Sotomayor Knows Her Nunchuks

Whatever you may think about Sonia Sotomayor's judicial philosophy, give her this: The woman knows her nunchuks.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) discovered this when he questioned the Supreme Court nominee this morning. "Doesn't your decision in Maloney mean that virtually any state or local weapons ban would be permissible?" he asked.

"Sir, in Maloney, we were talking about nunchuk sticks," the judge explained.

"I understand," said the senator.

"Those are martial arts sticks," Sotomayor added.

Hatch did not want to appear to be a ninja newbie. "Two sticks bound together by rawhide or some sort of a -- "

"Exactly," the nominee said. "And when the sticks are swung, which is what you do with them, if there's anybody near you, you're going to be seriously injured, because that swinging mechanism can break arms, it can bust someone's skull."

"Sure," Hatch said breezily. He wasn't about to get into a fight with somebody so knowledgeable in the martial arts.

As it happens, Sotomayor is also an expert in swinging mechanisms other than nunchuks. The first questioner, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, asked her to talk about a fellow who swings from trees in the jungle.

"One of the most important cases you worked on was the prosecution of the man known as the Tarzan Burglar," the senator said. "He terrorized people in Harlem. He would swing on ropes into their apartments and rob them and steal, and actually killed three people."

"The Tarzan murderer case," the judge said, "brought to life for me in a way that perhaps no other case had fully done before the tragic consequences of needless deaths. In that case, Mr. Maddicks was dubbed 'the Tarzan murderer' by the press because he used acrobatic feats to gain entry into apartments. In one case, he took a rope, placed it on a pipe on top of a roof, put a paint can at the other end, and threw it into a window in a building below and broke the window. He then swung himself into the apartment and, on the other side, shot a person he found."

After a more detailed description of the case, Leahy commented: "Obviously, the Tarzan case was unique."

Her experience with swinging objects such as nunchuks and Tarzan were undoubtedly stressful. This pressure -- along with the pressure of sitting through days of Senate Judiciary Committee testimony knowing that one slip of the tongue could doom an otherwise secure appointment -- could account for Sotomayor's extraordinary blink rate this morning.

When Leahy asked her to explain her controversial remark about the superior judgment of a "wise Latina woman," she blinked no fewer than 247 times during her answer. When Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) asked her about the same remark, she blinked an additional 146 times. Her overall blink rate, measured in BPM, or blinks per minute, appeared to be between 90 and 100. Sessions asked her about her ruling in the Ricci case on racial preferences. She blinked another 121 times.

Will Supreme Court ethics rules allow her to sign a sponsorship deal with Visine for some product placement on the bench?

Source: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/roughsketch/2009/07/sotomayor_knows_her_nunchuks.html?hpid=opinionsbox1