The Republicans come out against imperialism...from New York and California imposing cap and trade policy on the Midwest, that is. That and other political news in today's TPMDC Saturday Roundup.

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

I had not heard that Amos Elon, the great Israeli writer and intellectual, had died. Bernie Avishai remembers him.

If you're not familiar with Elon you can pick a copy of this book to get some sense of the loss.

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

We explained earlier how the Sotomayor battle has blown up the until-now simmering fight between GOP pragmatists (want to get reelected) and fire breathers (want to fundraise and burn heretics at the stake) by injecting the explosive issues of race, nativism and gender into the equation. Now Newt Gingrich has responded to Sen. Cornyn's call to basically shut the hell up by turning the volume way up on the Sotomayor as anti-American racist freak by invoking the Civil War, civil rights and arguing that American civilization itself may be at stake if her brand of 'racism' isn't defeated.

The NYT's Adam Liptak was on MSNBC this afternoon defending his Sotomayor-is-temperamental story.

Rush Limbaugh says that nominating Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is like appointing David Duke.

So why isn't he supporting her?

G. Gordon Liddy: Let's hope Sotomayor isn't "menstruating" at key Supreme Court conferences.

We've got video of Sam Alito's 2006 confirmation hearing where he goes on at some length about how he he can't help but relate immigration and discrimination cases before him to his own family's experiences. "I do take that into account," Alito told senators.

Posted on the website of the Times Observer in Warren, Pa.:

An errant classified "personal" ad which appeared in Thursday's Times Observer has drawn the attention of law enforcement officials.

A person from Warren placed the ad, which apparently alludes to the wish that President Obama meet an untimely end by linking him with four assassinated presidents. The ad representative didn't make the connection among the four other presidents mentioned and mistakenly allowed the ad to run.

Upon realizing the mistake early Thursday morning, the ad was immediately discontinued and the identity of the person who placed the ad was turned over to Warren City Police as per newspaper policy. The local police department forwarded the information to federal authorities, as per department policy.

The Times Observer apologizes for the oversight.

Catching fire on the right-wing websites, here's the Young Cons rapping the "Young Con Anthem." Basically two nerdy right-winger twenty-somethings preachin' it to liberal power-structure, yo ...

Seriously, you have to see it.

While making his boffo La Raza/KKK analogy, Trancredo also manages to get his mottos confused, with a special assist from Michelle Malkin.

The American Spectator: What If Sotomayor Were White?

Jefferson Morley explains how Judge Sotomayor helped puncture the Vince Foster conspiracy theory bubble.

The new Quinnipiac poll has Americans approving of the Sotomayor pick by 54% to 24%.

Dems almost unanimously support, while Republicans oppose. But critically, independents support the nomination 48% to 31%.

Sen. John Cornyn's swipe at Gingrich and Limbaugh yesterday on the Sotomayor candidacy shows what's emerging as a critical effect of the confirmation battle. We know that a key dilemma for the GOP in the early Obama era is that they are increasingly divided between people who want to get the party back into the business of winning elections and ultras who want to go totally off the deep end with often extreme rhetoric and quests for ideological purity. What's more, these 'pragmatists, for lack of a better word, are cowed by the ultras because in a shrunken GOP the ultras make up a much larger percentage of the party.

The truth though is that taxes and fiscal policy, while key issues for conservatives, simply aren't visceral and divisive in anywhere near the way race and gender are. So while this schism has been there for months, the Sotomayor battle -- still only three days old -- has thrown gasoline on the fire and intensified the rift dramatically.

Here's more on the story.

George W. Bush, defending torture policies last night in Michigan: "The information we got saved lives." That and the day's other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.

War is very cool. Especially for those who survive it. Even more for those who can read about it and watch it on TV.

TPM Reader DW condenses the conservative logic: "If the Republicans make legitimate arguments against Sotomayor, they'll be accused of doing it because of her race; thus, they're left with only racial arguments."

Now that it seems fairly clear that Benjamin Cardozo has lost any claim on being the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice, we can note that he was the first and one assumes the only Justice to look like Conan O'Brien ...

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

"Some lawyers just don't like to be questioned by a woman. It was sexist, plain and simple." -- Judge Guido Calabresi, Judge Sotomayor's colleague on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, on suggestions that her tough questioning from the bench suggests a problem with her 'temperament.'

This is from an article in the Times with the headline "Sotomayor's Sharp Tongue Raises Issue of Temperament." It's by Jo Becker and Adam Liptak, two of the best, though I'm personally more familiar with Becker's work since it's been in areas where I've done reporting too.

Read the article. It is, I think, an example where the headline is not quite borne out by the article itself and where -- choosing my words carefully -- the 'both-sides' imperative of conventional newspaper journalism made lead to placing two unequal arguments on equal terms. The piece itself reads like Sotomayor is tough and can be intellectually combative and that her gender leads some to describe those qualities in, shall we say, much less flattering terms. Compare to Scalia. Give it a read. I'd be curious to know what you think.

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

Conservatives like John Derbyshire are using the Sotomayor nomination to beef up, in their own minds, their working class white cred:

I get mighty annoyed by the unspoken implication in a lot of commentary that anyone not a member of a Protected Minority must have grown up in a twelve-bedroom lakeside mansion and been chauffered off to prep school with a silver spoon in his mouth. ...

