#3 Now out of 4 Total

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan has been confirmed by the Senate to join Justices Ruth Ginsberg and Sonia Sotomayor on the highest court in this United States. The percentage of women on the court just went from 22.2% to 33.3%, the highest in over three and one-quarter centuries of U.S. history.

Gobama.

Just Us Ladies

I couldn't care less arguing the merits or demerits of Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court, because at this point I implicitly trust President Barack Obama to make good judicial appointments. He nailed it with Justice Sonia Sotomayor, great choice and got her through the vile opposition non-arguments, and he's two for two with female appointments. I say the next one who goes, nominate another woman. Imagine a Court that's 44% female, under actual U.S. representation but just about half. Keep it up, Barack, and slam down the stupid Tea Bagger Partier arguments already forming that she's some sort of lesbian Communist. The only good arguments against her are from the left, and in this environment they'll rather take a chance that she's become better on the bench, and they'll probably be right.

I like that Obama has also nominated his second New Yorker. Go team! Two tough New York women...only a moron would mess with them in Court or deliberations. And I'll bet the conversations will speed up. I like that she was the first woman to do a lot of things:



I like that she clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American on our Supreme Court. And that she's already being attacked by RNC Chair Michael Steele -- for coming out against slavery!:

In its first memo to reporters since Kagan's nomination to the high court became public, the Republican National Committee highlighted Kagan's tribute to Marshall in a 1993 law review article published shortly after his death.

Kagan quoted from a speech Marshall gave in 1987 in which he said the Constitution as originally conceived and drafted was "defective." She quoted him as saying the Supreme Court's mission was to "show a special solicitude for the despised and the disadvantaged."

...

"We the People" included, in the words of the Framers, "the whole Number of free Persons." United States Constitution, Art. 1, 52 (Sept. 17, 1787). On a matter so basic as the right to vote, for example, Negro slaves were excluded, although they were counted for representational purposes at threefifths each. Women did not gain the right to vote for over a hundred and thirty years. The 19th Amendment (ratified in 1920).

These omissions were intentional. The record of the Framers' debates on the slave question is especially clear: The Southern States acceded to the demands of the New England States for giving Congress broad power to regulate commerce, in exchange for the right to continue the slave trade. The economic interests of the regions coalesced: New Englanders engaged in the "carrying trade" would profit from transporting slaves from Africa as well as goods produced in America by slave labor. The perpetuation of slavery ensured the primary source of wealth in the Southern States.

By now it's pointless to ask whether Michael Steele has any sense of shame -- we all know the answer. What people don't know is what Kagan will ultimately bring to the court, but it's okay to ask.

Speaking of women and firsts, Lena Horne has passed away at the age of 92. Lots of grandkids and even great-grandkids, a grande dame also of -- surprise -- Manhattan.



A long, fascinating, no doubt difficult career, breaking barriers by organically changing perceptions of race, an extremely appealing actress and singer, who was also extremely cool politically. And what an arc of a life:

Looking back at the age of 80, Ms. Horne said: “My identity is very clear to me now. I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody; I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”

Thanks to President Obama, the train's left the station on being able to imagine an American of any color or ethnic background eventually becoming President, nor will gender matter in a the Supreme Court nomination. America evolves, even with the yahoos barking at the door.

Good Week

You might not know it by the town hall ragers (and all their racial baggage) but last week was actually an excellent week for President Barack Obama and his Administration. There was a slowing in new unemployment (yes, not yet a recovery, but where it has to begin), the birthers/deathers/teabaggers are actually starting to boomerang in his favor, and he got his first Supreme Court Justice choice ever sworn in.

Best of all, he appears to have killed the Taliban chief of Pakistan, who was also their military leader:

Pakistan considered the al-Qaida-linked Mehsud its No. 1 internal threat. He was suspected in the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and many other assaults. He claimed responsibility for some, including an audacious attack on a police academy in March that killed 12 people.

His death would be a victory for President Barack Obama and a nod to the Bush administration, both of whom have relied heavily on the CIA-controlled missile strikes to take out militants in Pakistan's wild northwest. The U.S. had a $5 million bounty on Mehsud, whom it considered a threat to the Afghan war effort.

Caught like a Somali pirate in the crosshairs of a CIA missile strike. And it appears that the ensuing power struggle to replace him is upping the body count:

According to sources, commanders Hakeemullah Mehsud and Waliur Rehman, the two leading contenders for the chief slot, exchanged hot words at the shura meeting in Sara Rogha over the choosing of a successor to Baitullah. A shootout followed, leading to the death of Hakeemullah while causing life-threatening injuries to Waliur Rehman. A government official in Peshawar said that both Hakeemullah and Waliur Rehman had been killed in the clash.

How crazy would it be if Obama's war strategy turned out to be the shining success of his Administration? Up next: Afghan drug lords:

The generals told Senate staff members that two credible sources and substantial additional evidence were required before a trafficker was placed on the list, and only those providing support to the insurgency would be made targets.

