BREAKING: Terrorism Angle in Massachusetts ‘Immigration’ Raids; BUMPED: ‘Very Quiet Neighborhood’; UPDATE: Mohammad Bakht Zameen; UPDATE: ‘They Paid the Rent on Time’

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12:08 p.m. ET: DaTechGuy on the scene reports by phone: The boarding house where the suspects were arrested is “next door to public housing” in an “ethnically mixed neighborhood.” Residents describe it as “a very quiet neighborhood” where “nothing ever happens — until today.”

UPDATE 12:20 p.m. ET: New England Cable News names Mohammad Bakht Zameen as one of the suspects in the case:

Federal agents roped off a Mobil station in Brookline Thursday morning, raiding the building along with a gray Honda Accord in the parking lot.
A man being questioned inside the gas station was believed to be the owner of the gray Honda, police told NECN. Police are unsure of his relation to the owner of the gas station, who is a well-known member of the Brookline community, Elias Audy. As off 11 a.m., the man under questioning had not been released from the gas station.
FBI officials were inside the Mobil station throughout the morning, pulling material out of the building’s bays — it is unclear exactly what they were doing. The focus of the investigation was on a gray Honda Accord registered to Mohammad Bakht Zameen of 39 Waverley Avenue in Watertown, Mass. That residence was also raided by FBI officials Thursday morning.

12:52 p.m. ET: In his latest update via telephone from scene, Da Tech Guy reports that the 2-story boarding house at 39 Waverly Ave. is located two doors down and across the street from Watertown Middle School (68 Waverly Ave.).

Residents in the neighborhood tell Da Tech Guy they were awakened this morning by the sound of helicopters overhead. FBI agents have been seen taking papers and computers out of 39 Waverly, and have reportedly set up a temporary headquarters in the basement cafeteria of the Watertown Housing Authority (55 Waverly Ave.).

The boarding house at 39 Waverly is owned by absentee landlords and most people in the neighborhood don’t know their neighbors. That might make it “a perfect place” for would-be terrorists to keep a low profile, as one resident told Da Tech Guy, who is continuing to interview residents, police and other people on the scene. He will be filing photos and video later today.

UPDATE 1:15 p.m. ET: The Boston Globe reports:

Baij Joshi, who manages the Watertown property for his father, Shubh, said the tenants on the first floor were several Pakistani men, who had lived there “more than two to three years.” He said some had spoken recently of taking trips to Pakistan.
“They seemed to be very good people. They paid the rent on time,” he said.
“The impression that I got is they’re working people, making their daily livelihood by driving a taxi and working in a store,” he said. . . .
FBI agents also questioned employees at another Brookline gas station, at the corner of Cypress Street and Route 9, this morning. They asked about a recently hired Pakistani employee who apparently worked Sundays for the last several months, said Hiyam Jabour, the cashier at the Mobil station, who was interviewed.
Neither she nor the mechanic from the garage said they knew the man, noting that he worked on a different shift. They referred questions to Elias Audy, the owner of the station, who also owns the gas station on Harvard Street.
Bill Audy, brother of Elias Audy, said he “wants the truth to be known.” He said he did not know the Pakistani employee but said that he worked at the gas station for “a very short time.” He said the real victim is his brother.
“This is a mess,” Audy said. “I think the media has destroyed my brother’s business. If I’m an outsider, I’ve got to wonder if the owners of the gas station are terrorists. He’s not happy about this.”

In the interest of “responsible, ethical journalism,” we must stipulate: (a) the individuals arrested are merely suspects, and their connections to Faisal Shahzad are unknown; and (b) even if the arrested suspects are involved in terrorism, neither their landlords nor their employers have been implicated in any such allegation.

It has just been reported that Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick will be holding a press conference shortly.

UPDATE 1:20 p.m. ET: Linked by Jules Crittenden, who happens to be city editor of the Boston Herald.

EXPECT FURTHER UPDATES . . .