Was it really not possible to correct past injustices without creating an entire -- and apparently permanent -- class convinced that accidents of geography or biology have gifted them with special insight, wisdom, and "empathy"?

Mighty annoyed? Really?

Derbyshire was responding to one of his readers who was eager to "rain on the Sotomayor 'compelling life story' parade," as she put it:

The woman grew up in the capital of the world, went to two Ivy League schools, and was blessed by Providence with the precisely correct right race-gender two-fer for the moment.

This is a story of privilege, dammit, not adversity.

They're mad, and they're not gonna take it anymore!

According to The Politico, charges that Sonia Sotomayor is a "racist" are picking up steam and must be addressed. At least according to Lanny Davis and Chris Lehane.

Here's your next emerging meme. Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Blood & Soil) just went on CNN attacking Sonia Sotomayor for belonging to La Raza which he called a "Latino KKK."

As I said this morning, it's painfully revealing how conservatives simply cannot helping going hard on the race front with Sotomayor or, as David Kurtz just put it, can't help imagining that everyone else is as racist as many of them are.

For those who aren't familiar with it, La Raza is basically a Latino equivalent of B'nai Brith or the NAACP. Garden variety and uncontroversial unless you thinks it's a public safety issue if more than a handful of Mexicans or Puerto Ricans get together in one place at the same time.

There's much more of this coming.

When we go through this ritual of Supreme Court nomination and confirmation, the brainier publications look at the interest groups and great legal questions. But there's another part of the story -- in some ways bigger in terms of the result and often more gripping to my attention-- that is everywhere but too little discussed. And that is, the cast of spinmeisters and freakbots on the cable shows either smearing or carrying the water of the nominee.

And right out of the gate the chief anti-Sotomayor rabble rouser seemed to be a woman named Wendy Long. You can see her yacking it up on all the shows. You've probably seen her somewhere. In our ed. meeting this morning Brian Beutler raised the point that Curtis Levey -- another highly visible freakbot -- is not only the chief TV spinner for his group The Committee for Justice but also runs the group. And Long is only the TV yacker for her group, the Judicial Confirmation Network. And he even says that Levey's group has more muscle. So I had to take Brian to task and explain that he shouldn't waste my time with all those details. Wendy Long is the chief freakbot on TV. And really, what else matters?

So if you want to know a bit more about her, here's our run-down.

We want to keep an eye on Long though. So when you see her on TV, pay attention to what she says. And she says anything particularly nuts, drop us a line. And you have any more relevant background, let us know about that too.

Liz Cheney comments on "enhanced marriage techniques" -- denies gay marriage is torture.

Okay. Over recent days I've plumbed the question of whether Sonia Sotomayor would be the first or the second 'Hispanic' Supreme Court Justice. I'd first learned in the direction of 'second' -- thinking that Benjamin Cardozo, a Sephardic Jew of Portuguese ancestry who served on the Court in the 1930s might have been the first. But tips and rejoinders from readers slowly led me to reconsider the matter. First is the fact that -- whatever the history and etymology of the word 'Hispanic' -- it seems clear that 'Hispanic' today generally refers to people from a Spanish language heritage, not people from Portugal or a Portuguese speaking country like Brazil. There are various other complications -- Portuguese-American members of Congress have often joined the Hispanic Caucus, the US government seems to have given its imprimatur to the no-Portugal/Brazil formulation, some question about whether Cardozo's ancestors may have been crypto-Spanish crypto-Jews (my own semi-analytic, semi-farcical locution) and much more. But it all leans against Cardozo's candidacy.

But now Karl Rove is chiming in on Cardozo's behalf in today's Journal ...

While the next two to four months of maneuverings and hearings may provide more insights into the views of Mr. Obama's pick, barring an unforeseen development -- not unheard of in Supreme Court nominations -- Judge Sotomayor will become the second Hispanic (Benjamin Cardozo was Sephardic) and third woman confirmed to the Supreme Court. Democrats will win the vote, but Republicans can win the argument by making a clear case against the judicial activism she represents.

Clearly, Rove does not have as knowledgeable a readership as TPM.

We're watching very closely for news about this afternoon's meeting between President Obama and Palestinian Authority President Abbas at the White House. (I'm also curious why they're holding it so late in the afternoon; but that's another matter.) In the ether there's also this pretty direct back and forth today between Secretary Clinton and the Netanyahu government on the settlement issue.

But what just caught my attention was this article MJ Rosenberg just flagged in today's Yediot Ahronoth. It's an interview with former US Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk which is very blunt about Israeli intransigence on this issue. There's no English language version of the article but MJ has translated and flagged some key quotes.

I used to think of Indyk as on the mildly dovish but essentially mainstream, which is where I used to consider myself. But I didn't think of him as someone who'd say stuff like this or voice a very different view of the 2000 trainwreck than is generally accepted here in the US.

Return to those thrilling days of yesteryear (2003) when any opposition to Bush appeals court nominee Miguel Estrada was derided by the GOP as nothing but racism.

Can we all agree now that at a minimum Roland Burris wasn't really the elder statesman of Illinois politics with a sterling character who was utterly removed from and disinterested in all the unseemly jockeying for Obama's empty Senate seat?

Sotomayor nomination showing media's left-wing bias.

