Bits

Don't have the focus for my usual penetrating, incisive post today, but I keep running across things:

Via Booman, this (quoting Byron York):

The accusations of racism seem to come from a single sentence in the piece: "But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are." I wrote my post because of the striking numbers in the New York Times poll. Those numbers raise a question: What if a president were wildly popular with one group, and only middlingly popular with another group and yet was often portrayed as being hugely popular with the whole group?

Aside from the Alice-in-Wonderland quality of the whole statement, it's obvious that York doesn't get why he is being called a racist: he is so blind to it, in fact, that he doesn't see how nonsensical his original statement was. I'm not going to harp on the "racist" aspect of it, but the semantics: I guess my point is, looking at the highlighted text, this is empty noise: if the numbers are reporting a certain degree of popularity, then that's the degree of popularity, by definition.

Baca!

Orrin Hatch (R-Guantanamo) is against empathy.

Hatch found fault with a 2005 floor statement by then-Senator Obama on the requisite qualities of a Supreme Court justice. Obama said that a justice's "deepest values, one's core concerns, one's broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one's empathy" come into play in deciding some cases.

"The real debate is about whether judges may decide cases based on empathy at all, not the groups for which they have empathy," Hatch wrote.

It gets worse:

Hatch raised concerns initially that Obama was using “buzz words” for a liberal activist justice by suggesting he wanted someone who had “empathy” for the country’s problems. But Obama told Hatch “that was not what he meant, and I take him at his word ... and that he assured me that he would not be picking a radical or an extremist for the court that he was very pragmatic in his approach and that he would pick somebody who would abide by the rule of law.”

First off, like Hatch or any other Republican has any concept at all of the rule of law. Right. Second, "empathy" translates to "extremism." WTF?

I seem to remember hearing that the ideal was justice with mercy.

In spite of pressure to drop the matter, Spanish Judge Garzon has decided to pursue a war crimes invstigation against Bush administration officials:

In a ruling in Madrid today, Judge Baltasar Garzón has announced that an inquiry into the Bush administration's torture policy makers now will proceed into a formal criminal investigation. The ruling came as a jolt following the recommendation of Spanish Attorney General Cándido Conde-Pumpido against proceeding with a criminal inquiry, reported in The Daily Beast on April 16.

Good. At least someone's doing what needs to be done.