Comrade Pelosi blink

Slick Willy rub nose

Comrade Oboma open mouth

Dumb Donkey Gibbs laugh…Hehaw..he..haw..he..haw!

I Igor produce Barrack Milhaus Hussein Obama Birth Certificate at http://www.igormaro.org

This is essentially what I grabbed from the post as well. It's not that criticism of Sotomayor is unwarranted, but the Republican response is so formulaic that I feel like I could preempt their comments much in the same way I can recite lines from Clueless before each scene.

The difference being that I thoroughly enjoy watching Clueless, of course.

Because they (Gingrich, Limbaugh, Hannity, Goldfarb, Tancredo, Liddy, etc) think that this sort of barely-disguised racism will benefit them personally by appealing to their intended audience. (And if that crowd aren't vermin, they've spent years perfecting the imitation.)

But what I am incensed about is the crazy double standards that the MSM applies. She would be roasted if she was white and said the same thing.

As to the first issue – I find your discussion completely convincing, but I'm not sure why this then doesn't go in the “con” column in deciding on her confirmation? We're looking to confirm someone who shares our interpretation of the law as far as possible. If this is an ambiguous case where it's not entirely clear what the right interpretation is, but what IS clear is that she doesn't share ours, then isn't that a reason to oppose confirmation? (All other things equal, of course – I get that you have to vote on the whole package, that there's no line-item confirmation, as it were…)

As to the Ricci case – I'm right with you. It's pretty clear to me too that the town was just trying to avoid litigation – who can blame them? There's really no complaint against Sotomayer here – especially since it seems she's pretty consistent in denying pretty much all racial claims suits, regardless of the race of the plaintiff. I have no idea what to think about Ricci – though I admit to a sneaking hope that the Supreme Court will use it to give us a rule that says that all that is required is that the testing authority make a good-faith effort to keep tests race-neutral, freeing us from a lot of ex post performance metric nonsense. That Sotomayer passed the buck on this one is fair enough – but I dont' think that makes it wrong of me to say that I would've preferred it if she'd gone ahead and set that precedent.

Nothing about your thoughtful commentary here, of course, changes the fact that Will's post is pretty useless. Calling namecallers names is just more namecalling when commentary is what's actually required.

So what is your preferred method of implementing policy?

And thanks for trying to nip the name calling in the bud.

Ricci is even less of a no-brainer. I have NO idea what one should do here on the Equal Protection claim. It seems to me that where this is going is that it may turn into a day of reckoning for disparate impact analysis under Title VII altogether. Absent the EP claim, it seems to me that the city engaged in perfectly legitimate avoidance of a disparate impact Title VII claim against them, in good faith, and that there's nothing special here from a statutory standpoint. But the EP claim may very well be a legitimate one. It seems that there is this broader history of conservative jurisprudence using equal protection to undo remedial efforts to combat racial discrimination, in the name of colorblindness, and so it is easy enough to see what justices informed entirely by political preferences would do here, and in terms of my own political preferences, I have long thought that the time has past where aggressive remedial efforts were needed (and disparate impact analyses under Title VII seem to me one of the more aggressive tools). But that's policy. What the better EP analysis should be, policy aside, is something I confess to being utterly mystified by now. I guess the question would be, do Title VII disparate impact suits meet or fail to meet strict scrutiny. I can see an argument for disparate impact being *necessary* to remedy part discrimination, and remedying discrimination being a compelling state interest (I don't think “diversity” is a compelling state interest). I don't know. These issues seem hard to me as *legal* matters, even if they seem pretty easy to me as matters of political preference. Which leads me back to the political debate: someone who says that these issues are *easy* is just pushing their preferences, with a hefty dollop of inappropriate sanctimony and indignation. So Will is right, though for the reasons I've given.