Irin Carmon has a great rundown of Mitt Romney's botchtastic answer on the constitutional right to contraception at Saturday's GOP debate, which can be fairly summarized as such:
"It is silly that you would ask me about whether something is constitutionally protected. After all, nobody is threatening it. It's constitutionally protected!"
Ignoring that personhood amendments by and large do exactly that (as do the initiatives of any number of other conservative religious groups focused on the alleged sexifying effects of latex tubes and daily prescriptions), the question was important for another reason.
Romney (Harvard Law, when he admits it) replied with an ethic of constitutional interpretation that boils down to not thinking about it unless you have to, even when your main legal advisor is a guy who was denied a seat on the Supreme Court in part because of his stance on Griswold. Ron Paul chimed in by saying that the Commerce Clause would prevent the banning of birth control sales by states or localities, which would make a lot of sense if that was in any way what the Commerce Clause did. Earlier in the week, Rick Santorum declared that marriage was a privilege rather than a right, meaning that he's against the Supreme Court's decision in Loving v. Virginia, legalizing interracial marriage.
Add in Santorum and Gingrich's desire to abolish part or all of the Ninth Circuit (which would almost certainly lead to a massive due process and equal protection suit after a third of the nation loses access to federal courts), and the GOP has a widespread problem: their concern now is not stopping "activist judges". It's reliving a glorified costume party from the late 1780s, where we presume that the Founders sat down, calmly discussed every issue that could ever possibly pop up, wrote a document to cover it - except for the part about slavery, which would work itself out after a bit - and then got back to discussing what a pompous dick Ben Franklin was.
Conservatives increasingly aren't having problems withjudges. Conservatives are having a problem with courts.
Courts get in the way of the executive and the legislature. They're supposed to. They constitute a deliberative branch whose purpose is to analyze the actions of the other two branches and determine whether those actions comport with the law. Are they always right? No. But neither are the other two branches.
The GOP field's hostility to courts comes, largely, from the fact that courts are able to say and do things the other two branches can't, without the sort of rapid political changes that have led to Congress' position as a well-respected institution and the foundation of public life. Courts interpret and, yes, enshrine rules that the other two branches missed entirely. No matter how strong an executive is, after he has appointed a judge, his ability to constrain a federal court's discretion is limited mainly to the laws he or she signs.
By threatening the dissolution of courts and even entire circuits, or by deciding that entire swaths of Supreme Court precedents are wrongly decided because of stuff and things despite having almost zero familiarity with the underlying law or facts, the message is not that rogue judges can be constrained. It's that courts are no longer as untouchable as they thought they were, and if they don't step in line and rule along a particular ideological zeitgeist, they'll find themselves subject to the same punishment as a rogue legislator or insufficiently lockstep presidential candidate.
The Founders, of course, put in safeguards for just that purpose. Not that it matters, of course; should those Founders fight too hard for their beloved "Third Article", they're gonna find themselves the Founders of Finland, and we'll replace them with proper historical heroes, like Von Mises and Margaret Thatcher. Check yourself before you wreck yourself, oldheads.
The main reason I hate the Supreme Court's overreliance on the use of dictionaries? Dictionaries aren't meant to be prescriptive, they're meant to be descriptive.
Suppose a contract requires that a party google something as a part of its services to the other party. Did they mean that the party would search on the internet generally, or did they mean that the party would specifically use Google for all of its searching? Well, if you look in the dictionary, the first definition that comes up is the brand-specific one. However, Google has also made a concerted effort over the past few years to avoid genericide, the appropriation of trademarked terms for general, non-specific usage (also, not in the dictionary).
It's a lazy, faux-originalist way of figuring out the meaning of words without actually having to delve into what people actually think and how words are actually used.
Attorney General Eric Holder said President Barack Obama has concluded that the administration cannot defend the federal law that defines marriage as only between a man and a woman. He noted that the congressional debate during passage of the Defense of Marriage Act “contains numerous expressions reflecting moral disapproval of gays and lesbians and their intimate and family relationships - precisely the kind of stereotype-based thinking and animus the (Constitution’s)Equal Protection Clause is designed to guard against.”....
