President Obama has nominated his second Supreme Court Justice, Elena Kagan. Already a minor feeding frenzy has started. If she has ever had so much as a traffic ticket it will come out in the next few weeks. And like living in a small town, if they can’t find anything bad to say about her, they’ll make something up. Since she has never had judicial experience, there is no way to look back and evaluate her decisions, however, as the dean of Harvard Law School, she has published enough articles so that one can get some idea of her approach to the law. But what she has written has already taken second place to what people prefer to believe she has said. And to make matters even more confusing, as part of her previous positions as counsel to President Clinton, and Solicitor General for President Obama, she has had to defend some positions that do not necessarily agree with her written positions. ...
My alarm clock goes off every morning at eight, except for the few times when I have a breakfast date. Usually I wake up about an hour before that, or at least I partly wake up. It is important that I remain in a “not quite awake but not quite asleep” state, because I consider that time as the germination period for whatever seeds happen to have blown into my head.