Yes, that quote is from Jon Stewart from a recent The Daily Show episode. Jon Stewart is godly.
So one of the big news items of this week is Sonia Sotomayor's successful confirmation hearing and confirmation. I got a few things from both sides of the Senate aisle when hearing about the sessions.
It seems like Sotomayor is an eminently qualified judge on her own merits; she has exercised good judgment in interpreting the law for almost all cases, and she seems to be fairly moderate and not consistently judge according to one ideology.
I thought that the Republicans trying to paint her as a left-wing activist judge was rather unfair. That said, any judge who is not as ridiculously conservative as the current Republican party is automatically labeled like her. Furthermore, she has exercised remarkable restraint in general, especially so compared to the right-wing's own judicial hero, Antonin Scalia.
Also, their attempt to bring her down with her "wise Latina" comment was futile. Though her choice of words was rather poor in that it implied bias towards nonwhites rather than the idea that everyone invariably brings their own experiences to the table. This also tied in with President Obama's praise of her "empathy", which Republicans somehow mistook for "sympathy [to Democrats]". They also tried to play the victim by portraying the white American experience as the neutral background upon which all others should be judged, which all combined to portray them as a party of threatened old WASP males. Thankfully, this backfired and didn't affect public opinion of Sotomayor in the least bit. I'm somewhat disappointed that she had to distance herself from the praise of "empathy" just to placate the angry GOP.
To their credit, they really did scour her on the New Haven Firefighter case, because that seems to be her only controversial decision and one that may show how she might judge in the future. This is where the opposition in the Senate really did their jobs well (as per "advice and consent"), though a lot of it was still visceral opposition to her.
I was also disappointed that while Democrats seemed to stand behind her without much conflict, they couldn't really substantiate why she was eminently qualified for the job (though they did invoke her life's story several times). This is why I can't give such details here because no one ever mentioned them.
Then again, there seems to be a consensus that the "advice and consent" has turned into a circus (or a musical!).
