I don't want to sound like a reverse racist, but have you seen Ricci or heard him speak? I understand his beef, but he comes across as an entitled prick. Same with the NY firefighter that is always on the talking head shows whose son died on 9/11 and advocates against closing Gitmo. They just sound like uneducated hacks - maybe it's the accent. This is going to backfire on the GOP Senators.

fine, let em have the south. We'll take the rest.

Yeah BC, I agree. Until a year ago I lived just outside New Haven and heard Ricci on my TV many, many times. He's a publicity whore. It's easy to see why the Rs love him, he's a racist little prick just like they are. It was always pretty clear that he thought NHFD shouldn't have *any* of those people in it. New Haven has a large Puerto Rican community and he doesn't like them either. Quite frankly, I don't think he likes anyone that isn't Italian-American. I always found him to be a despicable POS.

Um... From SCOTUSblog:

Of the 96 cases, Judge Sotomayor and the panel rejected the claim of discrimination roughly 78 times and agreed with the claim of discrimination 10 times; the remaining 8 involved other kinds of claims or dispositions. Of the 10 cases favoring claims of discrimination, 9 were unanimous. (Many, by the way, were procedural victories rather than judgments that discrimination had occurred.) Of those 9, in 7, the unanimous panel included at least one Republican-appointed judge.

Has anyone else noticed that a conservative argument (ahem) goes something like this: 90% of the available information says one thing, but a single outlier data point says something different! THE OUTLIER IS THE ONE AND ONLY DEFINING THING OH NOES REVERSE RACISM!?!?!??!1!!

not to mention, she's replacing Souter who agreed with her on her non-ruling in the Ricci case, and there are 3 other justices who agreed too. If this means Sotomayor is unqualified, wouldn't that mean the same of the other dissenting justices?

The GOP only has one strategy, Bob. They're not the creative sort of minds that can hold more than one idea at a time or invent something new. They will never give up the Southern Strategy. In fact, current GOP members of Congress will still be using it when they leave office. The question is whether they will leave on their own or be carried kicking and screaming.

You see, the Southern Strategy itself is a zombie idea: dead, yet malevolent. It took over the brains of white politicians who then spread it like a disease. Thankfully, the current generation is largely immune to it; we're just waiting for the zombies to die off.