• The Carpenters.
• At age 10, seriously considered running to Canada if we were drafted.
• Farted in gym.
• Thought Holy Grail was boring on first viewing.
• Beat up a kid in fifth grade because he was the only one we could.
• Preferred the Monkees to the Beatles.
• Thought we were smoking dope one night in high school, but it turned out to be oregano.
• Flares.
• Once, during a vacation, when we were fighting with our brother in the back seat, Dad really did turn the car around and drive home.
• Didn’t consider at 21 what some asshole might think of us at 50.

Young Kagan’s Thesis on Socialism [NRO]

So, Mr. Plumber, have you ever stolen anything? “When I was a very little boy, I don’t exactly remember it, I guess we were going through a department store and I stole a pair of silk female garments and put them beneath my butt because I apparently liked how it felt.” [AOL News, via Countdown]

We won’t recap Glenn Greenwald’s argument against Elena Kagan here, but his most notable assertion is that nobody knows who she is. Sure, we know her resume, and she’s best buds with a lot of folks, but she’s something of a Chauncey Gardiner when it comes to divining her positions on legal issues. (We prefer that to the Harriet Miers comparison — Kagan’s actually competent at what she does, by all accounts.)

But if you don’t want to hear it from Greenwald, here’s Jeffrey Toobin making the same point from a much friendlier perspective:

I met Elena on our first day of law school at Harvard in the fall of 1983…

Elena danced at our wedding in 1986. When my wife, Amy, and I bought our first apartment, Elena’s father was our lawyer; he had a small real estate law firm in New York. (He died in 1994.) When Elena’s mother died last year, I sat shiva with the family in the apartment where she grew up on the West Side…

All of this may be interesting, but it’s largely beside the point for a Supreme Court Justice. The justices are not really managers of people, certainly not in comparison to the dean of a major law school. Judgment, values, and politics are what matters on the Court. And here I am somewhat at a loss. Clearly, she’s a Democrat. She was a highly regarded member of the White House staff during the Clinton years, but her own views were and are something of a mystery. She has written relatively little, and nothing of great consequence.

We won’t go as far as Greenwald and call Kagan’s supporters mindless camp followers. We’ll just wait for some basis to form a judgment. From what we’ve read so far, none is on offer.

Elena Kagan’s Nomination [New Yorker, via Political Wire]

Get out of the way, apparently: “Gordon Brown has said he is stepping down as Labour Party leader — as his party opens formal talks with the Lib Dems about forming a government. Mr Brown, prime minister since 2007, said he hoped a successor as Labour leader would be in place by September.” [BBC]

In our latest episode of ConLaw Obama is to Civil Liberties what MBA Bush was to the Economy, we’ve been learning the past few days that Eric “Midnight Pardons” Holder is invoking a “public safety exception” to Miranda rights that allows agents to question suspected terrorists for a few hours before letting on that they don’t have to talk. (They’re talking afterwards anyway, but we’ll let Liz Cheney lie about that one.)

We’ll get to the details in a moment, but the exception is based on a 1984 Supreme Court ruling that Holder has been artfully interpreting. Under the ruling, if there’s an immediate danger to address, you can wait a moment before pulling out the Miranda card. Holder waited more than a few moments in the cases of the Underwear Bomber and the Times Square Nickname Pending, and now he wants to formalize his improvisation:

The public safety exception was really based on a robbery that occurred back in the ’80s and something to do with a supermarket. We’re now dealing with international terrorists, and I think that we have to think about perhaps modifying the rules that interrogators have and somehow coming up with something that is flexible and is more consistent with the threat that we now face.

Because, as they say, two failed bombings changed everything.

Of course, we understand what Holder’s getting at. Both Miranda and its exception were based on everyday cop-show crimes. Here we’re facing potential networks of violent crime, something we’ve never seen before. Unless you count the Mafia. Or gangs. Or the Weathermen.

But since we’re stuck with the issue this week, let’s ground ourselves before the abstractions start hitting the fan.

Read more »

Lena Horne, Singer and Actress, Dies at 92 [NYT]

Title: “The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists”

Authors: Aaron Klein and Brenda J. Elliott

Rank: 11

Blurb: “The book uncovers a far-leftist, anti-American nexus that has been instrumental in not only helping build Obama’s political career but in securing his presidency.”

Review: “After reading, ‘The Manchurian President’, you may still wonder how America could have possibly elected BHO, but you won’t wonder why he acts like a marxist through his public policy. The truth is, he’s been around marxism and socialism his entire life, and his policy reflects this stunning truth.”

Customers Also Bought: “Edge of Apocalypse”, by Tim LaHaye

Footnote: The president wingnuts complain about sounds a lot better than the one we have.

The Manchurian President [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon kickback link]