Briar Patch

With little else to do, the right-wing blogosphere has worked itself into a frenzy over Sonia Sotomayor. To hear them tell it, she's so racist that she might as well wear Ku Klux Klan white for her judicial robes and spends most of her time stewing in chambers figuring out ways to put it to whitey. Moreover, the woman with six years experience on a federal district court and eleven years as an Appeals Court judge is apparently completely unqualified to sit next to Clarence Thomas on the high court and is the greatest threat to American jurisprudence since, I dunno, George Bush and Dick Cheney?

An important part of "savaging" Sotomayor (as one commenter put it) is to force President Obama into dipping into his political capital. Now, how standing tall to savage a Latina whose life story is out of Horation Alger will sap Obama's political capital is beyond me. Come on strong against Sotomayor and Republicans will use up so much of what little capital they have left with Hispanics that they'll be doing the political equivalent of deficit spending. They'd have to make huge gains among whites to make up for the beating they'd take in the Hispanic community. And yet it's Obama who has played the race card by nominating Sotomayor.

It's right out of Uncle Remus, with President Obama saying "don't throw me into that briar patch" while the opposition steps into the tar of its own free will...

E. J. Dionne writes that Sotomayor is the anti-Roberts:

In his September 2005 speech explaining his vote against Roberts, Obama argued that 95 percent of court cases are easily settled on the basis of the law and precedent. But in "those 5 percent of hard cases," Obama said, the "legal process alone will not lead you to a rule of decision" and "the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge's heart."

And that is where Obama found Roberts wanting. The young senator insisted that Roberts "far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak" and "seemed to have consistently sided with those who were dismissive of efforts to eradicate the remnants of racial discrimination in our political process."

Obama believes Roberts's subsequent behavior on the court has justified his initial suspicions. He hopes that Sotomayor will be the anti-Roberts, a person whose experience growing up in the projects of the South Bronx will allow her to see life and the quest for justice in a way Roberts never will...

By now, everyone has heard of Newt Gingrich's idiotic Twitter (which he apparently sent from Auschwitz) calling on Sotomayor to withdraw because she is a "Latina racist." Like a moth to a flame these guys just can't resist appealing to white resentment. I haven't decided whether the constant self-important pontificating about reverse racism is comical or offensive. But I have a feeling that I'd come down on the side of offensive had I ever actually been the target of racism...

Thoughts about Bush and Obama:

But just because things are different now, doesn't mean we can stop believing, stop paying attention, or stop holding his [Obama;'s] feet to the fire on things. We still have to make sure things are done as we believe he has promised them to be.

We have to hold his feet to the fire to make sure things are done, correctly, most especially. That's where things failed, before. No one, NO ONE, held BushCo's feet to the fire and made sure they were doing things legally and morally correct. They just turned their backs and let them go...

Lowell, Massachusetts, City Hall...

Bat Cat!...

Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu (D) prepares legislation to reform the Army Corps of Engineers. She actually sought the advice and counsel of the Dutch, something Michael Chertoff and his henchman resolutely refused to do. The Dutch know more about flood control than any country in the world...

Fred Barnes doubts that graduating summa cum laude from Princeton is any big deal. He also hints ominously that Sotomayor may have gotten into Princeton as a beneficiary of -- gasp -- affirmative action. An ardent supporter of the Iraq War, once had this to say about the war:

The war was the hard part...and it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but not as hard as winning a war...

The (Fats) Domino Effect...

Friday's Choice: John Coltrane, with an assist from McCoy Tyner, says it's so damn sad "Every Time We Say Goodbye":

Introducing Sonia Sotomayor

In the coming weeks, you will hear that Judge Sotomayor is

• a liberal activist judge, whatever that means. In conservative circles, it's o.k. and even desirable to be a right-wing activist judge, but woe betide he or she who grounds rulings in actual human experience;
• believe it or not, the possessor of a funny last name that should be pronounced whatever way "Americans" feel like and not how she calls herself. Fair enough: From now on, I'm going to pronounce "Krikorian" as "Idiotic";
• not especially intelligent. Judge Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that she's smarter than, say, a Yale legacy student with a C average;
• a racist and a bigot, based on her decision in Ricci v. DeStefano. Stanford Law's Richard Thompson Ford explains why the decision upheld decades of civil rights law...

