I had a good time and I heard I didn’t miss anything with the very boring Sotomayor hearings. I caught a few minutes on C-SPAN and was bored to tears.
Everything looks like the Wise Latina will be confirmed so that sucks, but who expected anything else?
Get ready! Today is the day.
I’m out of town for the week. So to all of you one person reading this blog the updates will be scarce if at all.
Yes, it sucks that I’m out of town during the Sotomayor hearings. I know.
RSS feeds are an interesting thing. I have all my political news feeds dumped into one folder I periodiaclly browse through, and this morning I bumped into two different headlines from two different CNN stories.
The first headline read “Poll: Sotomayor confirmation favored.” This particular feed chooses to show the first line of the story only (for those not familiar with how RSS feeds work, whoever runs the feed can choose to show all of the post in the feed reader, or just an except – usually the first line or two – which means you have to open the site to read the read. The first line of this story is the follow:
Days before the start of Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings, a new national poll indicates that by a narrow margin, Americans would like the Senate to confirm her as the next Supreme Court justice.
Nothing unusual to me so I skipped over it. I figured that Sotomayor’s confirmation would be favored, especially a poll CNN decided to run.
But then I’m caught by surprise by the next CNN story I run into. It’s in a different part of CNN’s website, has the headline “Poll: Do Americans want Sotomayor confirmed?” This headline seemed mildly more interesting than the last, but it was the first line of the story that caught me by surprise:
In a new CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll, 47 percent of those questioned said they’d like to see Judge Sotomayor confirmed to the Supreme Court.
Say what? Didn’t CNN just tell me that Sotomayor’s confirmatino was favored? 47% doesn’t seem favored to me. So I go back to that first story and click it, to pull it up on CNN’s website.
Suddenly the headline goes from “Poll: Sotomayor confirmation favored” to “Poll: Nearly half support Sotomayor’s confirmation.” Nearly half? So the actual headline of the story wasn’t, as you suggested, that Americans support her confirmation? It’s only nearly half? Well at least you kinda-sorta-tried to be honest.
This is just a minor example of the media malpractice that continues to persist, but it is absolutely ridiculous. Less than half of the country currently support Sotomayor’s nomination to the most important judicial office in the nation and CNN runs with a headline saying that Americans favor her confirmation.
Can you imagnie if this was a Bush appointee? The headline would read “Poll: Less than half support Sotomayor confirmation” with a lead-in like “Less than a week before her hearing, less than half of the country support Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.”
Instead, CNN tries to pull the wool over our eyes and declare that we actually favor Sotomayor’s confirmation, despite the number in support being less than a majority.
The intent is clear. People are shaped by what they hear, if they hear it often enough. If you continually hear that most Americans favor Sotomayor’s confirmation, eventually it will sink in and many of the undecideds will hop on the bandwagon and get annoyed at those dirty Republicans who always seem to be on the opposite side of the issue from “most Americans.”
The problem with media bias these days isn’t MSNBC with its cast of Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann. Everyone watching those programs knows they are parrots for the DNC and watches them because of that.
No, the problem is groups like CNN, publishing stories like this that are seemingly objective and only slightly spin the story to make it positive or negative. Here’s an idea: why not just report the facts? 47% of people in this poll favor Sotomayor’s confirmation, 40% don’t, and 13% are undecided. Why not just report the facts and let people reading decide whether or not 47% should be taken as a positive or negative? Whether or not 47% means that Americans favor her confirmation.
Is that really too much to ask?
Al Franken wants us to know that he thinks Sotomayor is in the “mainstream of American judicial thought” – which is funny to hear coming from a comedian with no judicial expertise.
What makes Franken qualified to interview Sotomayor about her judicial philosophy, exactly? Is it because he once did a skit on SNL poking fun at the Clarence Thomas hearings?
I’m honestly dumbfounded that he has been assigned to the judicial committee where he will be part of the hearings to nominate a supreme court appointee after being a senator for a week with no legal experience at all. Has the fact that we elected a comedy to the United States Senate made us numb to whatever other idiocy comes from his tenure on the Hill?
July 13th at 10 am. Let the fun begin.
Colin Powell apparently wasn’t content with his nonsensical mumblings about slogans and small government so he decided to let us all know that he thinks reverse discrimination like Sotomayor displayed in Ricci is fine by him:
“What we can’t continue to have is to have somebody like a Judge Sotomayor … called a racist, a reverse racist and she ought to withdraw her nomination because we’re mad at her,” Powell said in an interview broadcast Sunday on “State of the Union”
How about withdrawing her nomination because her ruling in favor of reverse discrimination is unconstitutional and against everything we value as Americans? Is that a good enough reason to deny someone a seat on our nation’s highest court?
Powell said Sotomayor has “an open and liberal bent of mind, but that’s not disqualifying. But she seems to have a judicial record that seems to be balanced and tries to follow the law.”
Oh I’m glad she tries to follow the law. How do you account for the fact that roughly 60% of her rulings have been overturned by the Supreme Court? Is that someone trying to follow the law and just failing miserably? Do we really want to nominate someone who has been given a failing grade by the Supreme Court? Last time I checked, a 40% pass rate whenever SCOTUS hears one of your rulings isn’t someone with a very “balanced” judicial approach.
Most of what Colin Powell said was incoherent rambling though. His real point about Sotomayor is the same point that drove him to vote for Obama:
Powell, a Republican who supported Obama, said his party still is not sensitive enough toward minorities.
Good enough for me! We won’t object to the lunacy of Sotomayor’s rulings because she is a minority and we’ll let her be one of only nine people who settle the most important legal matters in our nation.
You know what that sounds like? Reverse discrimination.
h/t HotAir
Rasmussen is reporting that a plurality of voters no longer want Sotomayor confirmed now that the Supreme Court ruled she was incompetent earlier this week:
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey, conducted on the two nights following the Supreme Court decision, finds that 37% now believe Sotomayor should be confirmed while 39% disagree.
Two weeks ago, the numbers were much brighter for the nominee. At that time, 42% favored confirmation, and 34% were opposed.
This is a surprise to those in the White House who are convinced that being overturned by the Supreme Court is a good thing when trying to be confirmed.
I’m sure someone with his intellectual prowess will come up with lots of good questions to ask her. I mean – going to law school probably shouldn’t be a requirement for the guy helping to determine whether or not a nominee has the legal mind necessary to serve on the nation’s highest court, right?
Good ol’ Gibbs. Always ready to turn an absurdly idiotic point into pure incoherent rambling.
“There’s little political significance to whatever the court decided today in terms of Judge Sotomayor except to render a fairly definitive opinion that she follows judicial precedent and that she doesn’t legislate from the bench,” Gibbs said.
Uh, yeah. Overturning her ruling is pretty much the same thing as saying she follows legal precedent, right?