Pressure is mounting on South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford to resign after he admitted this week that he “crossed the lines” with several other women, though he said he never had sex with them. “A lot of us are talking to him behind the scenes in hopes that he’ll make the right decision about what needs to be done,” Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said today. Sanford says he is trying to reconcile with his wife, but that could be difficult given that he told Associated Press he still loves Maria Belen Chapur, the Argentine woman Sanford called his “soul mate.”
Will Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court be jeopardized by the court’s decision Monday overturning her ruling in the case of the New Haven, Conn., firefighters? Should it be?
The Wall Street Journal editorialized: “Ms. Sotomayor’s supporters have been at pains to argue that she has ended up on both sides of racial discrimination complaints while on the 2nd Circuit. But those examining her record can reasonably ask if the disregard she exhibited for a Title VII claim by white firefighters falls into the category of neutrality or its own kind of bias.”
The Dallas Morning News editorialized: “Yes, her panel was criticized for a one-paragraph dismissal of the plaintiffs’ claims — claims the Supreme Court later recognized as significant constitutional questions. Yet one case does not a judicial philosophy make. Sotomayor has participated in hundreds of rulings from a number of benches — so many that Senate Republicans complained that they could not read them all in time to question her. They should remember that before focusing too narrowly on any single case.”
Through Tuesday, Kansas drivers could hog the left lane of multilane highways and risk only a honk or dirty look. As of today, they can get an officer warning if they loiter in the left lane on roads outside cities. A year from today, they may draw a fine. Is this the most important measure the Legislature passed this year? No. But it puts the law on the side of those who’ve always taken care to use the left lane sparingly, for passing and left turns.
In a New Yorker profile titled “The Contrarian,” Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. chairwoman Sheila Bair is variously referred to as a “Republican regulator liberals love” and “the skunk at the picnic.” A Bush appointee, Bair was among the few voices warning about the economic threat posed by subprime mortgages. The University of Kansas graduate, former aide to Bob Dole and onetime Kansas congressional candidate discusses her roots in Independence (“It’s an area where people make it, but you’ve got to work at it,” she said) and recalls working as a teller in a small-town bank in the simpler ’70s. “Everybody had a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage back then,” she said. “It was a ritual to come in and make your mortgage payment personally. There was a kind of pride in living up to your obligations, and, on the lender side, in making loans that people could understand and afford.”
