- ‹ previous
- 665 of 2728
- next ›
Sotomayor and the Right
In the New York Times this weekend, Emily Bazelon interviewed Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In the LA Times this morning, Jonah Goldberg read the interview, chopped off a Ginsburg quote about Roe v. Wade halfway through, and then asked this:
Unlike Bazelon, I for one would like to know whether Ginsburg believes there were — or are — some populations in need of shrinking through abortion and whether she thinks such considerations have any place at the Supreme Court.
And while we're at it, it would be interesting to know what Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor thinks about such things.
Yes indeed. Goldberg is seriously suggesting that maybe Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg believes we should try to shrink a few of our less desirable ethnic populations by providing them with increased access to abortion. And then, just for the hell of it, he thinks we ought to find out whether Sonia Sotomayor thinks the same thing.
Needless to say, Ginsburg believes nothing of the sort. You only have to read the sentence right after the one Goldberg quoted to see that. 
And Sotomayor, of course, has absolutely no connection to this at all. Isaac Chotiner has the details here.
The almost manic eagerness of the right to inject race into the Sotomayor nomination at every opportunity is enough to make you ill. It started within minutes of her nomination being announced, and it's continued ever since. Sen. Jeff Sessions took up the reins today.
There's never been any reason for it, of course. It was ostensibly based on one sentence in a speech and one court decision out of hundreds she's made. In reality, it's just because she's a Hispanic liberal and conservatives figure that a race-based attack is the one most likely to resonate with their base. And I suppose they're right, aren't they?
Well come on
Just because Laura Ingraham begins her radio show with a clip of Latin music, punctuated by Flip Wilson going "here come de judge," you jump to the conclusion that they're a bunch of racist assholes.
Where do you libs get such ideas?
Dunno. She could have
Dunno. She could have chosen to participate with MALDEF, but she chose instead La Raza.
You say, "it's just because
You say, "it's just because she's a Hispanic liberal..." You forgot to add, "...appointed by a black liberal president." That part makes the race-based attack even more salient with the base.
Goldberg's column
I read Jonah Goldberg's L.A. Times piece while I was eating lunch a few minutes ago, and right from the first sentence the words "STRAW MAN!" rolled off my tongue (significantly impeding my chicken sandwich).
let them whine with loud voices from tall buildings
I say let the white male republican senators and pundits continue their screed against
Sotomayor - all women and minorities can certainly hear the GOP dog whistle
now.
French
Please pardon my french, but Sessions is a bigoted, race-baiting, white southern fuckhead. He is living proof that Abe Lincoln was wrong. We should have let the south go and passed on the civil war.
Ahh, you shoulda stopped
Ahh, you shoulda stopped after "white" while you still had a point instead of diving right into full blown politically regressive regionalist contempt. Not only is rhetoric like that stupid, it's a great gift to the Republican right.
high-tech lynching...
...Or whatever the Latina counterpart of high-tech lynching is.
I love the part how one sentence provides a window into all of Sotomayor's thoughts -- a standard Jonah Goldberg, Jeff Sessions, or Rush Limbaugh would never want themselves to be held to.
Wow, that's just insane
Wow, that's just insane considering that Ginsberg's point was that she feared Medicaid payment for abortions could be mis-used and government payment could be government coercion. Hence, eugenics.
But then she saw that, in practice, the existence of Medicaid enhanced rather than limited a woman's right to choose, so she changed her position.
It's absolutely insane to turn her opposition to something she thought might be eugenics into advocacy FOR eugenics. Goldberg is scum and a liar.
All these old white guys are
All these old white guys are choking because Sotomayor thinks a Latina would make a better decision that a white guy. Nobody points out the obvious: that the old white guys think a white guy would make a better decision than a Latina. Why does the media go along with this crap?
White is a race. Male is a gender. When will somebody mention that those qualities come with a point of view, just as black, Asian, Latina, and female do?
Argh.
The Hon. Sen. Lindsey Graham:
"Don't go into speech writing if this law thing doesn't work out"
speechless...
Liberal?
Hispanic? Of course. But if Sonia Sotomayor is a "liberal" judge, then the word has no meaning. She is a classic Clinton-era centrist, and she certainly would have been on the right side of the aisle in the Warren or Burger courts
"The almost manic eagerness
"The almost manic eagerness of the right to inject race into the Sotomayor nomination ..."
Obama nominated her because of her gender and ethnicity.
right
It doesn't have anything to do with her educational pedigree, or her experience as a prosecutor & corporate lawyer, or her 17 years as a district & appeals court judge. The important thing is that she's got Puerto Rican ovaries. (Just like Rita Moreno, Obama's first choice, who was -- regrettably -- unavailable.)
Jackass.
fool
Remember when she was "dumb and obnoxious"?
Dumb and Obnoxious
That's the problem for Republicans in these hearings. The public gets to see how smart and gracious she is under the questioning of dumb and obnoxious Senators.
"The almost manic eagerness
"The almost manic eagerness of the right to inject race into the Sotomayor nomination at every opportunity is enough to make you ill."
It's also, given the previous Supreme court confirmation, a fascinating lense into the shifting definitions of "race" and "ethnicity" in this country. Alito's claims about his Italian heritage and Sotomayor's "wise latina" remark have very different resonances because Italian Americans aren't imagined now to be "racially" different from "normal" (white) Americans and latino/as still are. This wasn't the case until a good decade or two into the 20th century when "white" settled into place as the catch-all definition for a set of national heritages which had previously been understood as separate races in popular discourse.
While we're at it, let's find out . . .
If Justice Ginsburg and Judge Sotomayor believe:
That sunbeams can be extracted from cucumbers;
If gas can be cured by injecting good air with a bellows;
If horses hooves can be prevented from foundering through petrification;
If we should shorten discourse by cutting out verbs and participles because all things imaginable are nouns;
Or indeed if language should be eliminated altogether in favor of carrying about the actual things of which we wish to speak, thereby creating a universal language;
And while I'm borrowing ideas from the inimitable Dean Swift of St. Patrick's,
"n the school of political projectors, I was but ill entertained; the professors appearing, in my judgment, wholly out of their senses, which is a scene that never fails to make me melancholy. These unhappy people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favourites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity, and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities, eminent services; of instructing princes to know their true interest, by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employments persons qualified to exercise them, with many other wild, impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive; and confirmed in me the old observation, 'that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational, which some philosophers have not maintained for truth.' "
"I saw nothing in this country that could invite me to a longer continuance, and began to think of returning home to England."
"Goldberg is seriously
"Goldberg is seriously suggesting that maybe Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg believes we should try to shrink a few of our less desirable ethnic populations by providing them with increased access to abortion."
Perhaps Jonah is confusing Ginsburg with Bill Bennett.
http://www.neilrogers.com/news/articles/2005100517.html
Purposely obtuse. I was
Purposely obtuse. I was never sure whether the National Review's core audience was conservative believers, insincere debate aficionados, or liberals prescribed the rag for reasons of low blood pressure.
This is right out of the two page playbook.
Presumably the Hispanic
community is extra-sensitive to this, and the behaviour of Beauregard and Miss Lindsey has cost the GOP a few more points among them.
Because
Because leftists use phony race issues at every possible opportunity they assume that everyone who disagrees with them is racist. Of course, the true racists are those who use minorities to retain political power.
If whites were truly racists and voted in lock step as blacks and Hispanics do then we wouldn't even be discussing this nominee - she would not have a racist POTUS to nominate her.
Conservatives believe in equal opportunity - leftists believe in equal outcome - hence the left-wing's love affair with affirmative action , a race based program if there ever was one.