Good morning Christy, hope you had a sane and safe 4th.

We did. Our geezer dachshund was unhappy with the constant neighborhood fireworks popping (she also hates thunder), but the rest of us had a lovely Fourth.

Hope yours was good as well!

It’s very apparent to me that white right wingers of the American Taliban (today’s GOP) can do what they want, be part of any group they want, but if a highly educated Hispanic woman is part of any group, she is to have a rope around her neck, dragged down the street by these same right wingers, and will spend the rest of her life with the words, “Uppity Minority”, written on her forehead because they can’t have someone like her making them feel bad about themselves! Spit.

And Christy? The Uppity American Taliban is lazy and this is why they constantly complain about ‘not having enough time’. They only make time for golf with their other Uppity American Taliban members. See? It all makes sense now.

I have to say, when I was working in the prosecutors office here, and we had a deadline that needed to be met in a case? Telling the judge that we needed more time was not exactly considered a valid excuse unless we had been working pretty much 24-hour days to meet the deadline for days and days on end.

Which we did, when necessary. I can remember pulling 16 to 18 hour days, several days in a row to comply with disclosure and discovery deadlines and/or motions arguments any number of times. And did I bitch and whine about it? No — because it was my fricking job to do that. It’s what the people of my county were paying me to do, and so I did it.

Yes, the work was hard, and no I wasn’t paid nearly enough for doing it compared to what some of my classmates were earning in corporate jobs. But, you know what? I signed up for the job because I thought it was important to do it — and do it well.

If they can’t hack the job of public service, they should step down and make room for someone who will actually do the job well and in the public’s interest. That’s your fiduciary obligation, I always thought, given that the public is paying not only your salary but also for all of your benefits package on medical and dental and whatever else you get on their dime as part of your salary.

And, I should add, that every Senator on the Judiciary committee has dedicated Judiciary staff to do this sort of combing through documents for them. It’s part of their job, too.

So if Jeff Sessions, Jon Kyl and John Cornyn keep on whining? Perhaps their staff might want to, you know, do their jobs, too? Since we also pay their salaries from public funds as well.

I really have no sympathy for slackers. They took this week off from the Senate. Well, here’s a clue — you can put documents in your briefcase and read them in your down time. Welcome to how the rest of the world does their own jobs, slacker GOP.

KENNEDY FIRST ROUND QUESTIONING: Starts out with Vanguard right off the bat. Alito’s excuse – “oops, I forgot that I promised the Senate not to rule on anything involving who handles my personal investments.”

http://firedoglake.blogspot.co…..art-i.html

Its this kind of financial oversight and Cronyism that led to the banking Crisis! Who impeaches Supreme Court Judges? Oops I forgot nobody forgets their investments and certainly not Vanguard.

In his presentation to the Vanguard board, Bogle presented the historical data then available to him. In his account of The First Index Fund, Bogle writes:

“I projected the costs of managing an index fund to be 0.3% per year in operating expenses and 0.2% per year in transaction costs. Since fund annual costs at that time appeared to be about 2.0%, I concluded that an index fund should reasonably be expected to provide an annual return of +1.5% above a managed fund.”

In the intervening years Bogle has proven to be even more correct about indexing than he had predicted he might be. Since then, the gap between the performance of the market and the performance of actively managed mutual funds taken as a whole has actually been significantly wider than the 1.5% theorized by Bogle in 1976. During the 1990s, the total shortfall between actively managed mutual funds and the market as measured by the S&P 500 has so far been a whopping 3.4% per year.

http://www.fool.com/MutualFund…..unds01.htm

Vanguard invented the first index fund the returns up until Bush have been great people brag about owning money makers.
Next Alito is going to tell us he was unaware his son ad the most home runs in little league. ( I made up that example completely but next to a son’s sports record making money is not something Men forgot).
Its like Clarence Thomas forgetting Porn!

His CAP story makes no sense. He graduated from Princeton in 1972, the same year the ROTC had already returned to Princeton, and yet he now maintains that it was his grave worries over its exclusion from the campus that caused him to join the Concerned Alumni of Princeton in the first place.

http://firedoglake.blogspot.co…..anker.html

” This is what we call in the Pray trade a lie” Evil Cylon masquerading as a Preacher.

The Alito confirmation process really was a lesson in what not to do on so many levels. Not the least of which was the stall tactics that the DOJ used to try and block Senators from looking at any of the work Alito did while working there. From the Bush DOJ:

“Judge Alito and the Department have already provided to the Committee a voluminous set of documents relating to Judge Alito’s decades of public service,” read the response from then Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella. “Judge Alito has sat on the federal appellate bench for more than 15 years, and his decisions in that capacity represent the best evidence of his judicial philosophy and of the manner in which he approaches judicial decision-making.”

