The NYT rakes though Sotomayor's 12 year tenure on the board of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund and turns up this interesting tidbit:

Ms. Sotomayor was part of a three-person committee of the board that recommended in 1981 that the fund oppose the reinstitution of the death penalty in New York State, according to board minutes from that time.

“Capital punishment is associated with evident racism in our society,” the panel wrote. “It creates inhuman psychological burdens for the offender and his/her family.”

Granholm will be at the White House tomorrow and the hopeful word in some feminist circles is that she might be there for the announcement that she is being nominated to the United States Supreme Court. If this is the case, I think Democrats have very good reasons to oppose her appointment.

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The Supreme Court by a vote of 5 to 4 has just handed down a ruling that prisoners at Guantanamo do have a right under the U.S. Constitution, and in particular, the ruling restores habeas corpus to them, giving them the right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts. It does not specifically invalidate the entirety of the odious MCA as far as I can tell.

Need I tell you who the five and who the four were?

This is what happens when the Supreme Court becomes controlled by radicals:

For years, Johnson & Johnson obscured evidence that its popular Ortho Evra birth control patch delivered much more estrogen than standard birth control pills, potentially increasing the risk of blood clots and strokes, according to internal company documents.

But because the Food and Drug Administration approved the patch, the company is arguing in court that it cannot be sued by women who claim that they were injured by the product — even though its old label inaccurately described the amount of estrogen it released.

As opposed to the SCOTUS:

The Supreme Court for Republicans in the United States.

Cass Sunstein does some conservative framing on the Bush Court in WaPo today:

The most intriguing development on the Supreme Court this term has been the emergence of a powerful alliance between two different kinds of conservatives: the visionaries and the minimalists.

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the visionaries, are not merely predictable in their votes; their sweeping opinions call for fundamental changes in constitutional law. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, the minimalists, have also turned out to be predictable in their votes. But their opinions tend to be cautious, narrow and unambitious. They are reluctant to reject the court's own precedents, and attempt to rule in a way that preserves them.

In every one of the term's key cases, including today's momentous decision on school-desegregation plans, the minimalists and the visionaries have agreed on the outcome -- but they have frequently divided on the reasoning.

Er, I've got minor editorial suggestion for Professor Sunstein, and that's that he use change "visionaries" to another word:

If you listen to the SCLM you'll hear again and again that "Hamdan" is a political problem for the Democrats, and only an operational, policy problem for Republicans.

We demand to differ.

This is the first in a series of posts in which we will explore Republican vulnerabilities and Democratic opportunities.

We take the following truths--at a minimum--to be reasonably evident: