Just when you thought the racist comments were bad…

…in comes an anti-Sotomayor sexist comment about menstruation (Via Sullivan):

“Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when [Sotomayor]’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then.”

That gem is from G. Gordon Libby (and by the way… who on the Right decided it’d be a good idea to let Nixon’s chief operative for the White House Plumbers, uh, you know… speak). I seriously can’t understand these people. I’m flabbergasted.

Hilzoy’s got a great summation of what’s happening to the GOP:

Obama is a serious student of the civil rights movement, which in turn drew a lot of inspiration from Gandhi. Both Gandhi and the Civil Rights movement made brilliant use of the following method: you do something right, which you suspect might lead your opponents to do something wrong. If you are right about them, they discredit themselves, without your having to lift a finger. If you’re wrong, you are pleasantly surprised. But you do not have to do anything wrong or underhanded yourself, nor do you in any way have to hope that your opponents are bad people. 

That’s what he’s doing now. He has chosen a judge who is by any standard exceptionally qualified, and who has, in addition, a fairly conservative judicial temperament. She sticks close to the law; she follows precedent; having read several of her opinions, if I have any criticism of her, it’s that not seen much evidence of an overarching judicial philosophy other than restraint. (To be clear: if a judge has to lack something, I’d rather it be an overarching philosophy than devotion to the law as written. But I’d rather have both.)

But she is also a Puerto Rican woman. If the Republican Party were led by sane and decent people, this would not matter. But they aren’t. As a result, they seem to be unable to see anything about her besides her ethnicity and her gender. The idea that she must be a practitioner of identity politics, a person whose every success is due to preferential treatment, etc., is apparently one they absolutely cannot resist.

She adds at the end:

And I hate it. I want to have a reasonable opposition party. I also don’t want people of color, and especially kids, to have to listen to all this bigotry. We should be better than this.

Yes. We should be.

Why? Because baseball’s fun, goddamnit!

Have a great weekend! USF v. UCONN:

(Danke: Sullivan)

Friday Monty

A vital psycho-social service:

ReTweet: “Smooth Operator”

"Perriello_Petraeus_010809 001211" by Jon-Phillip Sheridan

By publius:

I’ll be honest — I’m a bit frightened of David Petraeus’s political and media savvy.  This guy is good.  I just watched him on Fox News and was very impressed with his answers on everything from Gitmo to torture to the ability of our legal system to try detainees.  The video is here, but I’ve posted some excerpts from the rough transcript:

On closing Gitmo:

What I do support is what has been termed I think a responsible closure of Gitmo.  Gitmo has caused us problems — there’s no question about it. I oversee a region in which the existence of Gitmo has indeed been used by the enemy against us.  We have not been without missteps or mistakes in our activities since 9/11.

On trying detainees in the US:

I don’t think we should be afraid to live our values.  That’s what we’re fighting for. It’s what we stand for and so indeed we need to embrace them and we need to operationalize them in how we carry out what it is we’re doing on the battlefield and everywhere else. So one has to have some faith I think in the legal system.  One has to have a degree of confidence that individuals that have conducted such extremist activity would indeed be found guilty in our courts of law.

On opposing torture:

PETRAEUS:  [F]or the vast majority of the cases our experience . . .is that the techniques that are in the army field manual that lays out how we treat detainees, how we interrogate them — those techniques work. That’s our experience in this business.

FOX NEWS:  So is sending this signal that we’re not going to use these kind of techniques anymore . . . What kind of impact does that have on people who do us harm in the in the field that you operate in?

PETRAEUS:  Well actually what I would ask is — does that not take away from our enemies a tool which again they’ve beaten us around the head and shoulders in the court of public opinion. When we have taken steps that have violated the Geneva convention, we rightly have been criticized.  And so as we move forward I think it’s important to . . . live our values, to live the agreements that we have made in the international justice arena into practice.

