Today's traditional Monday morning flurry of Supreme Court rulings is as notable for what remains as what was decided. The race preference in K-12 student assignments cases in Seattle and Kentucky remain in the hopper. Either it's being saved intentionally by the Court as a its final showpiece release, or the delay indicates a less obvious ruling than believed.

In three other key cases though we learn something about the new Court makeup. By saying no to the First Amendment rights of a student off-school property in the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case, the 5-4 majority has reaffirmed a line of decisions dating to the 80s which give extreme (and in ZR's opinion perhaps too much) deference to the decisions of public school administrators. The decision affirms the expected conservative alignment on student speech, although the Court will find itself facing the issue of off-school property speech again as blogs and internet criticism further embed themselves in our culture. The Court also affirmed a faith-based initiative as not-violated of the religion establishment clause of the First Amendment, and it overturned a part of McCain-Feingold on late-election "issue ads," allowing them. The decision there however shows an element of moderation in the two new Justices, with Roberts and Alito joining in a separate opinion for the Court, concurring in result with Thomas, Scalia, and Kennedy, who would have gone farther and completely overturned the 2003 permitting McCain-Feingold regulations generally. This interesting division both shows that the two new Justices aren't copies of Scalia and Thomas, aren't likely to overtly violate stare decisis, and that their position isn't as easily pigeonholed as many would believe. That will have implications for a lot of issues, including race preferences, although we could know any day exactly what many of those implications on that issue are.

Flint's ABC affiliate is running this wire story about the Reverend Al Sharpton's insistence on using the governmental powers of the FCC to quash what he considers racially-charged speech.

Don Imus will appear on the Rev. Al Sharpton's radio show on Monday, five days after Imus made racially charged comments his own show about the Rutgers women's basketball team, Sharpton and MSNBC announced Sunday. Despite Imus' scheduled appearance, Sharpton said his position was unchanged: He wants Imus fired and intends to write the Federal Communications Commission about the matter. "Somewhere we must draw the line in what is tolerable in mainstream media," Sharpton said Sunday. "We cannot keep going through offending us and then apologizing and then acting like it never happened. Somewhere we've got to stop this."

Apparently, Jesse Jackson has entered the fray too:

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said his RainbowPUSH Coalition plans to protest Monday in Chicago outside the offices of NBC, which owns MSNBC, over the remark Imus made last Wednesday during his show. Imus said members of the mostly black Rutgers University women's basketball team were "nappy-headed hos." The team, which includes eight black women, had lost the day before in the NCAA women's championship game.

While ZR strongly disapproves of Imus' statement, it is clearly outside the bounds of the current FCC rules (so any censorial action would be an ex post facto revision of the rules) and should remain so, since even "offending" speech should generally be protected speech.