Sotomayor Has Surpassed Thomas Already

When I read the Huffington Post title, "Sotomayor Asks More Questions In An Hour Than Thomas Has In Years," I surely thought it was an exaggeration. Wouldn't you? HA! WRONG!

Does Clarence Thomas really ask so few questions that Sotomayor could beat his total in an hour, you may wonder. Indeed, he does. As the AP reported in February 2008, Thomas had gone 2 years and 144 cases without speaking up during oral arguments. "It is a period of unbroken silence that contrasts with the rest of the court's unceasing inquiries," the AP wrote at the time.

What a wise latina!

Sotomayor Confimed 68-31

Here are the 31 US Senators that voted against Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation to the Supreme Court. Do you notice anything in common?

Barrasso (R-WY)
Bennett (R-UT)
Brownback (R-KS)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burr (R-NC)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Corker (R-TN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Grassley (R-IA)
Hatch (R-UT)
Hutchison (R-TX)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Isakson (R-GA)
Johanns (R-NE)
Kyl (R-AZ)
McCain (R-AZ)
McConnell (R-KY)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Risch (R-ID)
Roberts (R-KS)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Thune (R-SD)
Vitter (R-LA)
Wicker (R-MS)

You'll hear every one of these scumbags in the Party of No give some sorry excuse about judicial activism, but the simple truth is that they only consider a judge to be an activist if certain decisions do not concur with their desired outcome.

Franken Slams Supreme Court

During his statement in support of Judge Sonia Sotomayor and his vote to approve her to the Supreme Court, Senator Al Franken defined the real meaning of "judicial activism" and pointed to the current Supreme Court as an example. It's times like this that I wished more Senators spoke with such conviction for what is right rather than what is advantageous to their party.

Judiciary Committee Approves Sotomayor

Well, the Democratic members did, anyway. The vote was 13-6. The lone Republican yea vote was cast by Lindsey Graham.

Rachel Corrects The Record

Last week during the groudswell of racism that permeated the US Sentate hearing on the confirmation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, I posted video without comment of MSNBC "pundit" Pat Buchanan and the pretty remarkably harsh, racist statements he was making on the issue. I didn't comment on them because I thought that they basically spoke for themselves and that there were soooo many misstatements, factually incorrect statements and flat out lies, it would have taken too much time out of my life to go through them one by one. Besides, I value my normal blood pressure.

Luckily Rachel Maddow, who had a debate with Buchanan on the issue, took it upon herself to correct the record because she couldn't stand not to.

Frank Rich: They Got Some ’Splainin’ to Do

As political theater, the Sonia Sotomayor hearings tanked faster than the 2008 Fred Thompson presidential campaign. They boasted no drama to rival the Clarence-Anita slapdown, the Bork hissy fits or the tearful exodus of Samuel Alito’s wife. There was rarely a moment to match even the high point of the Senate’s previous grilling of Sotomayor — in 1997, when she was elevated to the Second Circuit. It was then that Senator John Ashcroft of Missouri previewed the brand of white male legal wisdom that would soon become his hallmark at the Bush Justice Department. “Do you believe there’s a constitutional right to homosexual conduct by prisoners?” he asked. (She aced it: “No, sir.”)

Yet the Sotomayor show was still rich in historical significance. Someday we may regard it as we do those final, frozen tableaus of Pompeii. It offered a vivid snapshot of what Washington looked like when clueless ancien-régime conservatives were feebly clinging to their last levers of power, blissfully oblivious to the new America that was crashing down on their heads and reducing their antics to a sideshow as ridiculous as it was obsolescent.

Read the rest of the op-ed here.

Lindsey Graham Is A Dick - UPDATED

The highlight of my day while watching the Sotomayor hearings was Senator Lindsey Graham (R-Doucheland) being Mr. Tough Guy and after about 6 hours of answering questions, incredulously asked Judge Sotomayor to repeat her "wise latina" quote because he couldn't find it in his notes to beat her about the head with it. Seriously.

You've had all day, Lindsey. If you want to drag Sotomayor through the mud, that's your prerogative. But don't ask her to help you do it because you're unorganized and misplaced your right wing talking points fax. Dick.

