Jeff Emanuel Online

As I pointed out on the day of the Sotomayor nomination, President Obama’s C-List administration staff has proven the old adage “As hire As and Bs hire Cs.” However, even the knowledge that a man with as little real accomplishment as Obama would only surround himself with people who make him seem distinguished by comparison couldn’t prepare me for his pick to oversee the government’s 60% of General (Government) Motors: a 31-year-old law school dropout who, according to the New York Times, “is neither a formally trained economist nor a business school graduate, and who never spent much time flipping through the endless studies about the future of the American and Japanese auto industries.”

The message this sends is striking. A president with zero executive experience and absolutely no experience in business (or any private enterprise, for that matter) is engineering the biggest government grab of private businesses in American history — and he’s hiring people even less qualified than he is to run them.

At some point, even the die-hards have to start wondering what’s going on in this young executive’s head.

That’s one of the questions being debated over at Politico’s “Arena” blog. Here’s my take, in a nutshell, on Sotormayor’s statement at Berkley in 2001 that the “richness of experience” of a “wise Latina woman” makes her more fit to judge (or more likely to “reach a better conclusion”) “than a white male”:

This is a whole bunch of nothing to most liberals, who accept as the natural order of things that empathy and common ethnic experience are more important in Constitutional law than dispassionate review and application of an objective standard. To conservatives, on the other hand, Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” statement is a something — if not necessarily a “big deal” — because it injects subjectivity into an objective process, and because it reflects an adoption of the race-and-gender-obsessed liberal worldview that denies any objective good outside of “diversity” for its own sake.

Given that Sotomayor’s speech from which the “wise Latina” quote was pulled was part of a symposium entitled “Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation,” it’s not surprising or offensive in the least that she discussed race as a topic. However, rather than using that pulpit to acknowledge that neither minority status nor an impoverished upbringing was the sine qua non of effectively interpreting legal texts and applying them to cases (her job as an appellate judge), Sotomayor chose to declare that, in her estimation, a white male simply isn’t as fit to render legal judgment as a “wise Latina woman.”

There’s a very clear reason why this statement has half of the nation up in arms. Ironically, the other half, which is brushing this aside and saying it’s no big deal, would be calling for the head of any white male who said his race and gender made him more qualified to judge than any “Latina woman.” The difference in that situation is that, had a white male said such a thing, conservatives would be condemning it as well — something race-and-gender-obsessed liberals simply can’t bring themselves to do with regard to Sotomayor’s statement, despite the obviousness of the double standard.

Via Tim Blair comes this gem:

One of the world’s greatest minds comes up with one of the world’s greatest ideas:

Steven Chu, the Nobel prize-winning physicist appointed by US President Barack Obama as Energy Secretary, wants to paint the world white.

A global initiative to change the colour of roofs, roads and pavements so that they reflect more of the Sun’s light and heat could play a big part in containing global warming, he said yesterday.

It would be interesting to get Chu’s estimate on the percentage of the earth’s surface that is covered by roofs, roads and pavements.

As Erick posted on Twitter, “When all it takes to solve global warming is painting my roof white, global warming isn’t a serious problem.”

I have to echo that statement, with the simple addition that, if Chu is serious in his suggestion, then the people who promote AGW as an issue are, quite simply, fundamentally unserious.

To Blair’s last sentence, I can only add this: Guess what already reflects sunlight better than white paint?

Water, snow, and ice.

I wonder what the ratio is of the water-covered portions of planet Earth to the pavement-and-roof-covered portions of planet Earth. Certainly Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu has a formula to figure that little problem out, doesn’t he?

Update by Jeff @ 12:41pm: Speaker Pelosi’s protectorate in the House has buried the GOP’s request that, if the CIA actually did lie to Congress, it be brought to their attention vis-a-vis a bipartisan investigation. The reason? If the CIA didn’t actually lie to the Congress, then Pelosi’s in some very, very hot water.

If you’re curious, by the way, Reps. Ron Paul (R-TX) and Walter Jones (R-NC) were the two Republicans who voted to keep the truth behind Pelosi’s and the CIA’s conflicting accounts under wraps. The rest of the vote was party-line.

A senior House GOP aide this morning confirmed that House Republicans will demand a bipartisan investigation of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) accusations that members of the Central Intelligence Agency “misled the Congress” in their briefings on terrorist detainees and interrogation techniques.

According to the source:

Lying to Congress of the United States is a serious crime. The Speaker has had a full week now to either put up the evidence to support the serious allegation she has leveled against the hardworking men and women of America’s intelligence community, or retract and apologize. She’s done neither. There is no choice now. A bipartisan investigation of the Speaker’s allegations is needed to get to the facts, and Republicans are done waiting.

Speaker Pelosi and her aides have been ducking the matter all week, and Democratic leaders are clearly trying to run out the clock and get to the Memorial Day recess in hopes the storm surrounding the Speaker will simply blow away once members leave town. That is unacceptable, given the serious nature of her allegations and the implications they have for our intelligence community, where her comments threaten to shred morale among the dedicated professionals serving our country.

The text of the resolution is below the fold.

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Speaker of the House (for now) Nancy Pelosi (Democrat-CA) stepped to the microphone this morning set the record straight once and for all on these pesky interrogation briefings.

Apparently, it’s all the CIA’s fault. They’re too good at hiding the truth from our naive Democratic leaders in Congress.

You see, according to Pelosi, back during the Dark Days of the Bush Administration (may their names be wiped from the record of history forever), the lies were flying so fast and furious at the residents of Capitol Hill that the poor Democratic caucus didn’t know what to do with itself — and the CIA, according to the Speaker, was in on the act.

“The CIA was misleading the Congress and at the same the administration was misleading the Congress on weapons of mass destruction!” Pelosi declared to the press this morning, implementing the Democrats’ Iraq strategy (”poor little us –we were being lied to and didn’t know it!”) in an attempt to shift blame from the person with whom the buck stops when it comes to House affairs — herself — and onto the first third party she could find.

Given this declaration of Pelosi’s, it appears we can, at long last, call off the search for the most gullible people in America. If they are to be believed, Ms. Pelosi and her fellow Congressional Democrats — professional politicians all — were being lied to by the entire establishment (apart, supposedly, from themselves), from the President to the foot soldiers in the intelligence community, for the last eight-plus years, and they were simply too earnest and gullible to realize it.

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