Your quote of the day:
Conservatives are already citing my initial piece on Sotomayor as a basis for opposing her. – Jeffrey Rosen
Yes. We are all shocked to see that development. No one could have predicted that an anonymously sourced hit piece focusing on Sotomayor’s alleged inability to serve as an “intellectual counterweight to the conservative justices,” her alleged lack of “command of technical legal details” and her alleged “bully on the bench” temperament might later be used against her by conservatives.
Also, we’ll be greeted as liberators and the war will pay for itself.
*** Update ***
No one could have predicted this would happen:
The whole thing is such a surprise.
eric
where is claude reins when you need him?
gwangung
This deserves the “No Shit, Sherlock” award of the year.
asiangrrlMN
Fuck you, Jeffrey Rosen. You are a journalistic whore in that all you care about is your link count. You don’t give a shit as to whether Sonia Sotomayor is qualified or not–you just want to stir up the controversy. The more people link to you, the better you feel about yourself.
STFU, Rosen, you piece of shit. Let the adults talk now. (Yeah, not me. I am not feeling very mature right now).
Sarcastro
Yea, someone has to.
AhabTRuler
Trying to tell us something, hmmm?
D-Chance.
Eh, Soots is kind of a yawner as a pick. Her views, from what I’ve read, will pretty much fall in line with what Souter would have opined.
With Ginsberg’s retirement on the horizon, Bam will have to make an even more liberal pick on the next round just to maintain the status quo on the SCOTUS.
JK
National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru on Jeffrey Rosen
Weekly Standard Spins George H.W. Bush’s appointment of Sotomayor
http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/05/why_sotomayor_was_appointed_by.asp
Brachiator
It’s funny. David Souter was originally viewed as a lightweight, a state court judge with limited knowledge of federal issues. And an odd duck (a bachelor who lived at home). And someone who would follow the lead of the more distinguished conservative jurists in rubber stamping their decisions.
But I recall how Souter spent the time before he formally joined the Court boning up on federal law. And I got a chuckle out of how Souter would enjoy delivering the intellectua bitchslap to Antonin “Mad Dog” Scalia’s phony originalist opinions.
Souter, in the proud tradition of New Hampshire, was his own man and nobody’s fool. Without regard to ideology or legal philosophy, this is the kind of appointee that I want to see Obama pick.
I respect Obama’s choice. And it is good to see the GOP revealing their weak strategy. It’s not going to work this time, and it won’t work in the future. And Obama will likely get to make a few more Supreme Court appointments.
Hell, for my money, Obama should just appoint himself to the Court. If Cheney can argue that he can simultaneously be in the Executive and Legislative Branch, Obama could make a case for himself as simultaneous commander-in-chief and Chief Justice.
OK, I’m joking on this last part, but God, it would make the wingnuts’ heads spin.
NR
It seems to me that the right has abandoned all traditional methods of fighting against Obama and is now going almost exclusively with Jarate.
Zifnab
In other news, I’ll be running the wingnut media circuit while sleeping in posh hotels and dining on caviar and champagne with Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. How could this have happened?!
Library Grape
dear god; what an un-self-aware f*cknugget! his piece a few weeks back was one of the most unscrupulous pieces of gossip-mongering I’ve seen since that Access Hollywood special on whether Brangelina planned on adopting Martian babies.
P.S. Did you guys see Glenn Beck’s classy tweet about Sotomayor’s diabetes? http://www.librarygrape.com/2009/05/stupid-tweet-of-weak-beck-on-sotomayor.html
Jay B.
I know of conservatives who think Ramesh Ponnuru is a panty-wearing lightweight who couldn’t even gin up an erection for a three way between him, Mark Levin and his ex-girlfriend Ann Coulter. These sources wish to remain anonymous, naturally, but can we really believe that a guy like that — so fearful of Democrats that he considers us “The Party of Death” — has what it takes to mewl about Supreme Court Justice nominees?
