The Supreme Court’s overturning of lower court judges, including Sonia Sotomayor, has hurt the nominee’s support for confirmation amongst the general public. That’s what a new poll from Rasmussen Reports released today shows.

A heavily publicized U.S. Supreme Court reversal of an appeals court ruling by Judge Sonia Sotomayor has at least temporarily diminished public support for President Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey, conducted on the two nights following the Supreme Court decision, finds that 37% now believe Sotomayor should be confirmed while 39% disagree.

Two weeks ago, the numbers were much brighter for the nominee. At that time, 42% favored confirmation, and 34% were opposed.

Sotomayor has a poor image with both men and women, with both demographics having more people disapproving of her than approving. Even most income brackets find majorities disapproving of her as a court nominee.

Will this hurt her chance of confirmation? I doubt it. Democrats are more interested in appeasing their special interests and repaying victim groups than putting up someone the American public approves of. She’ll still get confirmed, but it may hurt both the Obama Administation and Congressional Democrats politically.

The Minnesotan Supreme Court has ruled that Al Franken is the new junior senator from Minnesota, essentially ending a challenge by former Senator Norm Coleman. It’s official: The crude clown is a senator.

It is U.S. Sen. Al Franken.

The Minnesota Supreme Court today decided that Franken, a Democrat, won the highest number of votes in last year’s U.S. Senate race and deserves a signed election certificate.

The court said that Republican Norm Coleman didn’t prove that a lower court made mistakes requiring a rehearing of the case. Coleman had asked the court to order thousands of rejected absentee ballots counted. He had hoped the counting would allow him to overcome Franken’s 312-vote lead.

The ruling for Franken didn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone, though what Coleman does next is anyone’s guess. He could simply concede the election to the clown, or he could push his case into the federal courts and all the way up the ladder. Ed Morrissey believes that Coleman’s equal-protection argument would fare better there, and I agree.

By the way, the Minnesota Post is reporting that the court didn’t order the certification of the results. That would give Governor Tim Pawlenty an opportunity to hold off until Coleman challenges in the decision in the federal courts.

More: Michelle Malkin, Sister Toldjah.

The United States Supreme Court has overturned a decision made by Obama nominee Sonia Sotomayor during her time as an appeals court judge.

The Supreme Court has ruled that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.

The majority opinion was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, with Antonin Scalia writing a concurrence. Kennedy finds that the failure to establish that the defendents met the requirements to discard the test amounts to a violation of  Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and that the lower court — including Sotomayor — improperly applied the Equal Protection Clause.

We conclude that race-based action like the City’s in thiscase is impermissible under Title VII unless the employer can demonstrate a strong basis in evidence that, had it not taken the action, it would have been liable under the disparate-impact statute. The respondents, we further determine, cannot meet that threshold standard. As a result, the City’s action in discarding the tests was a violation of Title VII. In light of our ruling under thestatutes, we need not reach the question whether respon-dents’ actions may have violated the Equal Protection Clause. …

In other words, there is no evidence —let alone the required strong basis in evidence—that the tests were flawed because they were not job-related or because other, equally valid and less discriminatory tests were available to the City. Fear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer’s reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions. The City’s discarding the test results was impermissible under Title VII, and summary judgment is appropriate for petitioners on their disparate-treatment claim.

Justice Samuel Alito also wrote a concurrence, noting that the dissenters forgot to mention something:

I join the Court’s opinion in full. I write separately only because the dissent, while claiming that “[t]he Court’srecitation of the facts leaves out important parts of the story,” post, at 2 (opinion of GINSBURG, J.), provides an incomplete description of the events that led to New Haven’s decision to reject the results of its exam. The dissent’s omissions are important because, when all of the evidence in the record is taken into account, it is clear that, even if the legal analysis in Parts II and III–A of the dissent were accepted, affirmance of the decision below is untenable.

The overturn is really bad imagery for Congressional Democrats and the Obama White House. Up to this point they’ve been selling Sotomayor as one of the brightest minds in our nation. Now the very court she’s been appointed to is overruling her previous decisions, finding she inappropriately applied the Equal Protection Clause? Not the best press you can get.

The wife of Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich) has plead guilty to conspiring to commit bribery and faces five years in prison for the crime.

