Another example comes from her views about her future coworkers. In a 1995 book review, she claims that Clarence Thomas' "substantive testimony" in his confirmation hearings was "a national laughingstock." The "weakness of Justice Thomas' objective qualifications and the later charges of sexual harassment" deprived him of a solid confirmation (and rightly so, she suggests). Elsewhere, Kagan praises Justice Antonin Scalia for his brainpower, and she considers Justice Thurgood Marshall, the liberal black justice for whom she clerked, her hero. She adopts the lazy but standard liberal prejudice that conservative minorities are stupid, while liberal ones are heroic.I’m not sure it’s very wise on Yoo’s part to recall Thomas’s days chairing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), since, as noted here, he left a backlog of approximately 42,000 cases after eight years. Also, during his term as assistant cabinet secretary (given both jobs in the administration of The Sainted Ronnie R), he first encountered Professor Anita Hill; this is a link to her statement during Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing (and I never heard Thomas say that Hill was wrong; all I heard was Thomas’s cries about a high-tech lynching and similar expressions of supposed victimhood).
By the time of his appointment, Thomas, for whom I clerked, had served on the federal appeals court in Washington for two years, headed a major federal agency for eight years, and served as an assistant cabinet secretary for two years. Kagan will have been solicitor general for about a year, a deputy White House official for four years, and a law school professor for the rest. Whose qualifications are "weak"?
Airline and railroad employees will soon be forced into joining labor unions thanks to a shocking decision by the National Mediation Board (NMB). The decision was conveniently announced the same day President Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court so it received much less media coverage than it might have otherwise.In the prior post on this, I noted that a benefit of the NMB decision is that a “not-voting” vote would no longer count as a “no” vote, which tilted the odds more against the “yes” votes. Also, employers would no longer decide who would vote on the question of joining a union; in the past, this excused employers from providing a list of workers seeking collective bargaining.
Heaven forbid that Katie Packer of the Workforce Fairness Institute would admit that, however (and with a name like that, you can almost smell a Repug front group, which is what the WFI is).
When you navigate to the groups’s web site and check the About information, it doesn’t tell you who the members of the organization are, though it does tell you about allied groups, such as the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, the Employee Freedom Action Committee, and of course (inevitably) the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
And as noted here, former Dubya ad man Mark McKinnon of the WFI wouldn’t say who funds the group, which was “founded by several longtime Republican operatives.” Also with its hand in the WFI, so to speak, is Rick Berman’s “Center for Union Facts,” one of Berman’s many front groups which ran print ads comparing union leaders supporting the Employee Free Choice Act to Ugandan dictator Idi Amin and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, calling the bill a "scheme to eliminate workers' right to a secret ballot" (which is demonstrably untrue).
Actually, given all of this, it’s no wonder Packer and her crowd want to maintain the secret status quo whereby employers can hold sway over workers trying to join a union. Whatever effectiveness she and her group enjoys would be greatly diminished if its own operations were likewise held up to scrutiny under the cold light of day.
Republicans introduced a new argument against Elena Kagan's nomination today, suggesting she believes in banning books.Nice try, Sen. Mr. Elaine Chao; as noted here by Media Matters, Kagan specifically stated that federal campaign finance law had never banned books and likely could not do so.
In an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press," Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) pointed to the argument Kagan's office made before the Supreme Court in Citizens United vs. FEC, a controversial campaign finance case.
"Solicitor Kagan's office in the initial hearing argued that it would be OK to ban books," McConnell said. "And then when there was a rehearing Solicitor Kagan herself in her first Supreme Court argument suggested that it might be OK to ban pamphlets.
"I think that's very troubling, and this whole area of her view of the First Amendment and political speech is something that ought to be explored by the Judiciary Committee and by the full Senate," McConnell said.
And this is funny coming from the Republican Party, which brought us Sarah Palin inquiring into possibly banning books when she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska here (Palin backed off under pressure after threatening the Wasilla librarian with her job – no, the books weren’t actually banned, but it’s not as if Palin didn’t try). The party also continues to countenance the presence of “Lonesome Rhodes” Glenn Beck, whose lizard-brained followers tried to ban a book here (also, as noted here, federal prison officials tried to ban the books of a certain 44th President of the United States).
I would seriously hope that it is unnecessary for me to spend any further words pointing out how stupid this practice is (and here is a clip listing books banned in various world countries for different reasons…I don’t think there can be any other answer to the question at the end except “yes,” to say nothing of bothering some people’s delicate sensibilities).
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