COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Elena Kagan, Sycophant for Barack Obama



June 29, 2010
Kagan will be the Obama of the Supreme Court
Keith Riler American Thinker
Now more of us understand that running a successful political campaign does not qualify one to be President. Real job qualifications matter when it comes to oil leaks, fiscal stimulus and unemployment, the deficit, Iranian nukes, relationships with our allies, infrastructure modernization and government transparency. If we have learned anything, it is to ask harder questions and not presume "it can't be any worse."

Our unqualified President has now nominated an unqualified judicial nominee. Given his recent very public shortfalls, that he still does not understand the value of experience is startling.

Barack Obama has proposed Elena Kagan, who has no judicial experience, as his Supreme Court nominee. As Paul Campos points out, even if we generously extend the question of qualifications to publishing (forget actually judging), very little is added to the nominee's resume:

In the nearly 20 years since Kagan became a law professor, she's published very little academic scholarship-three law review articles, along with a couple of shorter essays and two brief book reviews. Somehow, Kagan got tenure at Chicago in 1995 on the basis of a single article in The Supreme Court Review-a scholarly journal edited by Chicago's own faculty-and a short essay in the school's law review. She then worked in the Clinton administration for several years before joining Harvard as a visiting professor of law in 1999. While there she published two articles, but since receiving tenure from Harvard in 2001 (and becoming dean of the law school in 2003) she has published nothing.

Nominee Kagan hasn't even voted "present" in a judicial hearing. If confirmed, she will become the Barack Obama of the Supreme Court, winging the job as badly if not worse than the unqualified President wings his job.

However, if our Senators do their jobs this week, this will be a quick interview. The Senate should focus on the candidate's qualifications not ideological predispositions, which focus will produce fact questions that are not easily circumnavigated with non-responsive palaver.

Consider a plumbing company hire. The hiring company is mostly unconcerned about the applicant's view of installing plumbing in an abortion clinic. More relevant first questions include: How many installations have you done? Commercial or residential? As a master plumber or an apprentice?

Likewise, for an investment banker, the question is not whether the candidate has a problem with sharia-compliant financings. Relevant first questions include: How many financings have you completed? Equity or debt? Lead or co-managed? In other words, basic "do you know the job" stuff.

This is common sense and Interviewing 101. Given the nominee Kagan's likely failure to pass the basic qualifications screen, questions of ideology and judicial philosophy are unnecessary and too complicated.

She should be asked: How many judicial proceedings have you overseen? What type of cases - civil, criminal, tort, constitutional, etc....? As a judge? What about private practice experience? How does your prior judicial experience compare to the experience of the current Supreme Court justices at the time of their nominations? Do you think it is appropriate for the President to foist an "on the job training" judge on the court and the country?

The President is trapped in what Chris Stirewalt calls a hypocrisy trap, having claimed competence and qualifications but evidenced neither. We should have no desire to see this sad state repeated in either of the other two branches of government. Surely qualified judges exist. Senators, please do your job and interview the candidate.


56 comments:

  1. She testified in a platitude of pap.

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  2. Jeff Sessions nailed her to the wall.

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  3. Anyone who watched the questioning of Sessions could come to no other conclusion that this Kagan is unfit to sit on the Supreme Court.

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  4. Republicans should vote against her confirmation simply on the grounds that she has never been a judge.

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  5. She'll be confirmed, regardless.

    With little doubt on how she'll rule on AZ's slew of new immigration related laws.

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  6. On to November. The only place to stop it.

    What's the deal on West Virginia now that Byrd has finally, finally! given up the ghost?

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  7. Washington Senate - Rossi vs. Murray Rasmussen Reports Murray 47, Rossi 47 Tie


    Maybe Dino will win this time. He won last time, but lost anyway.

    Ask Teresita.

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  8. Maybe Dino will win this time. He won last time, but lost anyway.

    Ask Teresita.


    Most expensive 160 votes ever "discovered" in recount.

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  9. She'll be confirmed, regardless.

    With little doubt on how she'll rule...


    Therein lie the problem. The Supreme Court is not supposed to rule, its purpose is to vote on Constitutional issues. The issues are within the Constitution not the expansion.