Very smooth.  Obviously, that’s all good stuff.  But I’m a little wary of relying too much on any argument that begins, “Well, I’m right because General Petraeus says X.”  Most obviously, he is a direct subordinate of Obama — just like he used to be a direct subordinate of Bush back when he was saying arguably unhelpful things about the surge.  And more generally, I don’t like the idea of relying heavily on the public statements of active military officials in political policy debates.

But I do think this passage shows Petraeus’s political dexterity.  He’s someone who can go on Fox News and articulate Obama’s political message, while simultaneously retaining the sympathies of all parties.

If he ever runs for anything, I hope it’s not as a Republican.

Great excerpts. Great points. Great caution against over emphasizing arguments just because “Petraeus said so”. Great post.

Operation Gringo

Nate Silver parces a potential GOP electoral strategy for 2012 and 2016:

Interesting map, eh? Read the post to figure out how he made it look that way.

Seriously? Like… seriously?

Rush Limbaugh, ladies and gentlemen. A new low:

“If ever a civil rights movement was needed in America, it is for the Republican Party. If ever we needed to start marching for freedom and Constitutional rights, it’s for the Republican Party. The Republican Party is today’s oppressed minority. It knows how to behave as one. It shuts up. It doesn’t cross bridges, it doesn’t run into the Bull Connors of the Democrat Party. It is afraid of the firehouses and the dogs, it’s compliant. The Republican Party today has become totally complacent. They are an oppressed minority, they know their position, they know their place. They go to the back of the bus, they don’t use the right restroom and the right drinking fountain, and they shut up.”

(Danke: Hilzoy)

Roland Burris fiasco

Some Blago fall out after-the-fact. This is going to get hairy. Burris’ greed is going to be the end of him.

Funniest. Op-ed. Ever.

Wow… just… wow. This is incredibly funny.

UPDATE: This reminded me of something… what could it be… what could it be? Ah yes, now I remember. Comment #1. The relevant section from The Onion:

What’s that? Now it’s making an appeal to reason? Never! Do you hear me, you eloquent, well-read behemoth? Never! We’ll die before we recognize what we secretly know to be true! The cognitive dissonance only makes our denial stronger!

The equations of love

"Love" by Shanissinha

Steven Strogatz:

The silly idea that love affairs might progress in a similar way occurred to me when I was in love for the first time, trying to understand my girlfriend’s baffling behavior. It was a summer romance at the end of my sophomore year in college. I was a lot like the first Romeo above, and she was even more like the first Juliet. The cycling of our relationship was driving me crazy until I realized that we were both acting mechanically, following simple rules of push and pull. But by the end of the summer my equations started to break down, and I was even more mystified than ever. As it turned out, the explanation was simple. There was an important variable that I’d left out of the equations — her old boyfriend wanted her back.

In mathematics we call this a three-body problem. It’s notoriously intractable, especially in the astronomical context where it first arose. After Newton solved the differential equations for the two-body problem (thus explaining why the planets move in elliptical orbits around the sun), he turned his attention to the three-body problem for the sun, earth and moon. He couldn’t solve it, and neither could anyone else. It later turned out that the three-body problem contains the seeds of chaos, rendering its behavior unpredictable in the long run.

Newton knew nothing about chaotic dynamics, but he did tell his friend Edmund Halley that the three-body problem had “made his head ache, and kept him awake so often, that he would think of it no more.”

I’m with you there, Sir Isaac.

GOP self-destructing

"self destruct" by Divine Harvester ™ NOW 40% MORE ! ! !

“White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw,” – Newt Gingrich, twittering.

(Danke: Sullivan)

This is what happens…

…when your “charity” is fundraising for Hamas: you go to jail.

Make sure you check out your charities before you give.

Prop 8 federal suit

It has been filed. From the sounds of things this one is based on a civil liberties legal arguments (unlike the case that went before the California Supreme Court). That sounds good to me.