PREVIOUSLY (11:08 a.m ET): Da Tech Guy just called from Massachusetts to tell me about this story now breaking on local news there:

The FBI conducted several raids in Massachusetts Thursday in connection with the failed Times Square car bombing, officials told CBS News.
Further raids are expected throughout the day.
Two people have been detained for “immigration violations,” FBI spokesperson Gail Marcinkiewicz told CBS station WBZ-TV in Boston, though she would not say whether they were involved in the plot.
“The searches are a product of evidence that has been gathered in the investigation subsequent to the Times Square bombing investigation,” said Marcinkiewicz.

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick cancelled a planned appearance in Fitchburg today. Da Tech Guy has already blogged about this story, as has Jammie Wearing Fool. Da Tech Guy called me from the road as he was en route to the scene of the raids, and promises to have exclusive reporting soon.

UPDATE 11:22 a.m. ET: In our brief phone conversation, Da Tech Guy said the raids involve a family well-respected in the Boston suburban community where the raid took place. The Associated Press reports:

[P]olice have cordoned off a small house in Watertown, a suburb about 10 miles west of Boston where a neighbor reported seeing an FBI raid. . . .
Vinny Lacerra, 50, who lives across the street from the house raided in Watertown, said he was in his living room about 6 a.m. when he heard somebody say, “FBI! Put your hands up!”
Lacerra said he looked out his windows and saw 15 to 20 FBI agents with their guns drawn surrounding the house.
He said about 15 minutes later, the agents went inside and came out with one man handcuffed and took him down the street. He also said he saw an agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“I was surprised to see this because this is what you see on TV,” Lacerra said.

Da Tech Guy should arrive in the vicinity within minutes.

UPDATE 11:32 a.m. ET: Dan Riehl was on this story early, with links to the New York Daily News and this report from the Boston Herald:

FBI agents were also seen at two gas stations in Brookline – one on Harvard Street and another on Cypress Street. . . .
Lacerra said the rental property [on Waverly Avenue], which is located across the street from Watertown middle school, is constantly turning over with new residents. Neighbors said they’ve seen police staking out the area for several days, but did not why . . .

UPDATE 11:40 a.m. ET: Just got off the phone with Da Tech Guy, who just arrived on Waverly Avenue in Watertown and reports: “There are police all around, news cameras everywhere.”

UPDATE 11:45 a.m. ET: Now a Memeorandum thread and a story at Fox News, linked by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, where one of the commenters gets snarky:

CNN investigating anonymous reports that the men were arrested at the local tea party headquarters.

Professor Glenn Reynolds says, “Hmm.”

Why Michelle Todd Will Never Work
for a Republican Campaign Again

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OK, so who the heck is Michelle Todd? Her name popped up in this story about Charlie Crist:

Gov. Charlie Crist told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on April 30 that he would “probably” give refunds to donors who don’t approve of him leaving the GOP. . . .
No more. . . . [C]ampaign spokeswoman Michelle Todd said there will be no refunds. Asked whether that amounts to a flip-flop, she said, “We have never made an official statement before. It is now the official statement. They donated to the Charlie Crist for U.S. Senate Campaign, and it’s still the Charlie Crist for U.S. Senate Campaign.”

Republicans have now written down her name on their persona non grata list. Michelle Todd is henceforth an un-person to the GOP, and everybody else who does one day’s work for the Crist campaign will find their names on the same list.

One of the reasons Charlie Crist thought he could get away with this betrayal was his erroneous supposition that he could hire competent campaign staff to replace those who resigned en masse when he announced he would run as an independent.

Knowing a thing or two about how these things work, however, I explained on Ladd Ehlinger’s radio show this week that Crist would have extreme difficulty finding staff because (a) he’s doomed to defeat, and (b) any Republican operative who hires on with a Crist independent campaign will be committing career suicide.

