HorsesAss.Org

Growing up, one of the surest signs to me of the quiet by endemic antisemitism that persisted in the United States was the relative lack of Jews on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sure, Jews never made up more than 2 to 3 percent of the U.S. population, so the bare handful to have been appointed from 1789 through 1993 wasn’t bad considering our representation in the population as a whole. But the legal profession, well, that’s a different story.

At the risk of perpetuating even a positive stereotype, the professions, that’s kinda our schtick, and so over the three decade drought between the confirmations of Abe Fortas and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a string of presidents had to pass up an awful lot of Jewish legal scholars to a degree that just wasn’t true for other minority groups. Imagine over the same period of time, if Hollywood executives had refused to hire Jewish comedy writers; that’s sorta like what our nation’s highest court looked like to me.

Now, with the appointment of Elana Kagan, the Supreme Court is about to become a full one-third Jewish, a presence pretty far out of whack with the general population, but which is actually unremarkable considering the composition of top New York and D.C. law firms. In fact, the truly notable statistic here, is that with Justice Stevens’ retirement, for the first time in its history the court will now be zero percent Protestant.

It’s been 20 years since a WASP, Justice David Souter was last confirmed, a period during which the court has seen a stunning transformation. In 1985, Justice William Brennan, a Catholic, was the only non-Protestant on the bench, and had been since Fortas retired in 1969 after the Senate refused to confirm his elevation to Chief Justice. Since 1986, six Catholics and two Jews have been confirmed.

To put that in perspective, over the court’s first century, 49 of the justices were Protestant, and one was Catholic. Over the next 97 years religious diversity improved, with six Catholics and five Jews joining 41 Protestants on the bench. But over the last quarter century, the once dominant WASPs will have been outnumbered nine to one.

How to explain this phenomenon? Well, I guess it’s only fair to assume that our nation is not nearly as bigoted and narrow minded as it once was, at least when it comes to religion. There is no “Jewish seat” or “Catholic seat” on the court anymore. Religion no longer appears to be an issue when it comes to Supreme Court appointments or confirmation.

Or is it?

It is curious to note that five of the six Catholics on the court were appointed by Republicans, while all of the Jews were appointed by Democrats, and it’s hard to chalk this up to mere coincidence. In fact, at the risk this time of perpetuating a cynical stereotype, it’s hard not to chalk this up to the increasingly threatened status of Roe v. Wade.

This is not to suggest that all Jews are reliably pro-choice, or that all Catholics are not. I myself married into an Irish Catholic family that is pretty strongly pro-choice, at least politically, if not always as a matter of personal conscience. But let’s just say that, in general, Catholics are much less reliably pro-choice than Jews, and vice versa.

Thus a conservative Catholic appointment has proven a pretty safe bet for any anti-choice president wishing to avoid an overt litmus test, as evidenced by Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito and Roberts, and as opposed to the last two Protestant appointees, Justices Souter and Sandra Day O’Connor, who both disappointed Republicans on this issue. Meanwhile, I think we can count on Kagan to be as reliably pro-choice as Ginsburg and Breyer.

I suppose I could be wrong, and the religious composition of the court is merely coincidental, or at the very least, incidental. But it sure doesn’t seem likely.

It looks like Obama is set to pick Elena Kagan for the open Supreme Court slot. Glenn Greenwald has previously laid out why this is a terrible choice. University of Colorado Law Professor Paul Campos explains how reminiscent she is of Harriet Miers:

At least in theory Kagan could compensate somewhat for the slenderness of her academic resume through the quality of her work. But if Kagan is a brilliant legal scholar, the evidence must be lurking somewhere other than in her publications. Kagan’s scholarly writings are lifeless, dull, and eminently forgettable. They are, on the whole, cautious academic exercises in the sort of banal on-the-other-handing whose prime virtue is that it’s unlikely to offend anyone in a position of power.

Take, for example, Kagan’s article, “Presidential Administration,” which appeared in the Harvard Law Review in 2001. The piece is dedicated largely to reviewing the extant literature on the power of Congress and the president to control the actions of administrative agencies. Kagan’s thesis consists of presenting a fairly standard view within administrative law scholarship—that relatively tight presidential oversight of administrative agencies can have beneficial regulatory effects—as if it were a novel argument. She maintains, on the basis of thin evidence, that such oversight increased significantly under the Reagan and Clinton presidencies, and concludes with the tautological insight that presidential oversight can be a good thing if it doesn’t go too far.