Holder wrote to House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, that Obama has concluded the Defense of Marriage Act fails to meet a rigorous standard under which courts view with suspicion any laws targeting minority groups who have suffered a history of discrimination.
It’s hard to tell what prompted this, and it’s possible it was a why-not sort of thing. But I like to think that the Obama administration sees challenges to gay marriage bans percolating up through the courts, and he’s throwing his hat in with the pro-same-sex-marriage people to send a signal to the Supreme Court. As basically everyone knows, the wild card vote should gay marriage come in front of the court is Anthony Kennedy. I’ve been fairly confident for a long time now that Kennedy would vote to strike down bans against same-sex marriage and legalize it across the country, because he wrote the decision for Lawrence v Texas. Yes, it’s been argued that he hedged his bets in that decision and said that it didn’t indicate the legalization of same-sex marriage, but that’s kind of standard bet-hedging in judicial decisions, from what I understand. What is more interesting to me was that Kennedy was extremely sentimental (in a good way) about Lawrence, reading the decision aloud to please all the people whose private sexual choices he just mandated cannot be made criminal.
Now opponents of gay marriage will find that not only with the Justice Department not back them if this gets to the Supreme Court, odds are high they’ll write an amicus brief suggesting same-sex marriage be legalized. That sort of thing can and probably will have a profound impact on Kennedy.
That’s just my prediction. Feel free to spin your own!
I’ve been told that Chris Christie is too imperious and too much of a bully to win the Republican nomination, and my feeling on that is that Republicans like imperious bullies (see: John McCain), so I don’t see how that could hurt him. I mean, it will in the general, but not so much in the primary. But he hasn’t learned the most important lesson of being a Republican favorite, which is that no matter how sure of yourself you may be, if you refuse to pander to bigots, you’re screwed. McCain knew this; he changed his position on immigration to the one that most appealed to people who flip out if they hear someone speaking in Spanish in public. But Christie’s gone and appointed a Muslim to the state bench of New Jersey, and the wingnuts are freaking out, sure this is a sign that sharia law is imminent. Adam Serwer:
The case against Mohammed—if you care to tumble down that rabbit hole—is that he’s represented people accused of ties to terrorism. The “stealth jihad” crew, despite ostensibly being concerned about the secular rule of law being subverted by Islamic fundamentalists, don’t actually believe in the presumption of innocence, or in providing legal representation to Muslims accused of crimes.
Sohail Mohammed defended some men who were caught up in post-9/11 secret sweeps looking for potential terrorists, and most of them were innocent of the accusation of having ties to terrorism. “Innocent” is a key word here when understanding how completely ridiculous the wingnut reaction is, though grown-ups have to also point out that even if they’re not innocent, they have a right to a legal defense, like anyone else accused of a crime. Basically, the tattered remains of the once-powerful 101st Fighting Keyboardists don’t believe that there is a difference between “Muslim” and “terrorist”.
– In a widely linked post, “Governor Christie’s Dirty Islamist Ties,” blogger Daniel Greenfield writes that “New Jersey, the Garden State, has just taken its first step toward becoming the Sharia State,” and criticized Christie for being “willing to stand up to the teacher’s union, but not to the terrorist’s union.”
– Hate blogger Pamela Gellar, in a post titled “Governor Christie’s Hamas Pick for Superior Judgeship,” declared Christie’s political career over: “Governor Christie looked and sounded like he could be presidential. He’s not. He’s in bed with the enemy. All the other stuff doesn’t matter if you don’t have your freedom.”
– At Commentary magazine, Jonathan S. Tobin wrote a post about Christie’s “troubling appointment,” and charged that Christie’s “appointment of Sohail Mohammed to the court shows that his judgment on the issue of support for terrorism is highly questionable.”
– The Investigative Project on Terrorism warned Christie’s appointment of an “Islamist” to a judgeship “betrays either naivete or calculation. Either is troubling.”
