* Happy Birthday, Mrs. President! Scott Shrake conducts an astrological analysis of Hillary Clinton. [Huffington Post]

* Speaking of witch, is Stephen Colbert "the best-scripted candidate this side of Hillary Clinton"? [Radar Online]

* "'Terrorism,' Censored Legal Briefs & The Blogosphere: Awesome Together." [Fishbowl NY]

* Lawsuit of the Day: Mom of "Let's Go Crazy" Baby fights back. [ABC News]

* Benchslap of the Day: federal judge tells SEC lawyer, to "sit down" and "shut up." [WSJ Law Blog]

It's the Friday afternoon before Labor Day, and we're ready to pack it in. We might put up another post or two -- e.g., Legal Eagle Wedding Watch -- but basically we are done for the day. (Our colleagues over at DealBreaker checked out hours ago.)

Before we sign off, we'd like to point out that yesterday was Above the Law's first anniversary -- or blogiversary, as some say. ATL launched one year ago, on August 30, 2006.

During the span of a year, ATL has grown in leaps and bounds. Traffic has been tremendous, far outstripping expectations. Even though ATL is in its infancy, it's already one of the most widely read legal blogs. The site has become quite well-known, garnering a number of media mentions.

We thank you, our readers, for making this success possible. Thanks for faithfully visiting ATL (and refreshing your browsers so frequently), for spreading the word about this website, and for sending us great tips and information.

Happy Labor Day! Enjoy the long weekend. You deserve it!

P.S. Are you on Facebook? If so, please join the ATL Facebook group. Yay!

Earlier: Letter from the Editor: Welcome to Above the Law

Some helpful tipsters reminded us: today is the birthday of [swing] Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Happy Birthday, Justice Kennedy!

We asked one reader, aspiring lawyer Andrew Cohen,* for thoughts on writing up a short post. His response:

"You don't. You write a ridiculously long post that both praises and denigrates him, pretending to come out clearly one way or another, but writing so murkily that no one can tell how you actually feel."

And let's throw in some flowery rhetoric, too. Considering that it's AMK's birthday, a shout-out to the "mystery of life" would be quite apropos.

Update: Thanks for the reminder. Birthday wishes also go out to Justice Kennedy's most famous former clerk: Judge Alex Kozinski!

Justice Kennedy Turns 71 [How Appealing]

* We include Mr. Cohen's name with his permission (and wish him good luck on the bar exam tomorrow). But our default rule at ATL is anonymity for all correspondents.

[Ed. note: ATL will be on a pretty laid-back publication schedule today. It's Good Friday, the markets are closed, and many folks are probably traveling for the holiday weekend. We will be posting, but not at our regular pace.]

* Stevens's key role. [USA Today via How Appealing]

* Surveillance laws outdated? He's probably referring to all of those pesky constitutional protections. [Jurist]

* Dude. You gotta make sure you're getting the right one when you're messing with the huevos. That's just not cool. Not cool at all. That guy deserves a bazillion dollars. [CNN]

* Lawyers and golf. [WSJ Law Blog]

* Fartman loses on appeal. [Andrews Publications via FindLaw]

* Belated birthday greetings to Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., who turned 57 earlier this week. [How Appealing]

* A hilarious read if you've been there, even if I tell you that the punchline is that this 70-year-old rich lawyer dude with 40-year-old sheets now has a 22-year-old Russian girlfriend. [New York Times]

* I think I heard a colleague at one of my first jobs say he wanted to f*&k me like an animal. It was a good thing I didn't find any cause of action, because it turns out it was just that Nine Inch Nails song playing in his cubicle. [Workplace Prof Blog]

* You are actually a day older than you think, a fact hopefully irrelevant to ATL readers. [Volokh Conspiracy]

* Groupies are much less trouble. [MSN Music]

We're a day late; Justice Antonin Scalia turned 71 yesterday, on March 11. But better late than never. Does anyone know how Nino celebrated this august occasion?

On the subject of Justice Scalia's age, here's an interesting squib from Jan Crawford Greenburg's most excellent new book, Supreme Conflict, describing how Justice Scalia edged out Judge Robert Bork as a SCOTUS nominee:

[T]he politics of the nomination turned on age and compatibility. Scalia edged out Bork on both. "It came down to the ten years," one top official later explained. Scalia was almost a decade younger than Bork, and even though he smoked and drank, he also exercised regularly. [DOJ official William Bradford] Reynolds and his team concluded that Scalia was likely to be on the Court longer than Bork because he was in better health -- an important consideration if Scalia was to be Reagan's last nomination.

Greenburg argues that nominating Scalia before Bork was a big mistake:

By nominating Scalia first, alongside the controversial Rehnquist, the White House used up all its political advantages. With Reagan at the height of his popularity and Republicans controlling the Senate, Bork would have been confirmed alongside Rehnquist -- leaving the more loquacious and charming Scalia to emerge for the next nomination, all but daring senators to reject the court's first Italian American nominee.

Hindsight is 20/20; but JCG is probably right about this. And considering that both Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork are alive and well today, in seemingly excellent health, both men would presumably have enjoyed long tenures on the Court had President Reagan switched the order of their nominations.

Happy birthday to Justice Antonin Scalia [How Appealing]

* Another day, another deepening of the doo-doo over at HP. Now the plot is taking on a "made-for-television-movie" feel: "[D]etectives tried to plant software on at least one journalist’s computer that would enable messages to be traced." [New York Times]

* National security adviser Stephen Hadley indicates that the White House is trying to reach a compromise with Republican Senators over what the CIA can and cannot do when interrogating terror suspects. [New York Times]

* A medical examiner hired by successful Supreme Court litigant Anna Nicole Smith performed a second autopsy on Smith's 20-year-old son over the weekend. The cause of death has not yet been determined, but heart disease, stroke, or a "congenital anomaly" have been ruled out. [Associated Press]

* Options backdating defendant William Sorin was outside general counsel at Comverse Technology -- a rather unusual arrangement. Sorin was awarded millions of dollars worth of stock options, even though he wasn't even a salaried employee of the company. [Corporate Counsel]

* A happy 67th birthday to Justice David H. Souter. And some advice: Don't eat that cupcake sent over by Ann Coulter, even if she did stick a cute little candle in it. [How Appealing]