And the winner of the Lying Hypocrite award goes to…Clarence Thomas.

He also lashed out at his critics, without naming them, asserting they “seem bent on undermining” the High Court as an institution. Such criticism, Thomas warned, could erode the ability of American citizens to fend off threats to their way of life.

“You all are going to be, unfortunately, the recipients of the fallout from that – that there’s going to be a day when you need these institutions to be credible and to be fully functioning to protect your liberties,” he said.

Yes, that was Supreme Court Justice Thomas speaking to a gathering of conservative law students…the same Justice Thomas who in 2008 attended the Koch brothers annual fundraiser for the conservative movement’s top movers and shakers…the Justice Thomas whose wife is a founder of a Tea Party group and who has now started a government lobbying group which looks to repeal the health care bill…and the same Justice Thomas who ruled in favor of corporations having the unrestricted right to fund election ad campaigns and to do so anonymously.  That guy.

And how does Thomas defend his actions in what is clearly a conflict of interests?  He uses the old standby…

“…there is a price to pay today for standing in defense of your Constitution.”

Of course. Criticize Thomas, or teabaggers, or Palin, or Beck, or those who work towards the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, criticize Wisconsin’s union busting tactics or gun nuts who look to remove the sanest of gun control legislation…criticize these people in any way and what you get back is a fraud wrapped up in the flag, lamenting how the Constitution is under attack.

How ironic that a Supreme Court justice warns of the consequences of institutions losing their credibility when he himself has had a major role in weakening the credibility of the institution he was appointed to.

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Don’t you love it when people rise up in an honest and open way?

When Target gave money in July to a pro-business group in Minnesota, the company thought it was helping its bottom line by backing candidates in its home state who support lower taxes. Instead, the retailer has found itself in a fight with liberal and gay rights groups that has escalated into calls for a nationwide boycott and protests at the company’s headquarters and stores.

The problem: Target’s $100,000 helped pay for TV ads supporting the gubernatorial campaign of Republican state Rep. Tom Emmer, who thinks Minnesota’s corporate taxes should be lower. As it turns out, he also wants to ban same-sex marriage.

All of this is a direct result of January’s Supreme Court ruling allowing corporations to contribute unlimited money for political advertising.  The court foolishly determined that in matters of free speech, there should be no distinction between individuals and corporations.  Adding to the idiocy of that decision is the fact that corporations may do so anonymously.  Target’s problems arose because Minnesota’s laws force political committee’s to disclose their list of contributors.

Let Target’s problems be a warning to other corporations attempting to influence political campaigns by way of money.  While they may do so with their clientele never being aware, they risk the chance of a national boycott should they be found out.

Mess around with the people, the people mess around with you.  It’s only fair.

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Is the Supreme Court messed up beyond repair?

• Virginia Thomas is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ spouse.
• Virginia Thomas is on record as calling our current President a “tyrant”
• Virginia Thomas is the President and Founder of Liberty Central, a conservative organization which lists FreedomWorks as a “friend of Liberty Central” and “Coalition Partner”.
• At least two directors of Liberty Central have strong direct ties to Koch Industries.
• One director had direct input to the Bush administration with regard to the selection of John Roberts and his elevation to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
• Liberty Central will directly benefit from the Citizens United ruling as a recipient (past, present or future) of undisclosed corporate donations.
• Justice Thomas supported the Citizens United decision.

The wife of a Supreme Court justice is the president of a tea party organization and this is supposed to be ok?  Yes, I know that legally it is allowed but how about ethically?  Virginia Thomas’ teabagging outfit has two donors – one who gave $50K and another who contributed $500K.  While it shows up in the paperwork as individuals contributing to the cause, it is not too difficult to imagine that any corporation wanting to contribute could easily disguise their involvment.

Clarence Thomas was a player in the Supreme Court’s ruling of the Citizens United case which banned all caps on corporate spending in elections.  Justice Thomas ruled in favor of any corporation being allowed to inject as much money as they wished in support of any politician who they ideologically agreed with.  Think BP, think any health care industry giant, think Wall Street financial institutions…and think tea party candidates.  Who do you think these corporations are going to put their money behind.

With Justice Thomas’ wife as president of Liberty Central, a supporter for all things Republican (e.g. fewer regulations on corporations), and a likely recipient of big money from big business, should Thomas not have recused himself from that Supreme Court case?

What a stinking rotten operation.

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Jon Stewart’s segment on the Senate hearings brings us the best line to date, compliments of Kagan.

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Of course it’s…

Lindsey Graham: The Christmas bomber. Where were you on Christmas day?

Kagan: You know, like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.

Perfect answer to a perfectly idiotic question.

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Five key issues to watch at the Kagan nomination hearing.

* militiary recruitment on Harvard’s campus (a non-story)

* abortion (yawn – the old standby)

* campaign finance reform ( Kagan represented the government in restricting corporate spending in elections)

* Kagan’s liberal background and how it’ll influence her judgeship (what?!!?  a liberal nominee?  horrors)

* Kagan’s lack of judicial experience (could be more of a plus than a negative)

They’ll yap, jab, nitpick, praise, question and at the end of the process, Elena Kagan will be the fourth woman to serve on the Supreme Court.  End of story.

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Pat Buchanan reminds us again why he’s little more than a bigoted white guy.

Indeed, of the last seven justices nominated by Democrats JFK, LBJ, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, one was black, Marshall; one was Puerto Rican, Sonia Sotomayor. The other five were Jews: Arthur Goldberg, Abe Fortas, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.
If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats.

Is this the Democrats’ idea of diversity?

But while leaders in the black community may be upset, the folks who look more like the real targets of liberal bias are white Protestants and Catholics, who still constitute well over half of the U.S. population.

Until the day Sarah Palin and her buddies in the religious right win out and the United States becomes a theocracy, religion should not be a factor in deciding who sits on the Supreme court…but, for the record, MediaMatters points out:

Overall, Jews represent 6.4% of ALL SCOTUS justices over the years (7 Jews have sat on the bench, total). By contrast, over 32% of justices have been Episcopalians, when only 1.7% of the country is within that religion.

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The timeline…

1787 - The U.S. Constitution is written. It represents slaves as “three-fifths” of “Free Persons”.  It does not grant slaves nor women the right to vote.

1865 - The 13th Amendment is ratified abolishing slavery.

1920 - The 19th Amendment is ratified giving women the right to vote.

1967 - Thurgood Marshall becomes the first African American nominated to the Supreme Court.

1987 - Thurgood Marshall delivers a speech in which he called the Constitution, as drafted by the Founding Fathers, defective.

I cannot accept this invitation, for I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever “fixed” at the Philadelphia Convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite “The Constitution,” they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the Framers barely began to construct two centuries ago.

For a sense of the evolving nature of the Constitution we need look no further than the first three words of the document’s preamble: ‘We the People.” When the Founding Fathers used this phrase in 1787, they did not have in mind the majority of America’s citizens. “We the People” included, in the words of the Framers, “the whole Number of free Persons.” United States Constitution, Art. 1, 52 (Sept. 17, 1787). On a matter so basic as the right to vote, for example, Negro slaves were excluded, although they were counted for representational purposes at threefifths each. Women did not gain the right to vote for over a hundred and thirty years.

1993 - Elena Kagan, writes a law review article in tribute to Marshall shortly after his death. She quoted parts of Marshall’s 1987 speech, specifically the part in which he calls the Constitution “defective” and that the Constitution showed “a special solicitude for the despised and the disadvantaged.”

2010 (April) – RNC chairman Michael Steele, in response to a question as to why African Americans should vote Republican, said:

“You really don’t have a reason to, to be honest — we haven’t done a very good job of really giving you one. True? True.”

“For the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South. Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, ‘Bubba’ went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton.”

2010 (May) – President Obama nominates Elena Kagan for a seat on the Supreme Court.

2010 (May) – RNC chairman Michael Steele, issues a statement:

“Given Kagan’s opposition to allowing military recruiters access to her law school’s campus, her endorsement of the liberal agenda and her support for statements suggesting that the Constitution ‘as originally drafted and conceived,’ was ‘defective,’ you can expect Senate Republicans to respectfully raise serious and tough questions to ensure the American people can thoroughly and thoughtfully examine Kagan’s qualifications and legal philosophy before she is confirmed to a lifetime appointment.”

2010 (May) – High-ranking Republicans think the RNC’s position is full of shit.

“I would say that the original Constitution was a document that needed amending, and after the Civil War it was amended and removed those offending parts.” -Senator Jeff Sessions

“I don’t like to see anybody downgrade the Constitution, but let’s face it: The Constitutition, to get passed, had to give the three-fifths language to the South, and that’s what Thurgood Marshall was referring to.  And I think most people in retrospect say that was a compromise that they had to make in order to have the Constitution, but it wasn’t right. The rest of the Constitution was right.” – Senator Orrin Hatch

Conclusion:

The Constitution as originally written was defective.

Thurgood Marshall was right.

Elena Kagan was right.

Jeff Sessions was right.

Orrin Hatch was right.

The RNC was not.

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In case you haven’t been following the latest, greatest reality show – Republican Hypocrisy – here’s a snippet from the latest episode.

Republican Senator John Cornyn, 2005 version, comments on Bush’s Supreme court nominee Harriet Miers.

“Although she has no prior judicial experience, this was true for nearly 40 percent of the men and women who have served as Supreme Court justices.  Indeed, rather than make her nomination less desirable, many of us believe that her long career in private practice will be to her credit.”

Republican Senator John Cornyn, 2010 version, comments on Obama’s Supreme court nominee Elena Kagan.

“The president says he wants to appoint somebody who will understand how the court’s decisions will impact regular people,” said Cornyn, a Republican who sits on the Judiciary Committee that will first consider Kagan’s nomination. “I don’t see how Ms. Kagan meets the president’s own standard. Her lack of experience as a practicing lawyer and a practicing judge are things that do not argue in her favor.”

If you’re capable of placing your brain in a box thereby suspending all rational though, then this is the show for you.  A few million Fox viewers can attest to that very fact.

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Here we go…

American Family Association (AFA) today, Bryan Fischer comes right out and says that the media should pointedly ask Kagan, “Are you a lesbian?” And if she is, according to AFA, she shouldn’t serve on the court:

It’s time we got over the myth that what a public servant does in his private life is of no consequence. We cannot afford to have another sexually abnormal individual in a position of important civic responsibility, especially when that individual could become one of nine votes in an out of control oligarchy that constantly usurps constitutional prerogatives to unethically and illegally legislate for 300 million Americans.

The stakes are too high. Social conservatives must rise up as one and say no lesbian is qualified to sit on the Supreme Court. Will they?

There was a time when one would write ‘far-right groups’ to describe these narrow-minded homophobes and hatemongers.  No longer.  Hate and stupidity has gone mainstream on the right.  Right-wing will suffice, thank you.

I wonder if these people are born ignorant and bigoted or does it develop over time?

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Another summer of discontent is upon us.  It appears that the President will choose current solicitor general, Elena Kagan, as his Supreme Court nominee because…(according to WaPo…)

Obama wants someone who can serve as a counterweight to the intellectual heft of Chief Justice John Roberts. Regardless of how strong a liberal Kagan would prove to be, as a former dean of Harvard Law School, Kagan practically defines legal gravitas.

She’s also a female, which adds to the court’s gender diversity. She’s young, at 50, which means she could be on the court for a quarter century. And she’s never been a judge, which gives her a quality that Obama is known to have been seeking: someone to bring a different sensibility to a court that’s currently dominated by judges.

That particular lack of experience also means she does not have a long record of controversial rulings that could provide fodder for the presidents political opponents.

Kagan had the backing of seven Republicans last year in her confirmation as solicitor general which should ease her path to the Court.  The vetting, for the most part, has been done.  Progressives have been critical of Kagan for being, well, not progressive enough.  Conservative opposition will be centered around any number of issues (mostly ‘no’ because ‘no’ is what they do best) but certainly their ideological opposition will derive from her rumored sexual orientation – something which Republicans will allow right-wing bloggers to shout out at every opportunity.

And for those interested in this sort of thing, Kagan is Jewish. There are currently six Catholics and two of the Jewish faith on the court.  Protestants won’t be happy.  Surprise.

Intelligent, Jewish, female, lesbian (?), liberal and young.  I wonder if Limbaugh and James Dobson will approve?

Here’s what the brunt of conservative criticism will sound like.

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