Some conservatives have been freaked out by polls showing Crist leading a three-way race, evidently forgetting that, a year ago, the same polls showed Marco Rubio trailing Crist by 30 points in the GOP primary. There are four basic reasons Crist is doomed to defeat:

  • Crist will get no more Republican money. Fundraising is crucial to politics, and there are no direct-mail lists of “raging moderates” who will donate to an independent Crist campaign. It was estimated in late April that Crist quit the GOP race with $6 million cash-on-hand. Based on his previous “burn rate,” he’s unlikely to have half that amount remaining by Labor Day. Florida is a large state where running TV ads statewide (from Miami to Orlando to Jacksonville to Pensacola) is very expensive. Crist will get buried under an avalanche of TV ads in September and October.
  • Crist has no campaign “ground game” infrastructure. Who will be county chairmen and precinct captains for Crist? Where will he find volunteers to staff local offices, working the phones and handing out yard signs? Crist must build a campaign apparatus from scratch, while Rubio will have the well-established election machinery of the Republican Party working for him. As Rubio’s senior advisors said in a memo last month, “Florida’s county GOP offices are some of the most organized and sophisticated in the country . . . Crist will be starting from scratch to recruit, organize and mobilize volunteers for his campaign, whereas both Marco and [Democratic candidate Kendrick] Meek will have built-in volunteer networks to draw from.”
  • Nobody trusts a traitor. And nobody respects a quitter, as Arlen Specter is belatedly learning. Like Specter’s switch to the Democrats, Crist’s decision to go independent was pure selfishness. Crist had expected his handpicked state GOP chairman Jim Greer to deliver the Senate nomination on a silver platter, and when that didn’t happen, Crist decided to take his ball and go home. Think of how that lends itself to a devastating 30-second TV ad.
  • Rubio will win the debates. For nearly a year, Crist avoided debating Rubio. Once they finally met in a debate — March 28 on “Fox News Sunday” — it was obvious why, and Crist quit the GOP primary less than a month later. At some point this fall, Crist will have to share a debate stage with Rubio and the Democrat, Meek. Charlie will lose that debate, too, for the simple reason that there is no persuasive political rationale for Crist’s candidacy. If Florida voters want an Obama-hugging, stimulus-endorsing, liberal stooge for Harry Reid, they’ll support Kendrick Meek.

Crist is doomed and, after Nov. 2, Crist’s campaign staffers like Michelle Todd are going to find themselves not merely unemployed, but unemployable.

MARCO RUBIO FOR U.S. SENATE

Sure, It’s Among The More Primitive Large-scale Bonding Events

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by Smitty (h/t The Corner)

Herndon is sort of an anti-Prom, a brutal anachronism that is a hot, sweaty end to a crappy year. In the spirit of Twain’s famous quotation

“Eat a live frog every morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”— Mark Twain

the Herndon ceremony gets you ready for the next three years, before you escape “Sing Sing on the Severn.”

Today there is news of potential un-sought change un-backed by hope:

In a Wednesday media briefing, the academy’s outgoing superintendent hinted that the institution may be reconsidering the Climb, an event that sometimes leads to minor injuries. The climb has taken as little as a minute and a half and as long as four hours. The first-year “plebes” never stop till they reach the top, in a greasy human pyramid.
A followup statement clarified that Vice Admiral Jeffrey Fowler believes the Herndon Climb may eventually be supplanted by the Sea Trials program, a 14-hour regimen of physical and mental endurance tests including “hill assault,” a two-mile regimental run, simulated bridge defense and demolition, pull-ups and something called “pugil stick jousting,” This year’s Sea Trials is set for Tuesday. The Climb takes place May 24.
Fowler did not say that he would end the Climb. He’s leaving the academy this summer.
The academy has had official doubts about the event since at least January 2008. A Washington Post article from that month quoted an institutional statement that leaders were “evaluating the Herndon Monument Climb to ensure the event remains a valid part of our heritage but is conducted with professionalism, respect, and most important, safety in mind.”

This notion is as utterly weak as the uniform change allowing Surface Warfare Officers, known as “black shoes,” to wear aviators’ brown leather oxfords. The regulation came out, and the SWOs looked left and right and said “Be the first twerp to step into a wardroom in brown shoes, legal or not.”

Every class likes to tout theirs as The Last Real Plebe Year, and Herndon is the ceremony that brings closure. Mine ranks as the slowest to complete the evolution, but we were also the first, AFAIK, to get someone boosted to sit atop the thing. I thought the Baltimore Sun had a picture of that on the front page the next day, but light Googling can’t locate it.

Members of the first class to omit this event will make Rodney Dangerfield look like George Washington.

