Scott Spiegel

President Obama called arguments against Supreme Court Justice nominee Elena Kagan’s confirmation “pretty thin gruel.”

That’s funny—I call no judicial experience and scant, conflicting legal theorizing in print “a short stack of hotcakes.”

We know little of Kagan’s judicial philosophy—and may know even less after her hearings this week if she has any say in the matter—but what little we know isn’t to like.  In fact, it’s enough to hold our noses at.

Kagan wrote in her master’s thesis at Oxford that “[J]udges will often try to mold and steer the law in order to promote certain ethical values and achieve certain social ends.  Such activity is not necessarily wrong or invalid.”  Years later, when challenged on these remarks, she brushed them aside, claiming she was just a “dumb” 23-year-old at the time.  (Question: Was Obama just a dumb 45-year-old when he was still attending Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s racist sermons at Trinity United Church of Christ?)

Kagan once paraphrased her boss Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall’s view that interpretation of the Constitution “demanded that the courts show a special solicitude for the despised and disadvantaged.”  Great!  Does that mean she’s on the side of corporations (the despised) and inner-city residents who want to protect themselves with handguns from break-ins (the disadvantaged)?

That’s probably a no on corporations, since as Obama’s solicitor general Kagan argued the losing position in the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (2010) case.  Kagan argued that corporate-sponsored pamphlets and posters could be banned before elections, because they violate campaign finance regulations.  She also claimed with a straight face that it was OK to ban books containing endorsements of candidates for public office before elections, because the FEC won’t actually enforce the ban.

Some have argued that the stances Kagan has taken as solicitor general reveal nothing about her personal views, because she is required by her job to argue the government’s position.  Yes, but was she required to accept jobs clerking for Marshall, strategizing for President Bill Clinton, and shilling for President Barack Obama?  Is it unfair to intuit that she’s a bit more comfortable implementing the visions of these liberal lions than she would be, say, clerking for Clarence Thomas?

When Obama nominated Kagan for the post of solicitor general, he boasted that she had chosen Citizens United as the first case she wanted to argue if confirmed.  So I think it’s safe to say that many of Obama’s predilections are near and dear to her heart.

And that’s probably a no on guns, since as Marshall’s assistant decades ago Kagan urged him not to hear a Washington, D.C. resident’s appeal of his conviction for owning an unlicensed handgun.  When the defendant argued that the D.C. gun ban violated his Second Amendment rights—a decision, by the way, upheld by the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010)—Kagan snippily replied, “I’m not sympathetic.”

Weak-kneed conservatives keep telling us we should be quiet and support Kagan’s nomination (which is exactly what they said about Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination last summer), because she’s only replacing another departing liberal, Justice John Paul Stevens (which is exactly what they said about Justice David Souter last summer).  OK, but since when did conservatives’ Supreme Court standard stop aiming for 9 defenders of the Constitution and start settling for 4.5?

Former Wall Street Journal assistant managing editor Tunku Varadarajan gushed that in the opening statement of Kagan’s hearings she spoke “with a face that was tilted at an appropriately deferential angle, and with a voice that betrayed—to my delight—the vowels of Manhattan’s Upper West Side.  (She sounded, let us say, like a wise Ashkenazi woman.)”  That and five originalists will get you a constitutional decision!  To Kagan’s credit, at least bloggers haven’t unearthed speeches in which she announced that better rulings would presumably be made by a wise Ashkenazi woman than a Gentile man.

The RINO herd keeps telling us we shouldn’t oppose Kagan, because then venerated liberals will paint us as stubborn and argumentative.  These are the same liberals, you will remember, who last year called town hall protestors racist, two-year-old teabaggers for opposing ObamaCare.

As gratifying as D.C. v. Heller, Citizens United, and McDonald v. Chicago were, here is why conservatives must oppose Kagan’s confirmation: because we can’t afford any more such 5-4 nail-biters, to say nothing of epic disasters we have surrendered like Rasul v. Bush (2004), Kelo v. City of New London (2005), Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), and Massachusetts v. EPA (2007).



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Since the clever acronym for Democrats’ new election fund accountability scheme is DISCLOSE, perhaps they could disclose for the American people the true intention of the bill and the consequences it will have on free speech and political advocacy during election cycles.

The Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections Act was proposed in response to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision in January, which slapped down the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act’s prohibition of corporate sponsorship of electioneering communications 60 days before a general election or 30 days before a primary.

