Can't put it off another day

A clueless Ilya Shapiro from the non-partisan libertarian Cato Institute goes all post racial:

Although her selection represents the very worst of racial politics — she is not a leading light of the judiciary and would not have been considered had she not been a Hispanic woman — her career achievements show that the American Dream endures. While in this world it is rare for an underprivileged child from a minority group to attain a modicum of professional success — let alone reach its pinnacle — in America it happens again and again.

Um, yeah. Since Thomas, Alito, and Roberts-especially Thomas! were such "leading lights of the judiciary". Seems like Mr. Shapiro is looking at Sotomayor through his 'Latina' lenses, holding her to higher standards than the . . . men. Hmm, maybe his lenses are 'male'.

Matthew Yglesias explains her qualifications to Shapiro:

I think this is a revealing moment. Sotomayor has the normal qualifications for a Supreme Court justice—she shares the president’s political views, she lacks a record of inflammatory legal writing that would prevent confirmation, the has experience as an appellate judge, she went to fancy schools. Insofar as her background was a consideration in selecting her, which it undoubtedly was, this is also totally normal. Presidents have always sought various kinds of regional, religious, and ethnic balance in the courts. Much was made out of Samuel Alito’s Italian American ancestry, and obviously Thurgood Marshall was initially put on the court in part to make a symbolic statement about civil rights and Clarence Thomas was appointed to replace him in part out of a desire to fill Marshall’s old seat with an African-American. There was a tradition of a “Jewish seat” at various times, etc.

Then he explains race to Shapiro:

But even more revealing is that even if Sotomayor’s selection were somehow out of the ordinary, the idea that picking one appellate judge rather than another for a promotion could possibly be the very worst of racial politics is ludicrous. At its very worst, racial politics in the United States involved the systematic disenfranchisement of millions of people, their subjection to pervasive social and economic discrimination, and the maintenance of the apartheid system via the threat and reality of state-sponsored terrorist violence. At its very worst, racial politics in the United States involved persistent filibustering to prevent the federal government from doing anything to curb widespread lynching. At its very worst, racial politics in the United States involved a violent rebellion that sought to dismantle the country in the name of chattel slavery and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

But despite that long history, broad swathes of the American right remain persistently and willfully blind to the problem of discrimination against non-whites. Their view is, essentially, that racism emerged as a problem sometime in the year 1967 and that the problem consists of white people being unduly burdened by efforts to remediate something or other.

Best last paragraph ever, Thanks, Matt.

The Chambers Bros. explain race to the country in 1968:



To this day I'm not sure which brother, Willie or Joe, is singing lead here. But it's clearly one of the best R'n'B/Rock vocals ever.

Freedom

I'm not a lawyer. Surprised? Too much work, too much school. But I do love the law, and read about it often. So I was not surprised when I found this critique of Sonia Sotomayor from conservatarian blog Point of Law:

I suggested hope that she might apply such strong free-speech views to cases involving campaign finance restrictions.

Alas, we now know better. A former member of the New York City Campaign Finance Board, Sotomayor has written aggressively in favor of strict campaign finance regulation:

The tolerance in this country for questionable behavior by public officials is illustrated by the persistence of extremely troubling--but legal-- practices in the public arena. In one of the murkiest and least well-controlled areas, we find ourselves debating what the quid pro quo's are for campaign contributions. Here we have abandoned standards we would surely apply in any other context. We would never condone private gifts to judges about to decide a case implicating the gift-givers' interests. Yet our system of election financing permits extensive private, including corporate, financing of candidates' campaigns, raising again and again the question what the difference is between contributions and bribes and how legislators or other officials can operate objectively on behalf of the electorate. Can elected officials say with credibility that they are carrying out the mandate of a "democratic" society, representing only the general public good, when private money plays such a large role in their campaigns? If they cannot, the public must demand a change in the role of private money or find other ways, such as through strict, well-enforced regulation, to ensure that politicians are not inappropriately influenced in their legislative or executive decision-making by the interests that give them contributions. (footnotes omitted)

As I read her comments, Sotomayor seems either woefully ignorant of or utterly unconcerned by the centrality of political speech to the First Amendment, and the pretty self-evident notion that monies spent on or donated to campaigns constitute political speech.

