Month: May 2009

For Lack Of A Pubic Hair

Drum can tell the future:

First, everyone is going to start looking for some dark secret in her background that will derail her nomination.  That will probably fail.  Then she'll testify before the Senate, and everyone will ask what she thinks of Roe and Casey and Kelo.  She'll dutifully claim that she's never even heard of these cases, and on the off chance that any of them ring a bell, she'll sing the usual song about how it would be improper to say anything about any matter that might come before the court in the future.  Which is everything.  After a few weeks of this, all the Democrats and maybe a dozen or so Republicans will vote to confirm her and she'll join the court in time for the fall term.

Obama’s Harriet Miers?

Jason Zengerle is all over Ponnuru’s glib assertion that Sotomayor is “Obama’s Harriet Miers.” Ramesh is usually a lot better than that. In the course of defending himself, Ponnuru pins a double standard on liberals who called Bush a “moron” regardless of his Ivy credentials yet laud those same credentials in Sotomayor. Zengerle pounces:

Bush went to “those schools” during an era (actually, at the tail end of an era) when admission to those schools wasn’t necessarily a sign of towering intellect, at least if you hailed from the right family, as Bush did. As Nicholas Lemann explained it in his 2000 New Yorker profile of Bush:

After Bush’s class was admitted, Yale’s new president, Kingman Brewster, Jr., a liberal-reformist New England patrician, brought in an insurrectionary new director of admissions, only twenty-nine years old, named R. Inslee Clark, Jr. Clark set about making Yale more of a national institution dominated by public-school graduates who were picked for their academic abilities. He made so many people mad that he lasted only five years in the job, but by that time the revolution was substantially complete. A good way of encapsulating the abrupt change from Old Yale to New Yale is this: George H. W. Bush is the eldest of four brothers. All four went to Yale. George W. Bush is the eldest of four brothers, too. He is the only one who went to Yale.

This approach, of course, spread to the rest of the Ivies, which is how Sotomayor, a poor Hispanic girl from the Bronx who went to a Catholic high school, got admitted to Princeton, from which she graduated summa cum laude.

And Bush, of course, touted a “C” average. If we truly want a meritocracy in the US, we should get rid of both legacy and affirmative action.

The Role Of Local Radio

A reader writes:

You wrote, "[T]alk radio, even more than the blogosphere, can promote ugly and inflammatory discourse in ways that even its purveyors find hard to control." 

The thing with right-wing radio is that these guys so easily get away with the low brow stuff when they discuss national issues.  But the local talkers, on local issues, are often quite in depth in their analysis and provide real value for the community.  For example, Mark Belling of Milwaukee has exposed vast government corruption, shady back room tax deals, and saved the city and state from quite a bit of garbage legislation that would otherwise have been rubber-stamped and never reported in the mainstream print & TV media.  And even while the blogs do some good, the fact is that most people just don't have the time to read all that's necessary to catch the important topics and act on them. 

The emotion of the voices of the callers and hosts cannot be duplicated on the screen, no matter how much bold-type and emoticons are used.  With radio, people can multitask while it plays in the background and still learn quite a bit.  Can't do that with a blog, as the act of reading requires 100% focus.

Unfortunately Belling, when he's filling in for Limbaugh, and the local talkers who aspire to be the next Limbaugh, turn into carbon copies of Dick Cheney on all things of national significance. (Belling is so pro-torture he would make Cheney blush; he advocates dismemberment – no joke.)

Calling A Marriage A “Marriage”

Dale Carpenter analyzes yesterday's prop 8 ruling:

There's plenty of ground to question the decision in Marriage Cases, and to support today's decision in Strauss as correct on the revision/amendment distinction. And I think the protections provided to gay families under the rubric of "civil unions" or California "domestic partnerships" are a huge advance that can't fairly be likened to a new form of segregation. But it seems to me that, given the rationale and rhetoric of the first decision, the court disingenuously minimized the deprivation in the second.

Rope-A-Conservative-Dope Watch

"White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw," – Newt Gingrich, twittering.

Gingrich is now allied with Tancredo and Glenn Beck in calling the first Hispanic nominee for the Supreme Court a racist, even though the full context of the quote refutes – or at the very least deeply undermines – what could be a reasonable point in less inflammatory language.

This Is Only A Test

Stephen Walt says the US shouldn't take North Korea's nuclear bait:

So the best response is to remain calm, and stop talking as if this event is a test of Obama's resolve or a fundamental challenge to U.S. policy.  In fact, the tests are just "business as usual" for North Korea, and it would better if the United States "under-reacts" rather than overreacts. Instead of giving Pyongyang the attention it wants, the United States should use this incident as an opportunity to build consensus among the main interested parties (China, Russia, South Korea, Japan) and let China take the lead in addressing it. Above all, the Obama administration should avoid making a lot of sweeping statements about how it will not "tolerate" a North Korean nuclear capability. The fact is that we've tolerated it for some time now, and since we don't have good options for dealing with it, that's precisely what we will continue to do.

With Enemies Like These…

Hilzoy checks in on the pitiful state of Sotomayor opponents:

Paul at PowerLine headlines his post "Che Guevara In Robes". I've been trying to think of something Sotomayor and Che have in common besides being Hispanic, but I'm coming up dry. But that's nothing compared to Mike Huckabee thinking her first name is Maria. Any moment now, I suppose someone will ask how we know she's in this country legally.

Of course, none of these responses really compares to John "No law can prevent the President from crushing the testicles of a terrorist's child" Yoo informing us of the real meaning of the Sotomayor nomination: that despite his best efforts, empathy has triumphed — and that this is a bad thing.

A Playmate For Kennedy?

Noah Millman has some good questions for Sotomayor (don't expect any of these to be answered):

If, as seems likely, much of her time is spent in a tug of war with Justice Roberts, with the flag being Justice Kennedy’s vote, how does she plan to win those tugs of war? (No, I don’t expect anyone up for confirmation to ever answer this one either, but this is certainly the question that should be uppermost in liberal minds for the short term.)