– PowerLine blog took extra pains to note that “The attorney’s name is Mohammed, first name Sohail — Sohail Mohammed.”
I, for one, cannot wait for the farmer’s market to have the crescents to indicate which tomatoes are sharia tomatoes. All that radical juiciness!
I think it’s time to start a Republican nomination index. Measure all the potential candidates against each other, see who is ahead which week, etc. My money is still on Christie getting it, but this has weakened the case, and I feel Pawlenty is now ahead. But watch out for dark horse Huckabee.
Who should be on such an index? Maybe creating a graphic for it would be a good idea.
In case you hadn’t heard, diabetes drug Avandia is coming under fire for maybe causing heart attacks, maybe. About 83,000, by the government’s estimate. It’s kind of a big deal, if you think 83,000 people having heart attacks they shouldn’t have had matters. Of course, giant slalom is on, so there are other things happening in this world.
Hugh Hewitt, however, laments the real victim here: GlaxoSmithKline, the makers of Avandia. You see, people are probably going to sue this company that made this precious heart-disrupting drug, and that creates problems.
If you or a family member has been taking Avandia and suffered a heart attack, this is more than sufficient cause on which to bring a lawsuit for damages. If death resulted for the loved one, a wrongful death suit will follow.
This is not the problem with our tort system. People who are seriously injured ought to be able to quickly recover their losses.
That’s so nice!
The problems with our system—problems left completely unaddressed by Obamacare—are the roulette-like aspects of our tort law, under which thousands of plaintiffs’ lawyers are already racing to attract any and all claims from anyone who thinks they may have taken Avandia and thinks their particular problem is related to it. There are no barriers to entry to the courts other than the willingness of some lawyer somewhere being willing to roll the dice on a contingency basis.
Nor are there many limits on certain types of damages that are subject to wild swings in the eyes of a jury, including punitive damages. Everything depends upon the jurisdiction in which the case is brought.
Again, advocates of tort reform do not argue that the injured should not be compensated. They should be and the courts can be made to work fairly in such settings as mass tort. But right now they do not do so, or at least not very often.
Actually, the court system works incredibly well in cases of mass tort (and the bar to class action suits in particular has gotten progressively higher over the past couple of decades). It’s not even really an argument - the main reason that the tort system in this country works the way it does is because we have weak regulation and a bad healthcare system. The best tort reform would be universal healthcare; subsidizing the cost of healthcare would drastically reduce the financial liability of companies that commit torts. Of course, that makes sense, so it’s better to not do it and instead just ensure that we toss valid cases out of the court system.
While this legal avalanche begins to slide and then pick up velocity, the pharmaceutical industry will be watching another disaster to its bottom line take shape, with all the consequent side effects on current and future research and development. Costs of all drugs will have to rise to cover the costs associated with all Avandia claims, good and bad. Diabetics will still want relief so the demand won’t slacken for the medicines that will help. Their costs will simply rise. Every dollar paid to victims,non-victims, and the lawyers for both as well as defense counsel will get passed right back to the consumer.
As the hard left edge of the Senate Democrats debate making a run at single payor, ask yourself exactly what that will do to prevent the costs described above from rolling through the system. The answer is nothing.
The crux of the argument here is that the 83,000 greedy victims need to keep their expectations in check (or, preferably, not file claims), because they’re killing more people. The optimal system, apparently, is to let drug companies make drugs that injure tens of thousands of people, hope they’re very, very nice about giving those victims whatever the drug company can afford, and be very happy that you have that great pill for your back pain that also makes you cough up blood. It’s the cost of health, friends.
Compensating people for the harm they’ve suffered is perfectly fine, unless it costs money. At that point, all bets are off.
I’m not sure which is more ludicrous—the endorser or the endorsee. Right-wing fading action hero and Total Gym informercial star Chuck Norris throws his questionable weight behind the disgraced, de-benched Chief Justice of Alabama Roy Moore. The press release is keyboard spew-worthy:
Montgomery, Alabama - August 26, 2009 - Chuck Norris, internationally known martial arts expert, actor, and media personality has endorsed Judge Roy Moore for Governor of Alabama. Norris believes Judge Moore is the strongest, best qualified candidate in the race for Alabama’s gubernatorial leader, the person who can best lead the state forward in the difficult times ahead.