To take the public conversation on its face, a key dynamic in the Sotomayor story is that Republicans can't easily level what would otherwise be legitimate criticisms because some will see them as evidence of prejudice or hostility toward a Latina woman. In other words, the GOP is hamstrung on this battle and has to fight it with one rhetorical arm tied behind its back.

In theory, that could be a problem. But a couple days in, it's actually playing really differently. While elected Republicans are keeping their powder mainly dry and avoiding -- in all but a few cases -- racial charged remarks. But you can't say that for professional Republicans. We've heard that her taste for 'ethnic' food might throw into question her judicial reasoning, that she's a product of affirmative action, that she's a racist, that she's challenging English language dominance by insisting on an alien Spanish pronunciation of her name, that she belongs to a scary group called 'la raza' that might want to help Mexico reconquer the southwestern United States and make it Mexican again and on and on. All told, there's a chorus from the right that Sotomayor is a scary Mexican, understood in the sense of 'Mexican' as anybody with a Spanish last name who isn't actively working to keep the Cuban embargo in place.

And to the extent that there's political calculation at work it seems more likely that it's the realization that any Latina nominee would bring out the rightwing crazies like moths to a flame. They simply can't help it.

Obama held a big Hollywood fundraiser last night. Everyone knows that, but does everyone know (we refer to these in the office as Kleefeld-isms):

Fun fact: one of the celebrity attendees was actor Kiefer Sutherland, who is of course the star of the right-wing favorite TV show 24 -- and is also the grandson of the late left-wing Canadian politician Tommy Douglas, considered by many to have been the father of universal health care in his country.

That and the day's other political news in Eric Kleefeld's TPMDC Morning Roundup.

The new Quinnipiac poll is out and it has Arlen Specter topping Joe Sestak 50% to 21%.

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

Brian Beutler talks to The Hill reporter whose seeming parody we flagged earlier this afternoon. No joke: A conservative source really did draw a connection between Sonia Sotomayor's gastronomical preferences -- traditional Puerto Rican cuisine -- and her allegedly "activist" jurisprudence.

ed. note: A sidenote to this nonsense. Lots of readers have complained that The Hill, and by extension TPM, has butchered the translation of Sotomayor's Spanish here:

Sotomayor also claimed: "For me, a very special part of my being Latina is the mucho platos de arroz, gandoles y pernir -- rice, beans and pork -- that I have eaten at countless family holidays and special events."

This has prompted some Republicans to muse privately about whether Sotomayor is suggesting that distinctive Puerto Rican cuisine such as patitas de cerdo con garbanzo -- pigs' tongue and ears -- would somehow, in some small way influence her verdicts from the bench.

TPM Reader HM speaks for many when he implores:

Just a comment about the news about food and Judge Sotomayor. First the issue is idiotic, second the translation is even worse. "Patitas de cerdo" are not pigs ears (that would be "cuajitos"), it is pigs feet and it is served as a kind of soup, thus the "garbanzos." I beg you to correct the record because it is ridiculous that TPM follows into the mistake of the Hill. ...

Here's what Sotomayor actually said in the 2001 speech in question, at least according to a transcript posted by UC-Berkeley:

For me, a very special part of my being Latina is the mucho platos de arroz, gandoles y pernir - rice, beans and pork - that I have eaten at countless family holidays and special events. My Latina identity also includes, because of my particularly adventurous taste buds, morcilla, -- pig intestines, patitas de cerdo con garbanzo -- pigs' feet with beans, and la lengua y orejas de cuchifrito, pigs' tongue and ears.

It appears The Hill transposed a couple of the dishes there, but I don't speak Spanish, so I will leave it to others to judge what got lost in translation and how, and where the blame may lie. And then we will not speak of this subject again.

Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate Pat Toomey welcomes Joe Sestak to the race: "I commend him for being a principled liberal who stands up for his beliefs and values."

CNN picks up TPM's Sestak scoop -- makes no mention of TPM.

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

No kidding. It pretty much had to happen. The Michele Bachmann comic book is set to go on sale.

This is separate from just Bachmann herself, who of course seems like a comic book. This is a real comic book. See the cover here -- it even has the flying imams.

Sen. Burris's ethics and integrity are beyond reproach.

When we have a free moment, can we go back and remember that it was the Bush administration's failed policies which got us a nuclear North Korea in the first place? Thanks.

I'm sure her conservative critics will come around to this realization eventually. But maybe the reason we can't trust Sonia Sotomayor is that just that there are too many unresolved contradictions about her? I mean, on the one hand she's a judicial activist, but also has a record of narrowly argued rulings with close attention to precedent. She's a affirmative action hire of questionable intelligence who we also hear graduated with honors from various of the country's most elite schools. At a certain point you have to step back and say, it doesn't add up. What's she trying to hide? How can we trust her?

That's what he's begun telling supporters. Here's our report.

Are The Hill -- and anti-Sotomayor operative Curt Levey -- really suggesting that the judge's fondness for Puerto Rican cuisine is a handicap for higher office:

Sotomayor also claimed: "For me, a very special part of my being Latina is the mucho platos de arroz, gandoles y pernir -- rice, beans and pork -- that I have eaten at countless family holidays and special events."

This has prompted some Republicans to muse privately about whether Sotomayor is suggesting that distinctive Puerto Rican cuisine such as patitas de cerdo con garbanzo -- pigs' tongue and ears -- would somehow, in some small way influence her verdicts from the bench.

Curt Levey, the executive director of the Committee for Justice, a conservative-leaning advocacy group, said he wasn't certain whether Sotomayor had claimed her palate would color her view of legal facts but he said that President Obama's Supreme Court nominee clearly touts her subjective approach to the law.

"It's pretty disturbing," said Levey. "It's one thing to say that occasionally a judge will despite his or her best efforts to be impartial ... allow occasional biases to cloud impartiality.

We're looking into whether this was a joke, because, really, it can't be serious, can it?

Late Update: Our crack news editor Justin Elliott, who caught this passage in the first place, also flags for me the use of the verb "claimed" to describe Sotomayor's assertion, as if they're hedging against this not being a true statement. You really need an eyewitness for solid confirmation because otherwise, what, it might be a faked love for rice, beans, and pork?

Later Update: It's no joke.

Al Hunt today praising Sonia Sotomayor: "This is not an Alberto Gonzales. This is someone who clearly has credentials."

As you can see, the Alberto Gonzales image rehabilitation effort has its work cut out for it. Zack Roth reports from the chat show trenches on Gonzales' rehabilitation campaign.

DOJ drops arguably vindictive charges against NH phone-jammer.

This is very similar to the Ted Stevens case, where the muckraker side of me was rooting for the government to nail these guys for wrongdoing, but the lawyer side of me became increasingly troubled by the conduct of the prosecutors.

Late Update: It should be noted that, according to AP, the government lost its appeal in the case last week, after the district court had dismissed the charges. So while not technically ending the case, the loss on appeal practically left the government with options to proceed that ranged from bad to worse.

Right-wing ex-Sen. Hutchinson: Republicans totally screwed on Sotomayor.

Not an exact quote. But pretty much.

Meet Wendy Long, the right-wing spinmeister heading up the anti-Sotomayor campaign.

Here's that video of MSNBC's Monica Novotny eviscerating anti-Sotomayor talking head Curt Levey on the anonymous whisper campaign against Sotomayor.

(ed. note: "Eviscerating" is maybe the wrong word. It's the best kind of knife-play: persistent, solid questioning.)

The man who has milked more from a four-year stint as speaker than any other speaker ever has shifted from late-night hogging of the CSPAN camera on the House floor, his signature profile-raising move in the 1980s, to Twitter:

White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw. 32 minutes ago from TwitterBerry

Imagine a judicial nominee said "my experience as a white man makes me better than a latina woman" new racism is no better than old racism
42 minutes ago from TwitterBerry

Torture-meister Liz Cheney takes Sotomayor to task for undermining the rule of law.

No final syllable pronunciation appeasement of Sotomayor? Is that the best they got?

The first President Bush introduced Clarence Thomas by hailing his "great empathy."

The push on the right, as we've seen, is that Sonia Sotomayor is the dread 'judicial activist', someone who uses the vast powers of a judgeship or, potentially, a spot on the top court to 'legislate' from the bench or impose her own policy or ideological vision on the country. Some of that is conservative judicial boilerplate. But clearly there are different kinds of judges on the right and left -- ones who stick more tightly to cobbling together decisions from existing precedent and others with a more expansive and ambitious judicial philosophy.

Unfortunately for Republicans, though, Sotomayor seems to be in the former camp. This is the upshot of Adam Liptak's piece in this morning's Times, who writes, in part ...

Judge Sonia Sotomayor's judicial opinions are marked by diligence, depth and unflashy competence. If they are not always a pleasure to read, they are usually models of modern judicial craftsmanship, which prizes careful attention to the facts in the record and a methodical application of layers of legal principles.

...

But they reveal no larger vision, seldom appeal to history and consistently avoid quotable language. Judge Sotomayor's decisions are, instead, almost always technical, incremental and exhaustive, considering all of the relevant precedents and supporting even completely uncontroversial propositions with elaborate footnotes.

What Liptak is saying here doesn't line up precisely with the activist vs. not activist question. But it strongly suggests this is not someone who falls into the more expansive, activist category. And if that's borne out by the coming scrutiny of her record, it suggests that the GOP line on her may be even more feeble than one might expect.

So far the criticisms of Sonia Sotomayor are much more revealing about her conservative critics than they are about her. I flagged Sen. Inhofe's statement yesterday. Here are some new morsels from the right:

National Review Online's Mark Krikorian: "Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English... and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn't be giving in to."

Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb: "Obama seems to have the views of a 21-year-old Hispanic girl -- that is, only by having a black president, an Hispanic justice, a female secretary of State, and Bozo the Clown as vice president will the United States become a true 'vanguard of societal ideas and changes.'"

Meanwhile, MSNBC's Monica Novotny just flayed Curt Levey, one of the anti-Sotomayor talking heads a few minutes ago. Levey foundered around until he grasped ahold of the Jeffrey Rosen TNR piece on Sotomayor that, curiously, Rosen hasn't been anywhere on TV to defend.

Obama jokes about getting upgraded to the presidential suite at Caesar's Palace. Watch.

President George H.W. Bush, upon announcing his nomination of Clarence Thomas: "He is a delightful and warm, intelligent person who has great empathy and a wonderful sense of humor."