U.S. District Judge Avern Cohn said, “The defendant now stands convicted.”…

She has long been under suspicion in the Synagro bribery probe, not least because she had been a vocal opponent of the contract before suddenly switching her sentiments. She became the deciding voice in the city council’s 5-4 vote to approve the sludge-hauling deal in November 2007…

The federal plea document released today cites two instances in late 2007, in the days surrounding the approval of the now-infamous Synagro Technologies sludge-hauling contract, when Conyers accepted cash bribes from a Synagro consultant.

What’s the problem? Er, judges aren’t supposed to have anyone’s back. They’re supposed to interpret the Constitution regardless of whether the outcome benefits someone they happen to like. I don’t care if you’re a strict interpreter or activist, a judge having someone’s back from the outset is a problem.

“I think what Biden said was foolish,” said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University who is a prominent legal ethicist. “She’s not there to ‘have their back.’ She’s there to interpret the law as she sees fit. . .

“It’ll be embarrassing to her when she learns of it,” Gillers said. “Biden crosses the line when he starts representing to interest groups that she would be voting in their favor.”…

The president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, John Wesley Hall, complained that Biden’s comment made it sound like she would overlook police misconduct.

“To say that a judge ‘has your back’ is an activist judge,” Hall said. “They’re raising doubts for everybody who’s concerned about the Bill of Rights. . . .‘She’s got your back’ is just the worst possible thing he could have said.”

But another legal ethics specialist, Stephen Lubet of Northwestern, said he was not troubled by Biden’s remarks. “If Judge Sotomayor had said that, perhaps [it would be problematic], but the fact that her supporters think she’s more disposed toward law enforcement does not suggest bias. Everybody’s in favor of law enforcement, no one’s opposed to law enforcement,” Lubet said. “This lacks the sort of specificity that would suggest bias.”

Uh huh. Except that one would assume that Vice President Biden knows her ideology better than most, so he might just have some credibility on where she stands from the outset. Standing on the side of cops isn’t exactly the worst direction in which to be biased, but that doesn’t really matter. A Supreme Court justice shouldn’t be on anyone’s side from the get-go.

Head over to Hot Air for the video. Joe Biden is just the gift that keeps on giving.

The United States Supreme Court has granted a stay of the approval by the Second Circuit of the Fiat/Chrysler deal. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is reportedly responsible for putting the breaks on the deal.

The lower court’s approval of the deal will be stayed to give the court time to consider whether to hear an appeal on the merits. A group of pension funds had sued to keep the deal from going through, alleging that the Treasury Department’s use of TARP funds to partially finance the deal was improper.

I’m sure we’ll be getting more information soon, so be sure to check back.

Update: More details from BBC News:

Three Indiana state pension and construction funds filed papers at the court on Sunday calling for the sale to be halted so they can pursue an appeal.

The Obama administration, which strongly backed the sale, had called on the court to reject the request.

The court says that the Chrysler sale is “stayed pending further order”.

Update X2: More from the AP wire, via Hot Air.

Chrysler has said a delay could scuttle the deal.

A federal appeals court in New York had earlier approved the sale, but gave opponents until 4 p.m. EDT Monday to try to get the Supreme Court to intervene.

Ginsburg issued her order just before 4 p.m., when Chrysler would have been free to complete the sale of most of its assets to Fiat.

How bad is the intervention when the liberal Ginsburg opposes the deal?

The hope is that the ankle, belonging to a wise latina, will heal faster than that of a white male. You know, because it’s had richer life experiences and can sympathize with the fracture.

WASHINGTON (AP) – The White House says Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has broken her ankle after an airport stumble in New York City.

Sotomayor fractured her right ankle Monday morning at New York’s LaGuardia Airport before boarding a shuttle to Washington for an afternoon of meetings with senators.

She’ll keep her six appointments on Capitol Hill Monday despite the injury, which has her walking with crutches, the White House said.

That should surprise no one. Remember, she’s wanted an appointment to the “North American Court” since her days in college. If she wants to fulfill her dream, she’ll have to win over the approval of a “North American Congress” whose support is less of a guarantee than before. Gotta keep those appointments.

American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee have been sentenced to 12 years in a North Korean prison camp after the kangaroo Central Court confirmed them as “grave threats” against the dictatorial regime. They were convicted of “hostile acts” and illegal entry into the communist country.

They were arrested in March after allegedly crossing into North Korea from China.

The trial comes amid growing tensions over North Korea’s nuclear programme which is prompting US-led sanctions.

“The trial confirmed the grave crime they (the reporters) committed against the Korean nation and their illegal border crossing as they had already been indicted and sentenced each of them to 12 years of reform through labour,” state-run KCNA news agency said in a brief report.