    This Kagan in real time, real world, skirted a law she did not agree with. She pled an amicus brief to the SC and lost 9-0. She did not like the no-tell pentagon policy even though it was the law. She chose civil disobedience which is a sixties euphemism for breaking the law.

    The video clip shows her devotion for and reverence to Obama.

    Bork the bitch.

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  10. In the Clinton Admin -

    She also changed the wording of a group of Doctors who declared that they knew of no situation in which the ONLY way to save the life of the mother was Partial Birth Abortion.

    ...she changed the words to:

    "...sometimes a partial birth abortion is the best way to save the life of a mother..."

    And pasted this lie above the names of the Doctors!

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  11. Which reminds me -

    Quiz for Ash:

    What is the LIE at the center of the drilling moratorium?

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  12. Saying one thing when we mean a mother. Another.

    ...psychiatrists don’t fire patients — not at $300 per session. Voters, on the other hand, positively relish it.

    All of this is a little unfair, of course. A president who spent his entire working life in either a crackpot left-wing nonprofit or a law school — although when you say it like that, it’s hard to tell the difference — couldn’t be expected to know anything about the complexities of deep-water drilling, the physics of oil under pressure, the trajectory of an oil slick as it slimes its way to shore.

    So, yes, it’s easy to imagine that there’s been a bit of the college seminar going on there, in the Oval Office.

    But why so defensive? Or, as we might have scribbled in our notebooks as President Obama took his place on the couch: “Patient v. v. defensive re: lack of oil knowledge. Ego bruise? Anger due to inflated sense of self vs. inability to stop oil leak? Anger due to sense of self under fire from oil leak, voters, etc.? Sense that like college seminar, he is all talk, no action?”

    All of which is accurate. And all of which seems to be what voters are thinking.

    Especially when he added, gratuitously, that he wanted to know “whose ass to kick,” when everyone knew that what he really meant was “whose ass to sue,” which doesn’t sound very butch.

    It’s been said that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is Obama’s Katrina, but that’s really not accurate. It’s Obama’s “Message: I care” moment. It’s when he started to read the stage directions.

    A brilliant actor once told me that the hardest thing to play is drunk. And then he told me how to do it.

    You play not drunk. You don’t play a guy weaving and slurring and bumping into stuff. You play a guy consciously, deliberately, carefully not doing any of those things. The way you indicate how immensely incapacitated you are, in other words, is to act super, super sober, to declare, in other words, that not only are you not drunk, you’re the opposite of drunk. Which just makes you seem incredibly drunk.

    Audiences find this hilarious.

    Voters, well, we shall see.

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  13. Dangit why does it always happen just as I'm about to go to sleep I remember the chocolate bar in the back of the fridge?

    She deserves a good Borking alrigth, more than I deserve this chocolate bar.

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  14. http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/06/kos_pollster_fired_for_faking.html


    Kos kids pollsters found to be 'just making it up'.

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  15. Ralph Peters echos Yon,

    Talk to anyone (1 star and below) in Afghanistan about serving under 'Crystal, and the reply ranges from

    "This Sucks"
    to
    "This Really Really Sucks!"

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  16. ...also says the goal is unachievable:

    Karzai and the Taliban are Pashtun, the rest are the mix that formed the Northern Alliance.

    Once again, we support our enemies instead of our allies.

    "Mission Accomplished" should have been declared in Afghanistan in the Spring of 2002.

    Also should quit sending Billions to our "Ally" Pakistan.

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  17. Says Petraeus got his COIN strategy at Princeton.

    A strategy with no precedent in the history of Warfare.

    Princeton's theories led to needless American deaths.

    Hopes Petraeus is man enough to face up to the fact that COIN will not work in Afghanistan.

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  18. Obama the Edsel

    Focus groups indicate independents are souring on Obama quickly.

    Earlier this month, Resurgent Republic — an independent public-opinion-research group headed by former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie —
    conducted focus groups in five key House districts, measuring how independent voters and, separately, self-identified tea-party members felt about the direction of the country.

    Bad news for President Obama and congressional Democrats is common these days, but these results unveiled Tuesday are simply dismal.