Kagan’s work reminded me of Orwell’s observation that, if book reviewers were honest, 19 of 20 reviews would consist of the sentence, “this book inspires in me no thoughts whatever.” The bottom line regarding Kagan’s scholarly career is that there’s no there there. This is a problem not only because we have no evidence regarding what her views might be on almost any important legal question, but also because Kagan’s supposed academic achievements are being touted as the primary justification for putting someone who has never been a judge on the nation’s highest court. Now the fact that Kagan is more or less an academic nonentity would be of merely academic interest if she possessed unrelated but compelling qualifications for ascending to the nation’s highest court. But what else, exactly, has she done?

Besides her law-school career, Kagan’s resume consists of four years in the Clinton White House, where she was Associate White House Counsel—a full rung down from Harriet Miers’ position in the Bush White House—and Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council, and six years as the dean of Harvard’s law school. (Last year, Obama chose her as his solicitor general).

Apparently her main accomplishment as dean at Harvard was raising a lot of money, which, given that it’s the Harvard Law School, sounds roughly as impressive as managing to sell a lot of pot at a Grateful Dead concert. (She’s also been given credit for improving the collegial atmosphere at the school, a.k.a., getting a bunch of egomaniacs to engage in less backstabbing, which anyone familiar with law school faculties can attest is not a negligible accomplishment. Whether it’s a sufficient basis for putting somebody on the Supreme Court is another matter.)

It seems clear Kagan is a bright person and an able administrator. But Harriet Miers was those things as well: She had a long and successful career in the private practice of law, she was the first woman president of the Texas Bar Association, and she was the top lawyer in the White House for several years prior to her nomination to the Court.

Miers’ nomination was derailed by two complaints: that her primary qualification was that she was a “crony” of the president, and that nobody knew what views she had, if any, on the vast majority of questions facing the Supreme Court. Both criticisms are just as relevant to Kagan’s potential selection.

Greenwald has a longer list of those pointing out the inadequacy of this pick.

UPDATE: Well, that didn’t take long. The “Obama is the messiah and I dare not question his judgment” point of view has already been shared in the comments:

As for trusting Obama’s judgement over my own? Yeh .. he is smarter than I am and has access to a lot of good advice. That is why I voted for him.

From Greenwald’s post I linked to above:

Perhaps most revealing of all: a new article in The Daily Caller reports on growing criticisms of Kagan among “liberal legal scholars and experts” (with a focus on the work I’ve been doing), and it quotes the progressive legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky as follows: “The reality is that Democrats, including liberals, will accept and push whomever Obama picks.” Yesterday on Twitter, Matt Yglesias supplied the rationale for this mentality: “Argument will be simple: Clinton & Obama like and trust [Kagan], and most liberals (myself included) like and trust Clinton & Obama.”

Just think about what that means. If the choice is Kagan, you’ll have huge numbers of Democrats and progressives running around saying, in essence: “I have no idea what Kagan thinks or believes about virtually anything, and it’s quite possible she’ll move the Court to the Right, but I support her nomination and think Obama made a great choice.” In other words, according to Chemerinksy and Yglesias, progressives will view Obama’s choice as a good one by virtue of the fact that it’s Obama choice. Isn’t that a pure embodiment of mindless tribalism and authoritarianism? Democrats love to mock the Right for their propensity to engage in party-line, close-minded adherence to their Leaders, but compare what conservatives did with Bush’s selection of Harriet Miers to what progressives are almost certain to do with Obama’s selection of someone who is, at best, an absolute blank slate.

Exactly. The idea that progressives need to support Obama’s decisions without question just turns us into what has been so dangerous about the current incarnation of the Republican Party.

UPDATE 2: Lawrence Lessig’s post at HuffPo is a good rebuttal to those who say that Kagan is unqualified. I’m still in agreement with Greenwald that Obama should be faulted for not picking a justice with a more well-established background, but Lessig does make me feel a little more optimistic about what is my primary fear – that Kagan will end up being the direct opposite of David Souter, a justice who ends up shifting the court in the opposite direction from what was expected by his/her supporters.

