There's an old joke about a Transylvanian cookbook. The recipe for an omelet starts off with this: "First, steal two eggs." If that note really appeared in some country's cookbook, don't look for constitutional government or a free market system to arise there anytime soon. That's because democracy is not something you can just plant, like shaking seeds out of an envelope.
Americans were blessed to have extensive experience of self-government when we made our bid for independence in the 1770s. And Americans at that time -- all the most thoughtful ones at least -- recognized the profound contradiction that human bondage represented. It was difficult to assert on the one hand that all government "derives its just powers from the consent of the governed" while holding millions of human beings as slaves. Amid many blessings, slavery was held to be a curse. It took another eighty years and fratricidal Civil War before those contradictions were resolved.
A free market can do many things efficiently and justly, but the free market is perverted when it treats humans as objects. Thus, almost all people recognize that slavery and international sex trafficking are wrong. Our laws protect artistic expression, but we demand strict enforcement of laws against child pornography. Such illicit trade cannot be honored as a part of legitimate commerce.
We already know something of the unusual ideas of human rights and commerce held by U.S. Solicitor General, Elena Kagan. Kagan has been nominated by President Obama to succeed the retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. Kagan also served in the Clinton White House, where she left an extensive paper trail of documented opinions.
Most interesting, perhaps, is Kagan's support for cloning human beings. Clinton Library documents show that she opposed any effort by Congress to prevent human beings from being cloned specifically to create embryos that would be experimented upon, then killed. Gallup recently reported that 88% of Americans oppose cloning human beings. Kagan does not.
We also know, from her record as Solicitor General in the Obama administration, that there are circumstances in which Elena Kagan would vote to ban political books. President Obama famously attacked the Supreme Court -- while its members sat robed before him -- during his first State of the Union Address last January. He attacked the Court for its ruling in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The president said, incorrectly, that that ruling permitted corporations to contribute directly to political campaigns and would allow foreigners to come in and influence our elections.
What the Citizens United case did say was that unions and companies, and non-profit associations, do not lose their First Amendment rights to speak on public issues just because an election is less than sixty days away. In fact, the Supreme Court found, during election campaigns was the very time when political communication among citizens was most important.
At issue was a film produced by Citizens United that attacked the public record of Hillary Clinton. The McCain-Feingold law says that such communications are unlawful contributions.
Kagan was asked if, instead of making a movie, Citizens United had published a book criticizing Hillary Clinton and it hit the stands less than sixty days before an election? Could the government ban that book? Yes, she said, representing the Obama administration. Ed Whelan, writing for National Review Online, pointed to the bizarre consequences of Kagan's reasoning:
As Chief Justice Roberts pointed out, the theory of the First Amendment advocated by Kagan on behalf of the Obama administration "would empower the Government to prohibit newspapers from running editorials or opinion pieces supporting or opposing candidates for office, so long as the newspapers were owned by corporations -- as the major ones are."
Here we can clearly see that the kind of disregard for human rights Kagan denied in her advocacy of cloning human beings extends to property rights and to suppression of free speech. All our Bill of Rights guarantees -- including freedom of speech and assembly -- can only be safe in a constitutional order that respects human life. We must stand for free markets, but those free markets themselves are supported by respect for those inalienable rights with which we are endowed by our Creator. When those rights are denied by government, destructive forces are unleashed against free markets as well.
Mr. Blackwell was behind the disenfranchisement of valid voters casting provisional ballots at different precincts, attempting to disallow voter registration through forms published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper because of the "wrong paper stock", and making sure that Republic Party areas had plenty of voting machines, while Democratic areas like Cleveland and Kenyon College had insufficient numbers of voting machines, making would-be voters wait outside for hours in inclement weather (Cleveland - 60 degrees, 0.67 inches of rain, average 16 mph winds; Columbus - 57 degrees, 0.28 inches of wain, max sustained winds 21 mph).
A good source of how Blackwell helped steal Ohio: http://harpers.org/archive/2005/08/0080696
But you sure seem to think it can forced on other countries at gunpoint.
-Blackwell
Give me a break, why does the huffingtonpost let this guy lie in an article?
Ok Mr. Blackwell here its goes,
just like dough is not bread is the way kagan supports "human cloning" she is for celluarmitosis
having cells/not humans begin to divide and then taking that material out of its nuclei to do STEM CELL research. Just like dough before being baked is not bread is in every bit as much the way Cells are NOT PEOPLE. Im sorry your religion tells you to treat them as such, but she is no more for human "cloning and killing" then you are for undercooked birthday cake. So either read up on what the hell you are talking about, or stop misleading the readers by spieces aguments that in know way have anything to do with truth.
Kagan urged the WH to back a ban on reproductinve cloning but to encourage Congress to ok cloning embryotic tissue. In other words, to ban the possibility that a real life human being might someday be cloned, but to allow science to develop, say, a cloned liver or pancreas that would exactly match the host in order to perform a perfect, rejection-free transplant. Ken loved to twist the facts.
As for criticism of the Citizens United ruling, this is about as close to advocating restricting a "person's" 1st Amendment rights as getting BP to pay for the spill is a restriction on a person's right to fairly earn a profit.... after all, as a corporation BP is also considered a living entity. The supreme court'sdecision was asinine, and Obama was right to call out the conservative judges who inked the majority decision.
Why in the world does Huffpo include this guy's posts? Is there really that significant a dearth of conservative intellect? Where are the William Buckley's of the world?
And about "gotcha". How many times have you heard it repeated already that Kagan said that "The Government says they can tell us what to eat"? My right wing friends are passing that right along on Facebook and email. But I heard the exchange between Coburn and Kagen. I invite you to read the transcripts online. Coburn gave her the scenario that Congress passed a law saying that people HAD to eat 3 vegetables and 3 fruits a day. Her first response was that "That's a pretty dumb law". Then she went on to say that it's not up to the courts to reverse every dumb law. That got turned in to "Kagan says the govt can tell us what to eat!" It's like a village of idiots is deciding our future.
By "morals", do you mean "purging poor blacks from the voting rolls in Ohio in 2004"?
Why is this guy here?
Aren't there alot of Gypsies that hail from Transylvania, or used to? Didn't Hitler kill every Gypsy he could catch in his death camps? Doesn't that make Ken's little opener a tad bit horrible?
It makes me think of the disdain my mother had for getting a "C" in school. She told me, "I'd rather you get an F than fake it!"
I detest these triangulators, cut in the same cloth as Clinton and Rahm and Reid, and yes, Obama. They are responsible for the worst betrayal of supporters and principles in the history of this country.
The right always gets their right-wing leaders to keep moving towards the batshit crazy. The left can't get shit. When do we get the socialist we've been endlessly and breathlessly warned about?
Screwing with elections should be punishable by life sentence with added public ridicule, like the stocks. Bring back the stocks! I got my molding veggies and fruit ready!
Me neither.