So, in other words, you’ve gotten everything we’re willing to give you, now go away Democratic Senators.

People nowadays just don’t seem to know their place. Everywhere one turns black and hispanics are demanding jobs simply because they’re black and hispanic, the physically handicapped are trying to gain equal representation in professional sports, and homosexuals are demanding that government vouchsafe them the right to bear children.

What no mention of Legacy admissions like Bush look at what the *cough* First Harvard MBA President has done to the economy.
Look at what the Neocons who are with Alito on racial admissions have done on the war.

Sammy’s never mentioned the ROTC thing before. That’s something GOP Senators seem to have unearthed in his defense, although really it just points the finger at the fact that Sammy’s simply another bedwetting GOP chickenhawk who found a way to stay out of Vietnam.

http://firedoglake.blogspot.co…..anker.html

Alito hides behind the ROTC ?

While a sophomore at Princeton, Alito received the low lottery number 32, in a Selective Service drawing on December 1, 1969. In 1970, he became a member of the school’s Army ROTC program, attending a six-week basic summer camp that year at Fort Knox, Kentucky, in lieu of having been in ROTC during his first two years in college.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Alito

6 weeks of Summer Camp that makes him a Vet in the Bush administration.

I’m thinking the selection of Alito as a Supreme is a case study in so many levels of what not to do.
You don’t need to pull out all the stops to confirm a good candidate for the job.
You do need to especially when Dems were in the minority of the Senate for a bad hire a Special Racist Small School Bus Hire.
We should leak Alito’s resume the next time the Supremes have an opening change a few names but leave the descriptions accurate and then tell Red State this is the resume of Obama’s next Supreme Court pick.

OT, but in the ballpark…
Take a look at what I found this morning: Pure Overreach

With a little-noticed order last week, we fear the Supreme Court has set the stage for dismantling the longstanding ban on corporate spending in elections for president and Congress. If those restrictions are overturned, it would be a disaster for democracy.

UH, yeah, since they do it anyway, this would be infinitely worse.

Right on Christy!

True

One week ago, I outed Patrick Buchanan, the former senior White House official in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, erstwhile reactionary candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and now a highly paid political commentator on MSNBC, for sponsoring a Holocaust denial forum on his website. Within hours, the forum in question, entitled “Disinformation, Deception and Other Tricks: Discussion about ‘The Holocaust’” (with The Holocaust in quotes, of course), mysteriously vanished from Buchanan.org, and the link to it was disabled.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…..05071.html

Alito, Pat Buchanan our last win on racism was Macaca we need more wins.

Ask anyone who graduated from Princeton between 1972 (Alito’s class) and 1987: you will be hard-pressed to find anyone who didn’t know about CAP and the ugliness it stood for. And Alito was a member? Yeesh!! The organization was not merely racist and sexist, it dedicated itself to the concept of limiting the numbers of women and minorities attending the University. Because CAP distributed its literature under the doors of students in the dead of night, it was virtually impossible to attend Princeton without being aware of it. In addition to harassing students with its literature, CAP was also discussed repeatedly in the Princeton Alumni Weekly (PAW) and other publications distributed to all alumni. CAP was widely discussed and extremely controversial.

In early 1984, Dinesh D’Souza–a young Dartmouth graduate hired to write and edit CAP’s dead-of-the-night drop magazine, The Prospect–published an article about a freshman student who was receiving birth control from the campus infirmary over her mother’s wishes. The article included the student’s name (she was then a minor), which D’Souza lamely claimed was an editing error. There’s every reason to believe D’Souza’s “error”, which was covered in two New York Times articles, led to the demise of CAP the following year. What was CAP’s legal exposure for having published such a lurid piece?

Interestingly, it was that following year that an enterprising rightwing lawyer, Samuel Alito, who had been friends since his undergraduate days with two founders of CAP, put the organization on his Reagan-era resume. Had Alito been called in for a legal opinion on the D’Souza debacle? You have to wonder.

And though it all happened a quarter century ago, it’s all still quite fresh and even shocking to me. It also marks my very first activist gesture: picking up a phone and giving D’Souza a piece of my mind. It’s ironic to hear him today talk about the unfair attacks on Palin’s children, among other things, given what he did back then to a young woman who, for very good reasons, didn’t want to be made pregnant.