‘Responsible, Ethical Journalism’

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Thanks to Maggie’s Farm for reminding us of this brilliant May 4 prediction about the Times Square car bomb from law professor Timothy Stoltzfus Jost:

I think the politics of this incident will turn heavily on who is found to be responsible. If, as seems unlikely, the bomb is linked to South Asian or Middle Eastern terrorists, questions will again arise as to whether the Department of Homeland Security is doing all it can do to keep us safe. If, as I believe is much more likely, the bomb was placed by a right-wing lunatic, it seems to me that questions need to be raised as to whether the right-wing media bear some responsibility for stoking the delusions of such people through their relentless and often unfounded attacks on the Obama administration and the federal government.
We need to consider whether it isn’t time to return to responsible, ethical journalism.

Don’t quit your day job, professor.

Wishing AllahPundit Could Be Less Gushing

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by Smitty

AllahPundit is entirely too optimistic about YouCut. Not everybody shares your passion for auto-budgetary-circumcision, man.
Eric Cantor is also just a bit too happy about “Putting Uncle Sam on a diet.”
But let’s consider:

  • The notion that individual citizens can take an active roll in budgetary decisions is worth fostering. As long as the 16th Amendment gives DC eminent domain over every American wallet, making a bad idea bi-directional is an improvement.
  • The GOP takes the lead in exposing a half a dozen Really Dumb Ideas every week. If Cantor can get DayByDay to provide some cool art, as in for the Obamaturism of the Day/Week, that would be a good thing.
  • A few billion here, a few billion there, and the amounts involved depart human imagination and enter the divine realm of Real Money.
  • The Left, ever incapable of real ideas of their own, could accidentally co-op the concept of fiscal responsibility, in a show of one-upmanship. OK, that’s a stretch.
  • The phone company will make a killing on text messages. That’s the real point of this exercise.

From little saplings grow mighty oaks, he said, studiously avoiding the use of the word ‘acorn’. It’s starting small and a trifle gimmicky, but, if you don’t overplay it, AllahPundit, it could be another brick in the wall of recovery.

Trebling My Doubts On Elena Kagan

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by Smitty

I’ve been enjoined by the wonderful Cynthia to read Clark’s WSJ piece, as a Kagan apologist over the Solomon Act violation. Cynthia, via email, wishes to highlight that:

It wasn’t a Sixties anti-war thing. It WAS an anti-discrimination thing over DADT, which, as you might expect, I think is completely legitimate. All through this, the military was allowed to recruit at Harvard. What changed was whether they did it through an official department of the university, or through a student organization of Harvard military veterans. But the military always had access to recruit. It would be classy of you to post a new story about this and apologize — at least for considering her an anti-military/anti-war protester. She was upholding a policy aimed at ending discrimination that should indeed be ended.

While I won’t back down, I will elaborate. First, a bit of personal theory.

  1. What we do as individuals is one thing. EK’s opinion of DADT is, like her sexuality, something for which I’m simply going to offer resepect, if disinterest in the content. I really don’t care, have known homosexuals on active duty, and generally think that factoring out sexuality to the greatest extent possible is helpful to the combat effectiveness of a military unit.
  2. Speaking of units, once you assume a leadership position in one, civil or military, your individuality subordinates itself to the office. Here is where I really don’t care if EK is agitating for the right for human beings to consort with lizards, so long as it’s on her own time.

As a result of Alinsky’s Rule #12, people want to conflate everything. If I think that a Dean’s official decisions show insufficient grasp of the Constitution to merit an appointment to the Supreme Court, that must mean I owe an apology for holding a derogatory opinion of her as a person. Meh. I’ll bet she’s actually quite cool, and I’d get along as well with her as I do Cynthia. By this conflation of individual with office, if I think that the President’s policies are wrongheaded, I must be a raaaaacist.
The point I’m getting at is that fidelity to the office is what matters. Clark’s apology article, like so much Lefty thinking, buries the issue in the play-by-play in an effort to distract from the bigger questions:

  1. Why is the country broken?
  2. How has the SCOTUS factored into the breaking?
  3. How does confirming Elena Kagan offer hope of improvement?

Roger Pilon has an article at Cato to which your attention is drawn.

