I'm opening this Greg Sargent grab-bag piece on Sontamayor with a comment from the thread following his post. It's an important point about the traditional msm, embedded in a new media post by a blogger who worked his way through his own excellent blog (Horse's Mouth), then Talking Points Memo (TPM), and now is on-line at the Washington Post:
- and here's the leading Sargent post: Happy Hour Open Thread: Dems To Make Sotomayor Fight About The GOP
* The emerging Democratic strategy on Sonia Sotomayor: Dems will try to make the coming fight not about her, but about the current state of the GOP. On MSNBC just now, Chuck Schumer argued that Sotomayor is a moderate and that GOP opposition will say more about the Republican Party’s extremism than it says about any of Sotomayor’s legal skills or opinions. Expect more like that.
* Mark Halperin says Republicans will cave.
* Over at his new Washington Post blog, Ezra Klein says it doesn’t much matter what Republicans do.
* Glenn Greenwald, a leading legal voice that’s frequently critical of Obama, hails the Sotomayor choice — in the pages of The New York Times.
* Conservative groups attack Sotomayor as a judicial “activist” with a “high reversal rate.”
* David Kurtz goes after the “high reversal rate” talking point.*
* Sotomayor was once a hard-boiled, chain-smoking New York prosecutor who dismissed the idea that the criminal justice system could change “the ills of society.”
- * Kurtz: Beware the Numbers
So what to make of the charge from the right that Judge Sotomayor has an allegedly high rate of reversals by the Supreme Court? Fox News' Major Garrett just raised it with Robert Gibbs at the daily White House press briefing. Here's the text of exchange (video here):
Garrett: Is a nominee's history of opinions and reversals a relevant factor for the public and the Senate?
Gibbs: Well, I think it is one of the many factors that likely will be picked over and weighed as we go through this.
Garrett: How does the White House evaluate Judge Sotomayor's record on this score?
Gibbs: Well, I think if one were to create 380 opinions and have 3 reversed.
Garrett: What's the Supreme Court ratio?
Gibbs: You tell me.
Garrett: 6 opinions, 3 reversals.
Gibbs: Well, Major, don't just judge, I wouldn't judge you on the stories I call you about, I might judge you on the full package of your repertoire. Whether or not you ultimately see fit to change any of the rhetoric on ...
Garrett: I am not a nominee for the Supreme Court, let the record reflect.
Gibbs: I would agree with that.
So when outfits like the conservative Judicial Confirmation Network say that Sotomayor has a "terrible record of reversals by the Supreme Court," what they're referring to is the narrow and misleading issue of how the Supreme Court has ruled when it has gone so far as to accept the case on appeal. There does not appear to be any sort of unusually high number of her cases making it to the Supreme Court.
Late Update: TPM Reader JH checks in:
About those reversals: It's worth pointing out that the Supreme Court reverses most of the decisions it takes. The percentage of cases it affirms usually is somewhere in the 25 to 30 percent range, and rarely as high as 40 percent. There's actually a saying among Supreme Court lawyers that the court grants cert to reverse. In that context, a .500 record is pretty good.
Later Update: Here's a piece on the Supreme Court reversal rate in recent years that confirms what JH is pointing out.
Hard to disagree with Jonathan Martin on the Sotomayor pick:
Obama, with his usual combination of professorial coolness and political calculation, has stayed within the judiciary’s 40-yard lines while also squeezing the opposition in a manner that would make a Chicago ward heeler smile.
John Cole: No One Could Have Predicted- Sotomayor Edition
Your quote of the day:
Conservatives are already citing my initial piece on Sotomayor as a basis for opposing her. – Jeffrey RosenYes. We are all shocked to see that development. No one could have predicted that an anonymously sourced hit piece focusing on Sotomayor’s inability to serve as an “intellectual counterweight to the conservative justices,” her lack of “command of technical legal details” and her “bully on the bench” temperament might later be used against her by Conservatives.
