Image Courtesy of State of Minnesota

​There's a fight over how we decide who can be a judge in Minnesota, and it's being fought out this week in front of the Supreme Court and on the floor of the legislature.

The state constitution says judges are supposed to be elected every six years, but in recent years, most supreme court justices have stepped down before their terms are up, allowing the governor to appoint their replacements.

On Tuesday attorney Jill Clark argued to the supreme court that justices have essentially conspired to keep the selection of their replacement in the hands of  the Governor and away from voters. Clark says the court should order an election for the replacement of Chief Justice Eric Magnuson, who is stepping down in June. Magnuson and the other justices appointed by Gov. Pawlenty recused themselves from the case.

Clark represents Greg Wersal, the Apple Valley lawyer who wants to run for Magnuson's seat on the Republican ticket. Wersal has long been a thorn in the side of the judicial establishment: when he last ran for a spot on the court, he sued the state's Board of Judicial Elections, claiming that the rules forbidding him to discuss political issues as a judicial candidate violated his First Amendment rights. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 2002 that Minnesota can't stop aspiring judges from taking political stands on the campaign trail. The ruling shocked the state's judicial establishment, which feared it would politicize the judiciary.

Meanwhile, DFL Rep. Steve Simon of St. Louis Park is pushing the other way. He's sponsoring a constitutional amendment that would let voters throw judges out, but would put the power to replace them squarely with the governor.

Photo by arturo ponciarelli

​When the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled last October that bong-water qualified a controlled substance, the rest of the country had a good laugh. Did the justices really think people were recreationally drinking and injecting pipe-sludge? What was next? Would the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms start regulating spittoon juice?

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The U.S. Senate today confirmed Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court. She is the first Hispanic and the third woman to serve on the court.

Our very own Sen. Al Franken presided over the vote today and announced the final 68-31 vote largely along party lines.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. will conduct the oath of office in the next few days, according to the New York Times.

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If there's one way to truly date yourself as a white male bigot, Pat Buchanan nailed that viewpoint straight on the head last night on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show. Maddow and Buchanan debated the merits of Sonia Sotomayor's U.S. Supreme Court nomination and Buchanan is convinced she is not qualified and only nominated because she is Latina. Oh, and she only got to the place she is in life by taking the spots of more-deserving white folks.

Buchanan says affirmative action is discrimination against white males, so when Maddow asked him why 108 out of the 110 Supreme Court justices have been white, here is what he said:

"I think white men were 100 percent of the people who wrote the constitution, 100 percent of the people who signed the Declaration of Independence, 100 percent of the people who died at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, probably close 100 percent of the people who died at Normandy. This has been a country basically built by white folks."

One of his other points: When he looks at a U.S. Hockey team that is all white males from Minnesota, he doesn't consider that discrimination. Just like he doesn't consider the nearly all-white U.S. Supreme Court. Totally the same thing.

This man is a winner. Check out the full video below. Minnesota mention comes around the 6:30 mark. Make sure to watch the whole video though to get the full picture of this man's idiocy.
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Public Radio sucks this week. The entire station has dedicated itself to the pontifications of senators, who between constitutional outcries, are trying to educate a Latino woman into how the "American people think." Maybe these senators, most of whom are white, upper class and excruciatingly boring (Franken), don't know how to talk to a Latina with an intellect bigger than all theirs combined. Then you have Amy Klobuchar.
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Finally, just as she goes down in flames, a reason to like Harriet Miers.

Today's Slate contains several interesting articles about Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, but my hands-down favorite is one by a former securities analyst that points out that at 60, Bush's longtime crony has nowhere near enough money for a secure retirement. Yep, that's right, consigliore to George W. Bush, the man who decreed that his (now squandered?) political capital would be spent privatizing Social Security.

When Miers left Dallas law firm Locke Liddell in 1999--and the $624,000 salary she earned as a managing partner--her IRA (then a firm profit-sharing account) contained between $500,000 and $1 million. Every year since, however, this account balance has mysteriously declined, so much so that it now totals the aforementioned $207,000...

...So, where has all that retirement money been going? Perhaps to another expense category depressingly familiar to most Americans: health-care costs. According to the Journal and AP, Miers is the primary caretaker for her 91-year-old mother, who has required in-home and nursing-home care since the mid-1990s. That a decade of her mom's health care could consume several hundred thousand dollars set aside for Miers' own retirement won't come as a surprise to anyone who has had (or paid for) a long-term illness in recent years.

I possess a uterus, and damn strong feelings about retaining control of it, but I daresay the spectre of abortion becoming illegal in this country is softened considerably by the thought of a justice who has some recent experience with what it's like to find that being middle class has diddly to do with financial security.

The emerging conventional wisdom about the Harriet Miers nomination--ratified today by the Big Three dailies (NYT, WP, LAT)--is that it's a safe compromise pick by a weakened Bush administration. Richard Stevenson of the NYT writes that in picking Miers, "President Bush revealed something about himself: that he has no appetite, at a time when he and his party are besieged by problems, for an all-out ideological fight." Dan Balz joins him in the echo chamber: "The nomination appeared designed primarily to avoid a major fight in the Senate and, said skeptics on the left and right, was made out of a position of political weakness, not strength."

What's so safe about Harriet Miers? You can be sure the Bush gang recognized her appointment would draw cries of cronyism, coming so soon on the heels of Katrina and the Mike Brown saga. It's likewise plain that they saw the conservative reaction coming: Dick Cheney got on the line with Rush Limbaugh just a few hours later as part of the Miers media rollout.

Meanwhile no one, the major pro-Dem bloggers included, is paying attention to what may prove to be the biggest elephant in the room: the looming conclusion of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's year-and-a-half-long investigation of the Plame/CIA leak. On Sunday, the WashPost's CIA love slave, Walter Pincus--who has been a steady and reliable source of stories damaging to Bush--reiterated that Fitzgerald is trying to establish a conspiracy involving Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, the president's and vice-president's right hand men. On ABC's This Week, George Stephanopoulos dropped this teaser: "A source close to this [investigation] told me this week that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were actually involved in some of these discussions."

Play this out. Discount what Stephanopoulos said if you like. We are still left with a multiplicity of grand jury leaks since this summer indicating that Fitzgerald is angling for criminal conspiracy charges against two of the most senior officials in the Bush White House. If this happens, it's sure to elicit legal challenges on grounds of executive privilege and--this being the Bush crew--national security. Against this backdrop, the president appoints to the Supreme Court his White House counsel and former personal lawyer, a woman repeatedly described in the past 24 hours as a "Bush loyalist" and "a pit bull in size 6 shoes." See anything remotely suspicious?