Friday, May 29, 2009 - Posts
-
sponsorship
You're right, Hanna. The White House, and Sotomayor, too, by agreeing to the walk back,
are giving the "wise Latina" mini-fracas more air, not less. Her speech
sparked an interesting and even vital discussion this week about the
value of having judges with different life experiences on the bench.
Now we move to hedging and hemming and hawing? I'll ask the next
question they'd all be better off not spending the weekend fielding... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said today that the president would say that Sotomayor's word choice in her suddenly-infamous Berkeley speech
was "poor." It's maddening that the White House is now taking this
line. Maybe they mean to take the air out of it, but I bet it will
accomplish the opposite, and give everyone license to talk about it
again all weekend. This was a published speech, after all, not an off-the-cuff remark, and presumably the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal allows authors to edit copy, like everyone else.
It wasn't the best choice of words, but I would downgrade that to
"poor" only because it is likely to be taken out of context when, eight
years later, she is nominated for the Supreme Court. As we have hashed
out here... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
Anyone notice that the New York Times story by Jo Becker and Adam Liptak about
Sotomayor raising "questions about her judicial temperament and
willingness to listen" was subject to a headline makeover this morning? (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
A post from Double X writer Vanessa M. Gezari:
If the Daily Telegraph is right that the unreleased detainee-abuse photos include graphic images of rape, Obama must have been lying when he said
the photos are “not particularly sensational, especially when compared
to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib.” For all the
pain of those earlier images, what they depicted were not generally
criminal acts in the same way that rape is. They showed violation,
humiliation, the horrific power differential between prisoners and
their jailors—war crimes, to be sure—but they tended to document the
effects and aftermath of violence more than its... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
I’ve been reading a lot of headlines to the effect that “Identity
politics are condescending,” and I’ve come to the conclusion that I
have no idea what identity politics are. To me, the phrase has always
referred to the dated assumption that the interests of any particular
subgroup are best represented by other members of that subgroup. So the
expectation is that Sotomayor will... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
There's a fascinating piece in The Star about a manuscript discovered by a Canadian researcher that appears to be ... a medieval women's magazine. It contains content about "cinnamon," an excerpt from Chaucer, recipes for making sealing wax, and more. As the Star puts it... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
Last night's 10-round National Spelling Bee final was a nail-biter, and
an awesome one at that. There were redonkulously hard, beautifully
arcane words (schizaffin, palatschinken, Neufchâtel).
There was heartbreak (heavily-favored Sidharth Chand, last year's
runner-up, crumpled before our eyes in the second round, when he
realized... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
A guest post from Cornell law professor Eduardo M. Peñalver, who
clerked on the Second Circuit for Judge Guido Calabresi and on the
Supreme Court for Justice John Paul Stevens:
As some of you have pointed out, considered in the context the rest of her speech, it is clear that Sotomayor merely meant
that appointing “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her
experiences” to the bench would (on average) do more to improve
judicial decision-making than appointing a(nother) comparably wise
white male judge. Understood in this way, the comment is benign and,
more importantly, almost certainly true.
Crucial to understanding Judge Sotomayor’s argument is... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
Guest post from The Big Money reporter Chadwick Matlin:
Sarah,
your clarion warning to men everywhere is too late. The cougar invasion
has already begun. I found myself mingling amongst the mythical women a
month ago, when, in the interest of journalism, I served as cub bait
for a Slate piece on the cougar phenomenon. That piece, written by the estimable Troy Patterson... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?