Judge Moore and Chuck Norris have much in common in addition to their strong conservative beliefs, including their martial arts skills and their service in our nation’s armed forces. Mr. Norris has won numerous martial arts tournaments around the world. As described in Judge Moore’s book, So Help Me God. Judge Moore fought professionally as a kick-boxer in both the U.S. and Australia, and is known for his strong leadership as a judge and as an Army company commander in Vietnam.
Judge Moore’s campaign is based on his defense of our individual rights, his plan for creating new jobs through the proven economic principles of Supply Side economics (“Reaganomics”) which brought our nation and state out of a severe recession in the 1980’s-by cutting taxes and reducing the size of government. He also has a strong plan to eliminate waste and corruption in state government. Judge Moore is well known for keeping his promises.
Defense of individual rights, wha?! Moore’s law means a two-ton slab of the Big Ten and death to members of the Homosexual Agenda. Oh that’s right, we probably don’t even register as human to this man, after all, Moore said this:
Moore, best known for installing a washing machine-size Ten Commandments monument in the entrance to the state’s judicial building, tacked a 14-page “special concurrence” onto a decision denying a lesbian mother custody of her children. In it, Alabama’s highest judicial officer declared homosexuality “abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature.” Gay sex, he wrote, is “an act so heinous that it defies one’s ability to describe it,” an “inherent evil” that “should never be tolerated.” And if homo-bamians continued to insist on fornicating? The state might have to use force, Moore wrote, wielding a biblical “power of the sword” to root out this evil once and for all.
At the risk of sounding like a hack, I’m going to go ahead and point out the fact that only 9 Republican Senators crossed over and voted for a centrist, experienced SCOTUS nominee—-and the rest didn’t because, in their own coded words, no way would they vote for a woman of color—-is some bullshit. Not because the Republicans are so partisan, exactly. Yes, because they’re so incredibly racist and sexist, but not because they’re so partisan, and there’s no way to know if they wouldn’t have voted right down similar lines against a white man, and if racism/sexism was just their excuse and and a cheap way to pander to their voting base.
But I’m going to just go ahead and point out that this is the sort of thing you get when you’re a Democrat and you try to be bipartisan and collegial and above it all with Republicans. They turn around and stab you in the back, then kick your corpse and call you a “pussy”. Most Democratic Senators crossed party lines and voted for John Roberts, even though he’s turned out—-as could have been predicted—-to be every bit the flaming wingnut that he was said to be, and whose calm demeanor as he pushes to roll back every sort of progress imaginable only makes it more chilling. But did voting for Roberts buy Democrats the same courtesy from Republicans? No, the best we could hope for was that they stopped screaming about how they were going to filibuster in a relatively short period of time.
If it’s going to be partisan, so be it. Like Scott, I’m not going to lose any sleep. But the illusion that judicial nominations aren’t a partisan issue is basically, at this point, a weapon used to force Democrats to roll over and to pull the courts to the right.
They are coming across as a bunch of snarky and bitter old white men who cannot bear the thought of their kind losing power.
Well, exactly. It’s hard to hide and may actually win major awards in the category of Incredibly Fucking Obvious. It’s really hard to spin the paranoia and bitterness any other way. But as usual with this blog, the question is a simple, “Why?”
When I see this seething fear and anger on the part of the bitter old white men that make up the vast majority of the Republican party, I’m honestly confused. Who the fuck actually thinks that Barack Obama or Sonia Sotomayor’s ascent means that there won’t be plenty of room for old white men at the hands of power, too much room really? More to the point, what do these old white men get out of protecting the privilege of old white men so fiercely? Senator Graham and Senator Sessions clearly think that Sotomayor is sitting in a chair they believe belongs to a white man, but what I fail to understand is why they give a fuck. (Or fail to understand for rhetorical purposes; believe me, I have my theories.) That Sotomayor instead of old white dude Democrat is taking this spot on the bench doesn’t change the worlds of Sessions or Graham. Sotomayor isn’t going for their particular jobs. She is no threat whatsoever. There’s no personal threat to their individual privilege that comes from treating Sotomayor with respect.
