Can't have a crash without running the race.

Steve, I imagine your job would be much easier if you stopped expecting substance from our republican colleagues.

i think it is important to have these up-close-and-personal confirmation hearings so we can continue to have thrust in front of our noses the absolute stoopidity and lack of statesmanship -- even a moderate modicum of maturity -- residing in the united states senate clown car...

Extremely educational. Enough people got a look at Jeff Sessions to swing the vote Democratic in a few districts, and the next meeting of National Hispanic Republicans will probably be held in a library carrel.

We really do seem to learn more about the panel than about the nominee.

The hearings did exactly what they were intended to do: give senators a chance to express their views to a public that otherwise would not care.

As Lawrence O'Donnell pointed out on Hardball, these hearings were not conducted at all before the advent of television. Note that he did not say they were not this extensive, nor that they were not this theatrical; they were not conducted, period. These things are purely political theater.

Before television the Senators studied the judge's record, met in committee and discussed that record amongst themselves, and away we went.

This week was very educational. I learned that the National Republican Party has jumped the shark. They are perfectly content pissing off both women and Hispanics, the fastest growing minority group to court white males, a minority group that is in serious decline. Thank God Rush Limbaugh is a white male. If Boss Limbaugh was Hispanic the Republicans might be trying to appeal to them. Republicans are engaged in political suicide. I say let them. The dittohead demographic is small and shrinking.

As to Sotomayor, anybody who has spent 17 years on the bench is an open book. What we will get from her is exactly what we see in her body of work.

This is a salient point. It seems this process plays out for either side when they are trying to get their candidate through the nomination process.

The party out of power will generate as much FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) about the candidate as they can, forcing the candidate to say as little as possible. And the party in power will just praise the candidate and lob them softball questions (simply to eliminate the possibility of providing an avenue of attack for the opposition). Nothing is learned and we are essentially counting on a very few individuals (the ones who select the candidates) to make the choice for the nation. At its heart, it's undemocratic.... but the only alternative appears to lead to gridlock.

Regardless of the sad state of the Republican Party, we have some serious problems in this country and at some point we are all going to have to row together to get past them. Returning at least some sense of civility to the governing process will be a prerequisite for this. Unfortunately that may mean waiting for the Republican Party to hit rock bottom; forcing the grown-ups in the party to retake the reins.

I'm not persuaded that there's anything wrong with the judicial nominee confirmation process. The point is that the Constitution requires a nominee to pass a political hurdle-- And when there's nothing wrong with the nominee, you get a Kabuki show like the Sotomayor hearings, but so what? More to the point, the cases where there was a big problem with the nominee (e.g., Bork, the Nixon nominees) the political process worked the way it was supposed to. So, it ain't broke, as far as I can tell.

Steve, I don't think you've ever made a post that I have disagreed with more strongly than I do this one, both the premise and the conclusion.

Did 'we' learn nothing about Judge Sotomayor from them? "What you mean, 'we'"? If you mean people like you, who is totally engaged in the news and politics of the day, or your audience -- political junkies or they'd be doing something else -- or even me, who turns on the computer and clicks on PA before he's even fully awake -- wellmaybe that 'we' didn't learn much. (But for myself, seeing the firefighters made me understand more about the Ricci case and made me understand that it wasn't some white racist thundering against affirmative action but two firefighters who simply wanted the test they took months studying for to count -- despite the fact that I knew the judge made the right decision, legally. And I'd heard the line 'Judge Sotomayor saved baseball' -- and you know how muchg a fan I am -- but seeing David Cone made it much more real to me.)

But that isn't the 'we' who counts. We political junkies are a small part of the electorate -- something which I feel you are forgetting more than I would have predicted. Most people don't live and breathe poilitcs, and they get their info -- if we are lucky -- from the more intelligent parts of the MSM -- if they are unlucky they get it from Fox and Rush and Aravosis.

They aren't going to spend 15 mninutes a day on political blogs of any stripe, but they might actually tune in to something like this, or look for it on the web because it is -- to use the old tv term -- a 'spectacular.' And for them, seeing Judge -- soon Justice -- Sotomayor in person, to see her respond to the baiting, to see her resist the claims may and probably did mean more than all the writing explaining how this was unnecessary and how she wasn't anything like she was portrayed by the wingnuts. (And maybe some of them who -- from ignorance, not stupidity or racism -- tended to accept the worldview of the Foxes and the like might have seen the contrast between 'who she was supposed to be' and 'who she was.'

(And maybe people like me, proudly on the left -- if center-left -- will have fewer expectations of her changing things than we would have last week.)

Sure, the confirmation was almost certain. So what?

Steve, I have lived through years of people from both sides attacking the very credibility of the government -- to the point where I've wanted to do an all-caps, bold, italic comment just pointing out that the more we chop down the government, the more we assume every politician, every spokesman, every leader is a fool, a knave, or a 'corporate shill' , the more the 'reichwingers' -- in the true sense of the term -- win.

Things have gotten so bad that almost every poster on liberal blogs is attacking Obama as a sell-out, or weak, or whatever -- up to the Aravosis level -- because he can count, because he doesn't have dictatorial powers to 'change everything all at once' and sometimes just because he doesn't see our concens as the center of the Universe. (You have done little of this because you are truly a journalist with political opinions, but my fellow commenters have done a lot -- I hope I haven't -- and a lot of more politicized bloggers have. The result is that every statement coming from any politician is assumed to be 'suspicious' at best, any political opinion that challenges ours is attacked rather than answered -- true on both sides but 'we' are supposed to be better than 'them.')

