Gender Preferences Indeed

Everyone is thinking about who might be or should be the next Supreme Court Justice, and some folks are decrying the looming discrimination facing white male candidates.

Only, Adam Serwer looked it up and the numbers are a bit staggering...

There have been 110 Justices on the Supreme Court. Of those, two have been women, and two have been black. The other 106 have been white men.

I'm gonna let Ezra Klein bring it home:

And though few would publicly argue that the Court has a duty to be liberal or conservative (or stacked with young appointees who have very low cholesterol), the institution does have to be considered legitimate. It is responsible for a country that's 51 percent female and whose law graduates are 48 percent female. Its highest profile cases revolve exclusively around things that happen in a woman's body. If we were aware of those facts and were stocking the Court from scratch, there is no doubt that we would strive for more gender balance.

Viewed from that perspective, the situation clarifies considerably. The reason white men are disadvantaged in this nomination process is pretty simple: They are not, right now, what the Court needs. They are not the best candidates for the job.

Isn't It Ironic...

No. not rain on your wedding day (that's just pretty crummy, but not very ironic). On the other hand those flashy new laptop hunter commercials from Microsoft appear likely to have been made on Macs (at least everyone who works at the ad agency behind the spots uses a Mac, you do the math).

What The President Had For Lunch

President Obama was joined by Vice President Biden for lunch at Ray's Hell Burger (if you don't know, you should) and what seemed like most of the White House press corps...



And yes this is news.

Have A Smart Phone?

(none of the images returned in a google search for smartphones contained the IPhone, interesting no?)

Help Wired test out national 3G network speeds. For the next week Wired is asking folks to run an app on their smart phones which will test the 3G network's capabilities in their location and then make the data available on a big old map, you also get to rate your satisfaction with your carrier.

At the end of the week Wired will report back with the results.

Full details and instructions are up at the Gadget Lab.

Quote For The Current Political Landscape

At the end of piece last week tangentially related to President Obama's first 100 days in office but more about how the Democratic Party came through the primary battles and how the Republican party is, not so slowly, flushing itself down the tubes; Salon's Joan Walsh nailed today's political landscape and how it's viewed...

Sadly, the only people who are reliably missing how marginal the Republican party has become are the leading lights of the mainstream media. They report on John Boehner and McCain, Newt Gingrich and Palin, Grover Norquist and Michele Bachmann, as if they matter and make sense to most Americans. When will media elites turn to the real story: A modern American party is committing slow suicide, because it consciously chose a path of elitism and exclusivity, while the Democrats fought a brutal battle, but came back together around the values of inclusion and equity that the political success of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton – and Michelle Obama – represent. No doubt Sojourner Truth is smiling.

So Long Souter

The news of the day is without a doubt the story that Supreme Court Justice David Souter is planning on retiring at the end of the Court's current term. While Justice Souter has not technically made a public announcement as of yet, NPR broke the story last night and now it's everywhere.

Speculation is also quickly piling up as to who President Obama will appoint to fill Souter's seat.

I'm anxiously awaiting Jeffery Toobin's take on the situation, he offered a quick run down of candidates in February when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg announced her cancer diagnosis, and although her retirement is no longer thought to be imminent the list may well be the same, and Toobin said to look for a non-judge appointee as the current Court is the only one to be made up entirely of former judges.

I'll be keeping an eye on The New Yorker's News Desk today.

Mr. Kelly Will Take You To School Now

Gene Kelly was pretty much the man...



Color me impressed.

(via Kottke)