A classic strategy for the unglamorous Supreme Court nominee.

The AP's Donna Cassata sums up the Alito hearings quite aptly:

The unflappable Alito gave his detractors little ammunition in days of testimony, offering a recitation of the facts of appellate court cases when Democrats sought personal opinions. He provided basic tenets that few would challenge - no president or court is above the law, court decisions on integration and privacy were correct, and the principle of one man, one vote, should prevail.

Senators were unable to elicit much more even though Alito had a long paper trail from the appellate court....

Senators pressed Alito on executive power, particularly in light of the revelation that Bush had secretly authorized the National Security Agency to wiretap Americans as part of the fight against terrorism. The nominee spoke of constitutional authority and congressional prerogatives, but he gave no hints of how he might rule.

Alito really did have a perfect strategy to win in his showdown with the Senators. And it wasn't devious or evasive. He insisted on talking about the issues they raised in the terms of a judge's careful legal analysis. This analysis tends to be rather tedious, even when you speak crisply and avoid any padding. Proceeding in this fashion, Alito looked smart and scrupulously judicial, yet he powerfully thwarted his opponents -- by boring us! The Alito hearings will stand as a model for how an unglamorous nominee -- a not-Roberts -- can prevail.

TV.

I'm going to be on "Reliable Sources" -- on CNN -- this morning (10:30 ET/9:30 CT), talking about the Alito hearings.

UPDATE: Political Teen has the video.

Two years old today...

This blog is.

Newly perceived: just how incompetent the Miers nomination was.

My son John Althouse Cohen emails (from the other side of the dining table):

The fact that Alito is so sure to be confirmed gives us a new reason to criticize Bush for nominating Harriet Miers. Back then, it looked as if Bush had chosen an underqualified nominee because she was a woman and had no record of taking positions on issues. But we now know that a white, male conservative with a long paper trail did not run into any serious obstacles. So not only did Bush choose an unqualified nominee for political reasons; those political reasons didn't even apply. We already knew that the Miers nomination was incompetent, but it looks even more incompetent now that the Alito hearings have gone so smoothly.

Indeed. We shall see how this new knowledge affects future appointments. Don't you think it will embolden this President and future Presidents?

(John is home from law school -- Cornell -- for winter break, and, don't worry, we do talk. But sometimes I say, "Email me that," for blog purposes.)

"Nobody really cares what I think."

Did anyone still watch the Alito hearings yesterday? It seemed so over. Surely, we lawprofs ought to be interested in hearing what lawprofs have to say, you might think. But, no, actually, no. We're so used to what we think that we feel we already know what will be said.

Nevertheless, I'm a blogger lawprof, so I will scan the transcript as a service to you, the reader.

[Professor Laurence] TRIBE: I'm not here to endorse the nomination of Judge Alito, as I did with my most recent testimony before this committee on a Supreme Court nomination with Justice Kennedy.

I'm not here to oppose his nomination, as I did several months before that time with Robert Bork. And I'm not here to lecture the committee on its responsibilities or its role. I don't think that's my role.

[Criticisms of Alito omitted.]

SPECTER: Professor Tribe, did you say you were not testifying against Judge Alito?

TRIBE: I am not recommending any action. I'm recommending that everyone -- because I think it's foolish. Nobody really cares what I think.

SPECTER: Aside from your recommendation, are you saying you're not testifying against Judge Alito?

TRIBE: I'm not testifying for or against Judge Alito. I'm explaining why I am very troubled by his views. Obviously, it follows from that that I would be hard pressed to recommend his confirmation.

Everyone's always "troubled" these days. Come on, he's opposed to Alito, but the opposition works best if you can oppose from within the humble law professor character. Does anyone actually buy that?

Well, no one's watching on Day 5 anyway, so what they hell? It's an attractive pose, isn't it? And gems of frankness still pop out, like the one I've extracted for the title to this post.

The Senators rush the professors along and bear down on Tribe in particular for going over the time limit. Later, at the end of the day, Specter and Leahy luxuriate in unclocked minutes babbling to each other, somewhat charmingly:

SPECTER: [L]et me say that it has been a pleasure to work with Senator Leahy and I think our collegiality has been demonstrated in many ways, mostly by all of the pictures taken where we're huddled together so that our voices don't carry too far beyond, and also with a sense of humor.

In the bad old days when I had no hair, the only way that Senator Leahy and I could be told apart was by the color of our ties.

LEAHY: You're still wearing the red tie?

SPECTER: And I'm glad to have some hair....

There's a Latin maxim, "The exception proves the rule."

There might have been four minutes in the hearing when it wasn't dignified, but we worked through that as well.