The Democracy, etc. Act—alternately referred to by insiders as DISCLOSE, H.R. 5175, McCain-Feingold Part II, ABRIDGE, SQUELCH, and SUFFOCATE—would ban certain parties, such as federal contractors with more than a specified dollar amount in contracts, from producing any political communications right before elections, and would impose burdensome “transparency” requirements on others.  For-profit and nonprofit corporations would be regulated under the law, but unions would be exempted from it—a fact that absolutely coincidentally happens to disadvantage Republicans and benefit Democrats.

The act would also require the top five corporate sponsors of any ad to declare themselves at the end of the ad—which means that in addition to hearing politicians recite, “My name is Joe Windbag, and I approve this message,” we’d have to hear, “My name is Joe Moneybags, and I’m CEO of Megalopolis Corporation, and I approve this message,” “My name is…” etc.  Given that most political ads are only 30 seconds long, commercials under DISCLOSE will inevitably start to resemble that Eminem song where he raps over and over, “My name is… My name is…”

New York Senator Charles Schumer and Maryland Representative Chris Van Hollen are the proud sponsors of this bill.

Upon its unveiling, Schumer trumpeted that the bill’s “deterrent effect should not be underestimated.”

Van Hollen, who just so happens to be the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, claims that the bill is necessary because it will prevent foreign entities from influencing U.S. elections via shadowy front groups.

This is a remarkable claim for a Democrat to make, given that: (1) Citizens United did not, as claimed by our Fabricator-in-Chief at his State of the Union Address, “open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections”—it did not even alter the existing ban on election-related contributions from foreign nationals or corporations; and (2) a good chunk of Obama’s presidential election fund was made up of overseas donors whom Obama, unlike John McCain and Hillary Clinton, never required to reveal their identities or associations for the public.

In the wake of pressure from the National Rifle Association, who wanted an exemption from the proposed regulations and threatened to campaign against midterm election candidates who voted for the act, Democrats arbitrarily refashioned the legislation to exclude groups that had at least one million members, had been around for 10 years, had membership in all 50 states, and received no more than 15% of their funding from corporations.  Only the NRA qualified under these guidelines.  (An aide leaked that earlier language, rejected as too obvious, would have offered a carve-out for any organization that had been around for at least 139 years, boasted national membership of at least 3.5 million, counted Ulysses S. Grant and Charlton Heston among its former presidents, and sported an eagle atop two crossed rifles as its logo.)

Due to bipartisan outrage over the narrowly tailored exception for the NRA, last week the bill’s sponsors lowered the membership threshold criterion to 500,000, which allowed groups such as the AARP and the Humane Society into the Mile High Club.

Realizing that there were still not enough votes for the act, on Thursday House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tabled the bill, though Van Hollen this week announced that House Democrats’ efforts to reverse Citizens United were not over.  The White House chimed in by giving the bill a fresh endorsement on Monday.

Yesterday, Van Hollen released hilarious poll results claiming that 87% of Republican voters and 90% of Democratic voters supported the bill.  The only thing Republican and Democratic voters agree on in such overwhelming numbers is that Republican and Democratic voters don’t agree on anything that strongly.

DISCLOSE went to the Rules committee today, and a vote may come as early as tomorrow.

Democrats are dying to shove this monstrosity through Congress well before the November elections, to prohibit right-leaning groups from facilitating the expected Democratic massacre.  Their maneuver recalls the proposal Senate Democrats floated to get rid of the filibuster earlier this year, when they thought they couldn’t pass their health care bill with it in place.  In a letter co-written with Harry Reid, Schumer admits that, “We commit to working tirelessly for Senate consideration of the House-passed bill so it can be signed by the President in time to take effect for the 2010 elections.”

The Supreme Court may well overturn this law, in keeping with the spirit of their Citizens United decision, but by that point the November midterm elections will be long gone.

What all of this proves is that, as usual, Democrats never think ahead to what might happen as a consequence of the crummy legislation they pass for short-term political gain, and whether it might come back to cause them long-term political grief—to say nothing of its constitutionality or its utility in preserving the nation’s ideals.  I don’t know, I think a filibuster might come in pretty handy after two waves of Republicans sweeping Congressional elections in 2010 and 2012—eh, House Minority Leader Pelosi?

