I speak illegal alien

And I belong to la raza, just like all my relatives in... wait for it — U.S. law enforcement and the U.S. military! And education and entertainment and medicine, OMG, how scary is that. We're everywhere!

It's enough to scare Tom, G. Gordon, Rush and Newt right out of their wits.

What if a white man had said what SCOTUS nominee Maria, er, Sonia Sotomayor blah blah blah blah blah?

Get back to me on that after there have been latinas from hardscrabble backgrounds, and only latinas from hardscrabble backgrounds, on SCOTUS for... gee, I dunno, say the better part of two centuries. Sheesh.


In other news, Tom Goldstein of the most excellent SCOTUSblog has actually studied each and every one of Judge Sotomayor’s race-related cases. From his SCOTUSblog post:

In sum, in an eleven-year career on the Second Circuit, Judge Sotomayor has participated in roughly 100 panel decisions involving questions of race and has disagreed with her colleagues in those cases (a fair measure of whether she is an outlier) a total of 4 times. Only one case (Gant) in that entire eleven years actually involved the question whether race discrimination may have occurred. (In another case (Pappas) she dissented to favor a white bigot.) She particulated in two other panels rejecting district court rulings agreeing with race-based jury-selection claims. Given that record, it seems absurd to say that Judge Sotomayor allows race to infect her decisionmaking.

Read Goldstein's complete post here.

Next-to-last word goes to Peggy Noonan: "Republicans, let's play grown-up."

And last word to Matt Yglesias:

Conservatives ought to picture an anti-abortion, gun-owning, married, male, prosperous, Cuban-American small businessman living in the suburbs of Miami. Picture him reacting to the news of Sotomayor’s nomination. Perhaps he’s happy in some sense to contemplate a Latina on the bench, but perhaps not. Either way, the guy’s still a solid conservative. Now picture him listening to G. Gordon Liddy say “I understand that they found out today that Miss Sotomayor is a member of La Raza, which means in illegal alien, ‘the race.’” That’s not going to play well.

[Oh, and it's So-toe-m'YORE, Mark. Easy-peasy.]

Related:
A Sotomayor core dump
Sonia Sotomayor and Identity Formation
Losing the Crucial “White People With Spanish Last Names” Vote
They Can't Help Themselves

Greenwald on hate-mongering

The most excellent Glenn Greenwald writes about bigotry, stereotypes and slaughter:

Obviously, there is nothing at all wrong with discussing incidents of violence, including those committed by Muslims or Arabs. But when those are the only incidents one discusses to the exclusion of all others, and when one highlights those incidents over and over, there is obviously a point being made by the person engaging in that behavior. It would be as if someone created a website for the purpose of posting every story of every actual crime committed by African-Americans, or by Jews, or other minorities, but no others. There are such sites, of course, but one never hears about them, because they are white supremacist sites outside of the mainstream.
[...]
If there is a prevailing view of Arabs and Muslims as hopelessly primitive savages, is it really all that bothersome if we slaughter lots of them? One could even say it's their fault for having brought it on themselves.

Related:
*John Walcott: Truth is not subjective