So we need to see more of this type of event, be reminded that only some Republicans (and some Democrats) are 'walking suits with labels.' Maybe we learned more about Jeff Sessions than we ever would have, but we also learned more about a Sheldon Whitehouse, an Al Franken, even a Lindsay Graham, things we needed to know.

The result may have been (almost) certain -- though there have been meltdowns -- but the process was valuable -- to 'us' and more so to people who were -- from either side -- givving up on politics.

Which means they were giving up on Democracy

(Sorry this was incoherent in spots, vet visit kept me from revising it as much as I wanted.)

Let me finish that sentence...

The amazing thing, come to think of it, is that after four long days of testimony...

the party that has opposed every piece of civil rights legislation and voting rights legislation for 50 years, got a chance to lecture the world on racism.

My Wednesday morning NYT's headline?
Republicans Press Judge About Bias and Activism.

Worst. Kabuki Theater. Ever.

What's next? Is Palin going to deliver a lecture to scientists on Global Warming? Or will her expertize be unfairly confined to Op-ed pages?

To continue my rant:

Hilzoy said many important things in her blogging -- and it is sad, but not entirely surprising to see the few of you who celebrated the departure of someone whose mind works in nuances rather than in simple attack mode -- but she never wrote anything more important than this, and I just want to repeat it again:

"As I said before, one of the things that led me to start blogging in the first place was the fact that I thought the country had gone crazy, and one of the things that particularly bothered me was the sheer level of invective and hatred that people seemed to feel comfortable directing at one another. I hated this, not just in itself, but because I thought: this harms us all.

A democracy is essentially about determining the course of our nation together. To do that, it helps a lot to have a good citizenry. A good citizenry is informed, serious about things that are worth taking seriously, and not liable to be led off course by demagogues. (Everyone doesn't have to be like this, but you need a critical mass of people who are.) But I've always thought that a good citizenry is also composed of people who assume, until proven wrong, that many of the people who disagree with them are acting in good faith.

This matters for policy: you're unlikely to choose sound policies if you assume that anyone who disagrees with you is a depraved, corrupt imbecile. It's hard to learn anything from people you have completely written off. But it's also corrosive to any kind of community or dialogue to assume the worst about large numbers of people you've never met. It makes you less willing to try to take their problems seriously, and to try to figure out how they might be solved, or to try to understand what's driving them.

I hate it when people do this to me. I never wanted to do it to them."

That says it all -- I hope most of you were listening.

I have to agree with posters who said that we learned a lot from the confirmation hearings, just not what we were "supposed" to learn.

Without the hearings, it would have been easier for wingers like Pat Buchanan to successfully cast their aspersions against Sotomayor, leaving lingering suspicions that she is simply an "affirmative action" candidate no more qualified than the notorious Harriet Meyers.

However, even a casual observer of the hearings was able to see the Republican keystone cops in operation--and watch Sotomayor's handling of them. I think the hearings helped to reveal a lot about a (hopefully dying) strain of virulent racism and sexism in our country and the judge's hard road to success.

I dunno. Even thought I wasn't able to watch it all, I found out a lot about Sotomayor. That she is able to keep her cool under fire, even when asked ridiculous and baited questions. That she has a sense of humor and used it well. That her family is obviously close, her mother and brother there the whole time, obviously very proud of her.

I also found out a lot about the senators asking the questions, particularly the Repubs, and esp Sessions and his racist transparency. While at the other end of spectrum was the whip-smart Dem, Sheldon Whitehouse.

I also enjoyed the non-scripted moments: Pat Leahy taking photos of Sotomayor and others from various points in the room (incl his chair) while proceedings were in recess. Admitting that had he not gone into politics, he would have been a photographer. That Al Franken is serious, but has not given up his sense of humor, his common man approach, to become a senator.

There was a very funny moment on Wednesday. After returning after a break, Leahy's and Session's microphones were not working. A loud voice chimes "mine works" (from the lowest point in the Democratic totem pole, it's Franken). Then Sen. Al offers to "trade places" with Leahy, to much laughter. Leahy then wandered down and sat in Franken's chair while Franken brought Leahy's name plate and placed it in front of him. I guess Sen. Al sat in Leahy's chair briefly (he was out of camera shot), but said how uncomfortable he was and got up right away and started to walk back to his place, as Leahy was still using Franken's chair/mic. Sessions even got into the humor saying about Franken "that's the fastest rise ever in the Senate".

Anyway, those were some of my perceptions.

Thank you Prup, aka Jim Benton. My thoughts exactly.
However, after eight year of insults and baiting and damage to our way of life (not to say we don't need some change, just not that change), I have to admit to an irrational and automatic rejection of all things 'r'. Can't even type the name. They certainly are neither grand, nor a party, although they do seem to be old.
I keep waiting for an 'r' to say something, anything that I may disagree with, but find constructive.
And I loved Sotomayor, she ran rings around all of them. I can't think of any off the top of my head, but there were some zingers that just seemed to go over their heads. It was, like, whoa.
I think she will give the old fogies (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia and Kennedy) a run for their money.

Thank God Rush Limbaugh is a white male. If Boss Limbaugh was Hispanic [...] -- Ron Byers, @10:43

And, as we say in Polish, "if grandma had wheels instead of legs, she'd have been a bicycle" :) Had Limbaugh not been a white male whale, his entire philosophy would have been different and, following from that, his entire "output".