About the only thing the respective parties have been able to agree to on this whole proceeding is that Senator Leahy and I have functioned collegially and have produced a full and fair and dignified hearing.

Ah, thank God, it's finally over! I waited so long for Supreme Court appointments, and I was so excited about finally getting to some hearings. But, wow, the drudgery of following these things!

Will there be another anytime soon? If so, how about not going on for 5 days? It's just crazy. The nominee and his family are subjected to a physical endurance test, and then -- it's not really that sad -- no one wants to listen to the lawprofs.

Setting up a million "bust" jokes.

Pamela Anderson has taken arms against a bust:

Television star Pamela Anderson is leading a campaign to have the bust of Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Harland Sanders removed from the Kentucky state capitol.

In a letter to Gov. Ernie Fletcher, the former Baywatch star says suppliers for the fast food chain, now called KFC, engage in cruel and unusual treatment of chickens, including tearing the heads off of live birds, spitting tobacco into their eyes and spray-painting their faces.

Anderson wrote the letter with the help of People for the Ethical Treatment of animals. In a statement issued by PETA, Anderson said, "The bust of Colonel Sanders stands as a monument to cruelty and has no place in the Kentucky state capitol."

I'm sure PETA has its choice of celebrities whenever it launches a campaign. It's not as if Anderson is from Kentucky -- or even the South. She's not just northern, she's Canadian! I've got to think they deliberately sought publicity but cuing up the easist possible jokes -- comedy for dummies. It's a challenge, a taunt: Leno, we dare you to keep your hands off this bust!

I'm actually, finally...

...going to see a movie! It's not that I never see a movie. More later.

UPDATE: Movie seen: "Capote." I expected to like it more than I did.

Part of my disappointment I attribute to the dim projection at the theater. The visual concept of the film is darkness -- lots of underlit, claustrophobic rooms and jail cells, many actors in black suits and black hats -- so cranking the light down a few notches drained the life out of the surface of the film. But the script was also weak, leaving the actors to carry the story with their faces -- aided by the conventional dramatic lighting that puts the same shadow-pattern curved around half of every face. And these faces all underacted, which is better than overacting, but fairly dull, especially when virtually the entire movie consists of closeups.

Yes, from time to time we see a bleak landscape (in case you've forgotten how all there is in Kansas is flat, empty land with the occasional dot of a farmhouse) or a crowd of people (congregated closely together in black suits and not making any noise or otherwise demonstrating that it comprises individuals). There's Catherine Keener, as Truman Capote's friend Harper Lee, but she's given almost nothing to do except stand about on the sidelines, looking crazily older and plainer than she's ever had to look in any other movie. (Is that good for an Oscar? Is it enough to count the way that gaining weight and looking bad routine worked for Charlize Theron in "Monster.")

But what bothered me the most about the movie is that it flattened the character of Capote himself. We seem him in the end devastated after the murderer he'd bonded with was hanged, and we're told that he never finished another book and that he died of the complications of alcoholism, with no sense at all that he went on to spend many years partying with socialites and being a lively raconteur on TV talk shows. I had to wonder if the filmmakers had meandered into some dopey Hollywood anti-death penalty message, which had nothing to do with what seemed to be the real story of the man. It seems they decided to drop the sexual attraction Capote was supposed to feel for the murderer. Capote's homosexuality had no energy to it, and Capote himself seemed to sleepwalk his way along a path he chose out of nothing more than writerly ambition. There was a deadness to the character as played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, which is a character idea that could make sense at the center of the movie, but they dialed everything around him down, creating the contrast in the wrong direction. There was a bit of a good idea: that Capote was a damaged man and he saw himself in the other damaged man, the murderer. But there were simply not enough apt words in the screenplay for that idea to live.

"They often looked as though they had coordinated their ensembles in the manner of a family heading off to the Sears photo studio."

WaPo's Robin Givhan analyzes the Alitos from the fashion standpoint:

He and his wife of almost 21 years wore similar wire-rimmed glasses. His were only slightly more angular than hers. They both have short-cropped brown hair....On the first day of hearings, her red suit with its contrasting piping matched his red tie. On the second day, she echoed his pale blue shirt with her blue sweater, which fell discreetly to mid-thigh. On the fourth day, her white jacket over a red dress mirrored his white shirt and red tie.

Givhan skirts very close to sneering, but in the end, she seems rather admiring. Or is that patronizing?

"She says she definitely is not running. I'd love to see her run, she's terrific."

Ooh! Laura Bush said that about Condoleezza Rice. So, then, Condi's running! Right?