JDM
From Rosen:
1. Questions of temperament are often overlooked, but history suggests that they are the most relevant in predicting judicial success.
2. (Justice Scalia may be a brilliant bomb-thrower, but has failed in his attempts to build coalitions and bipartisan majorities.}
His point I is his own ipse dixit, impossible to measure or quantify. I doubt Hugo Black’s temperament, as measured by years long membership in the KKK, would have been helpful in predicting his vote in the Brown case. He’s talking bullshit, dogwhistling code.
His point 2 assumes that coaltion building and “bipartisanship” are keys to working on a multiple judge appellate court, cort of like a lawyers Congress, as opposed, say, to getting a defensible conclusion or even the right answer.
Still pushing his brother-in-law for the Solicitor General, still straddling the NR/TNR ditch but pretending to be old line TNR. Also not much in the way of constitutional scholarship in his faux analysis.
The Moar You Know
I’d like to jam a pen in Rosen’s eye. He needs to have a visible reminder to all those who he has contact with on a daily basis that he is a complete imbecile.
John Cole
@JK: That isn’t spin. Because of the power-sharing agreement Moynihan crafted, he was basically the only one appointing judges for decades. That has been pretty widely reported on, and I just saw something about it on one of the cable channels a while back.
JK
Mark Halperin’s list of mistakes Republicans can make in the Sotomayor confirmation fight
1. Let the Michael Savages of the world define their views.
2. Come out against her without letting a decent interval (for alleged reflection) pass.
3. Fail to find conservative, articulate Hispanics and women to make their case.
4. Not have a plan for dealing with the inevitable public support she will draw from prominent Republicans.
5. Not project seriousness in their objections — and let whatever good points they might have be obscured by hysteria and exaggerated charges.
6. Seem out of touch.
7. Make themselves look anti-women.
8. Make themselves look anti-Hispanic.
9. Make themselves look like desperate, angry sore losers.
10. Most of all: not agree on what their goals are.
kid bitzer
“Also, we’ll be greeted as liberators and the war will pay for itself.”
though these are examples of predictions that were self-evidently *false* at the time made.
whereas the prediction that rosen’s junk journalism would be recycled into aaa-rated talking-points was self-evidently *true*.
other than that, yeah, all depressingly familiar.
justmy2
WE HAVE A WINNER!!!!!!!!!!!!
http://www.nypost.com/
NY Post goes with the Sonia from the Block headline…
Doug J, please come to the front to accept your prize….
John Cole
@kid bitzer: True. Even worse, I agreed with those two at the time. Glass houses and all that.
me
Nobody expects the Rosen Inquisition.
kid bitzer
@ john cole–
ehh, so you made some mistakes. me too: i made the mistake of believing the claim that iraq was making nukes.
so we learn. at any rate, those not in the cheneysphere do.
AhabTRuler
And yet you seem so smart. Christ, the cognitive dissonance must have been ringing your head like a goddamned fire bell.
buggy ding dong
Jeffrey Rosen is shocked, shocked that gambling is going on here.
Napoleon
I like TAPs head line in their blog on this matter: “Toothpaste isn’t just out of the tube, it’s all over the sink”.
sgwhiteinfla
Next liberal to be used by wingnuts to attack Sotomayor….
Jonathan Turley.
JK
@John Cole:
The story has been inaccurately characterized in several blog posts I’ve read. Republicans shouldn’t waste time trying to dismiss the relevance of Bush’s appointment of Sotomayor.
More important, Obama should ram Sotomayor’s thru the Senate and not tolerate the bullshit Republicans pulled with the nominations of Dawn Johnsen and Harold Koh. Someone needs to remind Obama that he’s the fucking President and that he shouldn’t have let Republicans block the Johnsen and Koh nominations. Johnsen and Koh have strong qualifications and deserved better than having Obama hang them both out to dry.