Let the battle begin! A new pro-Sotomayor group has a TV ad going up today. That and the day's other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

Robert Reich on Sotomayor and whether Republicans will take the gamble.

I'm glad we're in the post-racial era so we can get on to discussing whether Judge Sotomayor is a luke-warm IQ affirmative action hire.

It seems the tide may be turning against Benjamin Cardozo's candidacy to serve, in a time warp sense of the term, as the nation's first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice. Over at USNews Robert Schlesinger finds the official US government definition of 'Hispanic' (as defined by the Census Bureau) which they define as "persons who trace their origin or descent to Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central and South America, and other Spanish cultures."

Disgraced former NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik has been indicted by a DC grand jury for lying to White House officials when he was being vetted for his failed Secretary of Homeland Security appointment.

Kerik's lawyer, Barry H. Berke told WCBS that the indictment was an example of the DOJ's "overzealous pursuit of high-profile public figures."

I can't say I agree with that. But being indicted for lying to folks in the Bush White House Counsel's office does seem a bit rich. And Kerik has so much real sleaze to work with.

So much sleaze, so little time.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK): "In the months ahead, it will be important for those of us in the U.S. Senate to weigh [Sotomayor's] qualifications and character as well as her ability to rule fairly without undue influence from her own personal race, gender, or political preferences."

CNN found it necessary to bring Alberto Gonzales on to reflect on the Sotomayor nomination.

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

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.

Norm Coleman sends word that as soon as he's sworn in he'll be reviewing Judge Sotomayor's record and deciding how he'll vote.

Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton earlier this afternoon on MSNBC ...

The President said that he wanted a judge who had empathy and I read empathy to mean bias in favor of politically correct individuals, whether they be women or a gay person or a black or Hispanic. You know that's the way they should decide in favor of them no matter what the law is.

Scenes from this morning's Sotomayor announcement.

Torture lawyer Yoo speaks out against Sotomayor.

Whether or not Sotomayor would be the first Hispanic Justice on the Supreme Court she would be the sixth Catholic currently serving on the current Court, which is perhaps best to say quietly extraordinary, given that as recently as few decades ago they were comparatively rare. A recent Pew poll says that 31.4% of U.S. adults say they were raised Catholic and 23.9% consider themselves Catholic. (There was some question about whether Sotomayor was a practicing or lapsed Catholic. But Steve Waldman says she's practicing.)

And one other factoid. If Sotomayor is confirmed, the Court would have six Roman Catholics, two Jews and one Protestant -- and that, the oldest, John Paul Stevens.

(ed.note: This post has some good history of Catholics serving on the Court. For the first Catholic to serve on the Court you've got to go all the way back to Chief Justice Roger Taney (appointed by Andrew Jackson). But only 11 Roman Catholics have ever been appointed to the Court -- and five of those are currently serving.)

California Supreme Court upholds Proposition 8 (which outlawed same-sex marriage in the state) but says that the roughly 18,000 marriages that took place already are still valid.

VIDEO: Obama introduces Sotomayor this morning at the White House, and Sotomayor introduces herself to the nation.

What? Governor of Minnesota doesn't get to vote on Supreme Court nominations?

As Eric Kleefeld explains, the Minnesota and DC calendars suggest there's a good chance it will be up to Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) to decide whether or not Al Franken becomes a senator in time to vote on the Sotomayor nomination.

Jonathan Turley not so high on the Sotomayor pick.

Late Update: Turley elaborated in an appearance a short while ago on MSNBC.

Everyone is hailing Sonia Sotomayor as (if confirmed) the first Hispanic on the US Supreme Court. But we've had a few emailers who point out that, at least by one definition, that's not true. They point to Benjamin Cardozo who had a relatively brief tenure as an Associate Justice on the court from 1932 until his death in 1938.

Cardozo held what was then informally known as one of the Jewish seats on the Court (he overlapped with Brandeis and was succeeded by Frankfurter.) But his ancestors were Portuguese Jews. That is, they were Sephardic Jews presumably expelled from Portugal in 1497 or who lived as conversos and then later reverted to Judaism after leaving at some later point.

This could of course suggest that a hidden Hispanic seat stood vacant on the Court for a full 71 years until today. But, be that as it may, there's your asterisk: Sotomayor is the first Hispanic Justice, unless you think that Cardozo was the first.

Late Update: Okay, a smackdown has broken out in the TPM inbox over the meaning of 'Hispanic'. Several say that 'Hispanic' applies only to Spain or former Spanish colonies where they speak Castillian Spanish and not Portugal. I'd always understood the term as applying to the Iberian peninsula in general. And Wikipedia suggests this is or rather was correct but that that meaning has been superseded by a narrower focus on Spain or even just the Spanish colonies. For my part though I'd like to try to make this slightly more complicated. It has been suggested that not a few Spanish Jewish expellees in Europe in the Early Modern Era chose to call themselves 'Portuguese Jews' because 'Spain' was the national enemy in many of the countries in which they resided -- such as England, the Netherlands and even France. Furthermore, some Spanish Jews were expelled from Spain and went to Portugal, only to be expelled from Portugal a few years later. So I'm not sure we should yet stop defending Cardozo's claim to the first Hispanic Justice title.

Late I Never Liked the AP Update: From TPM Reader WM ...

