Elena Kagan and Laura Bush: When Pigs Really Fly

Kudos to the President for nominating another lady to the supreme court. Well done. But something’s not right here. What is it…? Oh, yeah.

I’m really, really glad Obama chose a woman. I really, really wish she were more liberal. I suspect she’ll be okay on Roe and other “social issues,” but her attitude to executive power is alarming.

Also, rumors abound that Kagan is gay. Let’s just pretend for a second that we care….

Glad that’s over.

As for social issues, the President has really given us a treat! He picked someone that is kind of pro-choice! OMG! But wait…

As a White House adviser in 1997, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan urged then-President Bill Clinton to support a ban on late-term abortions, a political compromise that put the administration at odds with abortion rights groups.

Documents reviewed Monday by The Associated Press show Kagan encouraging Clinton to support a bill that would have banned all abortions of viable fetuses except when the physical health of the mother was at risk. The documents from Clinton’s presidential library are among the first to surface in which Kagan weighs in the thorny issue of abortion.

The abortion proposal was a compromise by Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle. Clinton supported it, but the proposal failed and Clinton vetoed a stricter Republican ban.

In a May 13, 1997, memo from the White House domestic policy office, Kagan and her boss, Bruce Reed, told Clinton that abortion rights groups opposed Daschle’s compromise. But they urged the president to support it, saying he otherwise risked seeing a Republican-led Congress override his veto on the stricter bill.

Oh. But still! Since Kagan is probably a lezbo, she must support gay marriage, right? Wrong.

The meme has taken hold that Kagan is a stealth candidate who has avoided taking positions on important constitutional or other issues throughout her career.

But on one issue of critical importance to the left — the constitutional right to same-sex marriage, Kagan has staked out a very clear and unequivocal position: There is no constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

In the course of her nomination for Solicitor General, Kagan filled out questionnaires on a variety of issues. While she bobbed and weaved on many issues, with standard invocations of the need to follow precedent and enforce presumptively valid statutes, on the issue of same-sex marriage Kagan was unequivocal.

Kagan is a winner in other ways, too:

“Like Harriet Miers, she doesn’t have a record to tell us how she would adjudicate from the bench. They led a rebellion against the executive branch and the same thing should happen here.”

“I object to appointment somebody that has no track record. Corporate power is a big one because of the Citizens United decision, and also Miranda. There are a lot of things where it would be helpful to be able to examine past writings.”

“If I was in the Senate, I would vote no, because like Harriet Miers she doesn’t have the judicial experience.”

“Accepting Kagan just because people like Obama is wrong. That’s appropriate for American Idol, not the Supreme Court. Nobody knows what she stands for but him. It’s just a cult of personality with Obama. This is the Supreme Court.”

There is something fundamentally wrong about this. Everyone is used to Obama constantly rejecting his base. They are like devoted mistresses who constantly tell themselves that their boyfriends will leave their wives–he is just making a compromise right now; it’s a secret game of eleven dimensional chest and during the election time he will come crawling back. But really, why do liberals have to compromise in the first place?

The selection of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to be the nation’s 112th justice extends a quarter-century pattern in which Republican presidents generally install strong conservatives on the Supreme Court while Democratic presidents pick candidates who often disappoint their liberal base.

[…]

Along the way, conservatives have largely succeeded in framing the debate, putting liberals on the defensive. Sonia Sotomayor echoed conservatives in her Supreme Court confirmation hearings last year by rejecting the idea of a “living” Constitution that evolves, and even President Obama recently said the court had gone too far in the past. While conservatives have played a powerful role in influencing Republican nominations, liberals have not been as potent in Democratic selections.

Well, I don’t know. Maybe the blogger boyz just need a reality check. For one thing, Obama is just not that into them.

For another, the notion that Obama is a “Democratic President” is laughable anyway. Democratic Presidents don’t pass Heritage Foundation Health Insurance Reforms and then claim it as the biggest victory of their Presidency. Just sayin.’

The Democratic Party is obviously in trouble, and that is no secret. But they can’t be any worse than Republicans, right? NOTHING is worse than a Republican. I mean, Elena Kagan might not be perfect on social issues, but at least she’s more liberal that Laura Bush!

On her media tour for her memoir, Spoken from the Heart, Laura Bush stopped by Larry King Live, where she opened up for the first time about her advocacy for marriage equality, as well as her belief that Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision regarding a woman’s right to an abortion, should be upheld.