Crap. simply crap. I know, having buckets full of money entitles one to buy a big house, a private jet, a fancy car. But the weird fetish of the right that political contributions are "free speech" makes no sense at all.

Until one understands that they want, they encourage, government takeover by the wealthy, and the corporations. Then it all makes sense. Bribery as a public policy is a feature, not a bug.

Clearly the writers of the 1st & 14th amendments had no intention of these laws being used for this purpose. It is a perverse agenda-driven analysis that sees a wealthy person's contributions to a political campaign as being worth more that someone donating pennies. Yet the conservatarian right continues to sound this cry, that being able to donate $1,000,000 to Sen. X's campaign will give you a quid pro quo with Sen. X after he/she is elected.

Yes, you can donate anything you want to a campaign. No, you can not expect anything in return except that your dollars are sepnt by the campaign.

Fools, idiots, bastards.

There lives a girl everybody calls Patches

As if we needed further proof the writers at National Review Online (NRO) are one enchilada short of a combo plate, John "the human female is visually attractive to the human male at, or shortly after, puberty, and for only a few brief years thereafter" Derbyshire allows a commentor to demonstrate Extreme Stupid.

Rivalling Vanilla Ice's claim that being an upper middle-class white dude was key to understanding the urban hip-hop experience, The Derb's commentor criticizes Sonia Sotomayor's life story for being too privileged:

Derb — I’ve been hoping that someone might be bold enough to rain on the Sotomayor “compelling life story” parade.

The woman grew up in the capital of the world, went to two Ivy League schools, and was blessed by Providence with the precisely correct right race-gender two-fer for the moment.

This is a story of privilege, dammit, not adversity.

Curv3ball, writing at The Poorman, from whom we heard about this, has this to say:

Word.

For me, on the other hand, life’s been a non-stop hustle from the jump: grew up white, male and middle class in the suburbs, raised in a stable two-parent home with money for college…I marvel that I somehow managed to make it out alive and not end up just another statistic. The shit, as they say, was of the realest variety.

Despite surviving that ordeal, my ceiling is as low as my birth.

If only I could’ve caught a break, lost my pops, seen my mom scrub some toilets and moved to the projects, I’d probably be John Roberts by now. Cause that’s pretty much how kids from the projects roll.

Derbyshire goes onto rant that his story is as poignant as Sotomayor's:

Like my reader, and I'm sure a lot of other Americans, I get mighty annoyed by the unspoken implication in a lot of commentary that anyone not a member of a Protected Minority must have grown up in a twelve-bedroom lakeside mansion and been chauffered off to prep school with a silver spoon in his mouth. Judge Sotomayor was raised in public housing? So was I. Her mother was a nurse working late shifts? So was mine. When did white working poor people disappear off the face of the earth? Where are the eager listeners to their "compelling stories"?

Here's the public housing that poor, deprived Johnny knew:

The house was built in 1948 by the town of Northampton. It was a "council house" — that is, public housing let at a weekly rent. The initial rent was 19 shillings a week (about $3.80 at the prevailing exchange rate). My parents continued to rent it until 1982, by which time the weekly rent was £12.64 (though this was a reduced rent on account of their ages). I then bought the house for them under the policy instituted by Margaret Thatcher's government, of selling council houses to tenants at discount. Because my parents had been renting for over thirty years, they got the maximum fifty percent discount. I paid Northampton £8,425 for the house. At the time of writing (late 2007), houses like this in Friars Avenue sell for £150,000-160,000.

Cool. He bought a government-subsidized house. How, you know, socialist. How does that compare to Sotomayor's early housing?

Ms. Sotomayor, who is of Puerto Rican descent, was born in 1954 and grew up in the New York City Housing Authority's (NYCHA's) Bronxdale Houses. Bronxdale Houses, located in the Bruckner section of the Bronx, has 28 seven-story buildings with 1,496 apartments. Bronxdale is home to approximately 3,500 residents. A modern, high-tech community center opened its doors on the grounds of this development back in 2007, and offers educational and recreational activities for children and adults of the development and the surrounding community.

And how about the rest of her upbringing?

Ms. Sotomayor was raised in public housing by her mother, who worked as a nurse at a methadone clinic, to support Ms. Sotomayor and her brother Juan. At the tender age of eight, Ms. Sotomayor was diagnosed with diabetes and just one year later her father, a factory worker, died of a heart condition. She is no stranger to adversity, but she did not let these challenges deter her from reaching her goals.

So, Mr. Derbyshire, your charming English home is somehow equal to 28 7-story buildings, aka The Projects, in The Bronx?

I would write more, but I simply don't have the energy. This kind of "I was born a poor white child" kind of reverse racism has never played well, and now it looks even more ridiculous. Derbyshire, for all his obvious faults, may truly believe that he was as challenged as Sotomayor, but the facts really don't support this. Fantasize all you want about being oppressed, it's really all in your head.

Bastard.

just a little bit of spanish castle magic

Byron York, right-wing hairstyle that walks like a man, attempts to rain on the Sotomayor parade and invokes the sainted name of Miguel Estrada, who, like Sotomayor, seems to be Latino. But there, all resemblance ends.

York in the Washington Examiner:

In 2001, President George W. Bush nominated former Justice Department lawyer Miguel Estrada to a seat on the federal courts of appeals. In that instance, as today, the nominee was was a Hispanic with a compelling story and impressive qualifications. And some of the very people who are today praising Sotomayor spent their time devising extraordinary measures to kill Estrada's chances.

His "dark-and-stormy-night" goes on to describe furtive meetings with shadowy liberal groups like the NAACP and People For The American Way, who issues marching orders to Dick Durbin and other senators:

"They also identified Miguel Estrada as especially dangerous," the staffer added, "because he has a minimal paper trail, he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment. They want to hold Estrada off as long as possible."

Yeah. About that. Dahlia Lithwick unpacks the story further:

But the most vocal objections come from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, a group of 20 House Democrats who, unable to evaluate Estrada based on his judicial experience (he has none) or legal writings (which are not being produced) met with him for an hour last June, in the basement of the Capitol. Their conclusion? According to Rep. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Estrada "shares a surname" with Latinos but has done little to help them. Menendez complains that Estrada had not set up internships or mentorship programs specifically aimed at helping young Latino lawyers, and he told Democrats that his ethnicity would be irrelevant to his day-to-day work as a judge.

Armando at Talk Left adds more criticism of York:

What Byron York will not acknowledge is that unlike Democratic opposition to Estrada, which was based on his ideology, not once did a Democrat or progressive say that Estrada lived a "privileged" life filled with "preferential treatment." Yet that is precisely what York's conservative cohorts have done to Sotomayor. When York confronts Michael Goldfarb, Fred Barnes, Bill Bennett, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Tom Tancredo and the rest of the despicable racialists in his Party, then come back and talk to us.

An old Source Watch post (with broken links) describes Estrada according to the DOJ where he worked:

Miguel Estrada is a Federalist Society member and former clerk for Justice Anthony Kennedy. He is also a partner in the law firm that represented President George W. Bush before the Supreme Court during his post-election legal fight with Al Gore. Estrada is a strong supporter of capital punishment whose judicial philosophy has been compared to that of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Maybe it's just me, but that's plenty of reason to filibuster Estrada. And none of it applies to Sotomayor.


Note the very cool quote from "The Breeze and I" in Jimi's solo. Nice.