Post-exam link catchup.

* Today's abolish-the-Senate factoid: The 10 Senators on the Senate Finance Committee who voted for the public option yesterday represent millions more people than the 13 who voted against it. Dramatically depowering or outright eliminating the Senate should be near the top of any long-term political agenda for progressives. Also in Senate health care news: Tom Harkin says the public option has the votes to pass, while Ben Nelson thinks it's 2008.

* I don't usually play look-at-the-wingnut, but John Derbyshire says women shouldn't have the right to vote because we "got along like that for 130 years." Also, we should repeal civil rights legislation because it's wrong to "try to force people to be good." Well done, sir.

* Okay, a second round of look-at-the-wingnut: Newsmax ran a column yesterday advocating a military coup to solve "the Obama problem." Remember, conservatives love America and progressives hate America.

* Corzine continues to gain in New Jersey, with independent Chris Daggett now polling at 12%.

* Background ephemera from the new Red Dawn remake. It sounds like the Commies may have a point in this one.

* Where Superman gets his powers. At MeFi.

* New Scientist is having a flash fiction contest.

* Another entry in Jonathan Lethem's ten-million-part series on why he loves Philip K. Dick.

* People think torture works because it works in movies.

* New favorite song: Zork rock. (You know where I found it.)

* Also from Boing Boing: Trotsky: The Graphic Biography.

From the you-don't-say files: Tom Ridge admits in his new book to succumbing to political pressure to raise the terror alert level on the eve of George Bush's re-election, claiming he was so angry he almost resigned over it. How almost brave of him.

Early morning Wednesday.

* We finally saw Up! tonight. All I can say is if the first ten minutes don't break your heart you have no soul.

* Blackwater founder Erik Prince has apparently been implicated in a huge swath of crimes by a former employee and a Marine working with the company, ranging from tax evasion and money laundering to weapons smuggling to obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence to crimes of war and even to the murder of federal informants. (See MetaFilter for more.) My now-incredibly-timely review of Master of War is getting bumped up accordingly and will probably be online (updated) at Independent Weekly in a day or so. This is all pretty shocking, even by Blackwater standards.

* In not-completely-frakked-up news, Bill Clinton did a good thing today, a win for just about everybody but infamous douchebag of liberty John Bolton.



* More on the Olbermann/O'Reilly saga from Glenn Greenwald, Jane Hamsher, and David Sirota. While I appreciate that he finds himself in a tough spot here, Olbermann is not doing himself any favors with his behavior; making one type of statement on-the-air and another off makes it very clear what is going on, and makes him look like a fool.

* The 100 Greatest Sci-Fi Movies. Outraged to see Galaxy Quest only squeaking by at #95. And 12 Monkeys quietly buried in the 80s? Nonsense.

* "In Which I Ruin Rashomon For Everyone, Forever."

* And your short pictorial history of robots.

Sunday!

* Great Archie comics experiments of 1989-1990.

* This ruling of Sotomayor's, it must be said, was a little douchebaggy.

* "You almost get the sense guys like Thiessen are hoping for an attack so that they can blame Obama when it happens." Almost?

* Republicans who happily sat through three-and-a-half years of Bush vacations are outraged! that Obama took a night off.

* Tough times at Harvard U.

* Non-Whedon directors for the Buffy reboot. Wes Anderson snubbed again, though I bet Tarantino could do a good job with it.

The casual viciousness with which the leading lights of the Republican Party (Limbaugh, Gingrich, Beck, Buchanan and Coulter, even second-stringers like Tom Tancredo) have declared Sonia Sotomayor a "racist" is startling and deeply disturbing, even putting aside the irony that these individuals of all people would wave this particular bloody shirt. I'm not really sure what their long-term goal is. Do they think this is a remotely plausible strategy for Senatorial opposition? Are they trying to make "racism" itself a toxic, he-said-she-said subject that is outside the bounds of reasoned discourse? Are they so narrow-minded and short-sighted as to somehow believe she really is a racist? I don't get it.