“Never attribute to malice…

…that which can adequately be explained by stupidity”

– Robert Hanlon

For those who are curious, I haven’t been posting much because I’ve been living in interesting times, in the Chinese sense of the term.  I’d love to be a passive observer, sort of an anthropologist, watching fault lines develop and empires rise and fall.  There’s a book to be written about this period of time when the Ozymandius we call the American Dream started to crumble. Fortunately, there will be plenty of documentation for the future author to sift through. Oh, well, it’s very hard to reverse the bad decisions of 2008 when the king makers deceived the general public.  Who could have guessed that Obama would be the guy most likely to reintroduce feudalism?

Um, actually, I think we might have been on to that.  But whatchagonnado?  We’re just a bunch of uneducated working class menopausal sino-peruvian lesbians.  (Sorry, myiq)

Anyway, I thought I’d weigh in on topics I haven’t been following closely because we are all entitled to our own uninformed opinion.

Elena Kagan: All I need to know about Kagan is that Obama is appointing her.  Perhaps this is unfair guilt by association but as I’ve said before, “nothing good grows from a bad seed”.  Obama’s meteoric rise to fame and glory had some notable unpleasant features and starred some very bad actors giving him scads of money and encouraging party officials to reshape the rules to favor a predetermined outcome regardless of the voters’ sentiments.  That was a bad sign of things to come and our concerns were largely born out.  If you want to see what this has done to the party as a whole, you need look no further than BTD’s post from yesterday and the exchange in the comments that followed where several people straighten out his ass.  The Democrats really don’t know what to think about much of anything anymore.  That’s what you get when you opt for political expedience over guiding principles.

Anyway, about Kagan, I would hope that Al Franken questions her about stuff related to commerce and business and labor relationships and finance and pensions and whether investment brokers have an obligation to tell their clients what they’re really up to and free speech and net neutrality and stuff like that.  The abortion ship has sailed.  Roe never meant equality, ladies.  Let it go.  Work on getting real equality.  If the USSC wanted to outlaw abortion today, it has the votes to do it and that’s not going to change with Kagan’s vote.  If it remains the law of the land, it’s only because both parties find it politically expedient, except now we know that the Democrats are hyprocrites.  Let this be a warning to young Democratic women.  Never join a club that has less than 34% women.  If Democrats want my vote back, they’d be wise to implement a quota system in their party membership guaranteeing no less than 34% women running for office.  Scandanavian political parties have a quota system and they have some of the highest living standards and gender equality statistics in the world. But we can save an argument in favor of gender equality in the political parties for another post.  Let’s just say it’s past due and there are very good arguments in favor of it.

Facebook: As many of you may have discovered, I am not a facebook addict.  Send me an invite and I’m likely to ignore it.  I like friends as much as the next person and believe me, it’s not personal.  But I just don’t like the idea of facebook, it’s kludgy interface or the pressure to join it.  In my humble opinion, I feel it has the potential to become the tool to use for social engineering.  Imagine an army of Obot marketers and political psychologists getting their tentacles into facebook through some back room deal with facebook’s founder. The very thought gives me chills.   It would be like the Big Orange Cheeto on crystal meth.  Before you knew it, half the country could be convinced that social security is a commie plot and Democrats have always been against it.  I love to connect with people but prefer my GD independence.  If I wanted peer pressure, I could attend a DFA event.  Not really my thing.  I know some of you don’t see the harm in it and that’s ok.  But that’s how consensus reality works.  You get subsumed into the culture of a thing and before you know it, your perception has changed.  And when your reality is shaped by another entity, how are you going to be sure you’re making up your own mind?

I’ve been following some of the controversy around facebook privacy settings.  This Week in Google, had a very good discussion around the facebook issue and the potential dangers.  (the facebook discussion starts about 1/3 of the way through the podcast)  Also, Al Franken has instructions if you want to disentangle yourself from facebook.  Your choice.

Or it *should* be.

I’ve got a lot of things to say but limited time these days.  But as I watch events around me, I continue to be surprised, but not at all astonished, at the level of incompetence and pointless ambition of the people who we have entrusted to run things.  I can’t imagine why BTD wouldn’t want Bill Clinton back at times like these.  Nor can I understand why the Democrats would slit their throats and destroy the country rather than do the right thing.  If there’s an enthusiasm gap with voters, they brought it on themselves through what I hope is just stupidity. So, to them and all the other clueless who are cannibalizing each other these days, um, have a nice day.