Sonia Sotomayor will be confirmed easily by the Senate, with substantial Republican support, but Conservatives like Dear Leader Rush will continue to take ugly swipes at her, just as they have all along. But no matter. She is, as she proved once again yesterday, with her opening statement, a remarkable woman and an impressive jurist. Yes, she said all the right things, and her statement was nothing if not carefully crafted, but there is no denying, I think, her qualifications for the highest court...

President Obama today introduced Dr. Regina Benjamin as the new U.S. surgeon general (pending confirmation, of course). I don’t know anything about her — in fact, I’d never heard of her until today. Looking over her career accomplishments, though — notably: family physician, founder of the Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic (which was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina), government appointee (both federally and in Alabama), current president of the Alabama Medical Association...

By now, I suspect, many of you have read, or at least read about, Newsweek‘s article on Attorney General Eric Holder and the possible appointment of “a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation practices” (i.e., torture). Like Glenn Greenwald, I was, initially, optimistic. Finally, I thought. It’s about time. And, like Creature, I was also firmly in “the I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it camp.” Well, it looks like Glenn is...

On Tuesday, Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, one of the more extreme of Congressional Republicans, said this at the National Press Club: They understand socialism. They understand tyrants. But none of us have ever had it here. We don’t even know what it looks like. Part of what we’re trying to do in Saving Freedom [his book] is just show that where we are, we’re about where Germany was before World War II where they became a social democracy. Now, what did he mean by that? To...

So Jeb Bush, according to Tucker Carlson, may be, whether he knows it or not, the future of the Republican Party. That’s right, as if two Bushes haven’t been more than enough, another — this time the smart one, at least when compared to his more famous brother, Obama’s predecessor — may be on the way to presidential politics. If, that is, he can find a way back to high-level elected politics at all. You can read the Jeb-Tucker interview here. It was published just yesterday...

Roll Call: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday strongly urged Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) to drop a proposal to tax health benefits and stop chasing Republican votes on a massive health care reform bill. Reid, whose leadership is considered crucial if President Barack Obama is to deliver on his promise of enacting health care reform this year, offered the directive to Baucus through an intermediary after consulting with Senate Democratic leaders during Tuesday morning’s...

Whether we like it or not, we’re being bombarded with all things Sarah Palin, more so now pre-resignation than at any time since last year’s campaign. And, honestly, it was driving me nuts over the weekend. But the right loves her, and continues not just to apologize for her, not just to cheerlead for her, but to pump her up out of all justifiable proportion. Which is fine, when you think about it, because the simple fact is, she’s not — and is not close to being —...

I’ve written a lot already on the whole Mark Sanford saga and I don’t intend to write too much more on it this morning. Let me just say this: Is it really necessary to delve into the man’s psyche, and specifically to do so without actually examining him, and, what’s more, so publicly? He does seem to be going through some sort of adolescent mid-life crisis. And he does seem to be something of a narcissist. But what’s with one of his home-state publications, The State,...

Simply, the tide is rising against him. His Argentine mistress was his “soul mate,” he claims, but he wants to reconcile with his wife? Okay, but what does his wife think of that? “This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story. A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day.” Sure, I get that. And, in a way, I feel for him — and I feel sorry for him. It must be difficult to have all this out in the open. He admits that there...

Maybe you read about it at Crooks and Liars (which has the video), maybe you heard about last night on The Daily Show. Here’s what Michael Scheuer told Glenn Beck, crazy meets crazy, on Tuesday: The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. Because it’s going to take a grass-roots, bottom-up pressure. Because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans. It’s...

His death, at the age of 97, won’t get nearly the attention that Michael Jackson’s got, or perhaps even that Farrah Fawcett’s got, but Karl Malden was truly one of the great American artists of the last century, an exceptional film actor who starred in over 50 movies, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1951 — for which he won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor), On the Waterfront (1954 — as in Streetcar, playing opposite one of Marlon Brando’s iconic roles),...

A sad, troubling, rage-inducing story from The Canadian Press: A critically-ill premature-born baby from Hamilton is all alone in a Buffalo, N.Y., hospital after she was turned away for treatment at local facility and transferred across the border without her parents, who don’t have passports. Ava Stinson was born Thursday at St. Joseph’s Hospital, 14 weeks premature. A provincewide search for an open neonatal intensive care unit bed came up empty, leaving no choice but to send the two...

I haven’t written anything on the Mark Sanford saga since Thursday morning, when I commented on his humanity and hypocrisy — what he did was all-too-human, however bizarre the contortions of his trip to Argentina and the lies of those close to him, but also, given his conservative Republican moralism, deeply hypocritical as well. Since then, more has come out. For example: – His wife, Jenny, now says she’s known about the affair since January. – Fox News, hardly a media...

