Word: sotomayor
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...funding for these two-year institutions, which educate nearly half of U.S. undergrads - but you'd never know it from the crickets in medialand. CNN and Fox devoted no live airtime to the speech, which Obama delivered at Michigan's Macomb Community College, while MSNBC cut back to the Sotomayor confirmation hearings partway through. The fear of eyeballs glazing over isn't surprising: glamorous these trade schools are not. But there's a good reason why Obama calls community colleges "one of America's underappreciated assets." They set up their alumni for about a 30% earnings premium compared to high...
...Sotomayor made it through the eight hours of interrogation - with a civilized 90-minute lunch break - calmly fielding questions, taking notes and, when things looked like they might get tense, gently patting the table like she might a nervous dog. Though the questioning grew pointed a couple of times, it never became argumentative or acrimonious. Republicans must have blinked (and probably hoped their conservative base wasn't listening) when Senator Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat known for his bare-knuckle partisan tactics, expressed his gratitude. "I would like to first thank my Republican colleagues. I think the questioning...
Whatever Sonia Sotomayor does to reward herself - a glass of wine, an ice cream sundae, a bubble bath - surely she must be giving herself a small pat on the back after surviving her first day of cross-examination by the Senate Judiciary Committee without any kind of gaffe. Despite the best efforts of some Republicans to elicit a hot-tempered response, the Supreme Court nominee answered every question in the same deliberate, dulcet tones that seemed to lull her opposition into, if not complacency, then at least resignation. In between grilling her on abortion and reports of her tempestuous temperament...
...that the GOP didn't go out of its way to give its base something to chew on. Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, the top Republican on the committee, wasted little time questioning Sotomayor's objectivity by citing her now infamous comments that she hoped a "wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion" than a white male. "First," Sessions demanded, "I'd like to know, do you think there's any circumstance in which a judge should allow their prejudices to impact their decision-making...
...that's all Sotomayor was trying say: that her breadth of experience navigating different worlds might lead her to have greater wisdom on certain topics than her white male counterparts. It is no different from what Samuel Alito said in 2006 ("when I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender"). And what countless other Congressmen and Supreme Court nominees and presidential candidates have said when channeling their own "I grew up in a van down...