Early start on The Jot. Or maybe late, if you're wondering where Monday's Jot is? Let it go, let it go. I thought I'd do an evening Jot on Monday but time slipped away and next thing I knew it was time for the roundtable Gina and Krista are doing for the round-robin. I signed up for every night. How come? If Eli can give every night, so I can I.
Monday morning? I couldn't think of anything to jot. Guess I used up all my jots helping The Third Estate Sunday Review with their edition. (That's a hint to go check the latest edition out.)
So The Jot's about Alito today. (It's early, early Tuesday.) You've got Isaiah's The World Today Just Nuts at the top. Bully Boy's got his little hands balled into fists, tear coming out of his eye and he says, "Damn Alito!" Condi explains the problem with Bully Boy, he thought he was nominating Judge Ito. From the OJ Simpson case. That makes me laugh.
What doesn't make me laugh is stealing and so that I don't accidentally steal one of the good points made in the roundtable, I'm going to note some thoughts and announcements about Alito and the hearings that stood out to others enough that they posted on it before the roundtable.
Mike: I hope you're listening to the Alito hearings coverage on Pacifica. Remember that is not a one day thing. As long as the hearings are going on, Pacifica's covering them live.
Elaine: I'll also remind everyone to check their inboxes during the Alito hearings for the special editions of the gina & krista round-robin. Remember as well that Pacifica is broadcasting the hearings live. If you don't have a Pacifica radio station broadcasting in your area, you can listen online by visiting Pacifica and there is no charge for listening.
Mike and Elaine get stuck with the announcements. If you visit there two entries, you'll see that they're talking about an air raid in Iraq and how weapons get into Mexico from another country.
What other country? Someone didn't watch, listen or read Democracy Now! today. Now here's Rebecca making some points about the hearings after noting that NPR isn't broadcasting them.
Rebecca: if gas air's terry 'that's gross' had been present when john cornyn was speaking, i think the senate building would have floated right off the ground.
common ills community member billie has talked a lot about cornyn, he's her senator, and his cornyisms.
i enjoy it anytime c.i. posts any of billie's 'look, here he goes with another cornyism!' comments. but i wasn't prepared for him.
as i listened to him ramble from 1 topic to another, i would have thought the man insane if i honestly believed he meant a word he said.
at 1 point, he was speaking of school prayer and working himself into a case of the dry heaves over students wanting to pray at a school football game when all the sudden something else caught his attention and he started ranting that depictions of sex and violence are allowed but public expressions of religion are not.
okay, help me out here, but are students allowed to depict sex at a sporting event? i'm remembering get balled out by an assistant principal just for kissing in the bleachers. and violence?
is corny calling football violent? i thought he was from the state of texas?
if you're looking for easy laughs, always stand within ear range of john cornyn because his cornyisms will have you rolling on the floor.
Cedric: Yesterday, I was talking to Three Cool Old Guys and they were pointing out that not only is Alito not a woman, he's White. So when Sandra Day O'Connor steps down, we'll have one female on the bench and one person of color. We're going backwards. And that's just like everything else the Bully Boy does. He wants to turn back the clocks to before FDR when the robbers baron ran free and if you were poor, working class or lower middle class, you were just screwed.
Three Cool Old Guys pointed out that Clarence Thomas being African-American didn't influence the way he looks at things "But he still doesn't realize that he's Black." He acts like he doesn't realize it. They said something else too. I thought about it today when one of the Republican senators was going on in the hearings about porn and those 'bad liberals.'
They pointed out that the only time you can expect Thomas to fight is when the case has to do with porn and his love of porn may be the only thing he brought to the bench.
I don't know if you know this, but Clarence Thomas never speaks in Court. He's the only Justice that doesn't ask questions. He says it's because people picked on the way he spoke earlier in life.
So?
Three Cool Old Guys said that's not an excuse, that when he's a national figure, he has an obligation to learn to speak. But he doesn't speak. Maybe if he started asking questions, he'd find his voice, his real voice. Instead, he just shuts up and pretends he's white.
C.I.: With regards to Alito, let's note this from an interview Grover Norquist gave to El Mundo (September, 2004):
Question: And if Bush wins?
Norquist: The Democratic Party will be forever doomed. If we take control of the legislature and the executive branch, we will reinforce our control of the judicial branch to direct it against the Democrats. We will bring about a modest limit of the ability of the people to initiate lawsuits against corporations, which will damage the lawyers who specialize in these cases, which is one of the props of the Democratic Party. We will accelerate the decline of the unions. We will cut funding to groups of public employees, like teachers, who are one of the great sources of Democratic votes. And we will begin to move the welfare state toward a private system, in pensions and health care.
That excerpt is from Troy Duster's foreword (p. ix) of Si Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich's The Fox In The Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy. (And worth thinking about with the hearings going on.)
And there's a community note, so I'll note Kat.
Kat: While I'm noting things, let me note Elaine who wrote the nicest thing about my 2005 list. And let me note Trina who we interviewed at The Third Estate Sunday Review and who has just started her own site Trina's Kitchen.
I think Trina's wonderful. She's smart, she's funny and, without taking anything away from her husband, she's done a wonderful raising a large family. Just growing up in one can be a challenge but being one of the two responsible for all the children is a real challenge. Now she's doing her site Trina's Kitchen and it's intended to be a once a week site, Saturdays, where she'll talk about cooking and politics.
That's Mike's mom and she's a nice lady. My mother said, "I hope you're planning on mentioning Trina's site when you blog." Moms stick together LOL.
So pulling from members' sites, we got the information that Pacifica is broadcasting the Alito hearing live and we got some takes on the hearings and we got information about Trina's Kitchen.
