Veeery rich

Obama on his SCOTUS nominee:

In the interim, Obama said he expects "rigorous evaluation" of his nominee but added: "What I hope is that we can avoid the political posturing and ideological brinksmanship that has bogged down this process, and Congress, in the past."

He derided "some in Washington who are attempting to draw old battle lines and playing the usual political games, pulling a few comments out of context to paint a distorted picture of Judge Sotomayor's record."

Huh. Remember during the Roberts and Alito nominations when Obama criticized fellow Dems for 'political posturing and ideological brinkmanship'? Or when he spoke out about 'playing the usual political games' and 'pulling a few comments out of context' in order to distort a judge's record. Nope, I don't either. I'm sure we can expect pointed questions on the change of behavior from tough and aggressive journalists [cough].
I'm sure that absent more skeletons from Sotomayer's closet, she'll be confirmed in time for the next session. And she may very well be a fine Justice, if one that I'll often disagree with. Her nomination has become a good time for conservatives to argue against the joyful use of identity politics from the judiciary. I'm hopeful that some lesson will have been learned here. We want our judges to be as impartial as possible.
Shouldn't everyone?

Follow up on the Federalism Amendments

Randy Barnett has sharpened his Amendment call into something more similar to what I was suggesting, ten Amendments each designed to restructure our government. The full list is here. It all looks pretty good (though I'd like to see more analysis).