I love Sidney Blumenthal's articles because they take the pressing issues of the day and analyze them in a fact-filled concise manner.

In his astute description of Samuel Alito, Blumenthal has hit on common characteristics shared by many of the most influential conservatives today, simmering rage and a desire for revenge. Isn't it astonishing that decades later the blowback of the 60's often subsumes the influence of the "counterculture"? It comes in many forms: vengeful, as symbolized by Machievellian hit man Karl Rove; lazy, like rich kid GW, who couldn't be bothered to have new ideas because he might have to change his mind; hypocritical suck up, like Abramhoff and the nasty meek, Alito. Alito is even scarier than Roberts. Both are social conservatives, corporate enablers and out of the loop on civil rights, but Roberts is more charming and thus, less bitter. Hell hath no fury indeed.

It seems Alito's paper trail is more than broad enough to hang him- on abortion, on the constitution, on minorities, on women....

So, why are the Democrats like a herd of hippos on rohypnol? Once the rabid right have their Supreme Court majority, then all checks and balances are gone. Don't the Dems care? Do they actually *want* a rabid-right Supreme Court?

Maybe the Democratic Party is gambling that if they give the Bushies everything they ask for, they'll hang themselves. Possibly true, as far as the administration and congress are concerned, but not for the Supremes, because we can't vote them out. And once the Supremes start validating King George's pronouncememts, will we ever have a democract again?

So what in the name of all the stony hells does the Democratic Party think they're doing?

Alito joined CAP but he didn't really join it and even if he did join it, which he said he did on the job application, he didn't do anything while he was in it, which he probably was because he said he was in it on the application, but maybe he meant to join it but forgot, or maybe he did join it, but then he forgot after he remembered to put it on the job application.

Sounds like a flip-flopper to me. No stare decisis there.

Or, at the very least, he's someone who's willing to lie to get a job.

I don't know about the rest of the scary stuff, but I'm pretty sure Alito's views on presidential power will change as soon as a Democrat moves into the White House (well, assuming such a thing is ever allowed to happen again, that is).

I think it's misleading to reason as if Alito, Yoo, et al. were really talking about presidential power; they're talking about G.W. Bush's power. Like most right wing ideologues, they have no principles, only short-term objectives and prefered outcomes.

In a perverse sort of way, therefore, people like Alito are justified in claiming their past pronoucements are irrelevant to their future ones. As circumstances change, so will their "philosophy."

I agree that Mrs. Alitos' display of waterworks seems very well timed to divert attention from the questioning. It reminds me of the the movie "The Wedding Crashers" in which the two rogues put eye drops in their eyes at the start of a wedding to impress the women in the church with how "sensitive" they are. I wonder if she saw that movie?

Suppose Hillary Clinton had put on a similar display during the 1998 impeachment hearings - would the corporate media have shown her any sympathy?

No wonder Alito joined CAP. He has a long history of voting against women's rights, preferring them instead to be subject to their husbands' rule and arbitrary (and humiliating) police tactics for no legal reason. Limiting their "disgusting" presence at his alma mater is mild, really. I bet he likes to be tied up and spanked.

Nobody drives a point home more forcefully than Sidney Blumenthal.

Alito's confirmation, however, is all but certain. So the question is, when the subhuman son of a whore is in power a few days from now, what can the minority of human beings left in this country do to protect themselves?

This is the thing that all the "left" commentators have been dancing around helplessly ever since this creep first oozed on to the public stage.

For all practical purposes, democracy stops now.

What are we going to do about it?

I like Sidney Blumenthal's columns. But here's something I've not heard a single commentator say:

Clarence Thomas expressed fealty to the rule of stare decisis when he testified (under oath I should add) before the Judiciary Committee at his confirmation hearing. Here is what Antonin Scalia has since said about that notion:

Thomas "doesn't believe in stare decisis, period." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31117-2004Oct13.html

Gee, do you think Alito could be lying under oath too? Whatever your views on Alito, THAT should bother you. As should his amnesia about the Princeton alumni group.

And on that score, let me see if I've got this straight: As Ted Kennedy has noted, Alito can remember in great detail EVERY ONE of the 67 dissenting opinions he's written over the last 15 years, but he can't remember a thing about a racist and sexist alumni organization to which he belonged, a fact that he trumpeted in a job application for a position in the Reagan White House in order to establish his "conservative" credentials?

Please. That hearing room is full of 18 bloviators and 1 prevaricator.

Never in life did I imagine that I would look back fondly at the prospect of Justice Harriet Miers. After the fourth day of Samuel Alito's confirmation hearings, however, Miers' fawning incompetence and gratuitous cronyism are beginning to look far less offensive.

Alito's bland, milquetoast performance -- and make no mistake, it is a performance -- belies a judicial record that is so brazenly radical and stridently conservative that it borders on the fascistic. The odd handful of cases cited by cheerleading Republican senators only serve to highlight Alito's record as an activist judge who has spent his career working to dismantle every aspect of the social contract he finds objectionable, which by his own writings, seems to be all of it.

In many ways, Alito is emblematic of everything that is so terrifyingly wrong with this new breed of Feudal Republicans. Their fervent belief in the raw, unfettered power of the executive, their dismissive attitude towards civil and human rights, their obsession with the rights and privileges of the powerful, their fealty (in words if not in deeds) to religious dogma and their disdain for women reveal that the underpinnings of their ideology harken back not to the founding fathers and the constitution, but to the dark ages.