Every now and then, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has a hankering for graham crackers and shortbread. Like Pulp Fiction’s Jimmie, she buys the gourmet expensive stuff because when she eats it she wants to taste it. And so, rather than sending out her law clerks for Honey Maid grahams and Walkers shortbread, O’Connor calls Polly Brown. To say that Brown knows graham crackers and shortbread is a little like saying that O’Connor knows…

MONDAY: >> We’ve been hearing an awful lot about certain journalists who’ve spent superfluous time in jail for ideals they supposedly believe in — but, before you make any contributions to that gravy train, why not hear from Marie-Helene Carleton, who’ll be in town discussing the travails of her filmmaker partner Micah Garen, who was taken hostage in Iraq in 2003. Even if you’re an avid news junkie, there’s still a lot you don’t know…

Interested parties and supposedly disinterested pundits have taken to predicting what will become of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s most important swing decisions after her retirement. In the 2003-04 term, notably, O’Connor provided the fifth vote to uphold affirmative action programs at public universities – on certain conditions. As we saw in Bolling v. Sharpe, the District of Columbia is an important supporting actor in the development of discrimination law in this country. Twenty years…

OK, so there isn’t a specific D.C. angle other than it takes place here, but this is pretty monumental news in the larger scheme of things. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, today announced her resignation, the first in over 10 years and one likely to set up what is sure to be a long and brutal battle between conservative factions looking to reign in “judicial activism”…