Currently, they said, there are about 50 major traffickers who contribute money to the Taliban on the list.

“We have a list of 367 ‘kill or capture’ targets, including 50 nexus targets who link drugs and the insurgency,” one of the generals told the committee staff.

As another President once said, "Bring it on."

Wisdom

After days of silliness, posturing, litmus testing and anything other than a penetrating exploration of a legal mind, the newest Senator asks a key question so obvious but so overlooked, and gets something of a moving response:



Confirm, bitches!

I Love Tommy

Maybe Al Franken is proving that comedians can become United States Senators, but it sure doesn't go the other way. Take Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), who channels Ricky Ricardo of the I Love Lucy show, somehow more than inappropriate when questioning Judge Sonia Sotomayor:



To which one can only reply, "Tooooooooooooooooooooommy!"

Oh, Snap

What do I like best about Judge Sonia Sotomayor, currently acing her Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice?

Is it her coolness, her judicial temperament under fire?

Is it her supersmart answers to many, many pointed questions?

Nope. It's the accent. The little touch of a New York City accent. The accent that ought to remind Senators like Jeff Sessions that they are dealing with someone who shows up to a rumble prepared:

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), seeking to discredit Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy, cited her 2001 “wise Latina” speech, and contrasted the view that ethnicity and sex influence judging with that of Judge Miriam Cedarbaum, who “believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices.”

“So I would just say to you, I believe in Judge Cedarbaum’s formulation,” Sessions told Sotomayor.

“My friend Judge Cedarbaum is here,” Sotomayor riposted, to Sessions’ apparent surprise. “We are good friends, and I believe that we both approach judging in the same way, which is looking at the facts of each individual case and applying the law to those facts.”

Cedarbaum agreed.

“I don’t believe for a minute that there are any differences in our approach to judging, and her personal predilections have no effect on her approach to judging,” she told Washington Wire. “We’d both like to see more women on the courts,” she added.

Enjoy it for yourself:



As DailyKos blogger Upper West points out, it's her Annie Hall/Marshall McLuhan moment:



If life were only like this, especially when it is.

Slaves to the Dumb

Is Judge Sonia Sotomayor short-circuiting conservative brains completely?

This instantly infamous National Review cover tells the tale -- the leading "intellectual" conservative publication can't seem to decide if the Supreme Court nominee is Latina or Asian:


Interesting discussion about it on BagnewsNotes, including:

The mistaken ethnicity is indeed meant only to convey "she is not one of us". The target audience could care less about its accuracy.

And:

is she sitting in front of a large vagina? I know thats what terrifies these people.

And also:

And conservatives continue to be surprised that people think a lot of them are racists.

Ari Melber has a great piece in HuffPo that Republicans would do well to study, about how they've actually become slaves and victims of the vaunted echo chamber originally built to serve them:

There has not been a single hearing on Sotomayor's nomination, but Senate Republicans are already playing defense over the party's response to the nomination. But who speaks for the Republican Party? As every politico knows, the GOP's Supreme Court vision was hijacked by Limbaugh and Gingrich, two of the most visible pundits atop the conservative media machine. While the Republicans who wield actual power in this process -- U.S. Senators and especially judiciary committee members -- have to angle for a single TV appearance, Gingrich holds court with his paid platform on Fox. (Rush also dropped by there Wednesday)...

...Republican officials are learning that in the minority, their echo chamber still works, but it's working against them.

Not that I'm looking for them to get their game back. Not that very many of them are getting their received wisdom from Arianna Huffington's publication.

Nor should they.

On Point

I believe that our current "decider" is one of the most judicious leaders in the world right now. Anywhere. And I don't believe he's made anything close to a mistake with Sonia Sotomayor. In fact, I believe that the rightwing is terrified of her before the Senate Judiciary Committee, hence the push by losers like Newt Gingrich to get her to withdraw before that happens, because I believe that once she's heard fielding questions from Senators of both Democratic and Republican persuasion, she will prove not just her worth but her superiority as a member of the legal profession.

I'm sure the President does as well, hence he's right out front with this weekend's video address to the nation:



Just watch what happens when Sotomayor speaks for herself.

Hello, Ugly

While Republicans who actually rely on votes to keep their jobs rather than, say, radio ads and base fundraising, there's horror over their fellow travelers' race-based smears (via reverse racism claims based on and inflating wildly upon yet another out-of-context quote) in vicious attempts to derail the historic nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court, the loudmouths are doubling and tripling down:

LIMBAUGH: The real question here that needs to be asked -- and nobody on our side, from a columnist to a TV commentator to anybody in our party has the guts to ask: How can a president nominate such a candidate? And how can a party get behind such a candidate? That's what would be asked if somebody were foolish enough to nominate David Duke or pick somebody even less offensive.