Their strident panic attack about the possibility that non-white people or women will gain some seats of power is a much different thing than the sort of group advocacy of anti-racist or feminist activists, for a very simple reason. We applaud the rise of people that aren’t straight white men to power because actual obstacles are being diminished every time this happens. Because there are external obstacles between smart, ambitious women and minorities and the reins of power. Call it the glass ceiling or discrimination or any of these words, but it’s there. But no matter how many Sotomayors or Obamas rise to power, no one is going to start putting up obstacles between straight white men and power. Straight white men will never have to face having their gender or race be used to stereotype them and squeeze them out unfairly. Giving other people the same opportunities to prove themselves that straight white men enjoy doesn’t diminish the benefit of the doubt that straight white men get automatically. Sotomayor’s confirmation doesn’t mean that any straight white man looking to get a seat on the Supreme Court is suddenly going to be held accountable for stereotypes of his race and gender. No one’s going to accuse him of being too masculine, or suggest that uptight WASPness means his temperament is questionable.
Luckily, last night I mentioned to Marc all the tweeps yesterday praising Sotomayor’s calmness in the face of the bullshit, and he laughed and pointed out that she can run laps around these dumb fuck red state white dude Senators. And of course he’s right. First of all, being a judge and being a Senator, particularly from a Bible-thumping district, have much different intelligence and temperament requirements. Being a judge requires that you have the intelligence and temperament to handle the jargon-laden, complex, argumentative courtroom. This goes quadruple for anyone facing as many obstacles as Sotomayor has over her lifetime. But being a Senator from South Carolina or Alabama is simple for any hot-tempered, slow-witted dumbfuck, if he can thump the Bible hard enough and allow himself to be schmoozed by lobbyists with the greatest of ease. In fact, intelligence and definitely thoughtfulness are drawbacks, because these qualities might contain some of your more outrageously hateful actions.
Oh yeah, and if he’s a straight white male. That’s mandatory for the position of Senator in many states, still. But if you think about that, it becomes clear what privilege that the bitter old white men are defending: the privilege of dumbfucks to trade in on being straight white males to be powerful and rich without ever having to learn how to think or develop reasonable social skills outside of schmoozing. No wonder empathy turned into such a dirty word! Empathy is some complicated stuff. It requires imagination, feeling, understanding that other people are real, and intelligence—-all qualities that seem like onerous burdens for white men to have to develop if they want to stay competitive, at least in the eyes of the dumbfucks that hold Senate seats for some of your lousier red states.
The rise of individuals like Obama and Sotomayor aren’t a threat to straight white men of intelligence and thoughtfulness who are qualified for the jobs they seek. But yeah, I can say that power-sharing means that barking morons like Sessions and Graham need to start sweating. Being good enough to do your damn job is indeed an enormous obstacle for them in keeping their jobs, one that they hope to stave off by throwing loud, dramatic temper tantrums any time qualified people that fall out of the narrow straight white dude band vie for powerful jobs.
Confession: I haven’t had the stomach to flip on the TV and watch the Sotomayor hearings, because I have so little tolerance for the charade that there’s no such as fundamental political differences that inform the process. Judges pretending they don’t have opinions, Republican Senators pretending they have any intention of actually considering Sotomayor’s qualifications and basing their votes on that, the fundamental bullshit underlying the process in general annoys me to no end. I’ve been following the online text-based coverage and the tweets from my tweeps with stronger stomachs than mine, but the urge to keep C-SPAN shut off all day has won out.