UPDATE (10:35pm): Via Third Branch:

Via Atrios, Craig Crawford describes the political disaster that the GOP has decided to perpetrate upon itself:

Watching Lindsey Graham's gotcha grin as he needled Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor with disingenuous and rhetorical questions you had to wonder what was so funny. Does the Republican senator think it is amusing that he and his party's condescending tone toward the Hispanic woman was costing them ethnic votes with each passing hour of Tuesday's Judiciary Committee hearing?

. . . Even if they vote for her, the fallout for Republicans could reach well beyond Hispanic voters. They are coming across as a bunch of snarky and bitter old white men who cannot bear the thought of their kind losing power.

The only thing that can make it worse for the GOP will be, as I noted earlier, if no Republicans vote for Sotomayor's confirmation. Here's hoping.

Today's News

In my continuing effort to get my apartment ready to put on the market, I've completely neglected the blog today. I managed to get a couple of Tweets in (follow me!) during the installation of a medicine cabinet, bathroom lighting fixture and a pantry door.

So here's my version of today's news:

Judge Sotomayor's hearing in finally underway. And along the way Senators Sessions and Kyl show how bitchy they are to the world. Senator Hatch also gave us his whiny, wimpy side (as if he has any other) during Hardball. It was nice to see Senator Al Franken in his first Committee hearing as was the last to speak being the most junior senator. Speaking of seniority, the penultimate speaker at the hearing? Alren Specter. ...Heh.

Dick Cheney, in his latest impression of Dr. Evil, is exposed for ordering the CIA to withhold information from Congress for eight years! That would be his whole time in office as Vice President. Hmm... would that mean that Nancy Pelosi wasn't entirely incorrect when she was vilified a few weeks ago for claiming that she was lied to by the CIA? Still waiting on one of those creeps, namely John Boehner to apologize to Pelosi.

The future ex son-in-law of Sarah Palin, Levi Johnston continues his media tour and suggests Palin quit because she couldn't hack it. She couldn't take the pressure. Take it with a grain of salt considering the source, but you have to wonder about someone who quits because, according to her, she was tired of the attacks. And yet, the GOP and 7 in 10 Republicans would vote for her in 2012.

Fact Grenades

I've never experienced shell shock, but besides the pain, I can only imagine it's something like what Steven Spielberg depicted in Saving Private Ryan*. If I remember correctly, this happens twice to Tom Hanks during the movie; once towards the beginning of the movie during the beach invasion and once towards the end. An explosion takes place nearby, the shock wave causing temporary deafness, disorientation and confusion.

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski felt that shell shock today when Chuck Todd tossed a fact grenade into the MSNBC Morning Joe set. Bringing up the Supreme Court reversal on the Ricci case and how it would play with the Sotomayor nomination, Todd stated the obvious which had been pretty much ignored by the mainstream media: the fact that the conservative judges on the bench overturned the decision which had been based on legal precedent and created a new rule to overturn the decision. Some would call that "judicial activism" or "legislating from the bench." The very thing conservatives were accusing Sotomayor of doing when she ruled on legal precedent. Funny, that.

Watch the carnage as Joe's & Mika's heads explode with the realization that the "activist" judges we actually face are the conservative ones on the Supreme Court of the United States.

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Boom! goes the dynamite! The stunned silence from Joe and Mika after Todd makes his point is priceless. Mika even calls Todd "adorable" - who the fuck knows what that's supposed to mean. And Joe Scarborough, caught with his pants down, proclaims that he'll just let it go because he didn't know if it would take him half hour or an hour to debate Todd's analysis. Hint: If it takes you 30 to 60 minutes to rebut someone's statement, you're probably wrong and just making shit up. Nice try, Joe.

The post traumatic stress disorder from Todd's fact grenade is probably going to reveal itself in a disjointed rant or two in tomorrow's telecast from the gang at Morning Joke™.

* 4:58 mark.

Supreme Court Overturns New Haven Firefighter Reverse Discrimination Case

The vote was 5-4. Is anyone surprised?

NY Times: WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court ruled Monday that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.

New Haven was wrong to scrap a promotion exam because no African-Americans and only two Hispanic firefighters were likely to be made lieutenants or captains based on the results, the court said Monday in a 5-4 decision. The city said that it had acted to avoid a lawsuit from minorities.

