Steamroller

It's comedy, like a cartoon now. The GOP leaks out their airtight case against Judge Sonia Sotomayor for Supreme Court Justice, Obama headfakes with his old friend Judge Diane Wood leaked as visiting the White House, instead has Sotomayor in last Thursday without the press getting the least wind of it, and today announces her as his first nominee. And Wile GOP Coyote suddenly finds itself run out of cliff beneath its feet, puff of smoke, long fall.

There will be conservative talking points and smears and no one will be listening this time because Obama has selected the perfect replacement for David Souter, similar in judicial temperament, but a wildly groundbreaking choice, another Obama star-making ceremony today. And who could fail to be moved by the now commanding President, this Horatio Alger story judge representing the hopes of American women and Hispanics -- double sticks of Roadrunner dynamite -- accompanied and blessed by the older Catholic man who will make certain her path through the Senate confirmation process is a successful one.

At the announcement they had her mother, who worked six days a week as a nurse to raise her in the Bruckner Blvd. projects tens of thousands drive by daily. The President reminded us that Sotomayor is the judge who saved baseball. All that was missing was the apple pie:



There's no real play for the GOP, not unless something freaky comes out of the woodwork, because they can't afford to alienate every last Hispanic or non-reactionary woman in the country, even in their current state. But of course, as scripted as a sarcastic prime time cartoon, out comes Boss Limbaugh:

Do I want her to fail? Yeah.

He's so funny when he's fat. But for c-h-u-t-z-p-a-h, how about an instant (as in previously written) oppositional opinion from noneother than war criminal and conspiratorial co-architect of U.S. torture policy, Attorney (for now) John Yoo. I'd quote him, but then I'd have to waterboard you.

What's happening now is The Summer of Shove. Obama had the agenda forced on him by economic meltdown even before he was sworn in. He's handled that well enough that his real agenda -- the one America voted for -- can begin. And per Al Giordano, the President will be backed up by the same grand-scale community organizing that won him the job: grassroots action:

The political class of the Republican and Democratic Parties may plan on spending the summer on Martha’s Vineyard, or in the Hamptons, or in Newport, or in Mountain West resort towns, or along elite California beaches, or at country clubs all over, but like NFL players and soldiers at war, community organizers will be at boot camp: sweltering the summer of 2009 door to door with the rest of America for whom such paradises are out of reach.

The door knocking won’t get much, if any, mass media attention, in this season between Memorial Day and Labor Day (did I mention that the news editors and star pundits will be off rubbing elbows with those same elected officials in those same vacationlands?). The Supreme Court nomination spectacle in the Senate – one in which the final result is has a 99 percent probability of raising Justice Sotomayor up on high through a sleepy summer Senate going through the motions of looking busy – will provide cover for the grassroots push from below.

But the real history will be made, this summer - as during the last two - by the unsung heroes and heroines: the organizers. You know who you are. You’re the ones without a second home, or that valiantly choose to skip that beach house, in order to bend the arc of history toward justice once again.

New national healthcare policy legislation, climate change control legislation and Justice Sonia Sotomayor all by the end of this summer.

Don't forget how fast he moved to win both the primaries and the Presidency.

Beep-beep!