(Video of Obama's announcement and nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor)

The NRA will not be happy, but Judge Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed today to be the first Latina on the Supreme Court. That's a beautiful thing. Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan will be rolling in their racism over this vote.

PFAW:

By a vote of 68 to 31, the Senate today confirmed Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court. People For the American Way Executive Vice President Marge Baker issued the following statement:

“The confirmation of Sotomayor is a historic step for the nation and a triumph of the American way. The efforts by the NRA and the far right to sabotage her nomination failed badly, with a large majority of Senators uniting to confirm her today. Those Senators will not regret their votes.

Talk Left has the vote count:

The vote was 68-31. In addition to all Democrats and Independents (with the exception of Ted Kennedy, still absent due to his health), 9 Republicans also voted in favor - Voinovich, Bond, Martinez, Alexander, Graham, Collins, Snowe, Gregg and Lugar.

Back in our C&L Time Machine:

Look who's calling Sonia Sotomayor a 'racist': The Right's leading bigots

Pat Buchanan wonders if the nation will survive having 135 million Hispanics

Bob Shrum explodes over Pat Buchanan's racism as Limbaugh uses MLK against Sotomayor

Fifty People, One Question--By the end of the day, what do you wish to have happen?

I have simple needs, I really do. I have no desire for a bigger home or a newer car. I don't want jewelry, designer clothes, a maid, or any other "keeping-up-with-the-Jones" status symbols. But sadly, the things that I do want seem far more unreachable than the possibility of getting those things. I want to see an honest debate in media over issues that concern Americans. Not pundit after pundit asserting some opinion as fact or some politico drumming up some stupid strawman that never gets questioned by the purported journalist hosting the show. We're at it again this week, with the ongoing topic of Sonia Sotomayor's nomination, Iran's election and health care reform topping the list. Perhaps rather than focusing on the crooks and liars in the media, we should start a blog of moments of honest debate...nah, there'd be next to no content.

ABC’s “This Week” - Kathleen Sebelius, Mitt Romney. Roundtable: Ron Brownstein, Kimberly Strassel, Donna Brazile, George Will.

CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sen. Mitch McConnell, Sen. Dick Durbin

NBC’s “Meet the Press” – Vice President Joe Biden. Roundtable: Joe Scarborough, Mike Murphy

NBC’s “The Chris Matthews Show” – Panel: Katty Kay, Claire Shipman, Helene Cooper, Norah O’Donnell. Topics: Why is Obama a more elusive target for Republicans than Bill Clinton was? Why do women report higher job satisfaction even if they are paid less? Meter Questions: Will President Obama's policies be a riper target than his personality for Republican critics? YES: 12 NO: 0; Will Senate Republicans attack Sonia Sotomayor as a liberal or show deference to her? YES: 10 NO: 2

CNN’s “State of the Union” - Kathleen Sebelius, James Carville and Mary Matalin, Sen. Ben Nelson, Sen. Susan Collins, Sen. Kent Conrad

CNN’s “Reliable Sources” - ABC News President David Westin on "The New Normal" -- a network-wide series devoted to what life will be like after the recession ends.

CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” - This week, the big story is the Iranian elections. What should the world expect from Iran? What will the outcome mean for Iran's relations with the U.S. and the rest of the world? And can real reform come to Iran?

“Fox News Sunday” - Sens. Chris Dodd and Charles Grassley. Thomas Donahue, the head of the Chamber of Commerce.

So, what's catching your eye this morning?

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(Reagan's "shoe-in" set off more red flags than a May Day parade.)

A look back at another nomination for Supreme Court Justice. Robert Bork was President Reagan's pick to replace Lewis Powell. From the get-go the nomination was questioned, and when time came for Senate Confirmation hearings, Reagan's perceived shoe-in was quickly derailing.

Here are a series of news reports about the confirmation hearings with highlights of some of the days sessions from September 15 - October 2, 1987. I hope to run some of the hearings shortly as well as run reports on the outcome.

But here's a teaser for now.

(Thanks, Jed)

Glenn Greenwald wrote about this yesterday and I finally got to post about it today.

Justice Sam Alito on empathy and judging

With regard to that last point -- how completely different is the reaction to Sam Alito and Sonia Sotomayor -- just consider this exchange that took place at the beginning of Alito's confirmation hearing (h/t sysprog):

U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on Judge Samuel Alito's Nomination to the Supreme Court

U.S. SENATOR TOM COBURN (R-OK): Can you comment just about Sam Alito, and what he cares about, and let us see a little bit of your heart and what's important to you in life?

ALITO: Senator, I tried to in my opening statement, I tried to provide a little picture of who I am as a human being and how my background and my experiences have shaped me and brought me to this point....

Anyone who is objecting now to Sotomayor's alleged "empathy" problem but who supported Sam Alito and never objected to this sort of thing ought to have their motives questioned (and the same is true for someone who claims that a person who overcame great odds to graduate at the top of their class at Princeton, graduate Yale Law School, and then spent time as a prosecutor, corporate lawyer, district court judge and appellate court judge must have been chosen due to "identity politics").

But the attacks thus far -- not just from the Right but from the sterling Respectable Intellectual Center -- say far, far more about the critics than they do about her. How can her "empathy" views possibly be distinguished from what Sam Alito -- at Tom Coburn's urging -- said when he was confirmed?...read on

Glenn has the entire transcript up from the Coburn questioning and should be read. The idea that our own personal experiences do not shape the way we view life is absurd and Alito used it to try and sell himself to Congress, but for Sonia Sotomayor, that's a disqualifying event.

