Sotomayor favors "reconquista"?

As with the lily-white tea parties that compared Obama to Hitler and stereotyped Indians, conservatives are demonstrating their racism again:

Tancredo Confuses Mottos, Logos, And Much, Much MoreAs you probably already know, right wing, anti-immigration extremist Tom Tancredo went on CNN yesterday and accused Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor of being a member of a "Latino KKK" (known to people like John McCain as the perfectly uncontroversial National Council of La Raza).How Tancredo got it wrong:The motto Tancredo's referring to seems to be a mistranslation of a slogan of sorts from the 1960s:"Por La Raza todo, fuera de La Raza nada," meaning, literally, "for the race [or community], everything; outside the race, nothing."

It's a line that appears in a '60s era manifesto called El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, which was influential to members of a separate group called MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán). Several decades ago, MEChA was a fairly radical student organization, whose mission was to return the lands of the southwest United States to Mexico--an idea called "reconquista." Since then it has become, basically, the equivalent of a Mexican Students Association at most colleges across the country.]Why conservatives keep embarrassing themselves:These are the sort of ambiguities that I suppose you miss, if you can't tell the difference between a motto and a logo, or MEChA and NCLR, or, dare we say, people of Puerto Rican and Mexican descent.More on Sotomayor's alleged racism:

Commentary:  Judge Sotomayor is not a racist The evidence offered in support of Judge Sonia Sotomayor's alleged racism is a speech she gave in Berkeley, California, in honor of Judge Mario G. Olmos, a former judge, community leader and graduate of Boalt Hall Law School who died an untimely death at the age of 43.

The offending section of the speech is this: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." This passage inspired Gingrich, former speaker of the House of Representatives and potential 2012 presidential candidate, to call Judge Sotomayor "a Latina racist."

To lift one statement out of Judge Sotomayor's eight-page speech without examining the context and substance of her remarks, is an example of the kind of shoddy character assassination that I suspect will dominate this judicial confirmation process.

Judge Sotomayor's speech is, in fact, an excellent meditation on how the experiences of judges might affect how they approach aspects of judicial decision-making. It explores the important, and too-little examined reality that judicial deliberations can be affected by a judge's background, perspective and experience.Comment:  The idea that judges are objective and decide cases based only on the law is a complete fiction. This is especially true of conservative judges and the people who tout them as models of judicial "restraint."

For evidence, look no further than all the 5-4 Supreme Court decisions that split along ideological lines. If beliefs didn't influence decisions, there would be no left-right splits.

For more on the subject, see The Search for Aztlán and Antonin Scalia:  Supreme Court Doofus.