AhabTRuler
As much as I respect the John-Coles-of-the-left for acknowledging their errors, I still can’t write them off as being just “some mistakes.” Of the herd of poorly evidenced lies that were trotted out in the jingo-sphere, those were among the dumbest and least believable. Many, many people are still owed their punch-to-the-junk for swallowing/perpetuating those “ideas.”
eric
@buggy ding dong: precisely
justmy2
oh….here is the image…
JGabriel
(Reposted from previous thread, as it seems more relevant to this one.)
John Yoo @ AEI:
Which would mean that Sotomayor is just as good as the other candidates, and that Yoo’s (and Conservatives, assuming he represents their attitude) only complaint with her is her race.
There’s a word for that.
.
Tom
Here is what OSAGE, a commentor at FDL, had to say:
“THE DOOMED REMNANTS OF THE REJECTED PARTY OF BIGOTRY, HYPOCRISY AND FAILURE
What’s left of today’s GOP is a genetically and or psychologically deviant mélange of morally and ethically defective mutants, miscreants and kamikaze loyalists who are crashing and burning all things Republican. They are the figurative buzzards and hyenas fighting over the last scraps of a carcass riddled with maggots and festering clumps of putrefied viscera. They are the opportunistic parasites whose very existence is and always has been dependent on sucking blood from the engorged bellies of alpha predators. The prevalence of fear, paranoia and irrational hatred in today’s GOP represents the antemortem gasps of a doomed species struggling to survive in evaporating pools of their own toxic waste as they mercilessly slice and dice one another in futile attempts to become the biggest fish in an increasingly smaller and smaller pond.”
kid bitzer
@26–
wait, have the johnsen and koh nominations been withdrawn?
justmy2
@sgwhiteinfla:
Turley is a libertarian…not a liberal…
Funny how being against torture and an unconstrained Presidency are now considered liberal values..
demkat620
Um, where did this “90% of her opinions have been overturned.” crap come from?
JK
@Library Grape:
More Glenn Beck Stupidity
“Hey, Hispanic chick lady! You’re empathetic … you’re in!”
h/t http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200905260041
jonas
It’s like how my study showing that the gas chambers at Auschwitz never worked is always being cited by Holocaust-denying neo-Nazis. How could this happen?
kid bitzer
@34–
awesome.
keep it up, glen! i can hear florida and texas turning blue as you speak!
demkat620
Pat Buchanan”This is a prejudicial and affirmative action pick” Wow, not even 24 hours.
Laura W
@demkat620: Joan is paddling him down pretty well. Not hard enough, though.
demkat620
Jeffrey Rosen take two from Pat Buchanan.
Good job, Jeff. Fucker.
JK
@kid bitzer:
Obama hasn’t lifted a goddamn finger to fight for Johnsen and Koh. He’s letting the Republican dirtbags ride roughshod over him.
Bullsmith
If you don’t accept that white men are more qualified, you’re a racist. Diversity is proof of discrimination. Can’t see that picking up a lot of steam outside the bubble.
JK
Nate Silver: Current Senators Voted 35-11 to Confirm Sotomayor in 1998
h/t http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/05/current-senators-voted-35-11-to-confirm.html
demkat620
Please, please, GOP make Pat Buchanan your point person on this. Women and hispanics will just love it.
JGabriel
@JK:
Expect all of the Republican Senators that originally voted for Sotomayor, except Specter, to vote against her this time around.
.
gwangung
@demkat620:
The same place Rosen came up with his quotes and evaluations of Sotomayor.
Napoleon
@demkat620:
That number screams BS on its face for 3 reasons: 1) no one is that wrong that often, 2) the vast majority of the cases that come before the appeals court are routine and don’t even get appealed (I bet its less then 1%) and 3) keep in mind that she will sit on panels with 2 other judges. Any decision she is in the majority on she has one other judge on her side. How likely is it that she is convincing one other judge to run off in some wild direction with her on a case.
Montysano
As usual, Bill Kristol is a 55 gallon drum of Fail:
Zifnab
@demkat620: They came from where most crap comes from. The butt.
