Way to go, Mark Halperin!
This is an official Time.com blog. It's hard not to boggle at the nerve that it takes to declare white men an oppressed group because they've only claimed 96.4% of the seats on the Supreme Court, and only 97.7% of the Presidential terms. We don't need to get essentialist here---of course you have your Sarah Palins and Clarence Thomases out there---but the odds of Obama appointing someone like that are shockingly close to nil.
So, setting aside the sellout factor, the recent years for Ruth Bader Ginsburg alone show why we need more diversity on the court. Ginsburg has been the sole voice against encroaching Dude Nation antics on the court, after the more conservative appointments and the loss of Sandra Day O'Connor started to move the court in that direction. Ginsburg often sounds like she's howling at the winds in despair, as she should, because she's sitting on a court that now thinks that women's right to get paid the same as men for the same work is debatable, as is the notion that women are adult human beings who can make decisions about their own health without paternalistic male strangers telling them they're too stupid to know what they're doing. Told by your doctor that this pregnancy will kill you? Justice Kennedy knows better than you---you want to die in a fiery sacrifice to show how much you worship the patriarchy. Don't like suffering a strip search that comes dangerously close to school-sanctioned sexual assault excused on the weakest of grounds? Well, you should have thought of that before you grew breasts. Perhaps even one more woman on the court would help tilt the club towards remembering what they've been trying to forget, which is that women are people who can be assumed to have feelings and thoughts within the people range.
Much of what the Supreme Court does is protect the rights of its citizens against being encroached on by others, and that means that they'll often be looking at protecting people who are under attack for being non-white, female, or gay. The notion that it's acceptable to have a group of mostly straight white men examine these cases smacks too much of, "We have evaluated ourselves and found that we've done nothing wrong." Indeed, while we have some strong liberal voices from straight white men on the court, the trend has been exactly what you'd guess when you don't have much in the way of voices of people who personally know the sting of racism or sexism. The decision in Ledbetter and especially in Carhart shows how bad an idea it is to run things this way.
Now the homophobic idiocy of this is bad enough, but why the hell did this assistant principal think she had the right to do this? (
If you've been following this non-starter of a controversy over President Obama's commencement speech at Notre Dame---and I say non-starter, because the students, faculty, and staff all want it, with the exception of a small minority of right wing wankers pretending their objection is religious in nature---you've been witnessing a first class example of how religion is used as a rationalization for whatever you wanted to believe in the first place. Former Vatican ambassador Mary Ann Glendon is turning down some big award from Notre Dame to protest the fact that they're honoring President Obama, as they have every other President since Eisenhower. The ostensible reason that Obama is being protested is that he's pro-choice, and that implies---quite falsely---that Notre Dame is changing some tradition of rejecting pro-choice Presidents, even though they've done it before. It does make you think about what it could be that's different about Obama that is causing this reaction, but of course speculation of this sort will just result in a bunch of pearl-clutching faux outrage of the sort we've seen from 
Part of me wants to drop it, due to the extreme silliness of the situation, and I will after this post. But everyone here has been so awesome, hilarious, and insightful for the past few days, that I thought I'd update you and let you know that Peter Thiel's assistant sent me a self-aggrandizing note that Thiel wrote in response to my post making fun of him and 