Midday Open Thread

• The NYT has a long article on Sonia Sotomayor's "temperament." At TalkLeft, BTD finds the most salient part of the article:

  Judge Guido Calabresi, a former dean of Yale Law School who taught Ms. Sotomayor there and now sits with her on the Second Circuit, said complaints that she had been unduly caustic have no basis. For a time, Judge Calabresi said, he kept track of the questions posed by Judge Sotomayor and other members of the court. “Her behavior was identical,” he concluded. “Some lawyers just don’t like to be questioned by a woman,” he added. “It was sexist, plain and simple.”

  Linguistics professor Deborah Tannen has an interesting take on this topic.

• Out of curiosity, I did a Nexis search last night to see how the famously abrasive and cranky Scalia was described in articles during his confirmation process. Turns out he was "gregarious," "aggressive," "pointed," but never "unduly caustic." Go figure.
• If you're a Latina judge making over $200,000 a year, the AP says you're wealthy. Refreshingly, Politico gets this one right.
• Is Karl Rove constitutionally capable of not lying?
• Finally, Sotomayor's public support continues to look strong.
• As Steve Benen notes, "Congressional cowardice has not gone unnoticed on the international stage. It's a real problem." Why should Europe knock themselves out to clean up America's mess--if American politicians are going to play the game of being afraid of taking Guanatanamo prisoners, why should Eurpoean politicians be willing to take that on?
• Think Progress reports "[t]his Sunday, the front group Conservatives for Patients’ Rights will be airing a 30-minute documentary with “horror stories” aimed at chipping away public support for reforming our health care system." They've produced this video exposing Rick Scott, the leader and financier of CPR.

• Another edition of "What digby says," on torture and the evidence of it:

  The administration needs to realize that it can't avoid this issue even if it wants to and it's not useful to try to finesse it or kick the issue down the road. There are simply too many lies under the bridge --- it's impossible to take the government at its word. If sexual assaults beyond those which we already know about and saw evidence of (and which were prosecuted) happened, then it will come out. The only question is whether it will be a drip, drip, drip of toxic revelations and speculations that will continue to poison this country and its relationship to the world or whether it will be an official, transparent accounting of what happened. Either way, there's no running away from it.