Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.

Meh

I'm not eye to eye with Greenwald on everything civil liberties and liberalism related, but on this one, I'd have to agree he's made a convincing case that she's a bad pick. Thus far she's seemed totally incompetent at doing the one thing that she's supposedly useful for: swinging Justice Kennedy to Obama-favorable arguments. And she's mostly seemed very useful at attempting, badly, to advance arguments favorable to executive powers. One may assume that's what Obama wants. Because if he wanted someone capable of convincing marginal right-wingers (Roberts or especially Kennedy, the other 3 either come along for the ride or don't), he would have picked the judge that's been doing that in Chicago with two pretty right-wing judges (Posner and Easterbrook). Maybe he didn't want the home team political image?

Maybe that's not what Kagan wants philosophically. But without a record of opinions and written academic work (since she was at Harvard, one assumes she would have written academic papers on this stuff) on which to base that philosophy, we may have a mighty interesting series confirmation hearing sessions.

Or we could have a bunch of idiotic blathering like the stuff on how Sotomayor was supposedly this closet racist (and related focusing on a Connecticut firefighters affirmative action policy decision which came up for review at more or less the same time). Instead of focusing attention like a laser beam on her less favorable and very public record relating to property rights in a Kelo-esque decision. At least there we had a record on which to evaluate something like a judicial or political ethos. Right now it's all guesswork. And we must rely on a panel of idiots to conduct it. One side's idiots will line up because Obama picked her and won't question the decision. The other side's idiots will line up because Obama picked her and she therefore must be questionable.

It would be better if they operated from the position that she had something worth questioning of her own capacities relating to the law and its implementation and interpretation first.

Oh and while we're at it, Holder shouldn't have caved. My understanding of the issue was that Miranda has a public safety exception that can be used for terrorism already (or at least has been used by the FBI for a while now) so weakening it is unnecessary. The related posturing and hyperventilating by Lieberman over stripping US citizenship upon terrorist related accusations or arrest is one issue I would have to hope we don't see more backsliding on this whole terrorism/civil liberties scale. We can already kick people out of the US citizen club. If they are convicted of acts of treason (like say, blowing up things in concert with hostile foreign agents such as the Pakistani Taliban or Al Qaeda).