I’m not yet going to chime in on the merits of the president’s latest pick for the Supreme Court.  I am impressed, however, with the respect she has shown for conservative academics, her commitment to intellectual diversity and the appreciation she has shown for the Federalist Society.

That said, despite her broad-mindedness, Republican Senators have a good case for filibustering her.  Indeed, they just need crib from the comments made by Democratic Senators during the Alito hearings, including the words used by a certain Senator then representing Illinois.

NB:  To make sure I’m not misunderstood.  I’m not making the case for filibustering Kagan, just pointing out that Obama and his fellow partisans have already made it.

In his very self-important piece that Mark Lilla penned for the New York Review of Books, that very smart man has a real problem of putting things into context.  He writes that Obama

. . . has been elected president by a healthy majority and is grappling with a wounded economy and two foreign wars he inherited—and what are we talking about? A makeshift Tea Party movement whose activists rage against “government” and “the media,” while the hotheads of talk radio and cable news declare that the conservative counterrevolution has begun.

Yet, he is absolutely clueless how Obama built that majority.  If he had paid the slightest bit of attention to the Democrat’s campaign rhetoric, he might better understand the roots of Tea Party activism.  It’s as if Lilla believes that because Obama represents the more liberal party and because he won a majority, therefore people must accept the big-government initiatives he proposes.

Alas, that Mr. Lilla seems blissfully (deliberately?) ignorant of the rhetoric the Democratic nominee used to win over voters in the middle.  Recall, as I pointed out in a recent post, how Obama promised, in the campaign to hold the line on spending:

“In his half-hour infomercial” the Wednesday before the 2008 election, the Washington Post reported, candidate Barack Obama “repeated earlier assurances that he had ‘offered spending cuts’ to pay for every cent of the post-election bonanza that he plans to shower on his fellow Americans.”  (Emphasis added.)  Indeed, in the third debate that fall, pointing out ”that we’ve been living beyond our means and we’re going to have to make some adjustments” he told what he’d been doing ”throughout this campaign”: he had proposed “a net spending cut.”

Not just that, Obama was going to go line by line through the federal budget to root out waste.  Guess Lilla takes Obama’s campaign rhetoric as seriously as does the candidate himself.

So filled is Lilla with contempt for conservatives that he blinds himself to the circumstances of Obama’s (electoral) success and the sincerity of our concerns, concerns which parallel Obama’s campaign rhetoric.  And, as per my prior post on his essay, he’s all but blind to the economic reality (worldwide debt problem) which has, in large measure, spurred our activism.

You just gotta love our Queen Conservative Diva (I created a new title).

From today’s Washington Post “Right Now” blog by Dave Weigel:

On Friday, I noted that anti-gay activist Ryan Sorba, in the process of angling for a role in a CNN documentary, challenged prominent gay conservative Tammy Bruce to a debate.

Let Tammy Bruce and/or Andrew Sullivan know that I am going to publicly challenge both to a debate soon!

Bruce, who as of last week leads the advisory board of the gay GOP group GOProud, responded to me (bolds mine):

I was amused by Ryan Sorba’s declaration that he would be soon calling for a debate between himself and either me or Andrew Sullivan. I have a better idea — I would suggest Sorba ‘debate’ Ted Haggard, Bob Allen or perhaps even George Alan Rekers. I think that might prove more interesting, and would certainly help shed some light on how hypocritical homophobic bigotry has been masquerading as an element of both Christianity and conservatism for far too long. Frankly, I do find it rather odd that homosexuality seems to be more on the minds of certain so-called religious conservatives than it is for most of my gay friends.

In the meantime, as the new chair of the Advisory Council of GOProud, I’m excited to be able to do further work promoting how authentically conservative ideals improve the quality of everyone’s lives, especially gays and other minorities. We are only truly free as individuals when we are able to make life choices that best suit us. That requires limited government, lower taxes, and personal responsibility. This is the conservative message I embrace, that compels the Tea Party movement, and will transform this nation on November 2nd.

Bruce, who appears frequently on Fox News, has quite a bit more credibility with conservatives than Sorba, whom even some gay marriage opponents consider needlessly abrasive. Hence, smack-downs like this.

HAHAHAHA.  Ryan Sorba — what a tool.  I’d pay to see this debate.  She’ll eat him alive.

