A Saturday Fairy Tale

Far away and long ago lived an emperor who had no clothes. He strutted about butt-naked and his faithful sycophants all said that his clothes were marvelous indeed. This because the emperor had declared that anyone calling him naked was going to be sued for treason and was then going to be hanged from a lamppost in a public square until thoroughly dead.

The common people of the country could see that the emperor was naked (it was hard to avoid...), but they were too busy to hang off lampposts and too hungry to last through the torture that preceded the hangings. So they were mostly quiet and pretended to love the silk of the emperor's codpiece, too.

But one day a boy, dirty and hungry but clothed in something at least, saw the emperor's cavalcade drive by. The emperor stood up to pat the boy's bald head (the boy suffered from alopecia*) and suddenly the boy could see the emperor's bare nether parts.

"Hey, look at those peas-and-carrot! I've eaten bigger!" the boy shouted.

A silence fell, so deep that one could cut it with a table knife.

What happened next? Perhaps the scales fell off the eyes of the sycophants? Perhaps the naked emperor was tarred and feathered and chased out of his once-realm? No, sillies.

Everything went on just as before, except that the little boy was tortured and then sent to a secret prison for those who speak of peas and carrots in public.
---
*Alopecia: an autoimmune disease that causes hair loss. Not to be confused with philobaldia, the love of bald heads that some recent emperors have.

The Biased Quiz Of The Day And Some Feminism

Courtesy of ABC and John Stossel's 20/20:

Do you think voucher programs and school choice would improve public education?
Yes, the competition will lead to better schools for our kids.
No, we just need to increase public funding for our schools.

Not a scientific survey. For entertainment only.

Note the loading of emotionally positive terms into the Yes-choice. Note the "just" framing of the No-choice which also uses stilted language.

It is stupid to ask whether someone thinks that competition would lead to better schools without giving quite a long explanation of what, exactly, might happen with the voucher system. Consider just these points for starters:

Most voucher schemes would allow private and religious schools to accept vouchers. Madrasas, say, could be funded by U.S. taxpayers. But private and religious schools don't have to accept students they don't want to, so they could simply go cherry-picking in the marketplace and leave the public schools with the most demanding and needy students. And if they accidentally picked up any trouble-makers they could kick these out, to be collected by the local public schools. Then in the next round the assessments would show how much better the religious and private schools are doing, and the scene would be set for the abolition of public schools.

If the voucher schemes were limited to only public schools some similar arguments would apply. Think about the students of a school located in a nice, middle-class area. These students are not going to have the problems poor children are going to bring to school with them, and they are going to do better on all the assessments. The middle-class schools will continue getting more students, presumably, and the schools in poor areas will close. Then all the poor children will be bused long distances every day, assuming the schools will have them. It's very biblical. We would take from those that already have very little and give to those that already have a lot. Sort of like the Republican ideas in general.

The parental choice markets are not the only markets that we need to analyze. The market for teachers is also important. How would the voucher scheme affect that market? Its first impact would be to add the pressure on teachers to perform "better", to focus their teaching on the "right" things, such as standardized tests. This would make being a teacher less attractive. Most people go into education as a career because they like teaching children, not because they like marketing and test-coaching.

If I am correct about this, fewer people would choose teaching as a career, and many current teachers would leave the field. Schools would then have to pay more to attract the needed labor force. Which would cost the taxpayers more. The alternative would be to increase the number of students each teacher teaches, but that would make the job even less desirable and the process would continue.

These are not the only possible problems with the voucher solution. Another one has to do with the whole parental choice idea, especially if unassisted and when it comes to parents who are, say, recent immigrants or not very educated themselves. How many people do you know that judge colleges purely on the basis of their football teams? My point here is that judging the quality of a school is actually quite difficult to do, even for those who have the tools needed for that task.

There is a hidden feminist lesson in all this. One of the open secrets behind the whole school quality discussion is that the government is trying to go on running schools on a shoe-string, a strategy which worked as long as there was an ample supply of very intelligent women who had few career choices outside teaching, social work and nursing. This was the case until the 1960's. But then other career paths opened up for women, and teaching paid less than most of these. The consequence was a shortage of qualified teachers and in some places a reduction in the standards required of them.