In addition to being immoral calculators who would throw their grandmothers under the bus for political power, Democrats are shortsighted and lunk-headed when it comes to enacting their schemes.  If they get away with DISCLOSE, it will only be because of the moral cowardice and incompetence of Republicans in failing to oppose them.



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• Dems tweak campaign bill to garner support (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
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The list of countries that have provided tacit support to Israel for its imminent launch of preemptive missile attacks on Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities now includes: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Turkey, Egypt, and… not-the-United-States.

The Saudi government recently conducted drills to ensure that their missile defense system does not shoot down Israeli jets that might fly over their airspace in the near future.  This is crucial for any bombing raids Israel may conduct on Iranian nuclear facilities, because the only feasible route to Iran’s nuclear plants is over a wide swath of Saudi Arabia.  Israel might also need to fly over Jordan and Kuwait, which have not objected to this arrangement.

A much quicker, as-the-crow-flies route to Iran’s cluster of nuclear facilities at Natanz, Qom, Isfahan, and Arak would be directly over Iraq.  However, use of this flight plan has one sticking point: the U.S. commander-in-chief’s stubborn refusal to allow Israel to fly jets through Iraq’s airspace.

In arriving at this position, President Obama may have been following the advice of Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, who infamously offered the charming advice last year that if Israel tried to use Iraqi airspace to attack Iran, the U.S. should shoot Israeli jets down.

Saudi Arabia has never exactly considered Israel an ally, as the U.S. does.  Yet the Saudi government recognizes the danger a nuclear Iran poses to their country and the region, and is willing to clear a corridor of airspace for Israel over their country.  Why is Obama unwilling to do the same over Iraq, which isn’t even his country?

In 2007 Turkey allowed Israel use of its airspace in a sneak attack on a developing nuclear plant in Syria, Iran’s primary ally in the region.  At the time, the Syria attack was seen as a test run for an upcoming Israeli attack against Iran’s facilities, which means that Turkey was essentially helping Israel prepare for such an attack.

Egypt has also recently looked the other way as Israel sent warships and a nuclear-capable submarine down the Suez Canal toward the Arabian Sea in preparation for a conflict with Iran.

But due to Obama’s creepy, subtly anti-Semitic foreign policy, Israel must instead hurl its jets in a wide, boomerang-shaped flight path all the way around the southern tip of Iraq, across the Persian Gulf, and back up to central-northern Iran to get to the country’s primary nuclear facilities.

George W. Bush was certainly no hawk regarding the prospect of the U.S. attacking Iran under his watch.  However, it’s safe to assume, given the precipitous progress of Iran’s nuclear program over the past two years, Iran’s alarming self-declaration as a nuclear state this spring, and Israel’s brave willingness to confront Iran alone, that Bush would not have denied Israel the right to fly over Iraq if he were still President.

To put all of this in perspective: our current president is refusing to allow the only stable democracy in the Middle East (Israel) to serve as the U.S.’s front line of attack against the greatest state sponsor of terrorism in the world (Iran), by letting them fly over a country we recently liberated (Iraq) in order that they might serve as a model for neighboring dictatorships on the brink of regime change (such as Iran).

Ah, you say, but surely Obama has some other diplomatic maneuver up his sleeve, some nonmilitary means of pressuring Iran to abandon its nuclear program and allow weapons inspectors into the country.

Actually, no—the Obama administration has been working to weaken Congress’s proposed U.S. sanctions against Iran.  Obama fears that these injunctions may go too far and anger our allies.

These are not the sanctions imposed by the UN last week—the ones which we waited forever to be implemented, which two of the largest nations in the world (Brazil and Turkey) rejected, and which are watered down to the point of futility.  These are additional sanctions that would apply only to U.S. companies and not be legally binding on other countries.

The EU has already agreed to oil and gas sanctions of their own that go beyond the mild-mannered penalties imposed by the UN.  So even the likes of France and Germany are going further than the U.S. in isolating Iran, yet Obama still sees the need to appease our allies.

Americans ought to be deeply troubled by a U.S. foreign policy that fails to be as supportive of Israel’s right to defend itself as the doctrines of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt.



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Perhaps the heartrending lament that the Turkish aid flotilla Mavi Marmara—headed for Gaza and stopped by the Israeli Navy last week—contained a bevy of innocent Nobel Peace laureates would be more compelling if recent Nobel Peace laureates didn’t include the father of modern terrorism, Yasser Arafat.

