Is Alito even honest?

The NY Times editorial page yesterday asked the Senate to study whether or not Alito is honest:

The Senate should also explore Judge Alito's honesty. According to a senator he met with, he tried to dismiss his statement about the Constitution's not protecting abortion as merely part of a job application, which suggests he will bend the truth when it suits his purposes. Judge Alito has said he does not recall being in an ultraconservative group called Concerned Alumni of Princeton, which opposed co-education and affirmative action. That is odd, since he boasted of his membership in that same 1985 job application. The tortuous history of his promise to Congress to recuse himself in cases involving the Vanguard companies, which he ultimately failed to do, should also be explored.

Samuel Alito has not been honest. He has been spinning his way through the process and the truth has been a casualty.

This is an appointment to the highest court in the land and the nominee can't seem to tell the truth. At any other time in history, that alone would torpedo the nomination. But the Bush administration has made lying their standard operating procedure. Unfortunately, Republican Senators have accepted that standard. Read More......

Everything Alito

Markos has the day's wrap-up. Read More......

Open thread

What's up? Read More......

Did the Bush administration kill the 12 miners in West Virginia?

Knight Ridder:

Since the Bush administration took office in 2001, it has been more lenient than its predecessors toward mining companies facing serious safety violations, issuing fewer and smaller major fines and collecting less than half of the money that violators owed, a Knight Ridder investigation has found.

At one point last year, the Mine Safety and Health Administration fined a coal company $440 for a "significant and substantial" violation that ended in the death of a Kentucky man. The firm, International Coal Group Inc., is the same company that owns the Sago mine in West Virginia, where 12 workers died last week.

The $440 fine remains unpaid.

Relaxed mine-safety enforcement is widespread, according to a Knight Ridder analysis of federal records and interviews with former and current federal safety officials, while deaths and injuries from mining accidents have hovered near record-low levels in the last few years. Knight Ridder is the parent company of The Inquirer.

The analysis shows:

The number of major fines over $10,000 has dropped by nearly 10 percent since 2001. The dollar amount of those penalties, when adjusted for inflation, has plummeted 43 percent to a median of $27,584.

Fewer than half of the fines levied between 2001 and 2003 - about $3 million - have been paid.

The budget and staff for the enforcement office also have declined, forcing the agency to make do with about 100 fewer coal-mine-enforcement personnel, a cut of about 9 percent.

In serious criminal cases, the number of guilty pleas and convictions have fallen 54.8 percent since 2001. In the first four years of the Bush administration, the federal government averaged 3.5 criminal convictions a year; in the four years before that, the average was 7.75 per year.

More on Bush's mining fiasco from Hughes for America. Read More......

Hillary demands inquiry into the body armor imbroglio

Good for her.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton urged Congress Monday to re-examine the Pentagon's standards for soldiers' body armor in Iraq, after a new study found most fatal torso wounds to Marines would have been prevented or minimized with more protection.

More from Hillary here, she's asking for an investigation. Read More......

Full Day 1 transcripts of the Alito hearings

Or, how I lied under oath on my job application. Read More......

Kidnapped American reporter in Iraq now identified

E&P; has the story. Read More......

CNN's Jeffrey Toobin incorrectly says a lot of Americans support Bush's domestic spying

"It is an issue where a lot of Americans think, 'we're spying on Al Qaeda, good, and the more the better'." - Jeffrey Toobin, CNN, right now

Well, actually the latest poll shows a clear majority of Americans do not support the administration spying on Americans without first seeking a court order:

..56 percent of respondents in an AP-Ipsos poll said the government should be required to first get a court warrant to eavesdrop on the overseas calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens when those communications are believed to be tied to terrorism.

That's a greater percentage than who voted for President Mandate last November. And it's 14% more than those who think Bush should spy on us without a warrant. So enough of this "a lot of people," Jeff.

While it might be factually correct to call the 42% minority "a lot," you're still trying to give the impression that somehow the nation is divided on this issue, or even better, that most Americans support Bush's domestic spying. A 14-point spread in opposition to Bush, especially in today's day and age when the pro-Bush 50% of the country is willing to support pretty much anything the man does, well that's a big deal. And it hardly justifies suggesting on the air that somehow the domestic spying issue a danger zone for Democrats, and the clear majority of Americans, who think it's wrong.

