Channing Kennedy

RaceWire Allies Liveblogging Sotomayor Hearings [VIDEO]

Hoo boy! Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings kicked off this morning, and like RaceWire’s Debayani Kar said earlier, this thing is going to be lousy with clumsy conservative race and gender politics. Not to mention a foregone conclusion in favor of confirmation, according to Republican Sotomayor naysayer Lindsey Graham’s opening statements.

RaceWire will be blogging about, but not liveblogging about, the coming week of proceedings. Quite a few of our allies in the blogosphere are providing minute-by-minute commentary, however. Here’s who we’re watching.

SCOTUSBlog, the most delightfuly nerdy of Supreme Court blogs — and I can’t tell if it’s this blog or just reality that has a liberal bias — is liveblogging here, with links to prepared statement transcripts as they become relevant.

Old favorite Talking Points Memo has called in appellate lawyer Andrew Pincus, who frequently argues cases before the Supreme Court, to liveblog here.

Adam Serwer, aka dnA from Jack and Jill Politics and whom I dig, is liveblogging at Tapped. In Tapped’s case, you’ll need to refresh the front page to see each new post.

Feministing isn’t liveblogging, but has a few required-reading links, and they’ve embedded the cable news live video stream from UStream.tv.

Jack and Jill Politics has an open thread dedicated to comments on the proceedings; at the moment it’s sporting a healthy balance of thoughtful conversation and old-fashioned trash talk.

And satire blog Wonkette has said that they’ll liveblog ‘only if every other form of news in the world gets really boring.’ (they’re probably going to do at least an excerpt, in other words)

Today is probably going to be nothing but opening remarks, but that doesn’t mean we won’t see some senators laying down some juicy joints; check out Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse calling out the ‘neutral umpire’ metaphor: “If judging were that mechanical, we would not need nine Supreme Court Justices.” And in commentary on the commentary, an Associated Press piece by Ron Fournier provides an excellent unintentional example by which to calibrate your BS detector.

So what are you reading / watching / writing? Let us know in the comments.

Posted at 10:33 AM, Jul 13, 2009 in Courts | Featured | Video & Multimedia | Permalink | View Comments