Also, we’ll be greeted as liberators and the war will pay for itself.
dday: Media Know-Nothings
It happened the Friday before Memorial Day and went almost unnoticed, but this small bit at the end of Hardball fairly well sums up the Village approach to government.Fallows: On Memorial DayCILLIZZA: Here's the problem. She, she holds a press conference, she brings the leadership with her to show that everyone is behind her.Political reporters are often derided as being sportswriters. But sportswriters actually bother to watch the game. Cillizza's comment is akin to saying that the Lakers and the Nuggets for four quarters did "essentially nothing" to run out the clock on the postgame press conference so reporters couldn't ask Kobe about his relationship with Phil Jackson. I've never seen a group of journalists so openly dismissive about a subject they ostensibly exist to cover.
MATTHEWS: Yeah, but Steny was acting like her defender, he's her biggest rival...
CILLIZZA: I agree. She talks for, they talk for twenty-five minutes about essentially nothing. Everyone knows she has a plane to catch...
MATTHEWS: It's called policy, by the way, Chris. (LAUGHTER) Something only a political reporter would say.
CILLIZZA: That gets me. Well-played.
SIMON: Stuff we don't care about...
MATTHEWS: All this stuff, health care, cap and trade, all this stuff.
Because every report of this press conference focuses on the attempted extension of the Pelosi-CIA dust-up, you cannot actually find a record of what the House leadership talked about in those first 25 minutes. I assume it tracks closely to this statement about legislation passed in the last week and since the beginning of the new Congress. Here's an excerpt:SIGNED INTO LAW THIS WEEKThe housing bill had the guts ripped from it with the loss of cram-down, and the credit card bill mirrors closely rules already put in place by the Federal Reserve; this legislation will just accelerate their effective start date. But it would be nice for Americans to actually know what their Congress manages to pass, instead of having those statements of passage ridiculed as "essentially nothing" by the reporters employed, presumably, to inform the public. In fact, reporters could even detail the legislation and separate the facts from the spin, separate from dart-at-a-board predictions of political consequences or positioning. It's a novel idea, I know.
CREDIT CARDHOLDERS’ BILL OF RIGHTS, to provide tough new protections for consumers by banning unfair rate increases, abusive fees, and penalties—such as retroactive rate hikes on existing balances and double-cycle billing — giving consumers clear information, and strengthening enforcement.
MILITARY PROCUREMENT REFORM, to crack down on Pentagon waste and cost overruns, which GAO says amount to $296 billion just for the 96 largest weapons systems, by dramatically beefing up oversight of weapons acquisition, promoting greater use of competition, and curbing conflicts of interest.
HELPING FAMILIES SAVE THEIR HOMES ACT, building on the President’s housing initiative, to provide significant incentives to lenders, servicers, and homeowners to work together to modify loans and to avoid foreclosures, which cost families their homes every 13 seconds in America.
FIGHTING MORTGAGE AND CORPORATE FRAUD & CREATING COMMISSION ON CAUSES OF CRISIS, to provide tools for prosecuting the mortgage scams and corporate frauds that contributed to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression; and to create an outside commission to examine its causes.
I'd like to pinpoint the moment at which reporters stopped covering policy and began to cover "politics," which they defined as mini-controversies and gossip and what each side of the political divide says about the other (news flash: they're critical!). I have a sense the consequences haven't been all that stellar.
John Cole: Completely Missing the Point25 May 2009 10:15 am
Consider the Map the Fallen project, here. It is an overlay on Google Earth that provides details on the lives and deaths of 5600+ U.S. and coalition men and women who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sample:
Details for installing the overlay at the site above. (Mac users: it definitely does require the latest release of Google Earth, here.) As the project's originator says:I have created a map for Google Earth that will connect you with each of their stories--you can see photos, learn about how they died, visit memorial websites with comments from friends and families, and explore the places they called home and where they died.Respect to him, and to those he is honoring. (And, yes, I do realize that there could be a much more densely-populated map of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. That takes nothing away from the power of this project or the sacrifice it commemorates.)
Benen: ROMNEY AND HUCKABEE?....Andy Rooney had a Memorial Day piece up that was worth watching:
He made multiple great points, first of which is that many people don’t think of Memorial Day as anything other than a day off, and that honoring the memory of our fallen should include some memory of who they were as people. Hence the anecdote about Richie M. and his different colored socks and the fact that he thinks about his lost buddies every single day, not just on Memorial Day.
