Do not know why I thought of this just now. Lying sack of shit:

RedState’s Erick Erickson, who just six weeks ago declared he needed to “grow up” because he called David Souter a “goat-fucking child molester” last year, declares that a thirty-year-old college paper says all you need to know about the latest Supreme Court nominee:

BREAKING: We Have Elena Kagan’s College Thesis

This proves Elena Kagan is an open and avowed socialist. The woman declares that socialists must stick together instead of fracture in order to advance a socialist agenda, which Kagan advocates…

Keep in mind that Kagan wrote her thesis at the height of the cold war praising a group that collaborated with our enemies.

We’re not sure we’d peg 1981 as the height of the Cold War — the Cuban Missile Crisis was about twenty years earlier, after all. Then again, we’re not sure we were yet over our Karen Carpenter fetish.

“Eliot Spitzer, a member of Kagan’s social circle at Princeton University, wanted to make the same point as Walzer. ‘I did not go out with her, but other guys did,’ he said in an email Tuesday night.” [Politico, via Political Wire]

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]

Stinque’s 2009 Golden Anal Pear Asshole of the Year and runner-up for 2009’s Crystal Douchebag for Lifetime Achievement, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, is introducing legislation today (co-sponsored by Senator Centerfold of Massachusetts) that would give the State Department the power to strip citizenship from any American that the department thinks has ties to a terrorist organization.

Read more »

“Midway through the argument… Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. — who is known to write out his opinions in long hand with pen and paper instead of a computer — asked what the difference was ‘between email and a pager?'” [DC Dicta, via Political Wire]

Harold and Clay

[Post Updated 4/20/10 9:15 am PDT with photo of Clay and Harold and excerpt from the complaint]

Clay Greene and his partner of more than 20 years, Harold Scull, lived together in Sebastopol, California in the idyllic wine country of Sonoma Valley. Clay and Harold made diligent efforts to protect their legal rights, and had their legal paperwork in place—wills, powers of attorney, and medical directives, all naming each other. Harold was 88 years old and in frail medical condition, but still living at home with Clay, 77, who was in good health for his age.

One evening in April 2008, Harold fell down the front steps of their home.  Clay called an ambulance, and Harold was taken to the hospital.

Based on their medical directives alone, Clay should have been consulted in Harold’s care. Tragically, Sonoma County and health care workers instead refused to allow Clay to see Harold in the hospital.

There, then, the men’s nightmare began. Read more »