The Dish

Labour supporter Hopi Sen chuckles:

Gordon has at the very least secured a far better deal for the Liberal Democrats from the Conservatives, and made it absolutely clear that if the Liberal Democrats do go in with the Conservatives that they have freely chosen to do so. They will be rightly responsible for their choice. This will be important in many different ways, whether or not a Lab-Lib alliance eventually emerges.

Polly Toynbee is all for a Labour-Lib Dem coalition:

Here at last is the historic chance to heal the pointless rift between two near-identical progressive parties, divided only by history, tradition and a rotten voting system. Clegg would badly misread the mood of this country if he opted for the Conservatives now – despite their "final" AV offer late today.

The Labour offer laid before the Lib Dems is, instead, a coalition of equals, forming a government under a new leader, together with the SDLP, Plaid Cymru, SNP and others. The conventional British view is that a multiparty coalition would be unstable, but that's how most of Europe is governed. It would be in none of their like-minded interests to bring down this coalition government.

A reader notes:

elena kagan husband
elena kagan personal life
elena kagan married
elena kagan solicitor general
elena kagan bio
elena kagan supreme court

And people wonder why the MSM is dying … It's because they see their role as withholding information when it might affect their reputation, not disseminating it and looking like douchebags. But I have emailed the White House the simple question and will happily post their response if it ever comes.

The Speaker of the Knesset embraces the latest smear of Richard Goldstone:

"The judge who sentenced black people to death … is a man of double standards," Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin proclaimed. "Such a person should not be allowed to lecture a democratic state defending itself against terrorists."

"Should not be allowed"? By whom? Then this equation with Nazis:

"The judge who sentenced black people to death … is a man of double standards," Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin proclaimed. "Such a person should not be allowed to lecture a democratic state defending itself against terrorists." Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon insisted, "This so-called respected judge is using this report in order to atone for his sins," likening Goldstone's statement that he was forced to uphold the laws of an unjust regime to "explanations we heard in Nazi Germany after World War II."

So now Goldstone is Eichmann. That didn't take long, did it? As for Israel's own history of arming the apartheid regime, well … they were more complicated times, weren't they?

StoryCorps, "an independent nonprofit whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives," makes its first animation:

Joshua Littman, a 12-year-old boy with Asperger’s syndrome, interviews his mother, Sarah. Joshua’s unique questions and Sarah’s loving, unguarded answers reveal a beautiful relationship that reminds us of the best—and the most challenging—parts of being a parent.

A reader writes:

One important actor you forgot to mention in your remarks: Elena Kagan.  If there are elements of her private life that are unknown, after years in the public eye, it seems to me that she has chosen to keep them private.  And if that is the case, I don't think it's fair to accuse the White House of cowardice.  Perhaps you think Kagan herself is a coward.  If so, you should come out and say that.  But I don't see how it can be argued that it is the administration's duty to out her.

Another writes:

Did you really miss the very forceful push-back by the Obama administration on this?  They have, indeed, told us definitively that she is not. Maybe you don't believe them. Maybe she is and they really are lying.  And they shouldn't have called it a "charge." But don't lie about what they've said.

Another:

The White House, in beating back the CBS blogger report, said she is not gay. Both Kagan and the White House presumably understand the consequences of getting caught in a lie on this question, and they also would understand how easy it would be to uncover that lie if indeed her supposed lesbian relationship were such an open secret around Cambridge.  If she's gay, it would matter a great deal (and the Victory Fund would be shouting it from the rooftops in celebration of an historic appointment).

But she says she isn't, the White House says she isn't, nobody with any proof to the contrary has come forward to contradict her, and so absent any compelling reason not to, I'm willing to let her own telling of her life story suffice.

Another:

I realize that there will be those who chase after this question, largely from the right or the infotainment 24-hour channels. But let them be the ones intruding, not you.

The NYT does its bit:

She was a creature of Manhattan’s liberal, intellectual Upper West Side — a smart, witty girl who was bold enough at 13 to challenge her family’s rabbi over her bat mitzvah, cocky (or perhaps prescient) enough at 17 to pose for her high school yearbook in a judge’s robe with a gavel and a quotation from Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court justice.

She was the razor-sharp newspaper editor and history major at Princeton who examined American socialism, and the Supreme Court clerk for a legal giant, Thurgood Marshall, who nicknamed her “Shorty.” She was the reformed teenage smoker who confessed to the occasional cigar as she fought Big Tobacco for the Clinton administration, and the literature lover who reread Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” every year.

And she loves opera. Is there nothing the press won't reveal about her? Oh, yes, I forgot … the question that we are not allowed to ask, a question that, if true, would have helped shape her worldview as profoundly as, say, her penchant for the occasional cigar. But this is not just not "fit to print." It is not "fit to ask."

An interactive chart.

Hanna Rosin rules the question out of bounds:

As our own Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick pointed out last week, unless anyone comes up with actual proof that Elena Kagan is a lesbian—and NO, this is not an invitation to go hunting—the whisper campaigns and the whisper campaigns about the whisper campaigns should end. Whether that stops people from endlessly Googling “Elena Kagan” and “gay” is another story.

But, as Hanna notes, the president himself, by virtue of his criterion of picking Justices who have diverse experiences and have experienced discrimination, has already alluded to private facts about Kagan's life:

Law was not just an “intellectual exercise” for her, but something that

affects the “lives of ordinary people.” Behind the law, he said, she understands that “there are stories of people’s lives.” This naturally led into a little biographical sketch of Kagan. We learned that she is the granddaughter of immigrants, that she comes from a family of teachers, and that neither of her parents is still alive.

Is Hanna really saying that a person's sexual orientation in today's society is less of an issue than the fact that she comes from a family of teachers or is the grand-daughter of immigrants? Please. The premise is absurd on its face.

Did Obama shy away from Sotomayor's ethnicity? So why is it somehow unseemly or a function of "whispers" to ask an obvious empirical question to which there is an empirical answer?

By the way, Hanna. I am not whispering. I am asking in the same voice and with same decibels as I would ask any question of a public official who may, in fact, rule at some point on the very constitutional grounds of my own civil marriage. The only thing that could conceivably put this question into the zone of "whispers" and "privacy" is homophobia – and yes, that means the homophobia of liberal journalists.

In fact, the entire premise of Hanna's post is that there is something wrong with asking someone in the public eye about their sexual orientation. There isn't. This is not the same thing as "outing" people. It is simply asking them to tell, and refusing to be co-opted by double standards. Kagan can refuse to answer; or she can tell the truth, whatever it is, and move on. Those are her options. But the press has only one professional option: to ask a factual question that deserves a factual answer.

But they won't. Of course they won't. There is almost a competition to refrain from asking – so as to burnish one's reputation for seriousness and integrity.