Also noteworthy is that Theo Olson (the litigator on the Bush side of Bush vs. Gore for decision on the 2000 election) is on the case. Actually, he’s tag-teaming this one with his oponent from that case, David Boies.

ReTweet: “Sonia Sotomayor and Identity Formation”

UPDATE: For some fun snark in this ongoing… uh… “discussion”, once again see Matt.

By Matthew Yglesias:

As anyone who knows me can attest, I don’t have what you’d call a strong “Hispanic” identity. Three of my four grandparents are Jews from Eastern Europe. My paternal grandfather, José Yglesias, was a Cuban-American born in Florida. But that puts the family’s actual Hispanic ancestry pretty far back in the past. He grew up in a Spanish-dominant immigrant community, but spoke English fluently. My dad grew up in an English-speaking household and knows some Spanish. I took a semester of Spanish at NYU one summer. And Cuban-American political identity in the United States is heavily oriented around a highly ideological far-right approach to Latin America policy that neither I nor anyone else in my family shares. The Yglesiases emigrated from Cuba before the Revolution, José was initially a Castro supporter, and though he gave that up he and my dad and I all share what you might call anti-anti-Castro views.

But for all that, I have to say that I am really truly deeply and personally pissed off my the tenor of a lot of the commentary on Sonia Sotomayor. The idea that any time a person with a Spanish last name is tapped for a job, his or her entire lifetime of accomplishments is going to be wiped out in a riptide of bitching and moaning about “identity politics” is not a fun concept for me to contemplated. Qualifications like time at Princeton, Yale Law, and on the Circuit Court that work well for guys with Italian names suddenly don’t work if you have a Spanish name. Heaven forbid someone were to decide that there ought to be at least one Hispanic columnist at a major American newspaper.

Somehow, when George W. Bush affects a Texas accent, that’s not identity politics. When John Edwards gets a VP nomination, that’s not identity politics. But Sonia Sotomayor! Oh my heavens!

At any rate, Ann Friedman wrote a great piece on the hypocrisy of this back during the Democratic primary. And I think this item from Neil Sinhababu on constructing political identities is insightful. I think conservatives are playing with fire here, and underestimating the number of, say, Mexican-Americans in Texas who didn’t think of themselves as having a great deal in common with Puerto Ricans from New York who are waking up today to find that in the eyes of the conservative movement normal qualifications for office don’t count unless you’re a white Anglo.

I think this pretty well sums up the Sonia Sotomayor pick… I think it’s a standard pick. She’s incredibly intelligent and incredibly qualified. The only added spice is that the GOP is inevitably going to blow up even more by saying something that further alienates the latino vote that they need to have a prayer in 2010 and beyond.

Mostly though, I think people blow SCOTUS picks out of proportion… Obama won the election, therefore he gets his picks–and obviously its going to be someone with left-leaning tendencies. People should realize this during the election. Whining about it now is just sour grapes. The only time a president shouldn’t get his pick, is when that person is grossly underqualified (e.g. Miers).

The winner gets the picks. Period. This was the case for Bush, too. Move on to more interesting discussions people. Sotomayer will do a fine job (plus, she’s replacing David Souter… it’s not like the court is going to shift all that much).

Every Friday and Saturday night (and Wednesday… and Thursday…)

"Designated Drivers" by xkcd

A real story from GTMO

Jeff Tietz is doing a series of posts titled “You Think You Know How Bad Gitmo Really Was? A Teenage Detainee’s Story”. There are provocative and horrifically eye-opening. An excerpt from the most recent entry:

During the questioning, Omar gave an answer the interrogator did not like. The man spat in his face and threatened to send him to Israel, Egypt, Jordan or Syria—places where they tortured people the old-fashioned way: very slowly, analytically removing body parts. The Egyptians, the interrogator told Omar, would hand him to Askri raqm tisa—Soldier Number Nine. Soldier Number Nine, the interrogator explained, was a guard who specialized in raping prisoners.

Chilling.