Those wacky ObamaNauts. I guess when you’ve got the White House, the Senate and the House, you figure the world is your Oyster – and so’s the Supreme Court. But the Big O is finding life anything but a bowl of Cherry Blossoms this time o’ year in D.C. Most guys with the entire Legislative Branch as their bee-yatch would rightly figure that any nominee for the Supreme Court would have an easy time of it. Not this time. Chaz Bono impersonator Elena Kagan may have zero judicial experience (not a prerequisite for serving on the court, by the way), but she’s left a paper trail a mile wide and several administrations long – which presents her and the ObamaNation with something of a problem.
You see, back when Billy Bob Clinton was in charge of Le Chateau Blanc, Kagan was a legal eagle for the Executive Branch. Seems they were reviewing some legislation wending it’s way through Congress designed to shield volunteers with non-profits from lawsuits. The Clintonistas were concerned that the legislation might allow certain organizations to get away with . . .well . . . whatever they were up to. It would be all well and good, say to shield the AFL-CIO from legal action, but heaven forfend that the same protection cover the NRA in a warm fuzzy blanket of get-out-of-trial-free goodness.
So what happened? Apparently, Kagan was in a meeting about the law. She took notes. According to her handwritten notes (gotta love that Presidential Archive thing, huh?), she wrote down that the NRA and KKK were “bad orgs” and it would be bad (bad, bad, BAD) if they were protected. Apparently, nobody noted any irony regarding the lumping of the two organizations in the same group. (Truth to tell, most liberals seem to see very little difference between the NRA (guns) and the KKK (redneck bigots).
According to the rose-colored Progressive glasses crowd over at Media Matters, Kagan was on the phone, taking notes regarding another lawyer’s paper on the bill.
According to everybody else, that’s neo-revisionist thinking, and there’s no indication that Kagan was parroting the words of another mouthpiece, nor is there any documentation (other than fuzzy recollections from people that were in the Clinton Administration) that Kagan did anything other than offer her opinion.
For a Supreme Court nominee to lump the NRA and the KKK into the same group is…well…frightening. And it speaks to Kagan’s experience as a party-line loyalist, and someone willing to apply one helluva Reality Distortion Field to a grassroots organization that is millions strong, and compare it to a shadowy, secret organization who’s purpose is to surpress a hundred years of race relations progress.
Frankly, I’m not that worried about “did she or didn’t she.” I’m far more concerned that any Supreme Court nominee has a heapin’ helpin’ of Constitutional scholarship, and believes the Constitution is not some antiquated piece of paper, but the litmus standard against which all legal questions must be judged. From what we’ve seen so far, Kagan is a political hack, and Obama’s nomination is cynical, partisan politics at it’s worst – in other words, business as usual. Hope and Change, indeed.
I'm always amused when someone claims that the Dems control Congress. They do have a majority on paper, but in reality a significant bloc of Democrats in both chambers often fall in line with the conservative right. The old saying is that if Democrats could all agree with each other, they'd be Republicans. And then there's Lieberman.
IMO, yes, the Dems are generally against gun ownership, but the Reps will be for gun rights right up until the day they send the police to your door to collect them. And the current Supremes are quietly leading us to that day.
When an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose Obama's health care legislation and his financial bailouts/stimulus packages and they pass anyway, just who do you think controls Congress? The Tooth Fairy?
As you may have noticed, I don't give much credence to such statistics because you can phrase the questions to get the results you want.
The Health Care package passed because A – The insurance companies wanted all those new customers and B – Everyone, even Republicans, knew that the system had to be tweaked. Everyone played a cute game of being for or against it, but they all knew it would pass.
I disagree. Completely. If you look at the Progressive's playbook (there are several.. .http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_Radicals will do for the sake of argument) one of the central ideas is to frame the argument and it's context. So…you want to begin by stating "everyone agrees we need to reform healthcare."
Actually, not everybody did. But they got suckered into this piss-poor alternative because the Progressives did a great job conning everybody that what we had was fatally flawed. In point of fact, most people were (note the use of the past tense) happy with their health care – or at least not UNhappy. The vast number of uninsureds they spoke of were comprised largely of illegals, 20-somethings who chose to play the odds they wouldn't get sick, and a much smaller number of people who couldn't afford healthcare. So we screwed over the "haves" to take care of the "have-nots." Even better, a lot of the "have-nots" didn't want it (or believed they didn't need it). And those 20-somethings? Now they're gonna pay for it – and everybody else's – like it or not.
And don't get me started on the Republicrats. Party labels are a smokescreen. I don't care about parties. I care about ideology – and far too many Republicans are RINOs. A few Dems lean to the right – but they largely toe the party line when pressured.
What I want to see is a return to people who treasure, obey, and observe the Constitution, and it's original intent from the Founders. If that makes me a radical, then so be it. Forget party labels – that's how we got in this mess to begin with.
I'm not saying everyone agreed we needed to reform health care, I was saying everyone, including the insurance companies, knew the system was heading for financial collapse. Health care for the Haves has been getting more and more expensive. Mine just went up again, and has been increasing for as long as I can remember. And something had to be done to address otherwise indigent people clogging up emergency rooms for routine care.
I worked in the health care industry for a little over a year. The reason my job was created (at a division of Miles Labs) was that the government decided to "manage" health care costs for Medicare and Medicaid, by creating "DRG"s – Diagnoses Related Groups, essentially a way to limit the amount they'd pay per diagnoses. Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Aetna and the others quickly followed. Prices skyrocketed as everyone learned how to game the new system.
The problem with healthcare can't be solved by the government. The problem with healthcare IS the government. Capitalism and free markets (when left alone) have a marvelous way of solving these kinds of problems. "We're from the government and we're here to help" are some of the scariest – and most inaccurate words in the English language.
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