Laura W
I probably missed this in an earlier post or thread but when I heard Rush say Obama has a chip on his shoulder I laughed so loudly in the kitchen I nearly scared the cats away from their food.
Laura W
@demkat620: Ha! Axelrod: “I don’t want to discourage them.”
This is fun tonight.
Comrade Mary, Would-Be Minion Of Bad Horse
The ass of the late Ted Sturgeon?
TPM has an excerpt from Gibbs’ press conference that gives real numbers: 380 opinions and 3 reversals. Even when you tote up just the Supreme Court decisions, that’s 6 opinions and 3 reversals. So less than 1% is 50% is 90%, shut up, that’s why.
Alan
Has this video of Rush Limbaugh calling her a racist been mentioned?
Comrade Mary, Would-Be Minion Of Bad Horse
Only over and over again on MSNBC today, Alan. Complete with ancient and relatively flattering headshot.
Shinobi
This is ridiculous.
Laura W
@Alan: Matthews is sure beating that drum tonight.
Alan
Geebus, I guess I won’t be turning on MSNBC this evening.
That is, unless they’re taking Rush to task.
demkat620
@Alan: Yeah, that’s great isn’t it? I have to say from what I’ve seen of her, she seems pretty impressive and this, from a purely political view, could C-I-L-L the GOP.
Obama is too smart for these guys.
D-Chance.
TBegg with the following:
if Ross is truly interested in curtailing single motherhood, he might want to suggest that society, in the form of public policy, make birth control as cheap and as easily available as, say, handguns.
I never knew that Smith and Wesson had discounted the prices on their firearms to the point where a Trojan would cost more. As for availability, I’ve never seen a c-store in any area of rampant single motherhood that didn’t have those choice pieces of latex readily accessible, whether OTC or in the privacy of the little boy’s room.
BTW, is TBegg’s partnerette, Jane, still trying to shakedown the Dems for some
wingnut“moonbat” welfare?The Cat Who Would Be Tunch
Modest much?
@JGabriel:
I’d love to see McCain and Kyl actively campaign against Sotomayor. It’s not like they’re from a state with a significant Hispanic population.
JK
@JGabriel:
I expect nothing else from these dirtbags, just wanted to acknowledge Nate Silver’s research.
I also expect Ben Nelson and other DINOs to vote against Sotomayor.
Laura W
@Alan: No, watch Hardball. Tweety has been pretty good thus far. I mean, for Tweety.
demkat620
@The Cat Who Would Be Tunch: Yeah, I can’t wait to see McCain, who’s up inj 2010, vote against her. Wonder what Kay Bailey Hutchinson is thinking tonight?
Tonal Crow
Is it too early to say, “Upperdown vote! We demand an upperdown vote!”?
Rosali
CNN had Alberto Gonzalez on to talk about Sonia Sotomayor. WTF? Was Sammy Sosa booked?
JK
@Laura W:
That’s setting the bar awfully low.
How long will Sotomayor’s confirmation battle last?
http://innovation.cqpolitics.com/media/scnom/?referrer=js
KG
@ 34: it’s magical thinking. she’s had something like 6 decisions while on the Second Circuit go up to the Supremes. Three of them have been overturned. This is not wholly uncommon. Usually when a case makes it to the Supreme Court it’s because there is a Circuit split. One circuit has ruled that the law says X and another says that the law says not-exactly-X, or even Y. The Supreme Court must then figure out what the law says. Sometimes they hold that it says X, sometimes they say it says not-exactly-X, sometimes they say it says Y, and on occasion, they’ll even say “you’re both wrong, it says Z.”
This stems from a fundamental misunderstanding – in many cases, a purposeful ignorance – of how, exactly, the American legal system works. I made the mistake of listening to Rush this morning on the way into the office (without even knowing the pick had been made), and was just amazed at how little he knew of the legal system.
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
@Rosali:
And Ricky Ricardo was dead?
Little Dreamer
@JK:
That doesn’t matter, according to Orrin Hatch (one of the senators who voted for her previously) on MSNBC earlier today (paraphrasing):
‘This is different, this is the Supreme Court’.