In fact, you should have said "the majority of Americans oppose spying on Americans without a search warrant." Read More......

Alito hearings are on

Boring. Opening comments. Some Republican is praising immigrants. Yeah, right. Read More......

New York Times reporter murdered by thugs in DC

This is your nation's capital. A crime-ridden cesspool.

Yes, DC has improved loads over the past decade, but not in the area of crime. We are consistently at the bottom of the barrel, nationwide, in our violent crime statistics, and just a few years ago we became the murder capital of the US again. I know, because after I was violently mugged a few years back (some kids jumped me and tried to strangle me to death on a busy corner across the street from my apartment at 8pm on a weekday, and never even went for my wallet), and the reaction from the cops was little more than a collective yawn. I launched a citywide crime awareness campaign that got a lot of attention, caused a big scandal (when we, among other things, found out that DC's dial-911 emergency phone system was killing people, and the mayor and police chief (who was in charge of it) of course denied it) and we nearly brought down the police chief as result.

Funny thing is, nothing has changed since that time. Same excuses from the police, same horror stories from the citizens.

The problem? We have a mayor who cares more about baseball than crime, and we have a police chief who likes to tell us it's hard work keeping a big city safe. Yeah, we know it's hard work, but why does most every other city in the nation always do better than us, even when their inner-city and socio-economic problems are just as bad if not worse than ours?

It's sad, and its pitiful. But it's only a matter of time before all the fools who bought half a million dollar condos in horrible parts of the city start to realize that just because half your block is rich yuppies doesn't make it safe to walk around at night and doesn't stop people from getting murdered on your corner - in fact, you're quite tempting targets. When that happens, the mayor and the chief are in for a rude awakening, as are the fools who spent that much money on condos in the middle of a ghetto. Read More......

You'll do a heckuva job, Sammy

Bush is Sammy's biggest cheerleader:

President Bush sent Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito off to his confirmation hearings Monday with praise, a good-luck handshake and a demand that senators "give this man a fair vote."

Alito, who would be the 110th justice in U.S. history, was facing close questioning by the Judiciary Committee on abortion and other contentious issues. But first, he got some last-minute encouragement from the president over breakfast at the White House.

Speaking to reporters afterward in the Rose Garden, the president called Alito "eminently qualified" and said, "Sam's got the intellect necessary to bring a lot of class to that court.

Yes, because George W. Bush is really the arbiter of intellect and class in America. Read More......

Ricky and the Theocrats live at Justice Sunday III

Little Ricky "Man-Dog" Santorum, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins -- the gang that wants Alito on the Court. Need we say more?:

"Justice Sunday III" was held in the state where Alito, generally supported by conservatives, sits on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the No. 3 Senate Republican, told the gathering that liberal judges are "destroying traditional morality, creating a new moral code and prohibiting any dissent."

"The only way to restore this republic our founders envisioned is to elevate honorable jurists like Samuel Alito," Santorum said. "Unfortunately, the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee seem poised to drag these hearings into the gutter, so they can continue their far left judicial activism on the Supreme Court."

Read More......

Monday Morning Open Thread

It's barely 9:00 a.m. on a Monday morning and this week already feels likes it going full speed. Read More......

Ted Kennedy set the agenda for the Alito hearings

The Senate Judiciary Committee begins confirmation hearings today. Senator Kennedy set the stage for the hearings yesterday:

"He indicates in his job application his view about what the Constitution guarantees in terms of, for example, women and the issue on abortion," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), the committee's most senior member, said yesterday on ABC's "This Week." "We haven't had a statement like that since Robert Bork," the outspoken conservative who was rejected for a Supreme Court seat in 1987.

Kennedy described the now-disbanded group, Concerned Alumni of Princeton, as "anti-black, anti-disabled and anti-women," but he said Alito in 1985 "took a sense of pride in belonging to" it. Alito has said recently he does not recall participating in the group. Democrats say that is an example of evasions they will aggressively challenge.