In right-wing looney land, the only way for President Obama to prove that he isn't a racist would have been to nominate Sotomayor's opposite: A privileged white male, and the dumber the better. We had that for eight years in the Oval Office. Do we really need it in a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court?...

One thing is certain: She and we will not be spared this kind of stupidity. God/Buddha/Allah/Yahweh/Higher Power help Oklahoma...

Just A Song: Thanks to Stupid And Contagious for this insightful entry about the duende suffusing Townes Van Zandt's "Rake"...

Just my little piece of the world has more on Judge Sotomayor here...

Hispanics now comprise 15% of the population of the United States and are our fastest-growing ethnic group. Is it too much to ask that one of them sit on the Supreme Court and that she not be self-loathing? Especially after the way a Hispanic Attorney General embarrassed himself, his heritage, and his country with his disgraceful performance in office...

Fifty years ago last Sunday, Harvey (The Kitten) Haddix pitched 13 innings of perfect baseball for the Pittsburgh Pirates, an individual pitching feat that no one has come close to equalling since. In these days of relief specialists and closely monitored pitch counts, it's unlikely that anyone ever will, too...

Justin Townes Earle, Midnight At The Movies. I was all set not to like it on the assumption that Earle was simply riding on the coattails of his father, Steve Earle. How wrong I was. More country and less gruff than his father, Earle has a vision and sound all his own; he mines traditional country themes of love and loneliness with a fresh and at times rollicking perspective. Best of all, though, is the autobiographical "Mama's Eyes" about a son torn between respect for his father's genius and his mother's sense of right and wrong. One gripe: At 32 minutes, Midnight At The Movies is far too short. If Earle felt like he didn't have enough original material to stretch the album, he could have included more trad songs along the lines of his excellent reading of "They Killed John Henry"...

Miss Beatnik 1959 contestants...

"Whar the panter laid down"...

It's purple martin time in New Orleans! More on martins in a post to come...

Early yesterday morning, three men used crowbar to break loose the deadbolt locking the front door to Premium T.'s home. Her sons were asleep. They blindfolded, bound, and gagged one of them and demanded the location of "the safe." There is no safe. They then ransacked the house -- including the crawl space -- strewing it with trash, empty drawers, sofa cushions, and unwanted goods. They took with them laptops, wallets, car keys, passports, credit cards, prescription drugs, and sentimental items the value of which to them remains unclear. All told, they occupied the house for nearly two hours. Mercifully, they harmed no one physically, but inevitably left behind a profound sense of personal invasion.

T., a sister, and a friend cleaned up the debris and reorganized the house. A neighbor came over and reinstalled new, stronger deadbolts on the front and back doors. Neighbors trooped in and out to offer their condolences. I spent most of the morning on the phone to AAA, the bank, and pharmacies. In a gesture of defiance, R. -- the son who had been restrained -- decided to keep a scheduled job interview. I drove him there. (Pssst, Odd Fellows Cafe: You can really use him.)

T. and I spent the afternoon replacing cell phones and obtaining new SIM cards. I must say that the staff at Target and T-Mobile -- like the people I talked with from the bank and AAA -- were helpful and sympathetic. (One girl at T-Mobile nearly cried when she heard the story.) When there was confusion about one of the new car keys, the locksmith sent out by AAA offered to come right back out.

The anger has yet to set in. Yesterday was about putting Humpty Dumpty back together, and the combined efforts of all involved were effective. Although three people's lives have been changed, there is at least the balm of the kindnesses of strangers, friends, family, and neighbors to ease the searing pain of home invasion and the violence of assault.

BREAKING NEWS: President Obama nominates Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court...The Nation reviews the choice here and describes her judicial style here...The smear campaign begins...Rush Limbaugh claims that Sotomayor is a racist. A quick application of the filter of reality reveals that this actually means that she is a paragon of color-blindness...Sotmayor speaks in May 2003 as commencement speaker for the Pace University School of Law: