The Old Girl's Club

By Alan Caruba

I would be more depressed regarding the nomination of Elena Kagan to be a Supreme Court Justice were it not for George W. Bush’s nomination of Harriet Myers. That caused such a firestorm of rebuke that she withdrew herself from consideration. The same should be done for the ideologue that Obama has nominated, but it won’t.

Kagan, like Obama, salivates over having the power to change the history of the nation, tilting it toward the same failed socialism that collapsed the former Soviet Union, has been abandoned by the People’s Republic of China, and has brought a number of European nations to the doorstep of bankruptcy and default. No matter what form or modification of socialism has been tried, it has failed.

Watching the dumpy Ms. Kagan lie through her teeth saying her personal politics won’t influence her decisions is nauseating. Her rise through the ranks of academia and public service has all been due to how she politically positioned herself through life to get to this point.

It is a confluence of events and personalities such as history always throws up—-usually at the worst possible time.

America was blessed by some of the finest minds of their time when the Founders gathered in Philadelphia to write a Constitution. We were blessed by men of determination and vision like Lincoln and Reagan as just the right time in our history. In between those times, the tendency was to fall back into bad habits of thinking and doing things.

Kagan has a rather pedantic resume. There are surely a hundred or a thousand more attorneys who have demonstrated their knowledge and mastery of the law in a fashion superior to her. She has never been a judge. She has no substantial trial experience though, as Soliciter General, she has argued before the Supreme Court.

Little wonder, the former lecturer on constitutional law at the University of Chicago thinks she should be on the Supreme Court. They share a similar lack of real achievement in life by comparison with those who have built or managed companies, fought in wars, or excelled in the sciences or arts.

What they do share is an extreme, progressive outlook, filled with a hatred for guns, corporations, Wall Street, a bizarre desire to let homosexuals marry, and an admiration for all things that are not American. She will join Justice Sonia Sotomayor, another Obama choice, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a Clinton choice, as the Supreme Court begins to looks increasingly like an old girl’s club.

Americans know they have literally trapped themselves into this situation and, until control of the Congress can pass from the Democrats to the Republicans, they are helpless to influence or to stop these egregious “changes” in our nation’s affairs.

Short of some damaging revelation, the Senate will confirm Ms. Kagan and she will serve on the Supreme Court for decades. Contrary to popular myth, the Court has made some horrendously bad decisions in the past. One would hope that the Senate Republicans would mount a filibuster to save the nation from this, but that too is not likely to happen.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Bryd, Blago and Barack

By Alan Caruba

The long history of the nation is filled with examples of stupid and greedy politicians. The very profession seems to be a magnet for those who are, too often, ill equipped to function well in any other capacity. There are, of course, exceptions.

The death of Robert C. Byrd will be concluded with the ceremonies attendant to someone who should have left the Senate decades ago due to extreme age. Would any State trust its care to a man who, by the time he died, was so impaired that watching him in his final days in the Senate was an embarrassment of befuddlement. The answer is yes.

Byrd will be hailed a great statesmen, the embodiment of the Senate, and other encomiums, but the fact is that he mastered the rules of the Senate and achieved his stature by being reelected enough to have seniority over everyone and everything there including the chamber’s furniture.

Over the years Byrd managed to transfer an estimated $3 billion to the State of West Virginia. It is filled with some fifty highways, bridges, and every other manner of public structure, all named for Robert C. Byrd and even a few for his wife, Emma. For keeping him in office, West Virginia got back $1.75 for every $1 it sent to the U.S. treasury.

There will be brief references to his former membership in the KKK, but little mention of a voting record that resisted equal rights and justice for black Americans. For as long as he could, Byrd held out until the tide turned. To the end, he was a racist, the only senator to vote against the confirmations of both Justice Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas.

Byrd, however, was not intellectually deficient, a common factor among too many elected to high office. It is one thing to be able to raise campaign funds and make promises and quite another to have actually read a book since having left high school or college. He could quote the ancient Romans and classic literature. His greatest redeeming factor was, we’re told, his devotion to the U.S. Constitution.

In Chicago, a trial is unfolding in which the former Governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, is alleged to have improperly used his office to benefit himself from the appointment of a replacement for Barack Obama, formerly a Senator and, at the time, President-elect of the United States.

Illinois has put several former Governors in jail for various crimes, but I am inclined to believe that Blago is guilty mostly of stupidity and cupidity. As far as I can discern, putting a public official in jail for that is a stretch. Were that the case, Nancy Pelosi and most of the California delegation in Congress would be wearing stripes.

As Jeff Coen and Bob Secter, reporters for the Chicago Tribune, wrote on June 27, “At times, there’s a kid-in-the-candy-store flavor to the wish lists that Rod Blagojevich rattles off in the wiretaps played at his corruption trial. A very frustrated kid in a store with shelves that leave things mostly out of his reach.”

“Blagojevich wants to be ambassador to India, ore maybe Indonesia. Or how about the United Nations? The list goes on: a cabinet post such as health and human services secretary or commerce secretary, university professor, political action committee director, advocacy group head, leader of a nonprofit. Maybe, he said, he would just appoint himself to the vacancy in the U.S. Senate that he’s now accused of essentially trying to sell to the highest bidder.”

Blago even tossed out Oprah Winfrey’s name at one point. His political advisor, now a state’s witness, tried to steer him toward any kind of rational, reasonable choice, even in the context of Chicago’s and Illinois’ Byzantine political circus.

The White House, through Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff, is implicated insofar as various candidates for the vacancy were run by those most seriously involved in the selection process. The president was kept informed. There is nothing unusual in this.

Indeed, unless someone can be proved to have delivered a suitcase of cash to Blago, what is unfolding in the course of the trial is the sheer banality of the process. No one, including the federal prosecutor looks particularly angelic and free of sin.

What is most striking is that Blago actually believed he was capable of performing the duties of the positions he yearned for. He is a totally vacuous, foul-mouthed egotist with few redeeming qualities, but that is not a crime.

It is, however, an indictment of the voters who elected him and the Chicago machine that exploited their indifference to Blago’s obvious deficiencies. This reflects the growing apprehension regarding Chicago’s gift to America, Barack Obama.

If Blago was a big frog in a small pond, Obama is the biggest frog in the biggest pond there is. It has taken barely a year and a half in office for voters to realize they have voted a man into the White House who has no real capacity, nor competence to be President.

Byrd, Blago and Barack. They offer us the ugliest aspect of politics in America and each was elected by people who should have known better, but didn’t care enough, voting robotically as Democrats or for whatever other reason they had for pulling the lever.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The EPA Runs Amuck

By Alan Caruba

On Thursday, the Senate will vote on S.J. Resolution 26. It is an effort to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating “greenhouse gas emissions” without any legislative accountability. If the vote fails, the EPA will be free to continue its assault on the nation’s economy and every aspect of your personal life.

Here’s what my friend, Dr. Kenneth P. Green, a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, had to say about the energy and environment “advisor” to President Barack Obama:

“Carol Browner’s selection as ‘energy coordinator’ (sometimes called energy czar) virtually guarantees that the Obama administration’s energy and environmental policies will be anything but moderate.”

“Her two terms as Environmental Protection Agency boss were marked by adversarialism, punitive enforcement actions, draconian tightening of environmental regulations and the message that business is destructive of the environment and dishonest about the cost of environmental regulations.”

And that was just the nice things he had to say about Browner. It is worth noting that Browner has been the lead spokesman about the BP oil spill for the Obama administration after it became obvious that Ken Salazar, the Secretary of the Interior, was generating negative public reaction to his ‘get tough’ approach and there have been few public statements issued by Dr. Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy.

The current administrator of the EPA is Lisa Jackson who learned her trade working under Browner until she was picked to head the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. A Browner acolyte, Jackson has presided over an EPA run amuck.

Jackson will be remembered for leading the EPA fight to get carbon dioxide declared a “pollutant” that can then be regulated under the Clean Air Act. This is the same reasoning put forth by the constantly renamed Cap-and-Trade Act that is was a “climate” bill and has now become something else. It is based on the same totally bogus “science” that gave us “global warming” until Mother Nature decided that the Earth should begin to cool about a decade ago.

President Obama just announced that, just like the much-hated healthcare reform bill, he is going to devote himself to getting Cap-and-Trade passed by Congress. Combined, they should be called The Destroying America’s Economy Act.

Suffice to say that, other than oxygen, carbon dioxide is the other gas on which all life on Earth depends. It’s what all vegetation “breaths” and, coincidently, it is what all humans and other animals exhale. It has nothing to do with the climate.

Dr. Green points out that, “When it comes to climate change, she is a disciple of Al Gore for whom she worked from 1988 to 1991,” adding that “Browner believes that ‘climate change is the greatest challenge ever faced’ and that the EPA is the agency to face it.”

I have been watching the EPA in action since it was created in the 1970s by Mr. Watergate himself, Richard Nixon. It has since expanded like a cancer cell, doing a lot of damage along the way. There must be a sign on the wall of EPA headquarters that says, “If it’s a chemical, we will ban it.” On May 24, the EPA announced it was discussing the perils of oil dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico. Please, let’s do nothing to disperse the oil!

From its earliest days, the EPA set out to ban or limit the use of any and all pesticides nationwide. They have never stopped. It is essential to understand that what passes for EPA “science” is merely a charade to advance their agenda.

It can cost up to $15 million or more for a company to get a pesticide registered for use. If you take away the pesticides, all that’s left is the pests, but this simple truth is lost on the EPA. They have come up with a proposed new “permit requirement that would decrease the amount of pesticides discharged to our nation’s waters and protect human health and the environment.” If you really want to protect human health, you have to kill the billions of insect and rodent pests that have always spread disease.

So far in the last month, the EPA has announced they will release “a draft health assessment for formaldehyde that focuses on evaluating the potential toxicity of inhalation exposures to this chemical.”

Also announced was news that the EPA “is initiating a rulemaking to better protect the environment and public health from the harmful effects of sanitary sewer overflows and basement backups.” They are “reviewing” Florida’s coastal water quality standards, a move that will wreak havoc on its agricultural and tourist industries.

Another EPA announcement noted that “It just got harder for a TV to earn the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star. Starting May 1, 2010, TV’s that carry the government’s Energy Star label are, on average, 40 percent more efficient than conventional models.” This is all done in the name of “reducing greenhouse gas emissions” when, in fact, this is the baseless justification for the global warming hoax.

If at this point, you are beginning to think the EPA is just a tad intrusive regarding your basement backup problems, the kind of television set you should purchase, and other previous decisions such as how much water your toilet can use or the banning of incandescent light bulbs nationwide, you will be happy to know that in May the EPA took the time to “encourage ways to travel green by checking into an Energy Star labeled hotel.”

While in the hotel, you are advised to “turn off the lights and TV when leaving the hotel room”, “adjust the thermostat to an energy-saving setting so it doesn’t heat or cool the room while empty”, “to open curtains to take advantage of daylight when possible”, and “re-use linens to save both water and energy.”

If, by now, you’re getting the feeling that the EPA is more intrusive into the most mundane aspects of your life than any other government agency or combination of agencies, you’re right.

And very little of it has anything to do with protecting your health or the environment. It has everything to do with advancing a fanatical green agenda intended to threaten every form of energy production, manufacturing process, property rights, and your right to make a wide range of personal lifestyle decisions.

© Alan Caruba, 2010