UPDATE 3: Adam Serwer finds some evidence that Kagan may be better on executive power issues than expected, but wonders why the Administration hasn’t been more forthcoming over it.

Last week’s contest was won by waguy. It was the Bank of Greece in Athens.

Just as a reminder, each contest picture is related to something happening in the news. Also, the view can now be from any direction. Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Jeremiah 20:14-18
Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed! Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, who made him very glad, saying, “A child is born to you—a son!” May that man be like the towns the LORD overthrew without pity. May he hear wailing in the morning, a battle cry at noon. For he did not kill me in the womb, with my mother as my grave, her womb enlarged forever. Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame?

Happy Mother’s Day. Discuss.

– Poland has some draconian blasphemy laws.

– Radical Muslims are trying to shut down the Facebook profiles of Arabs who profess to be atheist or otherwise anti-religious.

– Israeli settlers are suspected in a recent fire at a West Bank mosque. This is following the burning of a different mosque in December and vandalism at another mosque last month.

– Commenter ‘slingshot’ sent me this NPR piece with Philadelphia Daily News reporters Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman. Laker and Ruderman won a Pulitzer Prize this year for their investigation of corruption within the Philadelphia Police Department’s narcotics division. As a result of their work, hundreds of drug cases in Philadelphia were re-examined.

Last summer, when my parents (who still reside in suburban Philadelphia) came out to visit me, I asked my dad what he thought about the case. My dad reads the Inquirer and watches local news, but he’d never even heard about it. At least the Pulitzer folks can still recognize that a rogue narcotics unit that may have sent hundreds of innocent people to prison counts as an important news story.

Dominic Holden has a very interesting post about how Q-13 Fox is threatening to sue the photographer and KIRO news over the video showing Seattle Police beating up an innocent man. The photographer is claiming that Q-13 refused to air the video in order to preserve their good relationship with SPD. He then turned around and sold it to KIRO, which Q-13 claims was illegal since the video was their property.

The photographer denies that, of course, but Q-13 sat on the video for three weeks. When it finally aired on KIRO, it caused such an uproar that the officer involved gave a teary apology at a press conference last night. Q-13 may very well be right that the photographer illegally sold the video, but what’s much clearer – and far more important – is that Q-13 tried to bury this important news story. I think we deserve to know why.

The new modem arrived late yesterday afternoon, and of course, it doesn’t work either. So yesterday’s tech rep insists he needs to send a technician to my house, which is a load of crap, as my line worked perfectly until they reprovisioned it without my permission Monday morning. If I had known then what lay in store, I would have just canceled my DSL and called Comcast.

UPDATE:
This morning, I lost dial tone again, which was a good sign, as it meant they were finally reprovisioning it back the right way. When dial tone returned, so did my DSL service.

Former FEMA director Michael Brown has been in the news recently for his bizarre insistence that President Obama purposely created the largest oil spill in history… but then, as the video above shows, Brown has a long history of bizarrely blaming others for man-made disasters.

Still, if Brown wants to blame me for exposing his lack of emergency management experience, I’m happy to take the credit, but… well… you can’t eat congressional testimony — not even Brownie’s — so it’s gonna take an awful lot more than accolades like that to keep me blogging. You know… I need money. Cold hard cash.

I haven’t blogged recently on my ongoing $25,000 fundraiser, if only to make a point that when I don’t nag folks to contribute, I don’t get many contributions. In the three weeks since I launched the fundraiser I’ve now received 109 individual contributions totaling $5427.37, or roughly $50 per contribution. Thank you for your generosity.

But that’s still below the total number of contributors and contributions over the one week fund drive I held two years ago, so I know the HA community as a whole can do better.

In addition to the individual contributions, I’ve also now received institutional donations and pledges totaling an additional $5,200, thanks to $2,500 sponsorships from UFCW 21 and SEIU 775, and a $200 donation from the King County Democrats. I hope to announce more sponsorships shortly.

I know $25,000 seems like a lot of money, but it’s really just the bare minimum I need to keep me blogging full time through the end of the year, and living pretty frugally at that. So if you value the work I do and the contributions I’ve made, please give generously today.

I’d like to pose a hypothetical to those of you who oppose new government restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions… a thought experiment if you will.