The news agency gave no further details.

No, it wouldn’t now, would it. Reports have actually indicated that Lee and Ling were captured while on Chinese soil, though Pynongyang insists that the reporters for Current TV had illegally entered the country. The DPRK court has mastered Orwellian Rhetoric 101:

It said the court, after a five-day trial, “sentenced each of them to 12 years of reform through labour”.

Exactly what, if anything, the United States will do in response to the severe sentence for a non-existant crime isn’t clear. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called the charges baseless, but so far the response has been restricted to rhetoric only.

Even lawyers with the Department of Justice who believed that torture techniques were the wrong answer agreed that the techniques themselves were legal. That’s according to a report in the New York Times today, which concentrates on the bitter internal debate within the DOJ back in 2005:

Previously undisclosed Justice Department e-mail messages, interviews and newly declassified documents show that some of the lawyers, including James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general who argued repeatedly that the United States would regret using harsh methods, went along with a 2005 legal opinion asserting that the techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency were lawful.

That opinion, giving the green light for the C.I.A. to use all 13 methods in interrogating terrorism suspects, including waterboarding and up to 180 hours of sleep deprivation, “was ready to go out and I concurred,” Mr. Comey wrote to a colleague in an April 27, 2005, e-mail message obtained by The New York Times…

The e-mail messages are now in the hands of investigators at the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which is preparing a report expected to be released this summer on the Bush administration lawyers who approved waterboarding and other harsh methods. The inquiry, under way for nearly five years, will be the Justice Department’s fullest public account of its role in the interrogation program, which President Obama has ended.

In years of bitter public debate, the department has sometimes seemed like a black-and-white moral battleground over torture. The main authors of memorandums authorizing the methods — John C. Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Steven G. Bradbury — have been widely pilloried as facilitators of torture.

Others, including Mr. Comey, Jack Goldsmith and Daniel Levin, have largely escaped criticism because they raised questions about interrogation and the law.

But a closer examination shows a more subtle picture. None of the Justice Department lawyers who reviewed the interrogation question argued that the methods were clearly illegal.

So even those who had moral issues with the techniques or believed that they’d come back to bite us in the ass believed that they were still legal methods. As that last highlighted bit exhibits, none of the lawyers argued that the techniques were clearly illegal. Not one.

The lawyers had to interpret a 1994 antitorture law written largely with despotic foreign regimes in mind, but used starting in 2002, in effect, as a set of guidelines for American interrogators. The law defined torture as treatment “specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” By that standard, a succession of Justice Department lawyers concluded that the C.I.A.’s methods did not constitute torture.

The only issues that provoked debate were waterboarding, which Mr. Goldsmith questioned, and some combinations of multiple techniques, which Mr. Comey resisted.

Some outside experts agree that the language of the 1994 law is strikingly narrow. “There’s no doubt whatsoever that a great deal of coercive treatment that most people would call torture is not prohibited by the federal antitorture statute,” said Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings Institution scholar who has studied interrogation policy.

Whether or not we should torture from a moral standpoint can be debated, though a majority of Americans now believe that torture methods can be morally justified in at least some circumstances. But it would appear that none of the Department of Justice lawyers — supporters or opponents of the methods — disputed the legality of the EITs.

Via HAH.

Let he/she who hasn’t misspoken the same idea many times over a multi-year period cast the first stone. And by the way, that means she expressed the same idea more often than in just 2001 and 1994. Quite a bit more often.

A draft version of a October 2003 speech Sotomayor delivered at Seton Hall University stated, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion.” That is identical to her October 2001 remarks at the University of California, Berkeley that have become the subject of intense criticism by Republican senators and prompted conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh to label her “racist.”

In addition, Sotomayor delivered a series of earlier speeches in which she said “a wise woman” would reach a better decision. She delivered the first of those speeches in Puerto Rico in 1994 and then before the Women’s Bar Association of the State of New York in April 1999.

The summary descriptions of speeches Sotomayor provided indicated she delivered remarks similar to the 1994 speech on three other occasions in 1999 and 2000 during two addresses at Yale and one at the City University of New York School of Law.

As Allahpundit says, it would be nice to be capable of expressing more sympathy for her side of the argument. But, as white males, we’re inherently handicapped. So no luck there.

I think this is getting far too much attention for the White House to continue ignoring the fact that only a complete moron (eg. Joe Biden) could repeatedly “misspeak” while expressing the same idea over the span of several years. I for one look forward to the latest spin.