Hand of friendship refers clearly to Iran and originally also to North Korea. Of all the dangers in the world it seems that you are worried about AIPAC. I don't think that Sotomayor is a racist, but your injecting AIPAC into a problem where it isn't ever mentioned may be.

"Had to bomb" this, "having to board and search" that....

I guess we're all Calvinists now.

Read Paul's post. He takes apart the whole racist attack on Sotomayor rather thoroughly. Even if you just look at that one sentence, how can the fact that she hopes that a Latina would make a better decision (in discrimination cases) more often than not be a "poor" choice of words? She's rather cautious, actually, to make certain she's expressing herself clearly and won't be misinterpreted.

I can't believe Gibbs said that and that Obama is basically implying she's to blame for misspeaking, which only serves to entrench the idea that Newt, Rush, and Ann have a point.

Brad DeLong:

On a related note, I find the “what if a white man said that?” move incredibly grating about 99 percent of the time it’s used, because it’s almost always a way of blotting out all the reasons that it would, in fact, be different. In the instance, it would be weird for a white man to say it because it’s probably not true that the experience of growing up as a white male in the United States specifically enhances one’s understanding of what it means to be a disfavored minority. In other words, it just wouldn’t be true or reasonable in this case—though it might be for a white male who grew up as a religious or ethnic minority somewhere else in the world. So yes, sometimes formally gramatically equivalent statements will have different connotations depending on whether it’s a white person speaking about whites or a Latino speaking about Latinos, because history happened. I realize this is, like, the worst racial injustice ever, but Republicans should realize how insanely tone-deaf they come across when they assert that Sotomayor’s is a “story of privilege” because she was “blessed by Providence with the precisely correct right race-gender two-fer for the moment”—as opposed to poor schmucks saddled with surnames like Bush, I suppose, who had to claw their way into the Ivies on their own merits.