Reading is fundamental...

I constantly rage against the slovenly work-ethic of the television and print news media. The industry is just skewed against original thought. One person with an incorrect perspective equals career over for the individual, dozens of so called pundits with an incorrect perspective equals a meme and maybe even a pulitzer. This quote from a Sotomayor speech in 2001 has been parsed and abused by the MSN since yesterday:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

The charge is racism, of course, and the MSN are lined up in a row to ask the "tough" questions regarding Sotomayor's assertion that being Latina made her a better judge than a white man. Had they only read the speech for themselves instead of following Rush and Gingrich they would have seen this:

My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.

and then this:

Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.

In essence, she was making a point which was the EXACT opposite of what the MSM and Right Wing punditry are accusing her of.