You know the drill.
Looks like more rain here again today. I suppose we need it, but it is making it hard to get anything done in the garden.
Open Thread- Lovable Losers Edition
Thanks for helping my sister out, she met her goal. Dinner was great, and this about sums up the general mood at Casa de Tunch:
This is a much better version, but you can’t embed it. Dunno if I have ever mentioned how much I like Waylon and actual real country music, but now I have. One of these days we will have to talk about the relationship between outlaw country and their defense of rap musicians, but we can leave that for some other time.
They don’t make ’em like Waylon anymore.
Also:
And in a completely different vein, if I were to ever propose, I would do it with this in the background:
I just love that song.
Friday Open Thread
I’m off to dinner with some friends, but I wanted to leave you with a shiny new open thread. Also, my insane sister, who never met a plane she did not want to jump out of or a cliff she did not want to climb, a trait that I simply do not share, is apparently riding 150 miles to fight Multiple Sclerosis:
I’ve registered for the Bike MS: Escape to the Lake (Erie) event because I want to do something for the people who have been diagnosed – and because I want to do everything to prevent more people from learning what it means to live with this disease.
The MS 150 is a 150 mile bike ride from Pittsburgh to Erie,PA and back, all in an effort to raise awareness and funding for MS research and programming.
Today, there is no cure for multiple sclerosis, and with diagnosis occurring most frequently between the ages of 20 and 50, many individuals face a lifetime filled with unpredictability.
If you would like to sponsor her, here is the link. I promised her I would put a post up about this, partially because I know that my life is easiest when I just do what the women around me tell me to do, but also because I think it is a good cause. I’m in for $25.00.
Also, this cat wants you to donate to the fight against MS:
And how could you say no to that face? I’ll be back later. Try to behave.
It’s all Latin to me
One wonders if Fred Barnes was really Morton Kondrake’s longtime companion.
BARNES: I think you can make the case that she’s one of those who has benefited from affirmative action over the years tremendously.
BENNETT: Yeah, well, maybe so. Did she get into Princeton on affirmative action, one wonders.
BARNES: One wonders.
BENNETT: Summa Cum Laude, I don’t think you get on affirmative action. I don’t know what her major was, but Summa Cum Laude’s a pretty big deal.
BARNES: I guess it is, but you know, there’s some schools and maybe Princeton’s not one of them, where if you don’t get Summa Cum Laude then or some kind of Cum Laude, you then, you’re a D+ student.
This is a perfect example of conservatives’ tortured relation with higher education. Everyone smart went to Princeton or some such, but even so, those schools are filled with A-giving pinkos.
It’s just emotion that’s taking me over
Michael Gerson has written what may be the ultimate anti-empathy manifesto today. It briefly left me wondering what might be next battlefield in the Global War Against Empathy. Then it hit me, at the end of this (quite reasonable) Brooks piece on empathy, which must be quoted if only because of the Two Great Conservative Thinkers who are mentioned at the end:
Right-leaning thinkers from Edmund Burke to Friedrich Hayek understood that emotion is prone to overshadow reason. They understood that emotion can be a wise guide in some circumstances and a dangerous deceiver in others. It’s not whether judges rely on emotion and empathy, it’s how they educate their sentiments within the discipline of manners and morals, tradition and practice.
It’s a slippery slope from empathy to emotion. And I think we all know how emotional Latinas are, right? I wonder if we’re going to see suggestions that Sotomayor lets her spicy, fiery Latin temperament cloud her judgements.
Open Thread
I’m really not a violent person, but so help me Allah, if I could figure out which one of you subscribed me to updates from David Vitter, I would punch you in the damned neck. Two or three times. If you are going to make me read crap like that, at least have the decency to hit the paypal when you sign me up.
Jerk.
Bonus fun fact- the spam email has no unsubscribe.
*** Update ***
A big shout-out to the pricks who, without hitting paypal, subscribed me to Ann Coulter, Human Events, and Our Lady of the Succulent Onion Ring. Seriously, I will read the shit if you inform me you hit paypal. Oherwise, just DIAF.
Mounds of Nonsense
The debate over Judge Sonia Sotomayor continues to rage this week. What is remarkable is how much is being said and how little substance can be found in the coverage. One would think that the law of averages alone would guarantee that some substantive points would be hit, if only by accident. It is becoming increasingly clear that, once again, we will not have a substantive and civil review of the qualifications of a Supreme Court nominee. Neither conservatives nor liberals seem to want (or are willing to tolerate) objective discussion of Sotomayor’s qualifications or opinions. For what it is worth, I would like to discard some of the most often heard arguments in the vain hope that we might still achieve some level of reasonable discourse in this debate.
What follows is a good dissection of the nonsense from the right, and some less stirring examples of falsehoods from the left. I particularly don’t understand his assertion that the left is using her stay at Princeton as the reason she should be confirmed, and Turley seems confused. The reason Princeton is an issue is a defensive posture to deflect the nonsensical and offensive claims that she isn’t very smart. Considering Turley was one of the first out of the gate with those kinds of assertions about her intellect, I suppose there is a good reason he wouldn’t understand that.
Overall, a good read, though.
*** Update ***
This Greenwald piece on his personal experiences with Sotormayor is also a very informative read.
*** Update ***
I concur with many of you in the comments, this Ambinder post is exceptional and could help to explain some of the friction between the reality the rest of us see and that which is posited by well-meaning folks like Turley:
I think Obama believes that the legal world is manifestly out of touch with modern society — that the judgment about Sotomayor’s intelligence stems more from the unwillingness of academics to believe intelligence consists of something other than how an opinion reads. Obama seems to be sensitive to classism in the elite. Perhaps an outspoken Puerto Rican New Yorker seems foreign and makes an academic a little queasy, which translates, in public, to complaints about her intellectual heft. It would be interesting to see if Justice Sandra Day O’Connor faced similar concerns when Ronald Reagan nominated her in 1981, she of humble western roots and a lack of ivory polish, who nevertheless also graduated from a top law school.
On MSNBC yesterday, a law professor (liberal Jonathan Turley) said that he and his academic friends were disappointed with the pick because he believed she wasn’t brilliant enough (compared to him presumably) and that she was more like “Thurgood Marshall.”
I think this underlines the same idea: Sotomayor and Marshall are/were from different classes and had different life experiences from most academics, who even if they come from humble roots became very insular, cerebral and theoretical once they become academics.
Stotomayor didn’t take this academic track, and as a result, is seen as different.