His second point was just as potent- if you really want to remember and cherish the memories of those who gave their lives, or, as Andy notes, had their lives taken from them, the way to best serve their memories is to work to make sure no more young Americans have to give their lives in combat. Idealistic and unlikely, but still a noble goal.
How do the wingnuts react to this? By freaking out:
Useful Idiot Andy Rooney Shames America on Memorial Day (Video)Andy Rooney couldn’t help himself. The bitter liberal could think of nothing better for his Memorial Day segment than to shame America for participating in war…
Angry old liberals like Rooney will never see the greatness of America, the values we stand for, the people we’ve liberated and the lives we’ve saved.
It’s just a shame this bitter man had to use the Memorial Day holiday to spread his sick propaganda.
These guys have seriously lost the plot and still think it is 2003. And considering that Andy Rooney was one of the first American journalists on the ground as we liberated the concentration camps in WWII, I think Andy Rooney knows a think or two about the people we’ve liberated and the lives we’ve saved:
That is from Andy Rooney’s best-selling book, My War
. I’ll take Andy Rooney’s experiences over the rantings of some idiot on the internet.
I often wonder what the standard is for major news outlets that receive press releases from political figures who no longer hold public office. How do editors decide what constitutes actual news, when these folks issue a statement about something?We know, for example, that Newt Gingrich's every thought is frequently considered news worthy, despite the fact that he hasn't held public office in more than a decade. Today, Mitt Romney's dissatisfaction with Judge Sotomayor's Supreme Court nomination was also deemed news.
Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney issued a statement Tuesday on Sotomayor's nomination:
"The nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is troubling. Her public statements make it clear she has an expansive view of the role of the judiciary. Historically, the Court is where judges interpret the Constitution and apply the law. It should never be the place 'where policy is made,' as Judge Sotomayor has said. Like any nominee, she deserves a fair and thorough hearing. What the American public deserves is a judge who will put the law above her own personal political philosophy."
This is pretty hackish, of course, but content aside, who cares what Mitt Romney thinks about a judicial nominee? He finds Sotomayor "troubling." So? There are plenty of former governors out there; Romney's thoughts on Supreme Court vacancies are as relevant as theirs are.
Around the same time, Mike Huckabee weighed in, too.
Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee issued a statement Tuesday on Sotomayor's nomination:
"The appointment of Maria Sotomayor for the Supreme Court is the clearest indication yet that President Obama's campaign promises to be a centrist and think in a bi-partisan way were mere rhetoric. Sotomayor comes from the far left and will likely leave us with something akin to the 'Extreme Court' that could mark a major shift. The notion that appellate court decisions are to be interpreted by the 'feelings' of the judge is a direct affront of the basic premise of our judicial system that is supposed to apply the law without personal emotion. If she is confirmed, then we need to take the blindfold off Lady Justice."
As a substantive matter, Huckabee's whining is blisteringly dumb. But in terms of actual news, the only thing interesting about the former governor's press release is that Huckabee, after weeks of coverage about Sotomayor and her prospective nomination, is under the impression that her first name is "Maria."
Collectively, Romney and Huckabee have no power, no influence, and no public responsibilities. So why would CNN run their silly public statements as news?
I suppose this is a lesson on why so many politicians flirt with possible presidential campaigns -- it prompts major news outlets to pay attention to your press releases. Otherwise, various rants from Romney, Huckabee, and Gingrich would -- I hope -- be easier for editors to ignore.
I think it is worth keeping track of the overall bias the traditional media shows during this period. I was listening to NPR’ Talk of the Nation, and they had 2 conservatives and zero liberals on to discuss the pick. I couldn’t listen to more than half the program, because Richard Vigurie [sic] was saying the same garbage he said when he had a whole segment of Talk of the Nation to himself last week.
I turned it to MSNBC and they had about a 2 : 1 conservative bias talking about Sontamayor. The bias is getting so bad, with this story and most others, that I don’t think even Howie Kurtz is going to be able to explain it away much longer.