Senator Dianne Feinstein finally said what I've been waiting for someone to say about the whole "reverse racism" charge now being levied by Republicans against President Barack Obama's first Supreme Court pick, Judge Sonia Sotomayor. From this weekend's Face The Nation, Feinstein summed the entire controversy up in her first response to moderator Bob Schieffer:

Well, there's one word, Bob, in the statement. It's the word "better." That a Latina woman who has gone through these experiences, that her views would be better. And without that one word, it's a perfectly fine statement. And I understand what she meant by it.

So you could say the use of that word was inartful. But I think you have to look at an individual in their total context. This is, in fact, an amazing woman. She is, in fact, the American dream.

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As a new month dawns with Al Franken still not seated in the Senate...

No, wait, that's not what I wanted to start with. Let me try again.

As a new month dawns, it is time once again to take a look at President Barack Obama's poll numbers. We kicked off this column series last month, and will be returning at the beginning of every month throughout Obama's term as president to take a snapshot of his approval ratings in the polls. This month, as an added feature, we will also be looking at Obama's poll numbers as compared to Bill Clinton's poll numbers from his first term.

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"Judicial activism" (or, alternatively, "legislating from the bench") is defined -- no matter what your political beliefs -- as "judges not ruling the way I want them to." It's an inherently partisan statement to make, even if it doesn't sound like it. If you are a Republican, using the term means courts ruling for things you don't like. Same for Democrats. The irony is that while the charge is leveled in order to prove some sort of bias or prejudice in a judicial candidate or judge, the only thing it usually winds up proving is the bias of the accuser -- and not the accused. Because it almost always boils down to the accuser wanting the judge or justice in question to rule in a certain partisan way -- before even hearing the facts of any particular case.

Republicans have begun their campaign to derail President Barack Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. And, as usual, the cries of "judicial activism" are loud and shrill.

But what is missing in this entirely predictable debate is an admission of the basic facts involved. Because our government was set up by the Founding Fathers to include a constant power struggle between the three branches. From the very beginning, the courts have struggled with both various congresses and various presidents. And "legislating from the bench" is only part of the story.

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Debates about national security always fascinate me, because almost without exception nobody bothers to define the term itself. This, to me, is a key feature of any debate about national security versus the people's right to know what their government is doing in their name -- such as the one currently raging over whether to publicly release thousands of photographs of detainee abuse. But the definition of "national security" is always conspicuous in its absence in the debate. Which allows the government to get away with using two definitions of the term interchangeably, when only one should be legally allowed.

You may think I am picking semantic nits here, but I don't think that is true. Because the word "security" in the phrase "national security" has two separate dictionary definitions which are vital to understanding how the government uses the term. One of these definitions is physical, and one is mental. Only the physical should legally apply, but the mental definition is used time and again by those whose business it is to classify state secrets.

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It seems these days, Republicans just can't attempt to do anything right without landing themselves in hot water as a result. As a result, they now face a no-win situation politically and racially. The forces of moderation (drastically diminished in the party though they may be) are up against the hardline conservatives. Add racial politics to this mix, and it's easy to see how Republicans have wound up between a rock and a hard place. And although it may sound like it, I'm not talking about Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court.

I wrote yesterday about the political conundrum Republicans (especially those in the Senate who actually get to vote on her confirmation) find themselves in over Sotomayor. But there's another struggle within the party over a Latino candidate with more profound overtones for the party as a whole, down in the race for a Senate seat in Florida.

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With apologies to Dave Barry for stealing his bit, I've always thought that "Signifying Nothing" would be a good name for a rock band. [That previous sentence, by the way, signifies exactly nothing -- it was what, in the theater world, is known as an "aside."]

Which, in the roundest of possible ways, brings us to President Obama's first nominee for the Supreme Court. But before we actually get there, we must detour 400 years to William Shakespeare, for the original quote. Macbeth, just after hearing his wife is dead (and just before his world's foundations crumble by being told that Birnam wood was indeed coming to Dunsinane), utters the following:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

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On a lonely hill outside the small town of Cobh, Ireland, is a mass grave marked by three somber headstones. As mass graves go, it's a fairly small one; holding not tens of thousands or even thousands, but merely a few hundred bodies. But the relative size of the grave on the scale of human misery is beside the point -- because while few, their deaths had monumental consequences for America. The dead were civilians, not soldiers (more on them in a minute). But their deaths deserve memorializing today just as much as those we remember who wore the uniform of our country. Because this is the final resting place of the people onboard the Lusitania.

Cobh itself is a town steeped in history, mostly because of its geography. It is situated next to what is reputed to be the second-largest natural deepwater harbor in the world (Sydney's, the residents will grudgingly admit, is larger). Meaning it was the last port of call for the great oceangoing ships of a century ago. For instance, Cobh was the last port of call for the Titanic (where Leo DiCaprio boarded, in the film of the same name -- although, due to the English propensity for renaming everything in sight to suit their fancy, it was called "Queenstown" at the time). And, earlier, it was the departure point for millions of Irish emigrants. There is a statue in Cobh depicting the first person processed through America's Ellis Island; a young Irish immigrant girl, with her brothers (a copy of this statue stands on Ellis Island, as well).

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President Obama and the congressional Democrats just had their first spat. While others have more-than-adequately delved into the fracas of Obama's national security speech and Harry Reid stripping out funding to close Guantanamo, what I was struck by this week was how Obama is better defining his character as president. This is going to be important later this year, when energy plans and health care reform legislation become protracted fights in Congress.

And I was beginning to get a little nervous, I have to say. But now, after Obama pushed back on his national security policies, I feel a little bit better for the prospects of both health care reform and a new energy policy. Because while Obama always starts the debate by projecting an image of "can't we all work together" on any difficult subject, it is becoming more and more clear that, when pushed, there is simply a point where Obama draws a line in the sand and decides to push back. And so far, he's done a fairly good job of holding his ground on a few crucial issues.

Now, don't get me wrong, I didn't agree with everything Obama said in his national security speech -- in fact I strongly disagreed with large chunks of it. And the gap between his words and his rhetoric was on full display, in front of the actual Constitution itself in the National Archives. Republicans are already crowing about this, in effect calling Obama "Bush lite," and saying that Obama's policies vindicate the Bush/Cheney policies.

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While President Obama's speech on national security today is getting most of the attention, another important foreign policy issue awaits, which Obama has so far been untested on as president. On the campaign trail, Obama's statements on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were inconsistent, to say the least. He spoke against it in battleground states like Ohio, but he also reportedly sent an aide to reassure the Canadians that when Obama said he would "renegotiate NAFTA," he really didn't mean it. So it's always been somewhat of an open question what Obama would do on free trade issues as president. We may be about to find out.

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Some writers love words and language more than others. At one end of this continuum are writers who use language much the way a carpenter uses tools, and don't think about the tools much (would a carpenter say he "loves" his hammer or saw?). At the other end of the scale are writers such as Geoffrey Nunberg, whose love of language is a core part of not just their writing, but their whole being. For instance, his impressive "day job" is researching linguistics at Berkeley's School of Information, meaning that even when he isn't writing, he is still thinking about language.

His previous book's full title proves this point, with what has to be an all-time champion subtitle -- Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show. The book lives up to this jaw-breaker of a title, and is one of the best things ever written about the problems liberals have had for years in competing with conservative phrasing and issue-framing.

Now Nunberg is back with a new book, written about the use of language in recent days, both in the political sphere and in everyday life. The book, The Years of Talking Dangerously, is a compilation of recent essays, op-ed columns, and commentary from appearances on NPR's Fresh Air. In his introduction, Nunberg calls them "snapshots of language during the final years of the Bush era."

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