Author: Andrew Sullivan

Kinsley on Kagan:

The Conservative Party in Britain now has eleven openly gay members of parliament and nine more in a glass closet. Compare that with zero for the Republicans and three for the Democrats, and no-one in the upper reaches of the Obama administration. One of the new Tories is an open lesbian. Two gay Tories are ministers – and both friends of mine. No one seems to be terrified of acknowledging this or reporting it – in fact, the party is deeply proud of this new diversity. I am too – as a Tory, a native Brit and a gay person. To see prejudice vanquished in such a way that the Tories now have more openly gay MPs than Labour is a real Cameron achievement – built on accepting the social changes that Thatcher unwittingly unleashed and Blair solidified.

The new chairman of the Tory party and cabinet member is a Muslim woman.

Joe Randazzo, editor of the Onion, hates Internet memes:

Instead of acting as an organic cultural touchstone, the modern meme — from LOL, which hasn't been used to signify physical laughter since 1997, to Lolcats — now sucks the joy out of our interconnectedness. It destroys uniqueness. Once an "enjoyable thing" becomes a "meme," we stop enjoying the thing for its own sake, but consume and regurgitate our enjoyment of it as a symbol of hipness, as if to say: "I am aware of this thing's popularity — therefore I, too, exist!"

Money example:

[I]f you've never had the unfortunate occasion to hear someone, forgetting that life is not a message board, yell "FAIL!" aloud, you are missing out on an exquisite kind of existential rage.

More meme talk here.

Is this a new face for conservatism in America?

As I understood the core premise of Obama's candidacy, it was that we were not going to continue the "Daddy Knows Best"  attitude of Bush-Cheney. Arguments would be made on the merits of the case, disagreement would be welcome, reason would predominate, sunlight would be the best disinfectant. We were all grown up enough to discuss all these things without partisan knees jerking, and without some sequestered and all-powerful executive doing the governing for us.

My worries about the judicial and political blank slate of Elena Kagan is that the slate is not, in fact, blank. And those in the know fully understand what she will do – and their goal at this point is to prevent the public from knowing. A reader captures my unease:

It’s not that we’re all guessing on Kagan.  As I’ve listened to her supporters—Lawrence O’Donnell, Lessig, and others—it’s clear that’s she herself and her views are very well known . . . inside the beltway.  She’s obviously been hob-nobbing with a lot of the villagers (as Digby calls them) for years now, and they're comfortable with her selection.

The clear problem is two-fold:  they are asking us to simply trust them that what they say is true, and because they don’t want to give anything away, they’re not telling Kagan’s potential supporters anything of substance, either.

It’s just as bad as Bush/Cheney in that way:  “Trust us!  We’re the good guys!  We’ll pick the right person for you!”  Not something that makes me any more comfortable than it does Glenn Greenwald.

That seems to be what they want with “terror suspects,” too, and it’s exactly like Bush/Cheney.  “Hey, they’ll get full rights unless they’re terror suspects—then we’ll do all those special things we need to.  How do we know that they might really be terrorists?  Trust us!  We’re the good guys!” Frankly, it’s sickening.

It's certainly not change we can believe in. How can we believe in something we're not even permitted to know?

(Photo: Sen. Scott Brown welcomes U.S. Solicitor General and Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan in his office in the Russell Senate Office Building May 13, 2010 in Washington, DC.By Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)

A reader cuts to the chase:

It’s pretty simple, isn’t it? The Tories have 306 out of 650 seats, or 47%. Therefore, they have enough seats to block a dissolution of Parliament, if they hold together.

Bingo. The question, of course, is whether an arrangement precisely tailored to get Britain through one parliament is a good rule to govern forever thereafter. There is no written constitution, remember. If this provision passes the Commons, it becomes the constitution. A fascinating Canadian perspective here.

"There's something ironic in the fact that the legacy of the New Deal is the inability to reproduce it," – Megan McArdle.

It's not just the emergence of a conservative party at peace with modernity, it's the willingness to compromise that is striking. A reader writes:

It is SO REFRESHING to see an on-paper list of common principles and goals between two parties on the opposite end of the political spectrum. Forcing politicians to compromise and form coalitions is a great strength of the parliamentary system that is sorely missed in America's current political climate, so characterized as it is by "the alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension" (Washington).

Take this line for example: "Provision will be made for Liberal Democrat MPs to abstain on introducing transferable tax allowances for married couples." It speaks volumes about the real potential for this odd political marriage of convenience to actually work and produce sound governance.

I sometimes wish we had in the US a system similar to that in Germany. A lower house that apportions seats solely on the basis of state populations seems a poor solution when citizen loyalty to a specific state has declined and modern technology has made moving from state to state so easy and common. How much better to let blue Alabamians and Red Californians have an elected voice they can point to as their own.