The Supreme Court and The Election

Supreme Court Vacancies Likely in Next Four Years

One issue that has been totally absent from the campaign is the Supreme Court. Five of the justices are 70 or more. Justice Stevens is 88 and unlikely to want to serve 4 more years. Justice Ginsberg had cancer and was operated on for it. Justice Souter is known to want to retire and return to New Hampshire. These are three of the most liberal justices on the court. If all three retire and are replaced by Obama, the court will retain its even split between liberals and conservatives for many years to come. If all three are replaced by McCain, the conservatives will have a clear majority and surely reverse Roe v. Wade and many other decisions that conservatives think are wrong. It is amazing that the court has gotten so little attention.

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Bundling

Bundling was the traditional practice of wrapping one person in a bed accompanied by another, usually as a part of courting behavior. The tradition is thought to have originated either in the Netherlands or in the British Isles and later became common in Colonial America^[1], especially in Pennsylvania Dutch Country. The aim was to allow intimacy without sexual intercourse.

Traditionally, participants were adolescents, with a boy staying at the residence of a girl. They were given separate blankets by the girl's parents and expected to talk to one another through the night. The practice was limited to the winter and sometimes the use of a bundling board, placed between the boy and girl, ensured that no sexual conduct would take place. More often, this rule was merely implicit, and was not always honored. In Colonial America, for instance, there are known instances of bundling leading to premarital pregnancies^{[citation needed]}.

The use of bundling boards allowed an expedient use of the practice of bundling in the early United States, where, in the case of a scarcity of beds, travellers were occasionally permitted to bundle with locals. This seemingly strange practice allowed extra money to be made by renting out half a bed. Hotels rented rooms for the night, shared by many occupants, and sharing a bed entailed an additional fee.

As late as the mid 19th century, there are indications that bundling was still practiced in New England, although its popularity was waning. The court case of Graham vs. Smith, argued before Judge Edmunds in the Orange Circuit Court of New York State in 1846, concerned the seduction of a 19-year-old woman; testimony in the case established that bundling was a common practice in certain rural social circles at the time. By the 20th century, bundling as a practice seems to have died out almost everywhere, with only isolated references to it occurring in Amish Pennsylvania.^[2]

Anachronisms

An odd placement of bundling boards was aboard the airline BCPA, British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines, Australia's first trans-Pacific airline, flying Douglas DC-6B sleeper Pullman style equipment over the long haul from Sydney, Australia to Vancouver, Canada via San Francisco across the Pacific Ocean in the early 1950s.

An article in the Dec. 12, 1969 issue of Time Magazine referred to a tongue-in-cheek effort to revive bundling by a so-called "Society to Bring Back Bundling."

source: wiki