The change I described happened forty years ago. For some reason we still pretend that it never took place. My prescription for fixing the schools is simple: pay teachers more.

The wingnut prescription seems to be to try to find some way of paying nothing, or as little as possible. Why they imagine that a market would lead to this outcome without any quality reductions puzzles me. But most things about wingnuts puzzle me when I'm bothered to think about them.

Houston Teachers' Pay To Be Tied To Test Scores

This article caught my mind while looking for something else. Houston has decided to reward merit by paying teachers more if their students do well in tests:

The pay incentives are to be based on three components, or "strands."

One will reward teachers based on how much their school's test scores have improved compared with the scores of 40 other schools with similar demographics around the state. Another will compare student progress on the Stanford 10 Achievement test and its Spanish-language equivalent to that of students in similar classrooms in the Houston district. The third measure will be student progress on the statewide Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test, as compared with that in similar Houston classrooms.

About half the district's teachers will be eligible for stipends in all three categories, for a total of $3,000. The system's 305 principals with the best-achieving teachers could earn as much as $6,000 in merit pay, and the 19 executive principals and five regional superintendents will be eligible for up to $25,000.

The linked article discusses many negatives with this plan: it encourages teaching the test only, it doesn't reward Special Education teachers or art teachers. But the article doesn't really describe the worst aspect of the scheme: Just imagine if we decided to do the same with physicians' pay. Pay physicians more if their patient's vital readings improve.

It's easier to see the problems in tying the reward to the "results" in that case, and the two cases have the same problems. Both patients and students enter the system with varying abilities to improve, and the outcomes for both patients and students depend not only on the doctor or the teacher but also on themselves and their families.

What this system will reward is teaching the cream-of-the-crop students, and it will give teachers an incentive to try to get rid of poor students if at all possible. It will also reward those that learn to game the system, by cheating, if necessary.

A Cunning Plan

If it gets really bad in our bright new future blogs might be censored as treasonous and anti-SovietAmerican. It could happen, you know. There are some current attempts at censoring our speech though I'm too lazy to link to them right now.

I'm not too lazy to have a cunning plan. Should the worst happen, this blog will be all about Olympus, but that will stand as code for real political events in the U.S.. So Ares will stand for George Bush and so on. Won't that be fun? I can write rubbish and it will mean something. Sort of the reverse of so much that is written today about this administration.

Among Possible Presidential Duties: Breaking the Law

According to Chris Matthews, our yellow-headed Tweety bird, it might just be the case that the American President's duties include breaking the American laws. Media Matters for America gives us the relevant clip:

From the January 12 edition of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews:

MATTHEWS: I'm asking you, you're our guest here. You're from NSA, you've been there. Do you have any evidence that we're spying on regular, you know, just regular political Americans, who maybe have views on all kinds of things? Or are we limiting it to people who are actually engaged in conversations or emailing with people in highly suspicious situations in the Mideast?

TICE: I can't say one way or the other, and I can't go into the details of how NSA does their business; it would be classified. But the question arises: Why would you do this beyond the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] Court?

MATTHEWS: Because, apparently, when you want to do this mining by going by topic rather than by who's on the phone, you would never get a court order.

TICE: That's true. That's true.

MATTHEWS: Well, then, how can you do it?

TICE: Well, I -- all the Middle East -- a large broad-brush approach could be used where you -- you know, if you have a haystack of information, you suck it all in to try to find the needle.

MATTHEWS: We're under attack on 9-11. A couple of days after that, if I were president of the United States and somebody said we had the ability to check on all the conversations going on between here and Hamburg, Germany, where all the Al Qaeda people are, or somewhere in Saudi [Arabia], where they came from and their parents are, and we could mine some of that information by just looking for some key words like "World Trade Center" or "Pentagon," I'd do it.

TICE: Well, you'd be breaking the law.

MATTHEWS: Yeah. Well, maybe that's part of the job. We'll talk about it. We'll be right back with Russ Tice. You're watching Hardball on MSNBC.