Suppose for a moment that climate change is not the obvious hoax that it is, perpetrated by Al Gore and 99% of the scientific community to some mysterious, nefarious end. Let’s just pretend that the evidence for climate change is overwhelming, that the earth is warming, that the environmental and economic impact will be devastating, and that it is absolutely conclusive that not only are these changes largely due to the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses, but that an immediate and substantial cut in these emissions could in fact lessen, delay and perhaps ultimately reverse the dramatic climatic shift mankind has set into motion.

Now hypothetically, just for the sake of argument, let us assume that you, being a reasonable and rational person, faced with overwhelmingly conclusive scientific evidence, accept all these (admittedly fantastical) assumptions as fact.

So… would you still oppose government restrictions on carbon emissions? Or, knowing that we are choking ourselves into an environmental disaster, would you still argue that the market should be free to do what the market will do?

Honestly. I want to know whether it is worth even trying to persuade you, or whether you would simply oppose any government interference in the private sector, regardless of the consequences or the facts?

In a bold, visionary editorial today, the Seattle Times strongly condemned the Seattle General Strike of 1919.

Or maybe I misread it, and they’re merely attempting to advise the government of Greece, which I suppose would make sense considering that about as many folks in Athens take the Times’ editorials seriously as we do here in Seattle.

Or perhaps the Times intends the Greek crisis as a cautionary tale for our own budget writers, but that would be stupid considering our own record deficits don’t even come close to the Greeks’ percentage wise, and are temporarily hopped up on the stimulus spending that kept our economy from falling off a cliff.

I dunno. Very confusing.

The invisible libertardian hand has its finger up your ass again. And you thought you could send your kids to college on that money. Sucker.

It’ll be that bankster’s kid going to the Ivy League school, not your kid, who will be lucky to pay $10,000 per to attend a de-funded land grant school.

So who’s waging class warfare in this country anyhow? And why are we supporting a party that is in on it?

If the video Goldy posted last night was the perfect example of why marijuana prohibition needs to end from a civil liberties standpoint, this may be the perfect example of why it needs to end from an economic standpoint:

The Brooks County Sheriff’s Department has a marijuana problem. They’ve got 200,000 pounds of pot, and they’re complaining that it would be too expensive to destroy it.

Even if you assume that this is all cheap Mexican weed, that’s still easily over $100 million worth of marijuana. Yet this Texas police department is worried about blowing their budget trying to destroy it. If they turned around and sold 1% of their looted stash, they could easily destroy the other 99% and probably upgrade their whole fleet of vehicles. Why we can’t do this math as a society (for a drug that makes people giggle and eat junk food) is why we arguably deserve the economic mess we’re living through.

That half-hour, thousand-point, momentary drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average today? Oops…

In one of the most dizzying half-hours in stock market history, the Dow plunged nearly 1,000 points before paring those losses—all apparently due to a trader error.

According to multiple sources, a trader entered a “b” for billion instead of an “m” for million in a trade possibly involving Procter & Gamble.

During this afternoon’s half-hour ride, P&G fell from $60 to $39.37, then back again, eventually closing at $60.75. But that was nothing compared to Accenture, which over the course of a single minute plunged from $40 a share to one penny. Accenture shot back up to close at $41.09, down 2.6% for the day.

How fucked up is this? Both NASDAQ and the NYSE have announced that they would cancel all trades were a stock moved more 60% from it’s price at 2:40 PM, but there are sure to be parties who will have made or lost fortunes on today’s market… um… “glitch.”

So yeah, I guess the Republicans are right… Wall Street doesn’t just doesn’t need government regulators getting in the way of its smooth operations.

Day four, and I still don’t have my DSL restored.

After several unfulfilled assurances by phone and email, I called Qwest this morning fairly resigned, and the tech support rep I reached wasn’t much more enthusiastic. He didn’t even try to reset my line or reprogram my modem. He just insisted that it was too old and slow to deliver the 7 Mbps service it had delivered reliably up until the moment Qwest fucked with my line Monday morning, and rather than wasting anymore time for either of us, he offered to send me a new one, free of cost.

That means I won’t be back up until tomorrow, or possibly Monday. Assuming the new modem works. But at least that’s better than the status quo, so I accepted.

The main reason I refused to upgrade to 12 Mbps was that I didn’t feel like dealing with the support hassle, and potentially being left without service for a day or more. I guess Qwest showed me.