The outcome of this thing is easy enough to predict. Republicans will pretend to be outraged that Sotomayor is “racist” because she doesn’t believe that white people are better than everyone else, though perhaps they’ll branch out into arguments about how she’s not a woman because she’s both female and adult and she’s not a judge because she writes court decisions. Democrats will use their majority to push her appointment through. She’ll then take her spot on the court as a moderate liberal and not much will change. And there will be more retirements, and new versions of the same charade.
What this is, then, is a chance for Republicans to do nothing substantive while conducting a bit of political theater to send the message that white people are the target of racist oppression that will keep white people from their rightful spot of completely dominating all power. I have very little doubt that this hearing will go down in wingnut lore right next to “Bill Clinton got a blow job and I didn’t even get a T-shirt”, both in terms of resentment and longevity. They have a lot of resentment bones and they’ll be dragging this one out and chewing on it from here until the end of time whenever they want to kick up some genuinely racist resentments, instead of the faux racist ones that are the only ones Republicans will even consider pretending to believe in. Long after the rest of the world has realized that this was all a fuss over nothing, wingnuts will trot out this hearing as evidence that the only people who suffer the slings and arrows of racism are white people who have lost their right to get first shot at every prestigious job.
Indeed, I suspect that Republicans trotting out sad stories of white firemen who actually won their Supreme Court cases think that this political theater against Sotomayor is a win for them. As the enthusiasm for Sarah Palin that is unmuddied by the strong sense that she’s a moron demonstrates, Republicans are still strong believers in the power of resentment to substitute for actual arguments or meaning. And usually, I’m worried about this tendency, because there’s a historical track record that demonstrates that Republican claims of victimhood because they have to share even small amounts of power with non-dudes and non-whites have been effective at rallying the troops, even rallying some troops that are too stupid to realize that their own whiteness doesn’t mean that Republicans intend to let them into the power circle. But in this case, I think the tide has turned just enough that Republicans are going to feel the pinch of diminishing returns. If this blows up as big as Republicans hope it will as political theater, they’re not going to gain any voters, but they will piss off a lot of Hispanic voters who are unlikely to be fooled by the pretend concern about “reverse” racism. And if they insist on digging up and chewing on this bone repeatedly after Sotomayor takes her highly distinguished place on the Supreme Court, it will just confirm that Republicans will not hesitate to put racism above basic common sense.
I just hope that Obama appoints another woman for his next Supreme Court judge. We need to get past token representation, and frankly, I think the public’s lost its willingness to believe that having a more diverse leadership is some sort of hostile takeover/attempt to enslave white men. For a long time now, it’s been apparent that the straight white male resentment strategy would have diminishing returns for Republicans, because it’s basically a strategy of trying to appeal to an aging, shrinking population. They only even half-assed attempt to address the demographic issues that face them has been a smattering of completely unbent anti-choice nuts who try to bully white women out of their jobs and into the maternity wards to have large broods and become more patriarchal in general, but even the party that indulged the Iraq War fantasy can’t really imagine getting a Republican breeding program under way. There’s just not much they can do about the changing demographics in America right now, and we might be seeing the beginning of what that means.
Several Republicans said they were upset with Leahy for scheduling the hearing without much GOP input and indicated they may use delay tactics in committee and on the floor to give themselves more time.
“I’m not sure we’ll be ready,” said Coburn, who sits on the Judiciary Committee. “If I’m ready to attend, I will attend. If I’m not, I won’t.”
[...]
Republicans argue that they would need to read 76 cases a day to get prepared for the hearings.
“She has 10 times as many decisions as Roberts did,” said Kyl, who is also on the Judiciary Committee.” “It takes a long time to go through that material. We’ll simply have to wait and see how that review goes. I’ve checked, and it’s not going really fast. It’s hard to do.”
As a law student, I realize that I am ill-prepared to weigh in on the proper way to pore over a Supreme Court nominee’s record, but I do have one thought…maybe you could, you know, get more people? I’m sure there are several dozen conservative lawyers and law professors who’d be happy to make a convincing case that Sonia Sotomayor opened every hearing with a ceremonial eating of babies.