Bolds are mine. If breaking the law is part of the Dear Leader's job then we no longer live in a democracy. I'm not sure what to call the resulting governance structure: Tyranny? Dictatorship? Whatever it is, democracy it ain't.

Osama bin Laden has succeeded past his wildest dreams. He is indeed destroying the cultures that he so hates, by making "freedom" something only available in Iraq and by turning the process of democratic decision-making into a farce. Good going, Tweety.

News from the Olympus

I visited my divine pals on the old home mountain. I partied a little, went to a cocktail bash held by some naiads (they had a wet bar) and met a few interesting monsters. After all that I have decided to go on a diet: no more than one wingnut is going to be devoured per week. By me. It's my New Year's Promise.

If the above paragraph makes no sense to you, be content. You don't want to know about the monsters and how they tasted. They had been on some weird diet themselves, Atkins or some such. All lard. Ugh.

Back to the party news: Ares is back in circulation, having been released by the succubi who snared him at Nascar races in Tennessee. He thought that they were Bible-reading wingnut ladies, in for the ride of their lives with him, and perhaps they were. But it was poor Ares who got ridden... He is so modest these days, the poor boy, though he still dreams about converting George Bush to Ares-worshipping. George loves illogical and poorly planned wars so I can see Ares's point.

Ares's droopiness ruined my tentative plans of re-igniting our little flame, and I ended up mostly circulating and picking up gossip about various divinities. Did you know that Thor has been spotted amongst the mortals? He is half-crazed and not very visible, but the neo-Nazis have worshipped him enough to make him almost-materialize. That is how making gods and goddesses work: if enough people believe in us we become real. Except for me. In my case it is the snakes that keep me going, and there has been no snake Enlightenment so I should be safe for a few more millennia. Safe from evaporating. That is what happens to dead gods. And whatever evil tongues say that son of a goat, Zeus, is still evaporated. May he stay so.

Other than that it was godly life as usual. Aphrodite had a new boyfriend she was dragging along. The poor guy needed some sleep, desperately, but he was dying of fatigue with a smile on his face. Athena has applied for a job with the Hudson Institute, a wingnut think-tank. A daddy's girl to the last breath, our Athena. But she won't qualify because she hasn't written any books that smear feminists and she hasn't broken the law like Scooter Libby. So I nailed a nice smile on my lips and listened to her ramblings about her great future career as the head of the Independent Women's Forum (google it), and I nodded and I urged her on. It was fun.

Boredom

This is the week for Echidne's moral sermons, it seems. Today's topic is boredom. The advertizing industry in the United States has been successful in turning most Americans into creatures which crave instant satisfaction and constant entertainment. Or that is how I will begin because I want to thunder about this concept that boredom is an undesirable trait in life.

The Alito hearings are boring, we are told by various journalists. The journalists deserve to be entertained, I guess, not just do their jobs. And the readers and watchers and listeners deserve to be entertained, too. If it's not entertaining, change the channel. Yet all the time the forces of Gilead are sharpening their spears and adding to their power over our lives. But they do it in a boring way so look elsewhere.

Boredom is...like...a really bad thing. Professors are now expected to tapdance across the podium or students will fall asleep. Soon I expect my dentist to sing a little ditty while she pokes around in my maw. I can always take my beautiful teeth and my credit card and go elsewhere. So better keep me entertained.

Politics doesn't work very well with a citizenry trained in expecting entertainment. But bread and circuses works for those in power; they have no real interest in making politics interesting for the non-wonks. Don't buy it if it isn't entertaining! Too bad that you buy it whether it is entertaining or not.

Boredom is an essential part of life, and better than some other parts of life. There is no way of sailing through totally unbored unless your life is short and violent. The proper approach to boredom is to crack through it and pay attention.

End of sermon.

The Tears

Alito's wife cried in the hearings. What does this mean? Was it her migraine headache that made her cry? Or what Lindsay Graham said when she started crying? No, it was the rude Democrats attacking her husband for hours on end.

Alito's wife cried in the hearings. What does this mean? Women are emotional and should be closed out of public life? The only valid emotion is rage? Wingnuts like to see women crying and use this to their advantage? The media will run with this because the hearings are b-o-r-i-n-g and who on earth cares about the tears that Alito will cause sitting on the bench?