KG
I’ll bet that Sotomayer gets at least 75 votes to confirm. Ginsberg got 96 votes, after all. There will be a sane Republican voice out there – probably Orin Hatch, who points out that she’s qualified, and that her jurisprudence isn’t outside the mainstream of legal thought.
Edit: and Little Dreamer makes me look like an idiot by one minute.
David Hunt
@demkat620:
Hutchinson is going to let her term expire and run for governor in Texas in 2010. She needs to work on her appeal to the batshit crazy portion of the GOP. Primary election almost always work like that.
AhabTRuler
@KG: Well, to be fair, it was Orrin Hatch who made you look like an idiot, what with your faith in his sanity and decency.
DanSmoot'sGhost
@JK:
Tweety has not been good. He has been his usual dense, ridiculous self.
He plays, and pimps, the YouTube clip of Sotmayor talking about how the appeals court is setting policy.
This is a clip that works only if you know absolutely nothing about your court system and how it works.
At the appeals level, most of the issues in front of the court are process issues, matters of how a case was adjudicated and what got the case to its current state. It’s all about policy, about setting the court policies that will guide how such cases are worked in the lower courts. That’s the WHOLE FUCKING POINT of having an appeals court. Appeals courts are not there to re-deliberate the facts of a case, except in situations where the process in the lower court was defective and put them in that position. Appeals courts are there to review the processes that were followed in the lower courts. They are setting policy for those lower courts, that’s what they do. And ultimately, that is what the Supreme Courts of the states, and the country, also do. They are providing guidance to those courts, and that guidance includes administrative and legal policy based on the law.
Not getting that is fine for some guy who never heard this before, but how is it okay for a guy at Chris Matthews’ fucking level not to get it? How does a guy get on tv and not know things like this?
I not spending the summer batting around shuttlecocks like this on the badminton court. Fuck these people. Learn how the world actually works, and tell the people the truth about it. What the hell is so hard about that?
Jay in Oregon
Hopefully it will be more of a surprise when, if I should ever meet Jeffrey Rosen in person, I punch him in the nads for being such a tool.
Seriously. It’d be one thing to hammer out a piece of crap like that, but to have right-wing assholes use it to further their political goals would make me quit my job, if not jump out a window.
Montysano
@DanSmoot’sGhost:
Tweety’s job is to attract eyeballs, not to know things. He’s playing dumb to gin up controversy.
The Cat Who Would Be Tunch
@David Hunt:
It’ll be interesting to see how Hutchinson will top Cornyn. I still have fond recollections of Cornyn questioning Eric Holder on the subject of “enhanced interrogation”.
Little Dreamer
@KG:
Apologies, but Orrin is not going to make this as easy as the last two times.
DanSmoot'sGhost
@Little Dreamer:
Yes, his actual words were, “This (voting on her now, as opposed to voting for her ten years ago) is different, this is the most important court in the world.”
Parentheses and their contents, mine.
What Hatch said is pure dogwhistle. She was good enough for that lower court but hey, this is the Big One. Is she good enough for this level?
Hm. I heard today that modern day SCOTUS nominations were averaging 72 days before confirmation. Hatch today insisted that they needed “at least 90 days or more” to handle this situation.
These people are vile.
Max
@justmy2: I loathe Turley and his smug, condenscending, anti-everything Obama musings. I hate that Keith and Rachel and now Tweety are giving so much time to him. He is Krugman-like in his postering, in that things in his world are hardly based in reality of what can get passed through congress.
Little Dreamer
@DanSmoot’sGhost:
If they did that, they’d always lose. They need propaganda and ignorance to fool some of the people or else they have nothing.
Balconesfault
Had the exact same thought. Want to run for Governor in Texas after voting against cloture on a filibuster of the first Hispanic nominated to the Supreme Court?
Want to run for the Republican Party nomination after voting FOR cloture?
Good luck with that, Kay!
