AddieStan

With last night's news of the pending departure of Justice David Souter from the bench, all bets seem to be placed on a female replacement. The one woman on the Court today, the venerable Ruth Bader Ginsburg , is elderly and suffering from colon cancer. NPR's Nina Totenberg this morning ran through a list of possible contenders: Possible nominees who have been mentioned as being on a theoretical short list include Elena Kagan , the current solicitor general who represents the government before the Supreme Court; Sonia Sotomayor , a Hispanic judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; and Diane Wood , a federal judge in Chicago who taught at the University of Chicago at the same time future President Barack Obama was teaching constitutional law there. UPDATE: Garance Franke-Ruta has more on this; women's group pushing hard.

Bill Donohue , perhaps your blogstress's favorite bigot, has a piece at Human Events Online in which he rehashes his charge of anti-Catholicism against your écrivaine for having dared to note, in 2005, that George W. Bush 's nomination of the very Catholic John Roberts to the top spot on the high court was a smooth move. Her point was that Roberts' religion would give the right cover when the liberals on the Judiciary Committee, before which he would appear for his confirmation hearing, pushed him for his views on abortion. "Anti-Catholic!" they would cry, of anyone who dared to challenge Roberts views on Roe v. Wade . Grouping your cyberscribe among the likes of the besotted Christopher Hitchens, the probing Nina Totenberg and the saintly E.J. Dionne, he then said that none of them could surpass your blogstress in one critical area: When John Roberts was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, his Catholicism became an issue with pundits like NPR’s Nina Totenb...

NASHVILLE, TENN.—-The discipline was dazzling--everybody on the same page. The usual rhetoric was deployed--the railing against "activist judges," waxings on the "originial intent" of the Constitution’s framers; abortion defined as baby-killing; the horror of "homosexual sodomy." It was a typical assemblage of speakers for a right-wing confab: 10 men, 2 women, all but one of them white. As usual, a couple of right-wing Catholics made common cause with right-wing Protestant evangelicals. Yet, for all that, this second incarnation of the Family Research Council’s second "Justice Sunday" simulcast fell a bit flat. Perhaps it was the lack of zealous enthusiasm for the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court, most probably due to the revelation that, while in private practice, Judge Roberts did pro bono work on behalf of gay rights activists who ultimately prevailed in overturning an anti-gay Colorado statute passed through referendum, a...