I sympathize with Ms. Bomgardner. It must be hard to hear your husband's beliefs and qualifications questioned publicly. But that is what the nomination hearings are for. What on earth are family members doing at the hearings in the first place? Is their presence so important that from now on nobody can ask a nominee a sharp question because it might upset the minor son or daughter of a nominee? How are we going to ask about something like pornography?

And the Republicans are using all this for misdirection. Look elsewhere! Nothing here to see! Just a b-o-r-i-n-g man being nominated to take us into Gilead. Then there will be plenty of tears for all of us. But they won't be televised.

Today's Action Alert

The National Women's Law Center urges you to call your Senator and to tell him or her that Alito is not your choice. Go here to find out how to do it.

Getting What You Deserve

The Alito hearings have brought up the argument that there should be no questioning of Alito, and certainly no filibustering, because Bush "won" the elections and the wingnuts won and they can nominate whomever they want. The spoils of war. A country consisting of winners and losers. One of the worst aspects of the two-party system, I think.

Then there is the slightly different but ultimately the same argument that people wanted Alito on the bench because they voted for Bush who campaigned on these issues. It is the same argument in the sense of telling us "losers" to shut up and offer our necks for the victor, but it is also slightly different because it makes an argument that can actually be studied for relevancy, and that is the one about Bush running on the issues that Alito represents.

He did run on the anti-abortion issue, true. But he didn't really go around telling that blacks and women shouldn't have good jobs or that ten-year old girls should be stripped naked in front of police officers if they and their mothers happened to visit a suspected drug dealer's house at the time when the police had a warranty to strip-search the drug dealer only. Yet these are the kinds of things that Alito supports.

It can be argued that Bush ran for all oppressive and vile things and that his base knew this. He talked to them in code about this, but it was in code for the very reason that most Americans would have vomited if they had known what he was proposing. Thus, to argue that the voters who picked Bush wanted Alito is far-fetched and mostly wrong. What most of them probably voted for was the sitting president at a time of war. Traditionally war-presidents are not kicked out and does Bush know this. We are most likely to have eternal war from now on.

The war is also used to change the basic nature of democracy: the arguing. The most recent wingnut interpretation of political debate is that there should be no disagreement with the president on anything. Disagreement is treason. The winners take all. We have always been at war with Eurasia, and Alito hearings are boring.

Wanna Know Whom I Call?

John Aravosis at Americablog just bought the cell phone records of General Clark for the time period of a few days last November. It seems that anyone can do this with just the number and a credit card. We could all compete with the NSA on terrorism watch! Also, we could find out all the dirt on public officials and politicians...

What John did was unethical, and that was the point of doing it; to show that our privacy is unprotected provided that the other side has our number and some money.

What Should We Call Him?

Sam Alito, I mean. Like a beloved child he needs a use-name. The left blogosphere has called him Stripsearch Sammy and Scalito, and these are good, but only for those in the know about Alito's legal opinions. We need something stickier, something easily grasped and funny.

Bob has blogged on some possibilities and links to other blog posts on this important question. What do you think of them? Can you suggest any others that we have overlooked so far?

Something Alito Will Never Experience

Is sex discrimination at work. Martha Burke has written an excellent article on why Alito's nomination is bad for employed women:

Alito's confirmation, if it happens, could also have profound implications for working women, only from the opposite point of view. Like the other seven men on the Court, he's never experienced sex discrimination firsthand, so he doesn't see it as a problem. His record is clear -- big business rules.

During his 15 years on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, he compiled a stunning record of backing corporations over workers in sex and race discrimination cases. He has bragged that he is "particularly proud" of his work in opposing affirmative action, and never expressed regret for joining a militantly anti-woman club dedicated to keeping women out of Princeton. This mindset does not bode well for female employment rights.

One case that could come before the Court in the near future just happens to be the largest sex discrimination suit in history, Dukes v. Wal-Mart. Current and former female employees of the nation's largest employer are seeking class-action status to pursue pay and promotion discrimination claims. They've won in lower courts, and Wal-Mart is of course appealing. If the case reaches the Supremes a vote against the women could effectively torpedo female workplace rights for a generation.