Ash Can
Jeffrey Rosen wouldn’t know journalistic integrity if it stepped in front of him, grabbed the front of his shirt, and decked him with a single brass-knuckle punch to the jaw.
Little Dreamer
@DanSmoot’sGhost:
They need that extra 18 days to give Rush ample time to gin up a strong Republican hatred for this nominee through vicious lies and fearmongering.
lamh31
Now that I’m thinking about it guys, it seems to me that the GOP got played by the WH since the announcement of Judge Souter retirements.
Before Obama ever picked his nominee, they gave away their ammunition. The let the admin know what they would attack on. You don’t give away your playbook to the opposing team.
Hell, even Gibbs was ready for the questions about Sotomayor.
JK
@DanSmoot’sGhost:
I’m no fan of Chris Matthews whatsoever. I was just responding to Laura W’s comment on his performance today.
I consider Matthews slightly less repulsive and nauseating than Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Joe Scarborough, and Lou Dobbs but I think he’s inching closer to them. They’re all malignant cancers in our body politic and we’d be much better off as a society if everyone would stop watching these smarmy, sleazy, knuckle dragging neanderthals.
DanSmoot'sGhost
@Little Dreamer:
And they are doing it, right now, on the Ed Show. Some potatohead is pimping the “we are making policy” comment as if it means something entirely different from what it actually meant.
Ed’s brilliant response? “Okay.” Ed joins Matthews as being a guy who has no clue on earth what Sotomayor was talking about.
I can’t take these people.
Alan
Geebus, I turn on MSNBC and hear Tancredo say Sotomayor thinks a brown person can interpret the law better than a white person.
Little Dreamer
@DanSmoot’sGhost:
yeah, I caught that too.
Notorious P.A.T.
LOL. Future generations will be impossible to convince that Kristol was NOT a performance artist/comedian.
PaulB
She did, but only if you completely ignore context and willfully misinterpret what she said. Here’s the statement in context:
Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O’Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.
Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown.
However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.
Occasional Observer
Gosh, I hope no one flies a plane into his building.
oh really
I almost find this
more offensive than his original wankery. In this sentence he concludes that his anonymous sources were correct about Sotomayor’s temperament deficiencies and that Obama had to “wrestle” with her character defects in order to choose her.
Rosen printed the words of anonymous people who may or may not have been in a position to offer responsible criticism of Sotomayor, and now he assumes those criticisms are entirely true — despite the contrary opinions of others.
Rosen would be better off if he just came out and said that only white males are qualified to sit on the Supreme Court.
Of course, even though Sotomayor has debilitating flaws in her temperament, once on the Supreme Court she can look to both Scalia and Thomas to mentor her on what appropriate judicial temperament is.
Scalia = arrogant, rude, loud mouthed know-it-all
Thomas = sullen, grudge-holding misanthrope
Great models for “Maria.”
Alan
@PaulB: As one of the dimmer bulbs here, even I realize her comment was taken out of context. Even so, my comment isn’t complete without the context. So thanks for your quote.
SpotWeld
Wasn’t she already on everyone’s short lists?
It’s not really a question of can she do the job… she’s already in the upper level of qualified people, right?
Now it’s just a matter of Obama picking the “best fit” as he sees it.
It’s pure and rather ugly politics, but he’s the guy who got elected.
The GOP can whine and play their politics too, but at some point they must get over it… right?
Mnemosyne
@oh really:
Don’t forget whiny baby Samuel Alito, who skipped out on a meeting with the new president because he was still pissed that Obama and Biden had voted against his confirmation.
Actually, I’m probably being unfair to whiny babies with that comparison.
Anne Laurie
If Obama’s only goal were to fry the wingnuts’ tiny brainboards, he could always nominate Michelle.
Per Cheney, no reason why the First Lady can’t also be the Chief Justice, amirite?
Delguy
Let’s see. Valedictorian of her high school class,second in her class at PRINCETON. Sure sounds like an intellectual lightweight?????