Someone has designed a tongue-control interface for the Nintendo GameBoy Advance. It’s not the cybernetic X-Box interface I’m waiting for, but we’re getting closer.
My friend Adam nominated for a spot in next year’s Humphrey Institute Policy Fellows program. It sounds like a really exciting opportunity; getting to meet other professionals who are up-and-coming in their respective fields. There may even be a potential trip to Washington D.C., which would be cool because I’ve never been there. One doesn’t grow up dreaming of becoming a policy wonk, but that looks like the direction I’m heading in. And next to writing, I really can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing. Who knows. If Kerry wins in November, maybe I could land some sort of policy advisor position in his Administration.

I’ve written previously about the Tennessee v. Lane case that was heard before the U.S. Supreme Court last fall. Today, the Court ruled that states can be sued under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. This decision came as something of a surprise to many because, in recent years, the Court has adopted a doctrine of limited federal powers based on the Eleventh Amendment. In fact, the Court had already ruled in another case, Garrett, that states cannot be sued under Title I of the ADA (covering employment discrimination). Title II requires publicly funded services and programs to be accessible to people with disabilities and the Court found that the legislation was congruent and proportional to its stated aim of making courts accessible. But that’s what’s puzzling about this ruling; it’s limited to the specific fact pattern of the case. The Court refuses to state whether states would be covered by Title II in cases involving other services or programs. I’m not sure why the majority took this approach. It seems counter-productive to leave the door open to future litigation with the somewhat absurd result of courts having to parse out the scope of a state’s responsibilities under Title II. Perhaps the Justices didn’t want to give the impression that they were making a dramatic break with previous Eleventh Amendment holdings.
And I have to point out something Scalia said in his concurring dissent:
Requiring access for disabled persons to all public buildings cannot remotely be considered a means of �enforcing� the Fourteenth Amendment. The considerations of long accepted practice and of policy that sanctioned such distortion of language where state racial discrimination is at issue do not apply in this field of social policy far removed from the principal object of the Civil War Amendments.
It’s this kind of strict textualism that drives me up the wall. How is eliminating institutional discrimination any different than eliminating institutional racial discrimination? No, the drafters of the 14th Amendment probably had no concept of disability rights, but they did have the wisdom to not restrict the Amendment purely to matters of race. The Fourteenth Amendment sprang out of the horrors of slavery, but it was crafted to ensure equal protection to everyone with no exceptions or qualifiers. Scalia rigid interpretation is without intellectual merit and, frankly, it’s un-American

A couple big events in the world of blogging. First, the Blogger interface has been redesigned. It looks more user-friendly and it has some cool features like blogging via e-mail. And Six Apart has released the developers’ version of Moveable Type 3.0. Every geek seems to have an opinion about the new licensing and fee structure in MT. Frankly, I could care less. I don’t have multiple blogs and I’m the only author on this one, so I can get away with the free version. Even if they did charge a fee for a personal license, I’d probably pay it. I tend to reward software publishers that make stuff I find useful. I sometimes think the free software movement has left us all a little spoiled and a little insensitive about the work that goes into creating good software. Free is good, but it shouldn’t be something something that we come to expect from every developer.

Look, I appreciate getting over 2,000 hits today, but you’re not going to find any illicit pictures of a certain disgraced US soldier. I’m not sure how this blog became a Mecca for every Google search on the subject, but it’s beginning to creep me out a little. So, sorry to disappoint, but feel free to stick around and browse my collection of oh-so-insightful commentary and witty observations. But something tells me most of you aren’t looking for insightful or witty at the moment.
I wonder if the Bookslut has a boyfriend. She likes comics, I like comics. She collects books obsessively, I collect books obsessively. She’s wry and sarcastic, I’m wry and sarcastic. Oh wait, she’s in Chicago. Okay, that might not work. Maybe she has a cousin in Minneapolis or something.

Scott McCloud is teaching a week-long seminar on the creation of comics at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in August. If it wasn’t for the whole can’t-draw-a-straight-line-or-any-line-for-that-matter thing, I might consider taking off work and signing up for the class. At least I’d be able to get someone to look at the script I wrote last fall. Maybe even get someone to illustrate it for me. Oh well. Maybe someday I’ll fly to England and show up on Warren Ellis’s doorstep and threaten to turn off my ventilator unless he reads it. He’d probably just fold his arms, shrug, and mutter something like “makes no fucking difference to me,” but it might be worth a try.
A friend of mine from work is out this week with pneumonia. Probably the same thing I had. She also has SMA and this is her second bout of pneumonia this year. I actually think that being on a ventilator has kept me healthier over the years. Before I was vented, I had pretty crappy lung capacity and a goldfish probably had a stronger cough than I did. Now, with the extra help of the vent and the occasional suctioning of my trachea, it’s a relatively easy matter of keeping my chest clear. When a lot of people hear “mechanical ventilation”, their reactions usually aren’t positive. I wasn’t too thrilled about it either at first, but hey, it beats the alternative.