Stranger than fiction

I watched the press conference with Governor Sanford yesterday. It was one of the worst attempts to defuse a situation as ever I saw. I understand that he's supposed to be "unconventional," and many of his constituents probably prize shooting from the hip over practiced, careful speechifying, but it was just embarrassing to watch.

It takes this article four paragraphs to get to the Gov's official declaration, which, believe me, is three times faster than Sanford managed. When one is caught in obvious shenanigans, the best thing to do is come forward and say, upfront, what's been going on. Instead, he meandered through all the plausible reasons why he might have disappeared for a week, apologized to friends, family, and voters, mentioned a reporter he'd had a run-in with at the Atlanta airport, and then copped to being out of the country on a booty call. He then went into embarrassing detail about how he'd met this person innocently at first, and how that had changed, and so on and so forth. Dude, you're here to tell people why you up and vanished without leaving your contact information, not trace your every thought process since your affair started. Great, you cheated on your wife; we do not need the play-by-play. (Unless it's going to lead to awkward questions like it did in Senator Ensign's case where he might have paid his mistress more, with GOP funds, while he was schtupping her and fired her when the affair was over.)

Of course, the real "news" here is that Sanford was a 2012 presidential hopeful and that looks like it won't be happening any more. I hope that such dashing of his chances happen for the right reason--for the fact that the executive leader of an entire state went AWOL and didn't think to make any provisions (like talking to the Lt. Gov!!!) to deal with state business while he was away. I don't give a shit who you boned unless your boning breaks the law (which, possibly, Ensign's firing of his mistress could have done--his paying her more while she had sex with him doesn't look great either). But you cannot just abandon your post as president. You want ass? Call up Hugh Hefner, go to Camp David, shag your weekend away, but for the love of the great noodly one, STAY IN TOUCH.

Calling all lawyers

I have a few questions about this ruling.

Let me start by saying that it is amazing, given the kinds of questions even the liberal SCOTUS justices were asking, that they ruled as they did. I'd also like to add, as many on progressive blogs have been doing, that I, too, was certain before I read the details of the ruling that Thomas would be the lone dissenter, proudly trumpeting the rights of school districts to strip-search tweeners at any moment for any reason. So, hurrah, SCOTUS actually managed to rally and say, no, you can't strip search a teenage girl because some other teenage girl felt like getting her in trouble and passed on a rumor that the first girl was packing heat Advil. (Thomas' dissent is giving me the creeps, so I'll leave it to you guys to read about it rather than going into it myself.)

But I still have a couple of questions:

1) The school officials have been granted immunity from, I assume, civil prosecution despite SCOTUS having found that the officials violated the girl's rights. Since Justice Thomas is so certain that every mixed signal = everyone breaking the law, won't this not deter schools from doing such searches in the future, despite their unconstitutionality, because they know they can't be sued?

2) The school district is not immune. Is it really the best way to stop this kind of adult-power-tripping madness to say that individuals can demand students be officially pantsed but that only the school can be sued for it? Honestly, wouldn't it better to say the school should be ashamed for not disciplining this person or that one but that the real problem was that person deciding to take the law into their own hands?

Basically, what I, the non-lawyer, get out of this is the following:
School teachers/administrators cannot strip search students...but there won't be any personal penalty if they do. The school district will be liable, however, meaning that the victims of these administrators will be in the oh-so-enviable position of suing a public school. So victims of this kind of unwarranted and now definitely unconstitutional assault will get to chose between letting the incident slide or bankrupting the center of education for their fellow students. Won't that be fun.