This is all predicated on a single out-of-context quote from a 2001 speech she made to Berkeley law students:

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.

Taken out-of-context this is a statement about which reasonable people might disagree, though it surely doesn't rise to the level of racism outside right wing histrionics. She's not, after all, making some empirical claim about the relative intrinsic qualities of various races; she's claiming that her life experiences inform the decisions she makes and may sometimes lead to better judgments that "a white male who hasn't lived that life." That's controversial, maybe, but it's not racist. It doesn't speak to race; it speaks to life experience, to empathy.

But when Ta-Nehisi Coates and Spencer Ackerman direct us to the full context, the controversy vanishes for anyone with reading comprehension and a basic understanding of rhetorical irony.

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.

(1) She's responding (quite humbly) to a quote attributed to Justice O'Connor that suggests that judicial reasoning is somehow universal and objective, "that a wise old man and wise old woman" will tend to reach the same conclusion on any given subject. There's very good reason to think that isn't so -- precisely because there is no universal, objective definition of wise, however much we might wish there were -- and I tend to agree with her.

In context, in any event, the correct hysterical accusation is plainly "She's a sexist!", not "She's a racist!"

2) Even more importantly, in context her introduction of "a wise Latina woman" is plainly a sly, self-mocking reference to herself. It's an ironic wink to her own position as exactly the sort of judge about which she is speaking—it's not a truth claim about race, and no one listening to her that day would have thought it was.

Sean Hannity, patriot, wants a revolution.

Al Franken has been declared the winner in the Minnesota Senate race, though Pawlenty and his secretary of state still has to sign off on it for Franken to take office—which they won't, because Republicans are cheaters. Don't miss the spectacle of nearly the entire Minnesota Supreme Court recusing themselves from Coleman's inevitable appeal.

"If you asked me what I would do, I would step back. I just think the healing process is so important. The possibility of any change of this magnitude in the voting system we have would be so remote — that would be my judgment. Mr. Franken will decide what Mr. Franken will do."
—Norm Coleman, two days after election day.

UPDATE: Minnesota's secretary of state is elected, not appointed, and is actually a Democrat now, Mark Ritchie. gerrycanavan.blogspot.com regrets the error. Mistakes were made.

Norm Coleman, man of honor, will sue to keep his Senate seat despite saying two days after Election Day that he wouldn't.

Monday politics wrap-up.

* Condoleezza Rice seems to be having a little trouble deciding whether she wants to come back from the Dark Side or else keep up the good work.

* Classic gaffe for John McCain: he's accidentally leaked the U.S. government's knowledge of the top-secret Iraq-Pakistan border.

* He's also having trouble getting published in the New York Times. Don't feel bad, John, they won't publish my op-eds either.

* Novakula says we'll have the Republican VP by the end of the week. That screams Romney to me—the sooner he's tapped the sooner they can start spending his money, which (because McCain accepted public money) they can't spend after the RNC convention.

* Bush hits 21% approval, with 72% disapproval. Still a bit high.

* My Official George W. Bush "Days Left in Office" Countdown Count shows only 182 days left in our long national nightmare, but a Cheney-linked think-tank has proposed that Bush declare himself president-for-life.

President Bush can fail in his duty to himself, his country, and his God, by becoming “ex-president” Bush or he can become “President-for-Life” Bush: the conqueror of Iraq, who brings sense to the Congress and sanity to the Supreme Court. Then who would be able to stop Bush from emulating Augustus Caesar and becoming ruler of the world? For only an America united under one ruler has the power to save humanity from the threat of a new Dark Age wrought by terrorists armed with nuclear weapons.

Ball's in your court, Mr. President.

* And Ben Smith has your day in photographs. Obama's had a good week so far.

As obscene as the right-wing's fetishization of 9/11 normally is, it takes a special kind of myopic self-delusion to go the extra mile and openly long for another attack.