According to the AP stylebook on my desk, Hispanic is "the preferred term for those whose ethnic origin is a Spanish-speaking country. ... Refer to people of Brazilian and Portuguese as such, not as Hispanic."

Cardozo, as you wrote, was of Portuguese descent.

But, remember, perhaps they were crypto-Spanish crypto-Jews (sort of converso scholarship inside joke ...)

It's hard to believe it now, but there was a time not too long ago when it looked like the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice would be ... Alberto Gonzales.

Disaster averted, narrowly.

One of the defining motifs of the early Obama administration has been the repeated Republican effort to reach back to the signature failures of the Bush era to find labels or taglines for hoped-for Obama failures. (The trauma is hard for some on the right to get over.) So now you have conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru has announced that Sotomayor is "Obama's Harriet Miers."

Brian Beutler recaps the anti-Sotomayor whisper campaign.

The Politico says that Republicans are in the difficult position of perhaps needing to hold their fire because of the political dangers of attacking a "Latina single mother."

But the Post says Sotomayor, who was married briefly when she was younger, has no children. And as far as we can tell, they're right: she has no children.

See the talking points on Sotomayor the White House is distributing to supporters.

Eight Republican senators still in the Senate voted for Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation to the Court of Appeals in 1998. Eric Kleefeld has the list. (Hint: One of those is now a Democrat: Arlen Specter.)

Obama flies to Vegas later today for a fund-raiser for Sen. Harry Reid at Caesar's Palace. (As an aside, Gov. Jim Gibbons -- who's various problems with women has made him a TPM fave -- is snubbing the visit because, get this, Obama criticized bailed-out banks for spending money on junkets to Vegas). That and the day's other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.

Obama set to announce his Supreme Court nominee at 10:15 ET, according to various news outlets.

Late Update: AP is reporting Sonia Sotomayor is the pick.

Later Update: NYT confirms it as well: Sotomayor.

Whisper Campaign Update: Check out Brian Beutler's reporting for us on the whisper campaign that it now appears failed to derail Sotomayor's nomination.

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

SEIU takes a whack at Obama in California.

Another site of the day, courtesy of TPM Reader DP. This Army website has the citations for all Medal of Honor recipients (from all services) going back to 1861, when the honor was created. While Memorial Day commemorates those who lost their lives in the country's service, these short descriptions give some flavor of American wars on different continents going back now some 150 years.

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

We brought our two kids to the annual Memorial Day weekend airshow yesterday, so they could squeal at low-flying planes, aerial acrobatics and parachute teams. But I'll admit I'm not above getting juiced by the machinery of war: The vintage P-51 Mustang streaking vertically into the sky looked way more fun than driving a high-end sports car, and the parked C-130 cargo plane left the same feeling in my gut as staring up at an imposing skyscraper. I'm pretty predictably sentimental on these occasions, too: If I don't breathe slowly and deeply, I choke up at the sound of taps or bagpipes and the sight of wrinkled old veterans.

But the memory of the day that I haven't been able to shake came later, at an old rural cemetery, where a headstone near the entrance marked the grave of a WWII casualty I'd never heard of.

Pearl B. Wilkerson was a 37-year-old corporal, according to the marker, who died in April 1945. I couldn't quite make out the wording and I wasn't taking notes, but if I read it right he served in the 4th Armored Division. As I've learned today, by April 1945 that division had pushed into Germany and on April 4 became the first U.S. troops to liberate a concentration camp, a Buchenwald subcamp called Ohrdruf, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Here's video of Eisenhower inspecting the camp shortly after its liberation. (I may have misread the headstone, and Wilkerson may have served in the 2nd Armored Division, which had also pushed into Germany by April 1945 and on April 11 became the first American division to reach the Elbe.)

There's very little about Cpl. Wilkerson online, but he is described as "killed in action" in a list of war dead for Callaway County, Missouri.

We stumbled across the cemetery on one of our occasional Sunday drives through the abandoned Midwestern countryside. It's near what little remains of a small 19th century village called Shamrock. Off a remote but paved county road, the cemetery was so obscured by trees that we'd passed it before I realized what it was and had to turn around and go back. Adjacent to the cemetery were the remnants of the foundation of what I presumed to be a church (a Presbyterian one, it turns out, pictured here in 1904), including a partially exposed stone-lined well that I had to make sure the kids didn't tumble into.

At first the most poignant thing about Cpl. Wilkerson was his date of death: April 1945 was just one month before V-E Day and Germany's unconditional surrender, reminiscent of the plight of Remarque's protagonist in All Quiet on the Western Front.

But what lingers for me about Wilkerson is how Memorial Day -- for all the somber remembrances and displays of military hardware -- is a small strike against the inevitable forgetting. Poor Wilkerson got a head start on being forgotten: buried in a now-churchless cemetery with headstones knocked over and steadily sinking into the ground, near a briefly prosperous village of Irish immigrants that was long past its prime when Wilkerson died and will eventually be a nameless crossroads. His is the same fate as that of the overwhelming majority of men who ever fought and died for their clan, tribe or country. Today we acknowledge how much we've forgotten by paying homage to what we have managed to remember.

This article just out from the Times suggests that motive behind North Korea's increasingly aggressive stance is jockeying over who will succeed Kim Jong-il, who reportedly suffered a stroke last August.

