Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Just finished skimming some comic art of vamped-up Disney princesses. Creepy. Interesting, but creepy.



General Motors, the American industrial icon, filed for bankruptcy on Monday. Accordingly, it - along with financial megalith Citigroup were dropped from the Dow Jones Industrial Average after 83 years as part of the index. How the mighty have fallen. I don’t have much to write about this, as pretty much everything I noted regarding the Chrysler bankruptcy applies to General Motors. On the plus side, the quick and tidy Chapter 11 reorganization of Chrysler by the federal courts that the experts insisted was impossible appears to be less than a week away from completion, indicating that a similar treatment of GM might also be possible. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the entire state of Michigan hopes that is the case.

An Air France A330 Airbus in flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared from radar Monday morning and is presumed down in the Atlantic. Last radio contact put the aircraft in the midst of heavy turbulence. Several minutes later air traffic control received automated messages of electrical failures, then nothing else. On Tuesday afternoon, Brazilian air force aircraft spotted a three-mile-long trail of wreckage scattered on top of the water. Speculation is that the plane may have been struck by lightning in a storm. This in and of itself is not unusual, airplanes are struck by lightning all the time. But if that is indeed the case, it seems Flight 447 was unable to dissipate the charge. Whatever the cause, it’s been a terrible day for every family that arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport expecting to pick up their loved ones. There’s a reason I don’t like to fly.

Infamous Kansas-based abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was shot and killed while serving as an usher at his church on Sunday. This marks the first time in 11 years since an abortion provider has been murdered. Tiller was no stranger to violence - his clinic was bombed in 1985 and he survived being shot in both arms in 1993 by individuals violently opposed to his practice. Police arrested 51-year-old Scott Roeder in connection with the murder. Apparently Roeder has a history of protesting at abortion clinics and posting about Tiller on various pro-life websites, but, every major pro-life organization stumbled over themselves this morning to issue statements condemning Roeder’s alleged actions. Two weeks ago in his speech at the University of Notre Dame, President Obama made the point that so many people are either unable or unwilling to concede. At its core, this issue is fundamentally irresolvable. There is no common ground between the poles of a woman’s right to choose vs. a fetus’ right to life. So, as a society we are forced to find some other way to mediate our disputes and work toward a common goal of reducing the number of abortions in this country. It’s more than unfortunate that there are some people who believe that bullets are an acceptable form of mediation.

Arkansas police arrested a 24-year-old Little Rock man in connection with a shooting at a military recruiting office leaving one soldier dead and another wounded. Yet another individual who thinks bullets are an acceptable form of mediation.

Apparently I was so wrapped up in trying to instruct winners to act like winners last week that I missed a couple big stories. The biggest of these was President Obama’s decision to nominate 2nd Circuit Federal Appellate court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to fill Justice David Souter’s soon-to-be vacant seat on the Supreme Court. If confirmed, Sotomayor would be the first Latina and only the third woman to sit on the high court since it’s inception in 1789. As usually happens when a justice is formally nominated, every special interest group in the country releases a pre-fabricated form criticism of the nominee. In this instance, since the nominee was selected by a Democratic president, liberal activist groups praise her adherence to established precedent and belief in unenumerated rights, while conservative activist groups decry her as a judicial activist extremist.

All this criticism is of course nothing more than code for whether or not said interest group agrees with her politics. When a judge has served on the bench as long as Judge Sotomayor has, darn near everyone can find a ruling or an opinion or a statement he/she takes exception to. Conservative talking heads have made much ado about a single line from a speech Sotomayor made several years ago that reads as follows: “...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.” De-facto GOP spokesman Rush Limbaugh and Republican retread Newt Gingrich immediately decried her as a raving liberal socialist racist, and demanded she withdraw herself from consideration. I guess in the age of Twitter-sized attention spans it’s pointless to expect the media to investigate or report anything beyond the sound-bite, so I have included some of the relevant context of the speech below.

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.

I also hope that by raising the question today of what difference having more Latinos and Latinas on the bench will make will start your own evaluation. For people of color and women lawyers, what does and should being an ethnic minority mean in your lawyering? For men lawyers, what areas in your experiences and attitudes do you need to work on to make you capable of reaching those great moments of enlightenment which other men in different circumstances have been able to reach. For all of us, how do change the facts that in every task force study of gender and race bias in the courts, women and people of color, lawyers and judges alike, report in significantly higher percentages than white men that their gender and race has shaped their careers, from hiring, retention to promotion and that a statistically significant number of women and minority lawyers and judges, both alike, have experienced bias in the courtroom?

Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.

After putting the sound-bite in context, it’s pretty clear that Judge Sotomayor is trying to make the point that every human being undergoes different life experiences and it it absurd to think that those life experiences never influence our judgement. But through understanding how our experiences shape our decision-making we can then be vigilant in keeping our assumptions, presumptions and perspectives in check when making decisions. Not racist. Cautious.

As a matter of practicality, short of discovering that Sonia Sotomayor is really a Romulan spy sent to prepare mankind for an impending invasion, there is nothing Republicans can do to derail this nomination. They have only 40 senators, and if they delay hearings until September as ranking member of the judiciary committee Jeff Sessions wants to do, the electoral farce in Minnesota will be resolved, Al Franken will be seated as the 60th Democratic senator and there will be no way for them to hold the process hostage with a filibuster, as many conservative activist groups are demanding they do. And truthfully, even if Franken is not yet seated, unless Sotomayor is Karl Marx reincarnated, Olympia Snow or Susan Collins will provide the cloture vote to prevent the filibuster. So, all they can do is continue to be the party of “no.” And for what purpose? Sotomayor’s replacement of Souter will not shift the ideological balance of the court. The only thing marching to war against a qualified female Hispanic nomination does is hurt the GOP with Hispanic voters, as if the incendiary rhetoric over immigration hasn’t done enough damage to that relationship. The first rule of warfare is to know your enemy. The second is to pick your battles. So far they’re failing on both accounts.

In a related story, de-facto party spokesman Limbaugh is in rare form, assailing the President over the nomination and the nominee over her existence. For years, many Democrats seems anxious that there seems to be no single coherent powerful voice to challenge him from the left. Fortunately in his case, no challenger is required. On an episode of his radio program during the confirmation battles over Justices Roberts and Alito, Limbaugh blabbered the following into the golden EIB microphone:

“I’m tired of these Democrats acting like they won the election. Somebody needs to stand up and say, “When you win the election, you pick the nominees. Until then, shut up! Just shut up! Just go away! Bury yourselves in your rat holes and don’t come out until you win an election. When you win an election, you can put all these socialist wackos, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, all over the court, but until then, SHUT UP! You are really irritating me.”

That’s right. You just read Rush Limbaugh telling Rush Limbaugh to shut the bleep up. What do you suppose the odds are on him talking his own advice?

The California Supreme Court upheld the validity of Proposition 8 making same-sex marriage illegal throughout the state. However, the court also ruled that the 18,000 marriages performed during the period of in which same-sex marriage was legal in California are also valid, and will remain so. Given the facts of the case, it was really the only conclusion the court could come to. However, being California, the players on both sides of the debate realize that the conflict over same-sex marriage is far from over, and will probably be waged again at the ballot box in November, 2010. A team of high-profile attorneys have filed a federal lawsuit charging that Prop 8 violates the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. Many feel it’s too early to mount a Supreme Court challenge, and they’re probably right. But discretion has never been the better part of activism, has it.

The FBI foiled a terrorist plot foiled in New York City by providing the would-be bombers with fake C4 explosives and dummy surface-to-air missiles. Fake C4 and dummy surface-to-air missiles. I hope all terrorists are this stupid.

Finally, Ashton Kutcher, television star and veteran of such movie masterpieces as “Dude, Where’s My Car?” has threatened to stop “tweeting.” Apparently, Twitter is rumored to be negotiating a deal for a reality television show that would put “ordinary people on the trail of celebrities in a revolutionary competitive format.” Kutcher fears such a program could lead to celebrities - namely himself - being stalked by crazy fans. I hate to say it, but he’s not as dumb as he looks. Of course it would lead to celebrities being stalked, which at some point would probably lead to a celebrity being kidnapped, harmed or worse. But let’s be honest about something. Ashton Kutcher is partially responsible for creating the culture in which a reality show of this nature could thrive. He is part of the entertainment system that now celebrates ordinary everyday idiots for accomplishing nothing more than making fools of themselves on television and on YouTube. If all one has to do to achieve national recognition is to appear in a poor-quality web video falling off the chair he/she is dancing on in his/her living room, how big of a leap is it to assume one can achieve similar fame by chasing down and harassing a celebrity for a hidden camera? Oh wait, I think Kutcher’s already made that show. Might he have “Punk’d” himself with this Twitter nonsense?