So I’m browsing through The Maine GOP Party Platform/Teabagger Manifesto, (PDF here)when I come across this gem:

b. Seal the border and protect US citizens along the border and everywhere, as is the prime directive of the Federal Government.

So wait… sealing the border is the “prime directive” of the Federal Government? Says who, exactly? And what’s this “prime directive” stuff anyway? As always, Wikipedia can help:

In the fictional universe of Star Trek, the Prime Directive, Starfleet’s General Order #1, is the most prominent guiding principle of the United Federation of Planets. The Prime Directive dictates that there can be no interference with the internal development of pre-warp civilizations, consistent with the historical real world concept of Westphalian sovereignty. It has special implications, however, for civilizations that have not yet developed the technology for interstellar spaceflight (“pre-warp”), since no primitive culture can be given or exposed to any information regarding advanced technology or the existence of extraplanetary civilizations, lest this exposure alter the natural development of the civilization. Although this was the only application stated by Captain Kirk in “The Return of the Archons”, by the 24th Century, it had been indicated to include purposeful efforts to improve or change in any way the natural course of such a society, even if that change is well-intentioned and kept completely secret.

Oh God, has it really come to this? The GOP has been overrun by theocrats, gun nuts, racists and pimply Science Fiction obsessed losers.

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]

ith apologies to Monty Python, I’d like for you to try a thought experiment. Imagine being a fly on the wall at a gathering of Tea Party intelligentsia. Now, imagine leaving that empty room and attaching yourself to a wall in an adjacent quarters that is playing host to a gathering of hysterical, conspiracy obsessed Tea Party organizers planning their next rabble rousing rally. Amid the fiery rhetoric and lunatic invective, the leader stands up and demands “What has Obama ever done for America?”

Then, unexpectedly, at the back of the room a solitary individual who didn’t get the memo about our president being the Antichrist, timidly responds by producing the following three charts. Read more »

The Fiat Ritmo was sold here in the US of A as the Fiat Strada. It was supposed to be the Italian Rabbit killer.  The only car that drew more derision from the automotive press was the Renault Le Car (the Renault 5 in France), and rightly so.

[via]