You ready?

I was born ready.

Welcome to Advisory Opinions, this is David French, with Sarah Isger and we're going to talk about a bunch of cool stuff today.

We've got a Supreme Court decision about voting districts in Alabama.

Okay, don't stop the podcast. This is going to be really interesting.

It's a fascinating decision with some pretty dramatic consequences actually because as is pointed out in the opinion,

Alabama, about 27% of Alabama is about 27% of Alabama's voters are black.

If the case goes one way or if the district can goes one way, the odds are overwhelming that only 14% of Alabama's congressional delegation will be represented by a black representative.

If it goes the other way, it's 28% or 28.5% so round up 29.

A very interesting case. We're going to dive into that. We're also going to talk about the ongoing Sarah Palin defamation case against the New York Times.

It really is giving people who are paying attention and insight into how the sausage is made and how groupthink is created.

It's really fascinating and interesting.

If we've got time, Sarah is going to dunk on the Russians. We've got a lot to cover.

We record our podcast on Thursday.

We record our podcast on Monday. Supreme Court comes out with an opinion shortly afterwards.

This kind of thing tends to seem to happen. Why did you set the stage for us on this thing?

We'll just dive in.

First of all, I take it as a personal affront. The Supreme Court, certainly by this point, should know when we record.

They normally release their opinions in the mornings.

However, for reasons that I can't possibly fathom, they released this opinion relating to an order after we had finished recording on Monday afternoon, just wildly inappropriate in my view.

I'm not, nevertheless, wildly.

It did a small time to read it and think about how to explain it in a podcast that, because in some ways, to the extent you don't understand this topic, it means you do understand this topic.

...