Burke also notes that the Judicial Committee holding the hearings on Alito has exactly one woman member. One out of eighteen. To decide on putting the eighth man on the court of nine Justices.

But the most important point in the article is the one I highlight in my title for this post. There are things that men or whites in this society do not experience, and having eight men and one woman and only one black Justice on the Supreme Court will not provide a balanced menu of possible human experiences.

Your Tax Money At Work: Harassing The Poor

Another totally illogical and cruel practice:

Tax refunds sought by hundreds of thousands of poor Americans have been frozen and their returns labeled fraudulent, blocking refunds for years to come, the Internal Revenue Service's taxpayer advocate told Congress today.

The taxpayers, whose average income was $13,000, were not told that they were suspected of fraud, the advocate said in her annual report to Congress. The advocate, Nina Olson, said her staff sampled suspected returns and found that, at most, one in five was questionable.

A computer program selected the returns as part of the questionable refund program run by the criminal investigation division of the Internal Revenue Service. In some cases, the criminal division ordered that taxpayers be given no hint that they were suspected of fraud, the report said.

Most of the poor people whose returns the computer flagged as fraudulent were seeking the earned income tax credit, a benefit for the working poor. The credit can return all of the income taxes and Social Security taxes withheld from the paychecks of poor people. Without the credit, many poor people coming off welfare and going to work would receive less money because of taxes taken out of their paychecks and the loss of health benefits, I.R.S. data and other government documents show.

The average refund sought was $3,500, which under the rules for obtaining the credit means that the vast majority of those suspected of fraud were single parents or married couples with children. The maximum benefit for singles is less than $400.

Ms. Olson said the I.R.S. devoted vastly more resources to pursing questionable refunds by the poor, which she said cannot involve more than $9 billion, than to a $100 billion problem with unreported incomes from small businesses that deal only in cash, many of which do not even file tax returns.

I am so angry that I can't really write about this. But the practise of harassing the poor in this way is both stupid, for how much money could we ever get that way?, and cruel, because the most powerful nation in the world doesn't even bother telling the poor what has happened to the prayed-for refund, the refund that has probably been used a thousand times in imagination, for things like shoes and car repairs and, yes, perhaps even booze. It's not a fun life, being poor, and the last thing you want is the IRS on your back like that.

Do You Remember When...

George Orwell's 1984 has the protagonist, Winston Smith, work in a job where he changes the past newspaper records to accord with the newest interpretation of events. Anything that actually happened but is no longer deemed desirable to have happened goes into the Memory Hole: a slit in the wall of Winston's office. When the government starts a new war any evidence of the fresh foe having once been a bosom buddy is erased. Hence the famous quote from the book: "We have always been at war with [add the name of the current enemy]."

This is all chillingly familiar in the new faith-based world George Bush has built us. "Facts" change overnight, and nobody seems to remember the old ones. It is not that many years ago that conservatives thundered about the big government. It was the Democrats who were seen as the spendthrifts. Today the situation is reversed and this causes little astonishment or surprise.

Winston Smith would find all this familiar: We went to war because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Then we didn't go to war for that reason at all, but for the Long March of democracy! No, I got it wrong: We went to war to build a bigger and smarter mousetrap in Iraq so that we would have no mice at home! No. It's democracy and purple fingerprints we want!

History changes the minute it is over, events slip into the Memory Hole, and every dawn the journalists accept the administration's most current construction of history. Revisionism at its finest, because it is not only the public history that is continuously being reinterpreted, but the participants appear to have blank slates for their own memories, too, slates which can be rewritten with any new message from the Bush administration.

All this is frightening, of course, and very frightening when I read some pundits tell me that looking at the past is a waste of time, that we should storm ahead, into the bright new future. But how do you even understand what future is if you no longer have a reliable past, no longer possess a memory of the real events? Wouldn't this future just hover there, like a bright balloon, not moored to anything? Wouldn't it be as fragile as a balloon, too, and as childish?