Well, what more is there to say? One of the genuine icons of our time, which says a lot about our time (more for bad than for good, I would argue), has died at the age of 50. Like him or not, there is no denying Michael Jackson‘s significance in global popular culture. He was a star above stars, as outsized a celebrity as we have ever seen. He was an artist, I’ll give him that, but he was so much more, and over the past twenty years or so his art, his music, receded further and further...

“Mark Sanford is no longer missing, but he’s obviously lost.” So writes Slate‘s John Dickerson to open an article on the Mark Sanford saga that, in light of what we learned yesterday, adds some much-needed humanity, largely out of respect to Sanford’s own humanity, to what has been, in some circles, a case of gleeful Schadenfreude. It’s an article that really got me thinking last night. Hopefully this makes sense. I and many other bloggers and political commentators...

I have defended Obama on Iran, I continue to defend him, and I’ll defend him here. I tend to be quite hawkish (as a liberal) on democracy and freedom, and I would love to see Iran shake off the shackles of theocracy and tyranny and embrace liberty and diversity and the sovereignty of the people, but, unlike war-now neocons and the many other hawkish conservatives, I also realize that the world, and Iran especially, is complicated, and not so easily reducible to categories of good and evil....

The other day, TNR’s Michael Crowley effectively captured the contradiction at the core of the conservative assault on Obama over Iran: So Now Obama Really Is Moses? For more than a year conservatives have ridiculed the alleged belief that Obama’s special rhetorical powers can do anything, including parting the waters. Now they’re all clamoring for him to change he course of Iranian history by leveraging what Paul Wolfowitz calls “his enormous political prestige.” In...

It’s just getting weirder and weirder. The State is reporting this morning that Sanford was not hiking the Appalachian Trail (as his office claimed), nor writing (as his wife claimed), but amusing himself in and around Buenos Aires, Argentina. He may even have taken a cruise. “I wanted to do something exotic,” he said. Okay, fine. So he went to Argentina for a short, “exotic” vacation. I suppose there’s nothing wrong with that. But that’s not really the point....

Yes, it’s quite amusing that (white nativist) Pat Buchanan and “white nationalist” Peter Brimelow spewed their bigotry and ignorance beneath a banner that misspelled the word “conference” — it was spelled “conferenece,” with an extra ‘e’ (for eugenics?) — but what’s rather more serious, if not genuinely disturbing, is that this sort of bigotry and ignorance still plays so well on the right and throughout much of America. Indeed,...

So apparently Mark Sanford, the AWOL Republican governor of South Carolina, is hiking the Appalachian Trail. (UPDATE: Sanford staff is now saying that the governor will be back in the office on Wednesday. Still, it’s all very, very troubling.) So, case closed, right? Story over? Well… For all I know, Sanford may very well be hiking. And he may very well have been hiking these past several days. Perhaps it all came about quite suddenly, like a trip to Vegas with your buddies. Maybe one...

Well, they made peace in the Republican Party, putting aside their differences for the sake of electoral success, the neocons and the theocons and the paleocons and the neo-libs, and that worked fairly well for them, largely because, for a long time, the desire to win overcame the obvious differences, and because the neocons, led by Krazy Bill Kristol, and the business-oriented, anti-tax-crazed neo-libs put up with the moralism and nativism of the theocons and paleocons in a quid pro quo to get what...

What can one say about adulterer John Ensign, Republican senator from Nevada? Like my friend Steve Benen, and so many other liberal-minded adults, I really don’t care what Ensign does with his personal life, as long as it doesn’t involve animals or children — or, rather, I do care, insofar as people may have been hurt by his actions, but whatever he did really isn’t my, or our, business. He did what he did, and now it’s between him and his wife, and him and his conscience,...

From Swampland: For two years now, John McCain has been entirely consistent on Iran: every last statement he’s made–at least, those that I’ve seen — has been (a) fabulously uninformed and (b) dangerously bellicose. He’s still at it, apparently. There is no question that President Obama’s more prudent path is the correct one right now. There is also no question that the neoconservatives are trying to gin up this situation into an excuse for not engaging with the...

My friend Barbara O’Brien (a.k.a. Maha of the very fine Mahablog) runs the Mesothelioma Law & Politics blog at the Mesothelioma & Asbestos Awareness Center and has been writing extensively on health-care reform. Take, for example, this must-read post on the American Medical Association’s appalling (if all-too predictable) opposition to a “public option,” that is, to a government-sponsored system (or even part of a system). Here’s a key passage, laying bare...

The right has been all over Obama’s measured response to the Iranian election — seriously, what was he to do? push America’s weight around with the situation still unclear, and with allegations of corruption and vote-rigging unproven, however credible, thereby likely driving the wedge between Washington and Tehran deeper at a time when the U.S. is seeking to open up diplomatic relations with Iran over its nuclear program? no, open meddling in internal Iranian affairs would hardly...