It’s unfortunate that we critique Supreme Court nominees today in ideological or political terms, because the Court is the nonpolitical branch of government. Justices are supposed to apply the law to cases before them — to call balls and strikes impartially, as then-Judge Roberts put it — not decide cases according to liberal, conservative or any other political values. Yet ever since liberals viciously attacked Robert Bork in 1987, that’s the way we’ve judged nominees.

The reason is simple: In large measure, we no longer live under the Constitution. Instead, after turn-of-the-century Progressives came to power during the New Deal, the Court began reading the document not as a limit on government but as a font of endless government powers and programs.

I’d disagree here. The Court has been politicized, I’d say, since the FDR’s infamous court packing trick. Judicial restraint has amounted to demoting the SCOTUS to an extra-Congressional committee. Said committee is chartered to derive mental gymnastic tricks which support the panem et circenses descending, manna-like, from the Federal cornucopia.

Sure, it’s easy to go back and criticize this all post-facto. Other than the part where the country is broke, we’ve all had our fun, haven’t we?

The Left cannot or will not face the music on this. Even the GOP’s best effort seems to argue that putting wings on a bus can make an aircraft, if we can just drive into a hurricane for lift.

Does Elena Kagan even think about these kinds of things? The non-Federal undertakings of Washington DC are our financial albatross. The Tenth Amendment, that tattered chastity belt, ‘prophetically’ included to mock the current debacle, has got to be the machete with which we hack the Federal government back to within Federal bounds. Sure, she can’t do it herself, but is she packing the gear to join the fight? Is she part of the problem, or part of the solution?

Back to Pilon:

First, for better or worse, modern Supreme Court confirmation hearings afford Americans an opportunity to reflect on issues that today are too rarely before the public, especially constitutional issues. Indeed, rarely do members of Congress even ask whether they have the authority, under the Constitution, to undertake proposals before them; they seem to think they may do whatever they imagine is politically expedient.

Second, thanks to the sheer ambition of the Obama administration, together with national indebtedness as far as the eye can see, we have before us today something called the Tea Party movement, the political implications of which have been seen recently in Virginia, New Jersey, Massachusetts and, just this past weekend, in Utah. And what, above all else, is this growing movement saying? “Give us back our Constitution!”

I would support a standing filibuster of all SCOTUS appointments from BHO, because I don’t think his judgement worthwhile in the task of preserving the country.

If Elena attains confirmation and reveal herself more judicially brilliant than Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito combined, I will cheerfully eat crow and sing her praises.
Previously:
A Rant
A Sequel

Update: Little Miss Attila takes me to task for my interpretation of the events, but let me quote the WSJ article:

When Ms. Kagan became dean in July of 2003, she upheld this newer policy. Military recruiters used OCS services, but at the beginning of each interviewing season she wrote a public memorandum explaining the exception to the school’s nondiscrimination policy, stating her objection to “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and expressing her strong view that military service is a noble and socially valuable career path that should be encouraged and open to all of our graduates.

In November 2004, however, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals found that the Solomon Amendment infringed improperly on law schools’ First Amendment freedoms. So Ms. Kagan returned the school to its pre-2002 practice of not allowing the military to use OCS, but allowing them to recruit via the student group.

So she may have be against the thing she later supported before she came out contrary to the position she had previously, courageously opposed. Whatever.

I’d like some clarity.

Update II: Via HotAir, WSJ also has a story about Elena Kagan’s West Point speech.  Interestingly, the meat of the Rule of Law/Constitutional Fidelity portion of the .pdf deals with Archie Cox, special prosecutor for Watergate.  While we shouldn’t denigrate standing up to an autocratic Nixon, it would be interesting to hear her exegesis of the Federalism point I’ve been making.  Does the invariant Rule of Law shift to more of a Rule of Should?  Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t.

So, How’s That Whole Party-Switching Thing Working Out for You, Mr. Specter?

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“Specter will be less useful to the Democrats now than he ever was when he had an ‘R’ beside his name.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, April 28, 2009

Arlen Specter’s belief that he would be welcomed warmly by Democrats was never realistic. Liberals had cheered him every time when, as a Republican, he plunged his knife into the backs of his colleagues, but why would Democrats invite a known backstabber into their own ranks?