Perhaps memory is what really distinguishes children from adults. Adults have more memories, and because of that adults have the ability to learn from experiences on a much wider scale. If we as a society condemn our collective memories into the Memory Hole, can we ever really grow up?

There are days when I think that this is the greatest sin of the current administration: that they have made the Memory Hole much bigger. Imagine what you would be like without any memories at all. How would you cope? What or whom would you love? I fear that the same thing can happen to a country which refuses to have real memories, and that would be a terrible crime, on par with those in Orwell's 1984.

Something To Read

This Kos diary and especially the attached comments are worth reading for what they say about the impact of wingnuts like Alito on women's lives and more widely on the lives of all of us. For example, when they have taken away the reproductive choices that availability of abortion provides (which I admit are less than real in vast areas of the country already), do you think that they will just sit back and relax?

No. Next they will remove our access to contraception and the federal laws against sex and race based discrimination at work. When Alito is asked about the Commerce Clause it is partly because the laws banning sex and race discrimination rely on that. Wingnuts want to get rid of these laws. Then the blacks will stay in their place and the women in theirs. It is as simple as that, the wingnut religion.

Tierney's Fatherhood Initiative

John Tierney is the Men's Rights Activist on the New York Times. Or an activist for anything that can possibly be seen as putting women down. A weird guy.

His last column recommends gender equality in pregnancy. No, Tierney is not offering to carry fetuses to term in the linings of his stomach. He argues that men should have the right to a "financial abortion". In other words, if a man gets a woman pregnant he can then argue that he doesn't want the child and may skip paying child maintenance. I couldn't figure out if Tierney would extend the "financial abortion rights" to men who happen to be married to the women they have impregnated, because by the column's end he has backed off from this idea, noting that it has a few teeny weeny problems. Like totally ignoring the rights of the child.

This is what Tierney says on the issue:

Judge Samuel Alito is a reactionary - at least according to feminists horrified by his notion that a woman can be required to notify her husband before an abortion. But Alito's critics in the Senate face two big obstacles this week if they try to make that label stick.

The first is public opinion. Most Americans tell pollsters that they think a husband should be notified before an abortion, and the Pennsylvania law that Alito approved was hardly a draconian version of that principle. It merely required a woman to say, without presenting any proof, that she'd told her husband. If she said she feared physical abuse, she was exempted.

The second obstacle is the logic of feminism. Spousal notification has been denounced as retrograde by the same advocates who have been demanding gender equality in the workplace and at home. If men are expected to be parents with equal responsibilities, shouldn't they at least be allowed to discuss whether to have a child?

This is an easy question for those on the pro-life side of the abortion debate. They'd like men to be not only notified of pregnancies, but also given veto power over abortions.

Being pro-choice, I don't agree with that position, but I admire the logic. It's a gender-neutral policy: if either parent thinks it's wrong to end the pregnancy, then the pregnancy must proceed.

If the pro-choice side adopted a gender-neutral policy, then either the man or the woman would have the right to say no to parenthood. I don't know of anyone advocating that a woman be required to have an abortion, but there's another right that could be given to a man who impregnates a woman who isn't his wife. If the woman decided to go ahead and have the child, she would have to notify him and give him the option early in the pregnancy of absolving himself of any financial responsibility for the child.

I bolded out the bit which shows Tierney's true colors. First, pro-lifers don't believe this; they believe that nobody has the right to terminate a pregnancy. The most extreme ones believe this to be the case even if the mother will die giving birth. Second, that Tierney added no mother's-health exemptions to his statement demonstrates that he doesn't think at all about how the child is actually created: in the mother's body, at the expense of her energy and at her pain and possible risk of death. In many countries giving birth is still the major health hazard women face.

And this is where we come to the problem with Tierney's whole argument: the process in which he demands equal dibs for men takes place in a woman's body, and it is she who bears the risks. Until the day comes when prospective parents hand over their sperm and egg to the laboratory technician when they want the child everything Tierney says is academic.

Now to something more serious: The question whether current abortion laws are unfair to men. There are two different questions in this, I believe, and they are the right of men to become fathers and the right of men not to become fathers. I'm not sure if any of us has the "right" to be a parent, actually, but until parthenogenesis is perfected for humans every single person wanting to be a parent must find someone else to contribute; either by the direct addition of sperm or eggs or via some form of adoption. None of us can legally force this other contributor to contribute, and that includes men.