By the way, can we PLEASE stop the notion that Andrew Sullivan is a conservative.  For crying out loud!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Forget the oil slick, TN floods (oh, Obama forgot already), the Grecian Formula for Disaster, or the Hung Parliament.

At least for the next 48 hours — it will be Elena Kagan 24/7.  So we might as well get the ball rolling.

Rick Klein of ABC’s The Note has the morning pre-game activities summed up well.

And so it begins, again and anew, with everything different, but more or less the same.

President Obama makes his selection of Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court official at 10 am ET Monday — thus concluding the period of time where the White House holds ownership over the all-important narrative.

Supreme Court confirmation battles have become storytelling contests in recent decades. Neither side wants to, or will, give up the chance to tell its own story — and the nominee him- or herself is only a bit player in many of these scripts.

The first chapter belongs to Kagan herself — she’d be the third woman on this court, the first justice named in nearly 40 years never to have been a judge, a legal whiz without a reputation as an ideologue, respected and liked by prominent lawyers and judges on both sides of the political divide.

As for the man making the decision: This is a choice that leans toward caution, from a president who knows full well there are enough other big fights out there than to see the need to pick a new one.

Yet Kagan will find herself wrapped up in the volatile politics of the moment: raging debates over the roles of the courts and the entire federal government; passion over Obama’s agenda, particularly against it; and just a bit of frustration nagging at the president from his left.

In the bigger picture — will she become a justice? — this is an environment where 59 votes are almost certainly plenty. It’s also an environment where one of the 41 on the other side just found out he’s not coming back, for reasons that don’t encourage accommodating anything the president wants to do these days.

Please READ THE WHOLE THING!  Rick does the work, so you don’t have to!

[RELATED: Gay Lefties Ponder -- "Is She, or Isn't She?"]

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

As I read the various conservative bloggers (as well as one of in the middle) criticizing the president for lamenting in a commencement address “Sunday that in the iPad and Xbox era, information had become a diversion that was imposing new strains on democracy, in his latest critique of modern media“, I thought of Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan, like Lincoln with newspapers in the mid-nineteenth century, would have been excited by all these new media.  He would have wondered at, rather, delighted in, their possibilities.

Strange for Obama to see new media as a diversion when he tapped into the latest technologies to run such an innovative — and effective — campaign.

Yes, there are downsides as there are with any technology.  But, couldn’t the president focus on the possibilities while cautioning us about those downsides?  Instead, he chooses to dwell on the negative.  Maybe he’s decided to sing a different tune now that his ideological adversaries are using the new technologies as effectively today to criticize his policies as he used them in 2007 and 2008 to promote his candidacy.

A number of conservative bloggers have been having fun taking down a very self-important piece by Mark Lilla in the New York Review of Books.  Basically, this very smart writer is the latest intellectual to badmouth the Tea Parties, letting his ideology prevent him from understanding what’s really going on.

His piece (which I couldn’t finish because I was certain I had read this before on multiple occasions at least since Ronald Reagan’s landslide reelection in 1984) basically repeats a lot of liberal clichés about conservatism and shows an incredible contempt for his ideological adversaries.  Not only does he repeat some of the common misrepresentations of the conservative movement, but he also misrepresents the past, trotting out the standard leftist lie line about the selfish 1980s:

A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.

So, selfish were the 1980s that charitable giving rose as our tax burden went down, with the American people demonstrating a generosity that has very much defined our history and which conservative politicians like Lincoln and Reagan so greatly appreciated.

If I had time, I might join my fellow right-of-center bloggers in taking on the clichés Lilla dresses up as an intelligent argument.  Let me first note this — in the portions of the article I read (and the remainder that I skimmed) I could discover no evidence he had taken any time to talk to a single Tea Party protester to ask why he (or she) took to the streets.

Then, there’s this:  I discovered Lilla’s article on Memeorandum not far below a series of links to posts on the nearly $1 Trillion European Union rescue package which would, to quote the New York Times on the matter, “to combat the debt crisis that has engulfed Europe and threatened markets around the world.”

And I wondered this:  is Mr. Lilla aware of the burgeoning debt of nations which have adopted policies similar to those Mr. Obama and the Democrats propose? (more…)