    Asked to compare Obama to a car, one Iowan chose an Edsel: “Something that had a lot of hype, but failed to live up to expectations.”

    Another older man described Obama as “a wrecked Ferrari, something that looked great to many people, but was now ruined.”

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  19. "Sending 'Crystal to conduct COIN in Afghanistan is like sending a Prizefighter to perform Neurosurgery!"

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  20. Quiz for Ash:

    What is the LIE at the center of the drilling moratorium?





    I don't down know dougo. Will you inform us? The, please state how that LIE will factor in the appeal...

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  21. Senate confirmation is just a "mating dance." Kagan even said so herself. What an fkg waste of time and money.

    It is one liberal replacing another. No big deal.

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  22. I am playing golf all weekend, so I hope my LIE is not in a divot.

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  23. The important thing is that you vae to have a sense of humor..

    Elena Kagan shows off sense of humor in confirmation hearings

    Elena Kagan is as guarded as any other Supreme Court nominee about her views on specific cases. But she is winning over senators anyway – by drawing giggles, laughs and even some outright guffaws from the lawmakers.

    The collective genius of our rulers and masters

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  24. It takes their collective minds off the oil spill, printing money, the border, their portfolios and mistresses.

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  25. They don't obsess 24 7 on their mistresses?

    Why the Hell have one?

    I know, I know,

    it's a part time job.

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  26. Lindsey Grahm would giggle at a video of Elena Masterbating.

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  27. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  28. ...don't forget to include Lindsey watching and getting his virtual rocks off.

    Not being in possession of a real pair.

    ReplyDelete
  29. Megan Fox to marry some dimwit.

    All this time I thot my amazing mind would carry the day.

    Such is life.

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  30. Doug,

    Still waiting for you to reveal the big LIE.

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  31. A Moving Sidewalk for Terrorists

    Muslim extremists have penetrated our southern border.

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  32. Same variety of LIE as Kagan's I posted

    @ Wed Jun 30, 07:53:00 AM EDT

    ---

    The Admin cited a panel of experts wrt the moratorium, asserting that they approved of it.

    But they approved it when it refered only to NEW projects awaiting permits.

    But they then changed it to include wells currently being drilled.

    Rigs that are now making plans to relocate to the opposite side of the World, not to return for years, if ever.

    ...seems to be a habit of this morally bankrupt regieme.

    To be expected of a fraud who hides the truth of his entire personal history, and claims authorship of a book he is incapable of writing.

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  33. Shannen W. Coffin: Kagan’s Abortion Distortion

    How the Supreme Court nominee manipulated the statement of a medical organization to protect partial-birth abortion.

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  34. Empty Bar this evening.

    I WOULD have something to say, some opinion, some comment on something of hopefully some interest, however mundane, however mistaken, however foul-mouthed...however liberal.

    I've desperately wanted something to say.

    But whatever opinions I might express are all of a sudden not there. Literally. I mean, if extraterrestrials did pay a visit, if Los Angeles were swallowed up in an earthquake, I'd have nothing to say. Not a fucking thing.

    I've NEVER not had something to say.



    Who was whose muse?

    And who knew?

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  35. Well you succeeded in making up a lot of nothing there, I couldn't do better.

    mee'mi

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  36. I'll tell ya this I've been studying all the politics all day and Rossi is gonna win and stay won, and the Republicans are gonna take both the House AND the Senate there is a tidal wave a comin' in.


    mee'mi

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  37. Also this Kagan commie is gay as a goose I can tell 'em from a mile away but we've been trained not to say anything and she the dominant partner too.


    mee'mi

    ReplyDelete
  38. Bob would make a better Supreme Court Judge by far.


    mee'mi

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  39. I noticed mee'mi was absent all day.

    ReplyDelete
  40. I was ironing football uniforms.

    mee'mi

    ReplyDelete
  41. While studying politics.

    mee'mi

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  42. Blowing Up the Well Could Create More Leaks, Diplomatic Headaches

    In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, Christopher Brownfield, a former nuclear submarine officer and a nuclear policy researcher at Columbia University, compared the solution to "stepping on a garden house (to stop) a stream of water."