But it is really the right of men not to become parents that Tierney speaks about, and I do have a lot of sympathy for a man who is led into having unprotected sex in the belief that his partner is taking oral contraceptives and then finds that he is going to be a father, with a monthly payment for the next eighteen years. A lot of sympathy. It is wrong to con people into parenthood.

Though doesn't this sound familiar in reverse? How many times have I read or heard about a man saying that he will pull out in time, that one never gets pregnant on the first time around and so on? Having sex is a risky business if you are absolutely sure that you don't want to be a parent, and anyone concerned about this would be well advised to take care of contraception themselves. This is actually a lesson many women learn quite early in life, and it is a good lesson to all our daughters and sons.

The Word-Perfect Alito

If true, interesting:

In the first hours of Samuel Alito's Senate confirmation hearings on Monday, Judiciary Committee member Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, may very well have irreparably compromised himself.

At the hearing, Graham told Alito, nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, that he had already decided in Alito's favor. "I don't know what kind of vote you're going to get, but you'll make it through. It's possible you could talk me out of voting for you, but I doubt it. So I won't even try to challenge you along those lines."

That certainly ought to be the case. Graham is one of a group of Republicans who have been coaching Alito behind the scenes. The Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire reported before the hearings began:

"On Thursday, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of the 'gang of 14' who sits on Judiciary, joined a so-called moot court session at the White House."

I'd love to know what took place in this moot court. Did they practise how to be really boring and bland while uttering the most spine-chillingly extreme plans for this country?

Deep Thought for The Day

By a Republican, of all things:

"We simply have too much power," says Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., speaking of lawmakers' ability to target tax dollars for particular projects, contractors or campaign donors. "We Republicans have abused that power badly over the past several years."

And, I might add, the Republicans will continue to abuse that power badly if they retain absolute control of all three branches of the government. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and so on.

Combine this with the hearings on the Alito nomination, hearings, which are aimed at getting a believer in the absolute power of George Bush into the Supreme Court of the United States. And then ask yourselves what the outcome might be.

Alito, the Absent-Minded Judge

I'm worried about Alito's bad memory. How can he keep large amounts of judicial information in his mind if he has trouble remembering the events of his own life?

Fact Check: Fact Check: Judge Alito and the Concerned Alumni of Princeton
NOW:

Today, when asked about his involvement in a Princeton campus group formed in opposition to the admission of greater numbers of women and minorities to the university, the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, Judge Alito said, "Well, Senator, I have wracked my memory about this issue, and I really have no specific recollection of that organization." [1/10/06]

Judge Alito elaborated: "And the issue that had rankled me about Princeton for some time was the issue of ROTC. I was in ROTC when I was at Princeton, and the unit was expelled from the campus, and I thought that was very wrong. I had a lot of friends who were against the war in Vietnam, and I respected their opinions, but I didn't think that it was right to oppose the military for that reason." [1/10/06]

THEN:

Judge Alito touted his involvement with the Concerned Alumni of Princeton when applying for a political job with the Reagan Justice Department. Now that he is being considered for the Supreme Court, he is distancing himself from Concerned Alumni of Princeton.

* In a statement promoting his conservative credentials attached to a November 18, 1985 application for a promotion within the Justice Department, Judge Alito said he was "a member of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton University, a conservative alumni group," including it as one of only two group memberships mentioned in the statement.

And what did the Concerned Alumni of Princeton care about? The adjective "Concerned" should tell you that these alumni cared about something very conservative, along the mode of the Concerned Women of America. Specifically, they didn't want to see Princeton become coed and they didn't want to have minorities on the campus:

The Concerned Alumni of Princeton University was founded the same year Samuel Alito graduated from Princeton, 1972, and was well-known for favoring restrictions on the admission of minorities and women to the University.

Can a leopard change its spots? Or does Alito still mull over the horrible events of the 1960s? Does he want to "correct" them?

I have no idea, but appealing to a faulty memory is not an adequate answer.
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Via MyDD.