Our democracy is served by an adversarial system with two or more strong advocates for clear, defined positions. The Democratic Party barely qualifies as one, and the GOP is somewhere between the Ayn Rand School for Tots and the parts of Pardon the Interruption where both of the hosts shout gibberish over each other.
I will never understand how people think a supreme judicial body with the power to hear whatever cases it wants for whatever purposes it wants, with the full ability to constrain or expand its decision to whichever procedural or substantive matters it so desires and bound largely only by a 221 year-old document and the things that the court itself has said can be non-activist.
Conservative judges are activists. Liberal judges are activists. You don’t get a case in front of the Supreme Court unless a majority of the justices has something they want to say about the issue or issues in front of them. If the Supreme Court wasn’t an activist institution, the only cases that would ever get heard were 9-0 clear findings of error on the part of the appellate judges. It’s slightly clever branding, but otherwise an ultimately pointless label; to call any member of the Supreme Court “activist” is to call a member of the Supreme Court “Your Honor”.
He admits that Sotomayor went to Princeton and graduated first in her class, but decides she’s stupid, because she went the extra mile to perfect her English. It’s a truly disingenuous smear, even though Buchanan sincerely is a racist. Sotomayor’s strategy was to consume books on grammar and language, for one thing, and Buchanan finds this beneath college students, even though MLA handbooks and other writing guides practically come with your admission letter when you get into college. Sotomayor’s crime seems to have taken them seriously, as you’re supposed to do. She also read a bunch of children’s classics that she’d missed, which Buchanan uses to insinuate that she’s practically illiterate. Which just shows that he wasn’t ever exposed to those classics in the first place, because most of them are written on a much higher level than pretty much any conservative political literature. Seriously, I’d put “Huckleberry Finn” or “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” or “Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland” way above anything Pat Buchanan’s written in terms of language and thinking skills required to get through it. I doubt seriously that Buchanan would make fun a Princeton student who read Jonah Goldberg’s piece of trash book in his spare time, even though it actually makes you stupider and weakens your reading skills per page.
Of course, Buchanan himself appears to need remedial reading courses, because, as Amanda Terkel points out, there’s no reason whatsoever to think that Sotomayor’s extracurricular work was done solely in her college career, and considering that she got into Princeton, it actually seems impossible that this is so.
I predict three weeks until we hear the rebirth of the “minorities should vote Republican because otherwise you’re on a plantation of your own choosing” talking point.
Okay, I promise that this is my last post in response to Dr. Tiller’s murder, at least in the long spate of coverage we’ve had today. But it strikes me as no coincidence that the shooter was moved to assassinate Dr. Tiller during a spate of increased coverage on reproductive rights-related issues due to the misleading poll that seemed to indicate (but didn’t) that Americans support banning abortion (they don’t), as well as Obama’s speech calling for “common ground” at Notre Dame, and of course the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. In the crazy right wing mind, these stories serve up, and let’s just say it now that the mainstream media kind of wants these stories to serve up, a narrative about how the silent majority of misogynists is being ruled over by the baby-hating Blackazoid. While there’s a good reason to believe that anti-choice terrorism is effective insofar as it discourages doctors from going into providing abortion, particularly in hard-luck cases or in rural areas, I’m not so sure these sorts of intimidation tactics will be as effective in swaying the public to sympathize with anti-choicers during the heightened tension of the Supreme Court appointment process.
It’s a whole hell of a lot easier to pretend that our opponents are reasonable people with moral “qualms” about abortion when no one’s walking into a church and shooting an usher because he has the nerve to live out his belief that women are human beings with lives worth protecting. It’s been 10 years since the last abortion provider was murdered, and people’s memories are short, and the anti-choice movement has benefited from this, using this time to build up the illusion that they’re moral people who just really love babies. But the existence of terrorism—-and the half-hearted attempts to distance themselves from it that reads more like ass-covering than actual concern—-exposes the reality. The anti-choice urge springs from the authoritarian urge, and contrary to the PR claims that would have you believe that anti-abortion activists just happen to be the same people who oppose gay marriage, sex education, diplomacy over warfare in our foreign relations, and the social safety net, the reality is that these beliefs are related.