Perhaps the fact that nine passengers were accidentally killed in the struggle would carry more emotional punch if the excursion hadn’t been funded by an Islamist, anti-Israeli, Hamas-allied, Turkish front group whose dream is to unaccidentally kill six million Jews.

Perhaps the claim that helpless crew members were unarmed and sought no confrontation with Israeli soldiers would ring truer if the Mavi Marmara hadn’t been stocked with butcher knives and heavy baton-shaped pipes and sticks.

Notwithstanding Pat Buchanan’s idiotic comparison of the ship’s passengers to civil rights protestors, and Israel’s stopping the flotilla to a garden-variety carjacking, Israel is not indiscriminately lobbing cannonballs into Gaza-bound aid ships and sinking them, or raiding them for loot and hostages, Somali pirate-style.

Firing on these “aid” ships that pro-Palestinian groups keep using to try to break Israel’s blockade would actually be justifiable, given that such groups are forever trying to sneak steel, concrete, and other weapons supplies to Gaza for the purpose of constructing more rockets to fire into neighboring Israeli cities.

Instead of reacting as, say, the United States would have if Germany or Japan had tried to break its naval blockade during World War II, the Israeli Navy patiently sends multiple radio warnings to ships entering the blockade zone and gently escorts them to a nearby port, where they inspect the ships, separate any items constituting genuine aid from those that could be used to build weapons, and offer to truck the permitted goods to Gaza at Israel’s cost.

The delivery of confiscated aid to Gaza is invariably turned away.

For example, Israel allowed the Rachel Corrie, a ship named after a dumb American from the hippie Northwest who was crushed to death after she stood in the way of IDF bulldozers clearing the way for Israeli settlements, to dock in the port Ashdod last Saturday, and offered to inspect its cargo after the passengers did not engage in murderous resistance.  The Rachel Corrie held only 11 passengers and, for once, was sponsored by a group that renounces violence.  Gaza’s refusal to accept the aid confiscated by Israel disproves pro-Hamas activists’ lie that Israel is a ruthless, bloodthirsty military state out to slaughter human rights activists and prevent vital aid from getting to starving Gazans.

The United States supports the blockade, which Israel instituted after years of suicidally tolerating aid ships delivering contraband to Gaza and Hamas’s ongoing offensive in which they have fired thousands of rockets into Israel’s most populous cities.

As with all too many international affairs, it looks as though the United States and Israel will have to go this one alone.  Even in the U.S., Israel has its detractors, such as the editorial board at the New York Times, which planted the following anti-Israeli zingers in a pseudo-balanced editorial last weekend: “Turkey is understandably furious about Israel’s disastrous attack on the Turkish-flagged aid ship that tried to run the Gaza blockade…  Israel deserves to be criticized for the flotilla disaster…  [Israel] has a strong interest in repairing relations with Turkey [but] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu still doesn’t get this.”

Imagine for a second if Staten Island were populated by trigger-happy terrorists who repeatedly stated as their goal the destruction of Manhattan and the tossing of all Manhattanites into the Hudson River.  Imagine if Staten Islanders had a history of smuggling in weapons-building materials from ships sent from: Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Long Island, Roosevelt Island, Governors Island, New Jersey, Connecticut, and upstate New York.  Imagine if Staten Islanders periodically launched thousands of rockets into the center of Manhattan.  Imagine if Mayor Bloomberg shipped thousands of tons of aid to Staten Island every day, to appease the New York Times, but instituted a naval blockade around Staten Island to prevent weapons from being sent there.

Now imagine if pro-Staten Islander phony aid ships repeatedly violated the blockade, filling its passenger lists with homicidal jihadists, deadly weapons, and a few token peace activists, and refused all offers for genuine humanitarian aid to be trucked to Staten Island and distributed at Manhattan’s expense.

I think there would be just a bit more sympathy toward Manhattan’s taking steps to defend itself—even at The Times.

Here’s a suggestion to pro-Hamas groups: how about calling the next phony relief vessel to Gaza the Yasser Arafat?  How do you think that would go over on the world stage?  After all, Arafat was a humanitarian Nobel Prize laureate!

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Deepwater Horizon is not Obama’s Katrina, because Katrina was not Bush’s.

The Katrina hurricane should have been addressed by state and local governments and residents who didn’t evacuate despite warnings of the impending storm.

