras would have been allowed in any case. The authorities obviously want to restrict coverage of a murder and a fishy investigation that could raise unpleasant questions about who ordered the hit on Politkovskaya and why. She would not have been intimidated.