And hell, right wingers told us this in the weeks prior to this murder, when they repeatedly and aggressively made fun of the concept of empathy. Before Obama made the nomination of Sotomayor official, and the narrative switched to race-baiting, it was clear what was so offensive about empathy—-the possibility that a judge might start feeling like women are human beings who deserve compassion and understanding when faced with unintended (or dangerous) pregnancies, instead of just being told to fuck off and they should have kept their legs shut if they didn’t want to have a baby.
Empathy: The quality that Dr. Tiller had in spades. No wonder he was public enemy number one to so many conservatives, with Bill O’Reilly leading the pack.
So my question is now, are they going to continue to drop “empathy” like it’s a dirty word, as if nothing has happened? Or are they going to try to avoid the topic completely, hoping race-baiting will be enough?
On ethnicity, Sotomayor herself has recognized — and contributed to — the dichotomy. She proudly highlights her Puerto Rican roots but hasn’t always liked it when others have. She once took issue with a prospective employer who singled her out as a Latina with questions she viewed as offensive yet has shown a keen ethnic consciousness herself.
In a California speech in 2002 now under renewed scrutiny, she remarked that, on a court, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
In that same speech, “A Latina Judge’s Voice,” Sotomayor drew attention to cultural differences between Mexican-Americans and Puerto Rican-Americans, and she narrowed her ethnicity beyond American, Hispanic and Puerto Rican to “Newyorkrican.”
“For those of you on the West Coast who do not know what that term means: I am a born and bred New Yorker of Puerto Rican-born parents who came to the states during World War II,” she explained.
Yet years ago, during a recruiting dinner in law school at Yale, Sotomayor objected when a law firm partner asked whether she would have been admitted to the school if she weren’t Puerto Rican, and whether law firms did a disservice by hiring minority students the firms know are unqualified and will ultimately be fired.
Yep, she both believes herself to have Puerto Rican heritage, but doesn’t believe that this makes her too stupid to get into Princeton. This is a contradiction, apparently, but it’s hard to see how, unless you believe that everyone believes that Latinas are stupid by definition. Otherwise, this doesn’t make sense and it’s like saying, “Sotomayor accepts that she has two legs, but hypocritically rejects it when people ask her if she’s a space alien.” It doesn’t really follow, unless you assume that all two-legged creatures are space aliens, and not only that, but that everyone believes this. Which makes you a loon.
I’ve been told that Chris Christie is too imperious and too much of a bully to win the Republican nomination, and my feeling on that is that Republicans like imperious bullies (see: John McCain), so I don’t see how that could hurt him. I mean, it will in the general, but not so much in the primary. But he hasn’t learned the most important lesson of being a Republican favorite, which is that no matter how sure of yourself you may be, if you refuse to pander to bigots, you’re screwed. McCain knew this; he changed his position on immigration to the one that most appealed to people who flip out if they hear someone speaking in Spanish in public. But Christie’s gone and 
In case you hadn’t heard, diabetes drug Avandia is 
Montgomery, Alabama - August 26, 2009 - Chuck Norris, internationally known martial arts expert, actor, and media personality has endorsed Judge Roy Moore for Governor of Alabama. Norris believes Judge Moore is the strongest, best qualified candidate in the race for Alabama’s gubernatorial leader, the person who can best lead the state forward in the difficult times ahead.
Confession: I haven’t had the stomach to flip on the TV and watch the Sotomayor hearings, because I have so little tolerance for the charade that there’s no such as fundamental political differences that inform the process. Judges pretending they don’t have opinions, Republican Senators pretending they have any intention of actually considering Sotomayor’s qualifications and basing their votes on that, the fundamental bullshit underlying the process in general annoys me to no end. I’ve been following the online text-based coverage and the tweets from my tweeps with stronger stomachs than mine, but the urge to keep C-SPAN shut off all day has won out. 
Republicans are angered beyond belief, friends, because 