The Enlightened Despot

What with never writing anything here and all, I haven’t posted this yet, though it’s a few weeks old now. But it is glorious, and deserves recognition.

• How about that? An enthusiastic reception and the most flattering picture I’ve seen of her from the New York Post. Hometown love trumps ideology. Incidentally, you can count on seeing a headline reading ‘SOTOMAJORITY’ the first time she writes an important majority opinion. It’s not quite as obvious in advance as the ‘Exit Sandman‘ headline we’ll see in 2010, but it’s close.
• The controversy over Sotomayor’s ‘wise Latina’ comments doesn’t, I think, have legs. It really is superficially offensive, pace the counter-outrage on the left, and I’m still not wild about it in context. At the very least, she could have been more careful with her words. But it’s pretty clear that she was referring to judgement on issues concerning women and minorities. She didn’t mean that a wise Latina will just be a better judge than a white man in general, though that is what she said. She will no doubt get grilled about this, but it won’t change the fact that she is a shoo-in.
• All the griping about identity politics and affirmative action is ugly. It’s all well and good to argue against preferential treatment and lowered standards on the basis of race as a general practice, but if you really think Sotomayor is a mediocre talent who got the nod because she is hispanic, then clearly the part to focus on is that she is a mediocre talent. Your empirical evidence for this fact is what lead you to conclude that racial preferences are afoot, right? The theory about Obama’s motivations is really just a side show, not particularly germane to the discussion. Of course, it’s a lot easier to demonstrate that someone is a Latina than that she is incompetent. But laziness is no defense for racism.
• You will hear a lot about how Sotomayor’s decisions are overturned at a high rate. Nate Silver points out that this is based on a very small sample, and that the sample actually shows the opposite. So you can put that in the straightforward lie file. The Volokh Conspiracy tries to plug Sotomayor into the results of a more rigorous statistical study, which shows her to be more or less in the middle of the pack. The methodology is murky at best, though. I doubt that there is any statistical shortcut here - if you want to figure out how smart and capable a judge is, you just have to read some of her opinions. Alternatively, you could acknowledge that she will be confirmed, for good or ill, and change the channel.

Never let it be said that the folks over at the New York Post aren’t fearless journalists:

Making fun of mafia figures for losing their homes is pretty bold. I glanced at the covers of the Times and the Journal this morning, and neither of those big shot publications had the courage to go there. Meanwhile, those children are some amazing specimens. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them before here.

Well played, Post. Well played.

I love the smell of populism in the morning.

In related news, Jonah Goldberg is blegging for advice on tax shelters.

This is why I hate leaving New York. You go away for a few days to inaugurate someone, and you run the risk of missing brilliant Post front pages about killing off geese.

Over the long weekend of Despot inactivity, the New York Post Awesomeness Watch missed a few gems. These aren’t hot of the presses, but our readers deserve to see them:

Goodness. Shockingly, their Blago cover today was nothing to write home about. Here’s hoping they step it up tomorrow.

Usually the New York Post Awesomeness watch highlights a front page that is particularly outrageous, hilarious, or both. This is just a great picture.

Still, he’s been president-elect for days now; time to take off the kid gloves and throw some biting headlines on those pics.

What’s good in a bailout is good in foreign policy; we should have demanded an equity stake in Iraq.

The Post took an unusually soothing tack this morning in the wake of another rough day for the Dow:

Wise words, NYP. No need to panic:

Keep on keepin’ it real, New York Post.

Capitalizing on the impression that he’s the right guy to steer the ship in a financial meltdown, Michael Bloomberg is likely to try to remove rules preventing him from running for a third term. I’m with Yglesias in yawning about this. Term limits are fundamentally undemocratic. Of course, that’s not enough to say that they’re a bad idea. All democracies have plenty of provisions that prevent 51% of the people from getting what they want in a wide range of circumstances. Some of these provisions are obviously a good idea, eg the Constitution. Others, I’m not so happy about, notably unchecked legislative power for the Supreme Court.

Like Yglesias, I don’t have particularly strong feelings about which camp term limits fall in, but I think the default position should always be to oppose anything comes between the voter and what he wants - unless we’re going to go all out and establish an enlightened despotism, of which I am of course in favor, provided we choose the right despot. So until someone gives me a compelling argument for why term limits are necessary, I’m inclined to think we shold scrap them.