Chris Christie smiling.

This post is the first in a series, premised on my observation that the candidate with the best smile wins the presidency. I'm not certain that's true, at least not all the time, but it explains a lot, as long as you start in 1976, when a man won the presidency almost entirely because of a gigantic, toothy smile.

So what I'm doing is a Google image search on a presidential candidate's name along with the word "smiling," then picking the least smiley photograph that comes up. I'm starting with Chris Christie because the results made me laugh, and I had a hard time choosing between the photo above and this one:

"President Barack Obama expressed gratitude last week to former President Jimmy Carter's grandson..."

"... who had a role in leaking secretly-recorded video of Mitt Romney's infamous '47%' comments, James Carter said Thursday on CNN."

Warren Lee Hill was sentenced to death for bludgeoning Joseph Handspike with a nail-studded board.

Handspike, Hill's fellow inmate, had been sleeping and other prisoners begged Hill to stop. Hill "was already serving a life sentence for murder in the 1986 slaying of his girlfriend, Myra Wright, who had been shot 11 times."

The Handspike murder took place in 1990, 23 years ago, and just as Hill was being prepped for the lethal injection, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay, so that it may be determined, after all these years, whether Hill is — as his lawyer put it — "a person with mental retardation."

Hill has received support from various activists and from former President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn.

"Georgia should not violate its own prohibition against executing individuals with serious diminished capacity," President Carter said in a statement....

Georgia passed a law in 1988 prohibiting the execution of mentally disabled death row inmates, and the U.S.Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that the execution of mentally disabled offenders is unconstitutional....

Before trial, Hill's family members described him as "the leader of the family" and "a father figure," the state notes. He was not in special education classes and served in the Navy, where he received promotions, the state said.

Does lifting the combat ban for women make it easier or harder to reintroduce the military draft?

Here's a story explaining the new policy change and why it was done.

In the military, serving in combat positions like the infantry remains crucial to career advancement. Women have long said that by not recognizing their real service, the military has unfairly held them back.

No mention of the draft. When I first saw this story, I assumed it meant that it would be much more difficult, in the future, to bring back the draft. I cannot believe that the people would accept forcing women into combat. But now I'm thinking that removing this barrier makes it easier to restore the draft, because women won't really be forced into combat. With neutrally designed physical tests, no woman will be forced. These tests, keyed to what strong men can do, will exclude all but the most fit and motivated woman.

You don't need discrimination against women to filter out all the non-volunteers. And it will be more acceptable to Americans to force men and women into an institution that renounces any formal, express policy of sex discrimination. A male-only draft would raise objections, and a draft that includes women, but puts them in back up positions should be a problem both for women, because they are subordinated, and to men, because they are, because of their sex, more likely to be put in life-threatening positions.

***

I've been thinking about this problem quite a bit over the years as I teach the old Supreme Court case Rostker v. Goldberg, which involved a challenge to the requirement, introduced in 1980, that males register for the draft. The draft itself had ended in 1973, but President Carter thought we should be prepared for the possibility of a draft. He wanted to include both women and men, but Congress made it male only, which was challenged as unconstitutional sex discrimination. The fact that only men would be used in combat was the basis for upholding the discrimination:

In light of the combat restrictions, women did not have the same opportunities for promotion as men, and therefore it was not unconstitutional for Congress to distinguish between them.

Jimmy Carter thinks "it's okay" to legalize marijuana.

Well, then!

He took the federalism angle: "That’s the way our country has developed over the last 200 years. It’s about a few states being kind of experiment states. So on that basis I am in favor of it.”

... I think we can watch and see what happens in the state of Washington, for instance around Seattle, and let the American government and let the American people see does it cause a serious problem or not.