Kim Jong-un, Kim's youngest son, is reportedly most likely to succeed him.

A sampling of images from around the country.

Brian Beutler, on Nebraska's ostensibly Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson.

A number of readers have written in to say that while they wish Newt would get off their TV as much as the next guy or gal, they fear he may actually be entitled to the continued use of the title just former Ambassadors and Judges can use the terms even after they've left the job.

So let me answer this in two parts. First, yes, there are many official capacities in which people are referred to by the highest office they've held -- particularly in official functions on Capitol Hill and such. But entitlement is the key. While presidents generally hold the title for life, few other people actually insist on being addressed by their formal title when they go on TV and do media events like Gingrich does. For instance, you don't see Tom Daschle going around calling himself "Majority Leader" or Colin Powell asking to be called "Secretary" Powell. Lots of people have this or that honorific they technically have a claim to but aren't silly enough to demand when addressed.

It's also true that with former ambassadors and judges, it's a pretty common thing. So for instance TPM Reader PK writes in ...

Here in Houston there is a big Democratic contributor who served as ambassador to the Bahamas for a couple years under Clinton--he uses the title on everything, and even in casual settings introduces himself with his rank. Sure, he's technically entitled to, but really ...

It's an interesting point. Why are these titles commonly used in this way. I thought about it and what I told PK was that people would probably laugh in this dude's face if he introduced himself as Ambassador to the Bahamas, since obviously he's not ambassador to the Bahamas anymore. He just gets to preen with the title.

Actually come to think about, I should probably be happy that Newt has warmed to the 'Speaker' title. For those who remember the heady days of the Republican Revolution will remember that early in his speakership, when he was affecting the air of a philosopher king, Gingrich would get key deputies and flunkies in the House to refer to him as "Professor" Gingrich. So maybe I should leave well enough alone.

Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), puts Memorial Day in its proper perspective.

If a government informant gives a would-be jihadist bags and bags of weed to entice him to join his jihad, where does he get the weed?

Just a moment ago on TV, would-be warlord and preemption dead-ender John Bolton was on TV arguing that in response to this morning's nuclear test, the US should push to have North Korea expelled from the UN -- something that brought an amused chorus of IM guffaws in the TPM newsroom. Zack Roth: "that will get them to stop!" Me: "that would teach them ... what a buffoon."

Really though, I found myself oddly disappointed. I've grown to rely on Bolton for over-the-top and generally insane responses to foreign crises. But expulsion from UN? As Kleefeld said, coming from Bolton, is that a punishment or a reward? Something's fishy in Denmark.

At our editorial meeting this morning we were trying to reason our way through the renewed prominence and media omnipresence of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich -- something that actually seems to happen every few years when the GOP starts taking on water. Now, though, Newt's out there calling on Speaker Pelosi to resign, considering running for president and generally speaking out on every issue under the sun.

But one thing we keyed into -- especially when considering his calls for Pelosi to stand aside -- is, does Newt realize he's not Speaker any more?

He seems to insist with members of the press that he still be referred to as "Speaker Gingrich." And actually his website is speakergingrich.com. Not former Speaker Gingrich, Speaker Gingrich. And it goes beyond him. On Meet the Press this weekend, he repeatedly refers to former intel committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra as "Chairman Hoekstra."

It is almost as if the Republican party, as it moves into its own tea bagging time warp has rendezvoused with Newt in imagined past and found that they're once again made for each other.

Two Sundays ago Dick Cheney picked Rush Limbaugh over Colin Powell as the better Republican. In today's Sunday Show Roundup Powell responds to the Rush and Cheney wing about his own party identification and the bigger picture of the future of the GOP ...

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

Obama will lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns this morning followed by a Memorial Day address. That and the day's other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.

Robert Reich: Only One Sure Way to Fund Universal Healthcare.

We've gotten various responses to the question I posed below. Here's TPM Reader RW's response ...

I think you oversimplify the issue of safe havens. In counter-terrorist operations, every second and dollar a terrorist organization must use to physically protect the organization is a dollar and a second it does not have to work on initiating a terrorist operation. In Afghanistan under the Taliban, al Qaeda had a government willing to provide an entire country for a safe haven. In other words, the Taliban used its state sovereignty as a shield to protect al Qaeda from the reach of law enforcement. It turns the problem of terrorism from a law enforcement to one of warfare.

From that perspective, terrorist groups who are protected by state sponsors are especially deadly to the nation-state. It is especially critical to the passive helper, the friend that agrees to leave his keys in his car on a specific night, or who hides a wounded fighter in his basement for a night. It is these passive supporters who, knowing terrorists have a far-off and powerful patron, are willing to invest, in their own small way, in the promised terrorist victory. Those passive supporters are the real lifeblood of Islamic terrorism.

This is why Bush's policy of not pressing Pakistan to get rid of terrorist havens made no sense. The only thing that has allowed the Taliban to survive for so long is the connections it maintains with the outside world via Pakistan's ISI. Those connections have been its only source of support and its only vehicle for launching attacks for its entire existence. Cut those connections, as Obama is trying to do, and you eliminate al Qaeda as the very real threat it is. In essence, Obama is forcing the Taliban and its al Qaeda allies to fight a two-front war for the first time ever. This is a winning strategy. The stateless terrorist is far less appealing to the passive supporter.