That's right, a Latina Federal Judge from the most diverse city in America, who graduated from Princeton and Yale Law School and worked for legendary NYC District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, and has sat on the Federal bench longer than anyone currently serving on the Supreme Court had done at the time of their appointment is somehow the moral equivalent of the avowed white supremacist and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Speaking of which, former Congressman Tom Tancredo, calls the La Raza, essentially the Latino version of the NAACP or B'nai B'rith, "a Latino Ku Klux Klan without the hoods or the nooses" and, regarding the Obama Administration, has "no idea whether they hate white people or not!" So whether or not his long-standing anti- illegal immigrant position has ever had any merit, he's revealed himself for what he truly is, without even knowing it.

Festering Newt Gingrich is getting in on the fundraising action himself, with mass emails going out that seems to nakedly pervert American history to his base-riling, dollar-raising purposes:

"If Civil War, suffrage, and Civil Rights are to mean anything, we cannot accept that conclusion," he writes. "It is simply un-American. There is no room on the bench of the United States Supreme Court for this worldview."

I don't even think I can untangle to parse that logic. Maybe he tweeted it then put it in an email.

But the cake-taker for the week came late, on Friday, with convicted former Nixon dirty trickster, G. Gordon Liddy:

LIDDY: Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then.

So if the Hispanic GOP strategists aren't upset enough at their prominent party members' utterances, how about every woman in America?

That's right, GOP, keep strengthening your base:



Let's see how small you can get it.

Hilarity Ensues

So the GOP line will be that Sonia Sotomayor will rule with emotion rather than reason. Unlike, say, the vein-popping Justice Antonin Scalia. There's also hints that the Republicans will play the soft-on-terror lie, maybe tie that fear meme into the fear of female emotion theme, like she's just a blubbery chick who cries over terrorists and lets them go free.

Except that Sotomayor isn't weak, she's from New York City. You know, attacked on 9/11/01?

So the cartoon hilarity continues, with the Randy the Ram of the Republican Party:

Newt Gingrich, who has twitually accused Sonia Sotomayor of racism, just as he twitually accused the President of being soft on pirates a few hours before the President got very hard on pirates a few weeks ago. Clearly, this is another case of Newt twitting before reading...or thinking.

Then there's the man and grandmother Nate Silver headlines as, Grandmother of World's 23rd Best Economist Posthumously Offended by Sonia Sotomayor's Spending Habits; Will Obama Withdraw Nomination?

I once wrote a short paper called The Savers-Spenders Theory of Fiscal Policy based on the premise that there are two types of people: Some save and intertemporally optimize their consumption plans, while others live paycheck to paycheck, spending their entire income as soon as it's received.[...]

Apparently, the new Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is an example of the latter. The Washington Post reports that the 54-year-old Sotomayer has a $179,500 yearly salary but

On her financial disclosure report for 2007, she said her only financial holdings were a Citibank checking and savings account, worth $50,000 to $115,000 combined. During the previous four years, the money in the accounts at some points was listed as low as $30,000.

My grandmother would have been shocked and appalled to see someone who makes so much save so little.

To which Nate responds,

...Perhaps Mankiw's grandmother would find her more virtuous if she were saving up for a Lexus or a summer home in the Hamptons, but that doesn't seem to be her cup of tea. Her one real indulgence is the apartment she keeps in the West Village. Although virtually anywhere that would be a reasonable commute from her courtroom in Lower Manhattan would be relatively expensive, she could save a bit by living in the Financial District or perhaps in Brooklyn. But Mankiw, who lives in a zip code where the median price of a house is 1.65 million dollars, should not exactly be throwing stones from his undoubtedly very charming, New England Colonial home.

It's all Kabuki Theater writ partisan, but just when you think the coyote can't get more slapstick, he does. For foodies:

Sotomayor also claimed: “For me, a very special part of my being Latina is the mucho platos de arroz, gandoles y pernir — rice, beans and pork — that I have eaten at countless family holidays and special events.”

This has prompted some Republicans to muse privately about whether Sotomayor is suggesting that distinctive Puerto Rican cuisine such as patitas de cerdo con garbanzo — pigs’ feet with chickpeas — would somehow, in some small way influence her verdicts from the bench.

Curt Levey, the executive director of the Committee for Justice, a conservative-leaning advocacy group, said he wasn’t certain whether Sotomayor had claimed her palate would color her view of legal facts but he said that President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee clearly touts her subjective approach to the law.

“It’s pretty disturbing,” said Levey. “It’s one thing to say that occasionally a judge will despite his or her best efforts to be impartial ... allow occasional biases to cloud impartiality. "But it’s almost like she’s proud that her biases and personal experiences will cloud her impartiality.”

And let's not forget those Jewish Justices with their gefilte fish, that Italian Justice with his manicotti, or the Protestant Justice with his cucumber sandwiches.

As for the empathy issue, it turns out conservative favorite, Justice Samuel Alito, used it to his benefit in his confirmation hearings.

Now for the grown ups amongst us who want to know the whole behind the scenes story of how the President and his White House staff handled the selection process that started and eventually ended with Sotomayor, it's dazzling.

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!