Just over one year ago, Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers gave a speech which sparked outrage among women's groups. In the speech, Summers suggested that one possibility why there are few women science and engineering professors at the nation's elite schools may be due to innate differences between men and women. Maybe, Summers suggested, that […]
I didn't catch this piece yesterday by The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin, but I just picture this scene in my mind and laugh. At times, Alito followed the lead of the other three justices who sat with him in the front row. When Bush said "We love our freedom, and we will fight to keep […]
I'm just getting to watching yesterday's State of the Union speech and I must confess that one moment struck me as ... odd. It is said that prior to the attacks of September the 11th, our government failed to connect the dots of the conspiracy. We now know that two of the hijackers in the […]
The New York Times report today on yesterday's 72-25 cloture vote on the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court contains the term: "filibuster." We have the Times filibuster definition courtesy of editorial page editor Gail Collins. When a cloture motion was made to move the nomination to a vote, Senator Frist voted […]
David Broder had an interesting article in Sunday's Washington Post that recounted Tip O'Neill's visit to Ronald Reagan's hospital room after he was shot by John Hinckley. When I reached [Max] Friedersdorf [, Reagan White House congressional liaison,] last week at his retirement home in Florida, I asked him how it happened that Reagan's first […]
Massachusetts' junior senator, John Kerry, has come out urging a filibuster of Judge Samuel Alito. It's going to be interesting to see how the New York Times editorial page characterizes Kerry's move, since by their definition a filibuster is occuring right now. And if the Times changes their definition to fit the political calculus of […]
The Senate isn't really debating the qualifications of Sam Alito to sit on the Supreme Court so much as they are speechifying. I watched a couple hours of the Senate yesterday and have C-SPAN2 on now and I think everything that can be said about Alito has been said -- it's just that everyone hasn't […]
California's "moderate" senator, Dianne Feinstein, had this to say today on the 10-8 party-line vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee on future Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., said things are different from when the Senate considered Breyer and Ginsburg, who were confirmed 87-9 and 96-3 respectively. "There […]
I saw "The Great Raid" when it was in theaters. Though it wasn't the greatest WWII movie of the past decade, it was a solid film that cast American soldiers in a positive light. The film was shot in 2002, but sat on a shelf until last year. There was a lot of grumbling that […]
Three Republicans voted against Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the Supreme Court. Nine Republicans voted against Stephen Breyer for the Supreme Court. Twenty-two Democrats (50 percent of Dems in the Senate) voted against Chief Justice John Roberts for the Supreme Court. Between 30 and 40-some Democrats will likely vote against Justice Sam Alito. On Fox News, […]