...In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the white firefighters "understandably attract this court's sympathy. But they had no vested right to promotion. Nor have other persons received promotions in preference to them."

Justices Stephen Breyer, David Souter and John Paul Stevens signed onto Ginsburg's dissent, which she read aloud in court Monday.

Another important note to ponder for those opposed to the Appellate Court decision in which Sotomayor was involved was that according to Pete Williams reporting on MSNBC just now, "the Supreme Court did announce a new rule today, one that was not available to [Sotomayor] at the time."

A new rule for the purposes of overturning the decision... which is perfectly acceptable, but will be immediately tossed aside by the right in order to further malign and discredit Sotomayor's nomination.

But It's Not About Racism (The National Review Cover Edition)

TPM: As part of a cover package called "The Wise Latina," the folks over at the conservative National Review--apparently flummoxed by the very idea of a "wise Latina"--have caricaturized the Puerto Rican-descended Sonia Sotomayor as an Asian Buddhist.

Good times.

Also featured on the cover in the current issue: "Jonah Goldberg On His Critics." That better be a long article.

(H/T TPM)

But It's Not About Racism (The Piñata Edition)

Someone should remind the general anti-Sotomayor population that she's not Mexican.

Rush Limbaugh Stands By His Convictions

NOT!

LIMBAUGH: If I could be convinced that Sonia Sotomayor might be the biggest hope for overturning Roe v. Wade down the line, then I might be persuaded to look at her nomination in a different light... She would be the sixth Catholic on the Supreme Court. … She’s a Catholic, a devout Catholic, she hasn’t got a record on [abortion] … I can see a possibility of supporting this nomination if I can be convinced that she does have a sensibility towards life.

This is the same Rush Limbaugh (ugh, imagine if there were more than one?) who called Sotomayor a racist, insisted that her nomination be withdrawn and called for GOP opposition.

Apparently in Limbaugh’s view, when judges allow their religious backgrounds to directly influence their rulings in ways conservatives view favorably, it’s blind justice. When judges remark that being a minority can give individuals perspective on the impact of their rulings, it’s racism.

Speaking of Racism...

... I was just speaking to my midwestern caucasian friend and asked him if he'd seen the first clip that everyone was touting from Monday night's Conan O'Brien debut on The Tonight Show. Here's the clip if you haven't seen it.



Big laughs and applause. It was all over the news the next day. Conan taking a shot at Vice President Biden. I thought it was very funny. And then I thought some more. No one including myself realized that it was a racist joke. Because the butt of the joke was Vice President Gaffe-a-Minute, no one picked up on the racial overtones of the joke.

Think of it this way: what if the nominee was an African-American woman and the Biden voiceover said, "I like fried chicken... and grits... and okra... and watermelon. How many baby daddies do you have?"

I know I may be overanalyzing here, especially in light of the word "racist" being thrown around and used against Judge Sotomayor, and that the subject of ridicule was Biden. But when you stop to think about it,there's a difference between being overly sensitive for the sake of political correctness and being completely desensitized. Just sayin'.

But It's Not About Racism (The Pat Buchanan Edition)

BUCHANAN: Well I, again in that Saturday piece, she went to Princeton. She graduated first in her class it said. But she herself said she read, basically classic children's books to read and learn the language and she read basic English grammars and she got help from tutors. I think that, I mean if you're, frankly if you're in college and you're working on Pinocchio or on the troll under the bridge, I don't think that's college work.

Amanda Terkel: Buchanan has long claimed that Hispanic immigrants are resistant to learning English and has said that it would be easier for them to "assimilate" if they did so. When writing about Mexican immigrants in 2006, Buchanan said that in contrast to Italian immigrants, "millions of Mexicans are determined to retain their language and loyalty to Mexico." Similarly, he has also said that "the road to culture is language" and "they want to keep their Spanish language."

So basically, Buchanan yells when Hispanics are allegedly unwilling to learn English. However, when they make an attempt to do so, he mocks them as being dumb.

You should watch the entire video for more crap like she's an affirmative action activist and belongs to La Raza a "radical group" advancing the Hispanic agenda. Remind me again why Buchanan is considered relevant?

President Obama's Weekly Address - May 30, 2009

The Experience of Judge Sotomayor