I don't think this settles the larger question by any means. But I think there are a few key errors in RW's logic.

First, not all states are created equal. They can be powerful in either military, financial, diplomatic or scientific terms. And one's that have one or more of those qualities can be very dangerous as state sponsors of terrorism. But Afghanistan under the Taliban's first reign had none of those. And given the poverty of the country itself, it's quite difficult to imagine it ever will. You're not going to have funds funneled through the intricate Afghan financial services sector or really do anything else. The key thing the Taliban offered al Qaida in the first round was non-interference, which isn't nothing. As a state, the central fact about Taliban-controlled Afghanistan was that it was barely a state at all, which in many ways was what made it so attractive to al Qaida. And to wrap up on this point, the idea that al Qaida operatives are going to get passive assistance from Muslims in Albany or Riyadh or Bali because they have the tacit backing of Afghanistan strikes me as ludicrous.

Second, it's true that a key element of counter-terrorism strategy is that you want to put pressure on a terrorist adversary on all fronts. And time and money that doesn't have to go toward self-protection can be routed toward forward operations. Earlier in this decade this got sort of distorted and warped into 'fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here.' But again, there are two key problems with this argument in this case. First, if you're going to fight them 'over there' it's key to know where they are. And most of al Qaida wasn't in Afghanistan. Many had come through. But most were in other Muslim countries or in the West. Rooting the command and control from Afghanistan was key. But much of the disruption operations were a matter of cracking down in other ways on operatives in other countries. Related to this, I'm not saying that the ideal isn't to deny al Qaida safe havens anywhere. It's a relative thing. Is it the best use of our resources? Most of these guys have been laying low in Pakistan for the last seven or eight years. And might we be creating more terrorists in a 20 year counter-insurgency than we kill or deny safe havens too?

It comes back to the same question: how critical is it whether terrorist capos can hide out, with the passive approval of the government, in caves in Afghanistan? And should this be the center-piece of our counter-terrorism effort or even our whole foreign policy?

Newt Gingrich declares that Gitmo should remain open until "the terrorists disappear." That and other political news in today's TPMDC Sunday Roundup.

I'm still trying to decide what I think about this question. But given how much strategic focus we're giving to Afghanistan, I'm confident we haven't given the question enough collective thought. Matt Yglesias had a post a couple months ago asking a basic question: how much does it really matter if al Qaida has safe havens in Afghanistan?

To be clear, no one's saying it doesn't matter at all. But does it matter enough, relative to other threats, to make Afghanistan -- and specifically, the escalation of our involvement in Afghanistan -- close to the focus of our whole foreign policy? Ethnic Afghans have played little or no role in any of the major terrorist incidents of the last decade. And most were planned and organized either in Europe, the US or in other Arab or majority Muslim countries. The training camps we hear a lot about mainly focused on light combat training and maybe car-jackings. As Matt puts it, the 'safe havens' in Afghanistan were neither necessary (the training could be and often was done elsewhere) nor sufficient (you still needed cells in the target countries) conditions for any of the major terrorist attacks. So why is this such a critical focus of our policy?

On the other side of the spectrum, I'd put the following considerations. If al Qaida types get plugged in in the thriving opium trade in Afghanistan that's clearly a source of money. And one of the best counter-terrorism strategies seems to be just keeping the members of terrorist organizations under pressure and threat everywhere. So you wouldn't want one country where bin Laden and his pals could live more or less unmolested and in the open -- though given what happened and how many drones we have on patrol, it's not really credible to me that quite that would ever be allowed again.

Then there's the question of Pakistan. On really every front, money, safe havens, weaponry, even nuclear weapons, Pakistan has everything that Afghanistan has, only ten-fold, though there's probably a decent argument that the two countries are umbilical when it comes to counter-terrorism policy.

And let me finish on two further points. Through much of the last decade, I've been in the group of people saying that Iraq was a distraction and that Afghanistan was the place we really needed to be focusing on. So this is in conflict with much I've said before. Furthermore, if you look at the history, the role of Afghanistan going back over the last few decades, wasn't so much that it allowed for safe havens but that the guerilla, semi-irregular wars there spun off thousands of violent, highly-trained and religiously intoxicated extremists who later spread out around the world spreading terror right and left. And that makes intensifying the conflict in Afghanistan to prevent the growth of safe havens a logically questionable proposition.

Like I said up top, I'm not sure where I come down on this one. But given how central a role 'safe havens' play in current policy and how much focus we're giving to this policy, it really requires more scrutiny. Let me know your thoughts. I'm curious what others have to say.

Girlfriends of two of the 'Newburgh Four' have come forward now -- in articles in the Daily News and New York Post. And while, as you'd expect, they're putting their men in the best light, suggesting they were tricked into the plot, it does seem clear that cash gifts, free rent and bags and bags and bags of weed may have been a stronger enticement for these goofballs than Islam.

David Williams is the one of the four who'd recently moved to Newburgh to help his mom care for his brother, who reportedly has terminal cancer. His mom says that "Maqsood", the name the informant was using, promised to pay for the brother's hospital bills.

These are all, of course, claims from highly interested sources. So we'll have to watch closely what gets borne out in court proceedings. But it bears watching.