Similarly, the Gulf spill should be dealt with by the company that caused it and has the best understanding of how to end it, British Petroleum.  The federal government’s role should be to adjudicate claims against BP.

Of course Obama and every liberal on the planet have been hollering for years that Bush was personally responsible for the Katrina-induced death of every man, woman, and crawfish in New Orleans.

Conservatives’ longstanding wish that liberals please stop trying to put the government in charge of everything recently prompted Frank Rich to sneer, “The only good news from the oil spill is that when catastrophe strikes, even some hard-line conservatives, like Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, start begging for the federal government to act, and act big.”

Rich’s solution is nonetheless preferable to two other New York Times columnists’ strategy for Obama, which is: to cry.

Maureen Dowd counsels Obama to offer President Clinton a job: “Bill would certainly know how to gush at a gusher gone haywire.  Let him resume a cameo role as Feeler in Chief.”  Tom Friedman, in his column “Malia for President,” advises that “the most important thing Mr. Obama can do is react to this spill as a child would.”

It should go without saying that the spill is not Bush’s Katrina II, notwithstanding claims by Nancy Pelosi and Chris Dodd.

Given the role the federal government has historically adopted, and the Obama administration has claimed, in preventing and dealing with large-scale industrial disasters such as the BP spill, the incompetence and radical environmentalist ideology of this administration have only exacerbated the crisis.

In a special investigation, AP reported that the federal Minerals Management Service, responsible for overseeing oil rig safety, failed to adequately respond to AP’s Freedom of Information Act request for copies of the agency’s inspection reports over the past several years.  MMS provided reports for only January, February, and April 2010; inspectors were revealed to have spent no more than two hours examining the rig during each visit; and the agency had inexplicably whited out sections of the reports.  AP also found that in 2009 MMS awarded Deep Horizon a safety award.

The Obama administration took a week after the explosion to announce an inquiry into the cause.  The same day, the Interior Department “point person” assigned to the incident left town on a work trip that included rafting in the Grand Canyon.  Meanwhile, Homeland Security was busy denying that the Defense Department was involved in addressing the crisis, then backtracking and claiming that Defense had been there since the day of the explosion.

Michael Barone argues that the public views the spill as reflecting poorly on the administration’s competence, rather than its ideology.  Peggy Noonan calls the oil spill a “political disaster” for Obama and labels it an “unforced error” that was “shaped by the president’s political judgment and instincts.”

A good part of Obama’s judgment and instincts relate to his environmentalist ideology, which places the needs of caribou, fussy Democratic Senators with pristine oceanfront views, and other lowly creatures over those of everyday Americans.

As Charles Krauthammer asks, “Why were we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place?”  His answer: “Environmental chic has driven us out there…  [W]e go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production…  [I]n the safest of all places, on land, we’ve had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.”

After the spill, while BP was spraying the dispersant Corexit to prevent oil from spreading, the Environmental Protection Agency butted in and told BP it had 24 hours to replace Corexit with another, less toxic dispersant from a list of EPA-approved dispersants, or else provide documentation on why the other dispersants on the list didn’t meet BP’s requirements.  BP responded by tactfully noting that none of the dispersants on the EPA’s list met the toxicity and effectiveness criteria the EPA expected BP to live up to, and concluded that it would continue to use Corexit, the dispersant most readily available to it.

Obama flew gaggles of lawyers, EPA officials, and environmentalists to Florida in the weeks following the Gulf tragedy, which shows where his priorities lay: not in rapidly and effectively solving the crisis, but in preventing federal liability claims, ensuring compliance with executive rulings upholding green dogma, and using the event as a PR opportunity to ban future drilling.  As Noonan writes, “When your most creative thoughts in the middle of a disaster revolve around protecting your position, you are summoning trouble.”

Although the leakage of radioactive gases at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania in 1979 yielded no casualties or even detrimental health effects, the accident helped pave the way for a moratorium on building new plants in the United States for the next 30 years.  This, despite the fact that “eco-friendly” countries like France, Sweden, and Switzerland all get more than twice as high a percentage of their power from nuclear sources as the U.S.—80% in France’s case.

The Gulf oil spill isn’t Obama’s Katrina—it’s more like his Three Mile Island: a rare but inevitable accident, an unavoidable byproduct of an essential method of power production, and an incident used by a far-left administration to phase out an entire category of energy production in the hopes of scaling back industrial civilization as we know it.



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