    But opponents of the solution, including BP itself, argue it's a lot more complicated than that. The explosion, they say, could potentially disturb rock formations that had helped contain some oil, resulting in new leaks.

    "The problem with exploding a highly powerful device down there -- you essentially lose any and all control," a BP spokesman said. The explosion, he said, could create new "flow paths" for the oil.

    "Now, instead of having leak coming from one wellhead, you would have it come from 100 different locations on the seafloor," said Paul Fischbeck, an oil platform expert and a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. "How do you stop that?"

    Proponents counter that the depth at which the explosion would occur could prevent that possibility.

    "If you go deep enough underground, nothing gets out," said former Air Force Secretary Hans Mark, now an engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin specializing in national defense policy.

    Mark and others point to the former Soviet Union's strategy of capping out-of-control gas wells with below-ground nuclear explosions.


    But others argue that the fact that the BP well is an oil well -- not a gas well -- and that it is underwater (unlike the Soviets' gas wells) make the situation too different to be comparable to the Soviet experience. There's also the Soviets' not-so-reassuring success rate: though the U.S.S.R. successfully plugged four gas wells with nuclear explosives, its last effort in 1981 failed.

    "A 20 percent failure rate is way beyond anything that would be acceptable here," said Fischbeck.

    Choosing a nuclear explosive, in particular, could land the U.S. in a diplomatic pickle, nuclear policy experts warn.

    "The United States has signed a treaty that we would not explode nuclear weapons under water or anywhere else," said John Isaacs, the executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation.

    The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which nations began to sign in 1996, puts a moratorium on nuclear weapons testing. Were the U.S. to run afoul of the treaty, experts say, states like Iran might use that to justify their own nuclear weapons exercises.

    Brownfield argues that conventional explosives could be used instead and so does Clinton.

    "You don't have to use nuclear weapons, by the way. I've seen all that stuff, just blow it up," the former president said at last weekend's media event.

    But not everyone -- including proponents of the explosives idea -- is so sure. Mark says it would take larger conventional explosives to match the power of nuclear ones, and they might prove trickier to transport.

    It's a "problem of getting to the pipe," he said.

    "You'd have to get very close, and you'd have to be very lucky."

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  43. Posted by: FulghumInk
    Jun 30, 02:24 PM
    clarityrising: By your own words, it is obvious that you don't know the history to which you refer. Aisha's parents feared Mohammad when he took an interest in their 6 year old daughter. Even by the standards of pre-pubescent girls of then, for 6 year old girls to be married was considered an anolamy. He "consummated" his lust for her at age 9. She remained with him until he died (9 years later). What most will not reveal in the vile life of this pedophile, murdering "prophet" is that he was poisoned by a beautiful Jewish girl whose husband was murdered by Mohammad. Muslims don't like to talk about that...



    Just how did Mohammed die?

    mee'mi

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  44. "But whatever opinions I might express are all of a sudden not there...


    Fair Calliope comes up short.

    A pity.


    Da Muse Be Metagrabolized


    .

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  45. Anne Chapman, the perfect spy.

    Lovely to look at.

    Intellegent (Ran successful business)

    But not too smart. (She did, afterall, get caught)

    And 28 years old.

    What's not to like?


    "There were 11 alleged Russian agents arrested this week, under accusations that they'd been living as Americans while reporting back to the mother country.

    But mostly we care about the hot one..."


    A Natasia She's Not But Even Bullwinkle Would Be Impressed With This Spy


    .

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  46. Wow that Anna and at 28 still not too old to be a slut. She's got a good seven years left.


    What hair, a lot like that of bob's sister. And she's no slut at all.

    nite the ballplayers call

    mee'mi

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  47. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) confirmed it was looking into Chapman's connections to Britain, but declined to comment on whether it investigated the possibility that she spied against the U.K.

    ...

    Chapman, a 28-year-old entrepreneur, was arrested in Manhattan. According to British media reports, she "spent time working in London and may even have a British ex-husband."

    According to the woman's LinkedIn profile, she worked in London between 2003 and 2007.


    Link to UK

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  48. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."


    House passes HR 5175

    Time to call it a day.

    ReplyDelete
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