As for Alito, what kind of deal did he do to get his Supreme Court seat? So the incomplete records of CAP didn’t turn up his name–I’m hardly surprised, given the stealthy long-term planning of the CAP crowd. You have to know that there’s evidence (somewhere) of Alito’s CAP activities, and you have to wonder if it’s a kind of blackmail tool for the powers-that-be who placed him on the nation’s highest court…. I continue to wonder about that. He lied to get on the court, after all.

The irony is that Sonia Sotomayor was just the sort of student that CAP was trying to keep out of the hallowed halls of Princeton in the first place. And she proved them right about how it would make the place worse by graduating summa cum laude from there. That’ll teach her for being an uppity woman.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Alito

So Sonia graduated at a higher class rank than Alito who was trying to keep her out of Princeton for being a Women and Hispanic? Because Women and Hispanics were not as qualified as White Males like Alito
BWAHAHAHA!!!
Please tell me some smart Dem is going to ask Judge Alito to testify at Sonia’s confirmation hearing!

Ask anyone who graduated from Princeton between 1972 (Alito’s class) and 1987: you will be hard-pressed to find anyone who didn’t know about CAP and the ugliness it stood for. And Alito was a member? Yeesh!! The organization was not merely racist and sexist, it dedicated itself to the concept of limiting the numbers of women and minorities attending the University. Because CAP distributed its literature under the doors of students in the dead of night, it was virtually impossible to attend Princeton without being aware of it. In addition to harassing students with its literature, CAP was also discussed repeatedly in the Princeton Alumni Weekly (PAW) and other publications distributed to all alumni. CAP was widely discussed and extremely controversial.

My bold Alito belonged to a group that passed out hate literature under minority and women’s students doors isn’t that threatening behavior?
Does anyone have copies of that hate Lit?

OMG – Mo Rocca is giving a commentary on pundits…. and how they should have their credentials on the crawl and fact checked. If found inaccurate … out of there……

What a wish….. and I have NOT gotten over being mad about Roberts and Alitos confirmations……

It really was a trauma… Somehow I deleted what Dinesh D’Souza did as editor of CAP’s the Prospect magazine in early 1984. D’Souza wrote an article about a student, then in her first year in college, who was receiving birth control from McCosh Infirmary despite her mother’s wishes. D’Souza included the student’s name–she was at the time a minor–and the “error” was not caught before the magazine had been slipped under the doors of every dorm room on campus. The “error” resulted in two New York Times articles.

CAP apparently published another issue or two of the Prospect, including one with a young Laura Ingraham as editor. But the organization ultimately seems to have died a quiet death in 1985, the year it was on Alito’s resume. Was Alito one of the lawyers who put CAP to rest?

So by the logic of Alito’s own Princeton Group Alito should step down as head of the Supreme Court and give Sonia the job?

Bwahahaha!

This is like shooting fish in a barrel the GOP does not want us comparing these two!

Read through Sen. Ted Kennedy’s attempts to get his hands on anything substantive about CAP and contrast that with the Sotomayor response. And then tell me who is forthcoming and who was very clearly not, despite Jeff Sessions protestations at the time to the contrary

Double Standard for the GOP? Women and Minority candidates have to be smarter and cleaner for the job? yep the usual.
Crony Capitalism you get ahead by who you know, what groups you belong to, and by trying to keep everyone else down especially if they are more qualified but of course you never say that.
The film ” 9 to 5 ” reset in the 2000’s?

Sorry Christy the more I read the less worried I get. Sonia makes Alito look like David Broder writing predictions.
I now want the Senate to ask Sonia if she is going to lose weight and exercise cause I want her on the bench for decades:)
Pick the battle field you want to fight on GOPers picking a fight on Sonia with Alito as the head of the Supreme Court as a comparison only makes Sonia look better.

He lied to get on the court, after all.

Can we impeach him for lying under oath?

As I think I made clear (at least by inference), those who presumably have the goods on Alito could use the threat of impeachment as a tool to influence his decisions. For me, that’s the most troubling implication of his deceit, this peculiar Sword of Damocles that hangs over his entire tenure on the court.

I doubt the CAP folks who hold evidence of Alito’s true involvement with the organization are likely to spill it to our side, however. It’s something they would hold over him in private.

There’s no question that the existing CAP records are incomplete and (apparently) expurgated. Alito’s name appears nowhere in them, yet we know, and he admits, that he was a member… What gives?

CAP folks are just as likely to have ex wives with a grudge as anyone we can get the information we want.