Welcome to your Monday open thread. Once again you’ll have to be entertaining yourselves since my brother is still visiting today. I hope you had a good weekend. I did! We went to Philly yesterday and visited the Mutter Museum plus ate some really good food.
Is the Kagan confirmation fight almost over but for the Republican showboating?
Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Senate’s Republican whip, said Sunday that he doesn’t see the GOP employing a filibuster against Kagan, who was nominated for the high court by President Barack Obama.
“The filibuster should be relegated to the extreme circumstances, and I don’t think Elena Kagan represents that,” said Kyl, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
GOP senators will put great weight on Kagan’s testimony because of her lack of a judicial paper trail. She is now solicitor general, the top government lawyer who argues the administration’s cases before the Supreme Court, and was dean of Harvard Law School. But she has never been a judge.
Don’t worry though. I’m sure they’ll drag it out as long as possible and ask silly questions about her sexual orientation. She plays softball.
The stupidification of the Republican party continues unabated. Newt Gingrich shares his wisdom with Fox News:
It was the latest in a series of reminders that this is nothing — literally, nothing — that a far-right media personality can say to be driven from polite American society.
Disgraced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), inexplicably one of the nation’s most ubiquitous Sunday-show guests, sat down with Chris Wallace yesterday on “Fox News Sunday.” The host confronted Gingrich with one of his recent quotes: “The secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.”
Wallace said, “Mr. Speaker, respectfully, isn’t that wildly over the top?” “No,” Gingrich replied, insisting that he believes President Obama intends to “decide who earns how much.”
Remember, Gingrich is supposed to be one of their intellectual leaders. Really, the rightwing has convinced themselves that Obama is a wild-eyed leftist. You should hear my brother – “the left of the left.” Of course, we know he’s a centrist at best, and a cautious one. How do we keep up if some people live in an alternate reality?