Michael provided an analysis of Alito's history in an earlier post. He has become the prototypical Bushie -- not responsible for anything he's said or done.

It's not really too dramatic to say this is the start of an extremely significant process for the country. If Alito is confirmed, Americans will lose constitutional rights. His mission is to overturn Roe, but that's just a start. He is the dream Justice for the theocrats. The question is whether people in the country understand the stakes. So far, it doesn't seem that way. Read More......

Cheney hospitalized this morning

Update: A spokeswoman now says that the shortness of breath was related to medicine he has been taking for a foot problem. It is also said that the foot problem has nothing to do with his recent surgery in September.

He's at GW hospital in Washington after having shortness of breath. No details at the moment. Read More......

Why is Penn State supporting rape and discrimination?

I know that State College is in the middle of nowhere so the traditional media let's a lot of things slide, but what the hell is going on there? Rene Portland, the women's basketball coach, has been on a crusade to attack lesbians including openly attacking lesbians during recruiting and yet Penn State has done nothing to reprimand her.

More recently the right wing football coach Joe Paterno has dismissed a rape charge against a Florida State football player as nothing more than a young girl flirting with a popular football player and trying to get him in the sack. And to think that some consider Paterno a dinosaur who is well past his time...go figure. Maybe making rape jokes is funny in State College but in the real world it's not quite the same.

The common denominator here is that both coaches have enjoyed a lot of success at Penn State for their respective programs which can only lead one to believe that the university has no issue with tarnishing their otherwise good reputation all in the name of winning. It's a sad day when a public university accepts and makes excuses for blatant discrimination and for dismissing serious charges such as rape. Penn State ought to be ashamed of themselves for their bunker mentality of blaming the media and going on the offensive against critics, just so they can maintain winning college coaches. How many free passes are they going to give these people? Read More......

Why Is Alito So Ashamed Of Himself?

The far right wants us to believe that Supreme Court nominee Alito is similar to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Even though everyone knew Ginsburg was a liberal, she was passed by a vast majority in the Senate. They are both in the mainstream of judicial philosophy, the far right says. So Alito deserves the same treatment because he's "qualified."

So why is Alito so ashamed of his entire career?

Ginsburg IS in the mainstream of judicial philosophy, even though she's clearly a strong liberal. But she never pretended to be anything else. And everything on Ginsburg's resume was something she was proud of. Every group she belonged to, every organization she worked for, every position she staked out on the issues of the day and every promise she made reflected who Ruth Bader Ginsburg was, what she stood for and what she believed in.

Did she insist you shouldn't read anything into her work for the ACLU? Of course not; she was proud of that work. Did she insist you shouldn't read anything into her activism over the years, her push for equality among the sexes? Don't be absurd. Did she break her word on solemn pledges made before the Senate? Never.

Nothing could be further from the truth for Alito. He is apparently ashamed of everything he's ever done. Alito boasted on an application for promotion in the Reagan administration about belonging to the racist, Neanderthal-ish Concerned Alumni For Princeton. Now he pretends he can't remember ever belonging to them at all.

Alito said he wanted to become a lawyer because he was so distraught about Supreme Court rulings that led to "one person, one vote," a cornerstone of our modern democracy. Now, he says we should ignore his consistent, persistent attacks on affirmative action.

Alito also cannily helped to devise the incremental approach to dismantling Roe v Wade that has been the very tactic the far right has used. Now Alito says to ignore all that.

Alito has repeatedly proven he believes the president is more like an emperor -- someone who deserves almost unlimited deference from the Supreme Court, especially during a time of war.

Finally, Alito pledged to the Senate that he would recuse himself under certain situations as a federal judge. He repeatedly broke that pledge. His excuses vary: he forgot, the computers shouldn't have assigned him those cases in the first place, he never HAD to recuse himself, and finally he never promised he would recuse himself forever. The reasons change, but the fact remains: Alito gave his word and then he broke it. He can't be trusted.

Since Alito is so clearly ashamed of himself, shouldn't we be ashamed of him and keep him off the Supreme Court? Read More......

Late night open thread

Ok what the heck is going on with the comments? It's like comment traffic doubled overnight... Read More......