Digby writes:

Yesterday I dashed off this glib little bon mot, which deserves a much more serious treatment:

One can't know for sure that the fact that Chief Justice John Roberts, who has so far voted every single time with the ruling elites, was affected by his personal experience as a privileged white male -- coddled, groomed and rewarded from his earliest days by the conservative establishment he served -- but it certainly isn't unfair to think he might have been.

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Not many people know that Judge Jay ByBee is a Mormon and an anti-gay supporter. As Patrick Leahy, Russ Feingold, Jerry Nadler, and Jan Schakowsky all spoke out against him, Harry Reid wasn't saying much. Even though Diane Feinstein voted against his confirmation she now either has a no comment or is trying to wrestle control of the investigation.

Russ Feingold voted against his nomination back in 2003:

On more than 20 occasions, Mr. Bybee refused to answer a question, claiming over and over again that as an attorney in the Department of Justice he could not comment on any advice that he gave at any time. This is unfortunately becoming a very familiar refrain of nominees before the Judiciary Committee.
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But the failure to make OLC opinions available to the Judiciary Committee during the consideration of a nominee for a seat on a circuit court is unacceptable... The administration should be able to agree to an acceptable procedure to allow the Judiciary Committee to review Mr. Bybee's OLC opinions. Given the recent history of many OLC opinions being made public, it is hard to believe that there are no opinions authored by Mr. Bybee that could be disclosed without damaging the deliberative process. Indeed, it is very hard to give credence to the idea that OLC's independence would be compromised by the release of some selection of the opinions of interest to members of the Judiciary Committee or the Senate.

After the release of these memos why then is Harry Reid not in line with almost every Democratic Politician?

A serious setback, however: Harry Reid, whose Senate would rule on an impeachment in the House, doesn't seem to like the idea:

"Judge Bybee has a good professional reputation in Nevada," Reid spokesman Jon Summers said in an e-mail. "While the memos that have been released are disturbing to Sen. Reid, at this point in time, he doesn't think we should be making a rush to judgment."

And as Alex Koppelman reports in Salon:

Reid has also resisted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's request to create an independent commission to investigate the interrogation tactics. In a recent statement, Reid said, "I think it would [sic] very unwise from my perspective to start having commissions, boards, tribunals until we find out what the facts are.”

Reid sponsored Bybee's judicial appointment, along with fellow Nevada Senator John Ensign. Ensign has been adamant in his support of Bybee, referring to the calls for the judge's ouster as "outrageous" and saying that "This was not torture. This is the thing we have to get away from, that this is somehow accepted that it was torture. The United States does not engage in torture. This was 'advanced interrogation techniques.'"

My question is of Harry Reid. Are you supporting Judge ByBee because he is a Mormon? I'm not against religion as I've said many times, but if Bybee was involved with any other religion, would Harry Reid have supported him? Will any reporters pose that question to Harry Reid? It just seems odd to me that Reid didn't condemn the memos he's credited with writing much more harshly and is resisting any form of inspection. This is very troubling.

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Senator Gregg suddenly rediscovers his conservative roots and decides that he wouldn't be a "good fit" in the Obama administration. Who knew so much could change in the matter of a week?

GREGG: the president has been incredibly gracious. And none of this decision is related at all and in any way to his willingness to include diversity of thought and initiative within his cabinet. Just the opposite. He has been a person who has reached out -- and aggressively reached out across the aisle. And I immensely respect that and I immensely respect him. I know he's going to be a strong and effective and good president.

But for me, I just realized, as these issues started to come at us, that -- and they started to crystallize, that it really wasn't a good fit. You know, I wouldn't be comfortable doing this and that it wouldn't be fair to him to be part of a team and not be able to be 100 percent on the team.

So with that in mind, I said I'm going to withdraw from this process. And I realize that to withdraw at this point is really unfair, in many ways. But to go forward and take this position and then find myself sitting there and not being able to do the job the way it should be done on behalf of the president -- 100 percent -- that would have been an even bigger mistake.

You also have to wonder if it might not have something to do with that Abramoff connection and how Tom Daschle had to stand down as well. Though it would have been funny to watch Republicans restrain themselves from attacking Obama by proxy through Gregg.

Full transcript below the fold:

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Sanjay Gupta vs. Michael Moore on the national health care system on Larry King Live, July 2007

WSJ Health Blog:

The Washington Post is reporting that Barack Obama has offered the job of surgeon general to Sanjay Gupta. He’s expected to accept the job, the Post says, citing two unnamed sources. Gupta declined the Post’s request for comment.

Besides his CNN gig, Gupta also appears on CBS and writes for Time Magazine. He was a White House Fellow and a special adviser to Hillary Clinton when she was First Lady. Oh, and he’s a neurosurgeon at Emory and associate chief of the neurosurgery service at Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital.

There’s a certain logic to picking a TV talking head to be surgeon general, because the surgeon general is largely a talking head. The top doc does oversee the 6,000-member Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service, but the real work of the job is traveling around the country, using the title as a bully pulpit to advance a public health agenda.

Of course, it would be nice if he used that bully pulpit to advocate for Universal Health Care, which would be the single best news for public health in this country, but it doesn't appear that Dr. Gupta thinks there's a problem. Paul Krugman agrees:

I don’t have a problem with Gupta’s qualifications. But I do remember his mugging of Michael Moore over Sicko. You don’t have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore “fudged his facts”, when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.

What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It’s sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less “serious” than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion.