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Sunday, May 09, 2010

Is Obama TRYING to hand the Republicans an issue in November, or is this just plain cronyism?
Posted by Jill | 10:45 PM
How any of the teabaggers get the idea that Barack Obama is some kind of Marxist, I have no idea. When his health care plan delivers hundreds of thousands of new customers to insurance companies and his economic advisers are some of the very people who contributed to the economic meltdown of 2008, I just don't see where this comes from. And now it appears he's going to nominate someone who was an adviser to Goldman Sachs from 2005 to 2008 to replace John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court:
President Barack Obama will nominate U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan to serve as an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, NBC News’ Pete Williams reported late Sunday night.

Kagan, 50, served as the Dean of Harvard Law School from 2003 to 2009. Obama nominated her to serve in her current post as solicitor general early in 2009, and she won Senate confirmation by a vote of 61-31. She is the first woman to serve as solicitor general of the United States.

She was widely viewed as a front-runner when Obama was considering candidates for a Supreme Court opening last year, but the president ultimately chose Sonia Sotomayor for the job.

Glenn Greenwald has done a ton of advance work on what Kagan's nomination will mean for the Court -- little if any of it good. Kagan is either a) a crony appointment, coming out of Chicago as she does, b) yet another Obama attempt to curry favor with conservatives for whom nothing he does will be acceptable; or c) viewed as somehow confirmable because she has very little written record on hot-button issues.

I'd like to believe that this is an example of the mythical 11-dimensional chess that some progressives still long to believe the Obama administration is playing, because they can't yet face the reality that Barack Obama is every bit as much a corporate-privilege Democrat as Hillary Clinton would have been. I'd like to believe that he's throwing Kagan out there so when the Republicans filibuster, he can say "I gave you a moderate and you filibustered, now here's Diane Wood." But there is absolutely nothing in Obama's track record so far that would give any indication of such a strategy. No, it looks like Obama too serves corporatist masters, and wants to put a Justice in there who will do the same.

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3 Comments:
Blogger Unknown said...
She seems better qualified than Harriet Miers.

Anonymous Anonymous said...
I have no clue why the royal jackass would nominate anyone.

There will be absolutely no difference on decisions, the right wing nitwits republican catholics have a lock on the supreme joke for at least 30 to 40 years.

He could trade no nomination for all of the other stalled nominations that are not moving. Promising to nominate when all other nominees are in place.

Then tell the Republicans to go piss up a rope.

Blogger merlallen said...
Obama does seem to spend a lot of time trying to please the people who didn't vote for him last time and won't vote for him next time. I hope there's a primary in 2012 or the repugs come to their senses and run a moderate.