Of all the things one can bag our future Justice about, this is the one thing that really drives me crazy.  Even slightly misworded statements that can be made to sound inflammatory - or even ragging on food that many people think is "gross" - doesn't piss me off nearly as much as the Repub cracking on Ms. Sotomayor and the fact it seems that Spanish was her first language as a child.

Maybe its because I'm the kid of Chinese immigrants and I've seen how hard my parents worked to get their english as square as possible. But its just absolutely aggravating to see pundits try to score points because the woman was born in a Spanish speaking home.

I was just at the Dallas Farmers Market a few months ago and at the ice cream stand I saw a  hispanic couple buying ice cream for their kid from a hispanic teenager.  Guess what language they were speaking between the four of them?  At the time I thought it was a interesting and touching moment of american assimilation that would especially make even right-wingers proud -- but I guess not since its now painfully obvious that its their existence and not their language skills that drives conservatives to conniptions.