[O]ne year after he switched his affiliation from Republican to Democrat in part to claim a sixth term, he is still viewed with suspicion by many in the party and faces the gravest threat of his 30-year Senate career because a significant portion of Democratic voters simply cannot get accustomed to the idea that Specter is one of them.
Rep. Joe Sestak, a second-term congressman and retired admiral, is surging in the polls and seems to have momentum headed into Tuesday’s primary . . .

Concern about such a Sestak surge — a gut-hunch that, in the end, Democrats would prefer to vote for an actual Democrat — was what inspired my “Republicans for Specter” idea. We want Arlen to win the Democratic primary, so he can lose in November. Look at the polls:

Rasmussen
R – Pat Toomey . . . . . . . . . 50%
D – Sen. Arlen Specter . . . . 38%

Franklin & Marshall
R – Pat Toomey . . . . . . . . . 48%
D – Sen. Arlen Specter . . . . 36%

Republican Pat Toomey would stomp Specter into geriatric smithereens in November, and the attendant demoralization of Democratic voters would help GOP candidates down the ticket. If Specter should lose the primary, however, Joe Sestak might be able to rally Democrats. Sestak would certainly get more support from independents, who can at least respect an honest Democrat, whereas a political hermaphrodite like Specter . . . not so much.

Specter’s meltdown was accelerated when Sestak hit him with this ad reminding Democratic primary voters that Specter was endorsed by the detested George W. Bush:

So Specter fires back with this ad featuring Obama’s endorsement:

Some clever fellow responded by putting together this mash-up ad:

Even if Specter’s got Obama on TV, though, that isn’t quite the same as having Obama in the flesh:

Arlen Specter launched a TV ad Tuesday featuring the Democrats’ biggest star, President Barack Obama.
But Obama won’t be bringing his star power to Pennsylvania to stump for Specter ahead of next week’s primary election, according to the White House. . . .
The new ad follows a statewide anti-Specter ad put out by Joe Sestak, Specter’s challenger in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary. Sestak’s ad shows then-Republican Specter receiving similar accolades from President George W. Bush in 2004. . .
Specter’s Obama ad will play especially well in Philadelphia, where both men remain popular. Philadelphia is Specter’s traditional base, and his political future may hinge on voter turnout in the city. But Obama’s failing to appear there in person may hurt Specter’s effort to energize the base.
Meanwhile, Vice President Joe Biden confirmed on NBC’s ‘ ‘Today” show Tuesday that he will be campaigning for Specter before next week’s primary.

So the White House is sending in the B-team, suggesting that they’ve spotted him for a hopeless loser and don’t want to diminish the President’s prestige any further by associating Obama too directly with that useless old crapweasel, Arlen Specter.

“You almost feel sorry for Arlen Specter. I mean: Almost.”
— Charle Krauthammer

Exit question: If Democrats can see through Arlen Specter, why are some Republicans still supporting useless crapweasel John McCain?

Elena Kagan’s Bold, Refreshing, Courageous Heterosexuality

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Y’know, when you have to get your friends to leak it, as if divulging a dirty little secret . . .

Elena Kagan is not a lesbian, one of her best friends told POLITICO Tuesday night, responding to persistent rumors and innuendo about the Supreme Court nominee’s personal life.
“I’ve known her for most of her adult life and I know she’s straight,” said Sarah Walzer, Kagan’s roommate in law school and a close friend since then. “She dated men when we were in law school, we talked about men — who in our class was cute, who she would like to date, all of those things. She definitely dated when she was in D.C. after law school, when she was in Chicago – and she just didn’t find the right person. However, she definitely enjoys penis. Totally into it.  Can’t get enough. Honest.” . . .

Maybe I added something at the end there. And the headline of the day award goes to Comedy Central:

Elena Kagan to Become Only 112th
Heterosexual to Serve on Supreme Court

This is good news indeed for Andrew Sullivan, who is ecstatic to learn that Kagan shares his love of penis. It’s also good news for Kagan’s left-wing critics, who are now free to hate her without fear of inciting homophobia.

Kagan’s uncanny resemblance to Harvey Lembeck spared her the worst possible humiliation. If she was kinda hot, the AOSHQ morons would have demanded video proof of her sexual preference.