This piece originally ran on the Opinion page of the May 17, 2010, edition of the Washington Times.

Elena Kagan’s problem is not that she has too much empathy but that she has too little. President Obama famously made “that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles” his key qualification for a seat on the Supreme Court. What little we know of Ms. Kagan’s record demonstrates that she does not meet even that nebulous standard.

Empathy would require that Ms. Kagan place herself in the position of the “despised and downtrodden,” as her mentor Justice Thurgood Marshall put it. And who could possibly be more despised than a United States Army officer assigned to recruiting duties at Harvard Law School?

Did Dean Kagan put herself in his place before enforcing her law school’s repugnant ban on military recruiters? Did she imagine the feelings inside that young captain, perhaps limping from the fragments still in his leg from an improvised explosive device that hit his convoy outside Ramadi, as he walked through Harvard’s gates? Did she consider the stares he drew at the training academy from the liberal elite, the palpable contempt directed at him as one whose mere presence Harvard had officially designated as morally unworthy? (more…)

The Orlando Sentinel recently reported that President Obama wants to nix NASA’s moon missions and instead intends to spend funding for space ventures beyond earth’s orbit. Perhaps to Avatar’s beautiful planet Pandora?

Now what would make the president stray so far from JFK’s vision of lunar supremacy? Perhaps he wasn’t that thrilled to learn what I just did about what occurred on the first moon landing. My friend Eric Metaxas wrote a great book, Everything You Alwayhs Wanted to Know About God (But Were Afraid To Ask), and in it he recalled that Buzz Aldrin confirmed to him that he took communion on the Moon.

Nobody knew.  The live broadcast was blacked out at the time.  Here are Aldrin’s own words, as quoted by Metaxas: (more…)

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann broke from his self-described pattern of not offering commentary, and called for an end to the media’s self-imposed editorial silence concerning the U.S. government’s response to a terrible natural disaster.

Okay, it was a different disaster during a different administration. But did you hear what he said? A week into the Hurricane Katrina recovery he declared that,

But now, at last, it has stopped getting exponentially worse…and having given our leaders what we now know is the week or so they need to get their acts together, that period of editorial silence I mentioned should come to an end.

As the chaos of recovery efforts in and around New Orleans became the big story, old media commentators fired barrages of harsh rhetoric toward President Bush and members of his administration directly involved with disaster relief. Never mind what part of that criticism was justified, and what part was driven by political preferences. It was a blend. (more…)