Here's the text directly preceding the sentence that's got everyone all riled up:

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases.

--This to me is the softening-up that leads to her more provocative statement. Even here there is subtle racism.. 'I know better because I belong to group X, which is imbued with mysterious powers of wisdom and decisionmaking'. She puts up a strawman: that people of different group-ID will tend to come to *different* decisions, on average, does not imply that those decisions will be *better*, on average, by any yardstick other than the subjective perceptions of one group or the other. And those yardsticks are the ones that are least accurate or reliable, so forget them :P.

No thanks, lady. I grant that wisdom is a fundamentally subjective quantity. It is my opinion that any system of comparison that leads to the declaration that one ethnic/gender/whatever group is inherently superior to the other, without directly comparing all/nearly all specific individuals of that group is hopelessly racist. Also very probably wrong.

I wonder how many people have read the original speech? There's a link to it my sig, also:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/us/politics/15judge.text.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1

I've read the speech. Within the context of it, taking into account all she wrote, I personally interpret her statement as a racist one. It makes blanket generalizations about the quality of one group over another. That's about all there is to it, IMO.

Does that mean she is fundamentally biased/racist? No. One data point does not a pattern make. I truly have no idea, as I haven't studied her history and don't intend to. But all this partisanization of her statements, on the record, is silly. Overt racism is not hard to identify. There it is.

Even a stopped clock (Rush) is right twice a day.

Did they actually resign? Kabuki theater? Also, the article is not publicly accessible, I have to subscribe to read it.

"Conservative" flaps jaws about things he does not understand and which are not his business. World yawns. Not news.

I disagree. The car you drive, the bicycle you ride, your underwear, your dog food, your vegetables, the cheese on your sandwich.. every bit of it was touched by knowledge workers somewhere along the way, making things more efficient, driving prices down, etc. There'd be no way to have seven billion people with the standard of living we have now without *massive* numbers of information workers. However, the cost of the type of labor has come down because the supply has come up. Just as the cost of Walmart labor has come down, because the supply is more plentiful. The supply of all skilled labor is coming up due to transmission costs falling. The price of unskilled labor (Walmart) always has been and continues to be dirt cheap.. even cheaper now!

I don't argue with Reich's theory so much as its applicability in the current circumstances. It's a great way of describing the world as one boat we're all in. On the other hand, if some of us want our corner to be nicer than average (we do), and we're prepared to play rough for it (we are), we ought to at least do it right.

to get into a few choice oil stocks. I'm not telling which, though :]. Best thou hurry.