SmartRemarks

Why? Why does a presidential administration that came into office on the diligent labor and fervent hopes of progressives continue to send progressives the message that it doesn’t need them, indeed that it doesn’t even care what they think, that their principles and passions are nothing more than chips to be bargained away as evidence of the White House’s “post-partisan” cred?

Today Barack Obama announced that his nominee to replace John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court will be Elena Kagan, current Solicitor General, former Dean of Harvard Law. After much debate and speculation in the press and online, the decision isn’t really a surprise. It is, however, a major disappointment.

A Supreme Court vacancy is always a huge opportunity, and my personal hopes for Obama’s choice when this one arose could be summed up in just three words: please be bold. I had hoped that with (as it were) strategist David Axelrod whispering in one ear (recently fairly outspoken about the pointlessness of seeking cooperation from the right) and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel whispering in the other (advocating triangulation and expediency, valuing power over principle as ever), for a change Obama might recapture the spirit that animated his campaign and decide that, if the GOP is determined to give him a fight, he’ll make it one with stakes worth winning.

But once again, he didn’t.

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Tags: Elena Kagan, Glenn Greenwald, John Paul Stevens, judiciary, Obama, progressives, Rahm Emanuel, Senate, Supreme Court

Yesterday’s inbox contained a political e-mail message forwarded by my girlfriend’s parents. They’re not especially political people; their sensibilities (to the extent they’ll even discuss them) tend toward a somewhat mushy moderate conservatism, the kind of folks who instinctively vote Republican, even though the party’s center of gravity has moved far away from them. Indeed, they even said as much in the forwarded message—”you’re much more interested in politics than either of us”—yet they invited a response, practically asking for an informed rebuttal even as they implicitly treated the viral message as credible and worthy of attention.

Which, once I read it, was really hard to believe.

This is the message they forwarded, word for word:
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Tags: Congress, conservatism, Constitution, e-mail, government, health care, insurance, Medicare, Michael Connelly, Supreme Court

The GOP Senators questioning Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor must have a truly remarkable tolerance for making themselves look like condescending, hypocritical jackasses in public.

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Tags: Republicans, Senate, Sotomayor, Supreme Court