IN THE COMMENTS: A pseudonymous Condi hater makes a racist slur, and after I delete it, makes it again, in the middle of the night, so that I don't see it to delete it for a few hours. When I do delete it, I write:

I suspect Democrats who fear the strength of a Rice Presidency have a stake in making Republicans fear that racism will sink her. Who are these people who are willing to slink about and type racist slurs in the hope that conservatives will stay in touch with racist feelings some moronic liberals assume surely lurk in their hearts? Or is it just a relief to finally find a way to express their own racism? Be careful, Condi opponents, we will be closely monitoring your racism. Though possibly not in the middle of the night!

I note the possibility that the commenter in question is not a Condi hater but is only posing as one to make people who actually oppose her look bad.

"Condoleezza Rice is a very cruel, offended woman who lacks men's attention... Such women are very rough."

Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky on Condoleezza Rice:

Speaking with Pravda this week, Zhirinovsky chastised Rice for calling on Russia to "act responsibly" in supplying natural gas to Ukraine.

The fascistic pol attributed that "coarse anti-Russian statement" to Rice being "a single woman who has no children."

"If she has no man by her side at her age, he will never appear," Zhirinovsky ranted on. "Condoleezza Rice needs a company of soldiers. She needs to be taken to barracks where she would be satisfied.

"Condoleezza Rice is a very cruel, offended woman who lacks men's attention," he added. "Such women are very rough. … They can be happy only when they are talked and written about everywhere: 'Oh, Condoleezza, what a remarkable woman, what a charming Afro-American lady! How well she can play the piano and speak Russian!'

"Complex-prone women are especially dangerous. They are like malicious mothers-in-law, women that evoke hatred and irritation with everyone. Everybody tries to part with such women as soon as possible. A mother-in-law is better than a single and childless political persona, though."

You can say he's simply crazy, but do you think there are not plenty of people in this country who think such things?

"We have to hit him harder."

Said a Democratic senator to E.J. Dionne during the afternoon break of the first day of questioning at the Alito hearings:

The senator was expressing frustration over a process that doesn't work.

Define "work." You mean, doesn't permit you to defeat the President's nominee as long as he is very well qualified and can give reasonably substantial answers to all the many lines of searching inquiry the opposition party has been able to develop?

It turns out that, especially when their party controls the process, Supreme Court nominees can avoid answering any question they don't want to answer. Senators make the process worse with meandering soliloquies. But when the questioning gets pointed, the opposition is immediately accused of scurrilous smears. The result: an exchange of tens of thousands of words signifying, in so many cases, nothing -- as long as the nominee has the discipline to say nothing, over and over and over.

Define "nothing." You mean everything that isn't a pledge to decide cases the way you'd like or to confess to bias and bigotry?

Democrats seem to be wary of mounting a filibuster. What they should insist upon, to use a euphemism Alito might appreciate, is an extended debate in which his evasions will be made perfectly clear to the public. If moderate senators want to vote for a justice highly likely to move the Supreme Court to the right, they can. But their electorates should know that's exactly what they're doing.

Oh yes, extended debate, for the benefit of the public. Because we haven't heard enough verbiage from the Democratic Senators yet.

"If they want to filibuster, frankly, bring it on."

Says Senator Orrin Hatch, reported in the Washington Post. Senator Ted Kennedy is saying "We've still got a ways to go to figure what the strategy is going to be." But the Democrats know they've lost the fight to stop Alito:

When the hearings began Monday, liberal activists said their best hope was for Alito to commit a gaffe or lose his composure.

So they tried to set up opportunities for gaffes and goad him into losing his composure. They succeeded in making his wife cry, which which only hurt their cause by making them look mean-spirited and callous and by overshadowing the message they hoped would capture the news reports.

When his 18 hours of testimony ended at lunchtime yesterday, and Republican senators scurried to shake his hand, both sides agreed he had done neither.

In fact, by the end of the first day of questioning (that is, the second day), the outcome seemed clear. Most Americans, I think, if they were tuned in at all, saw how things were going and tuned out. To stimulate their outrage and make defeating Alito a possibility, something very unusual would have had to break out of the tedium of the Senate and get people thinking that the nomination was still in play. But we watch politics selectively, and we're good at seeing which things are rolling toward predictable outcomes and which things deserve our attention.

I will be interested to see which Democratic Senators decide to vote against him. I'll invoke my favorite Hillary Clinton quote (spoken about the vote on John Roberts): "They will do what they think is in their interest, however they define it."

Will any of the 22 Senators who voted against Roberts turn around and vote for Alito? It's hard to see why. But will any of the 22 Democratic Senators who voted for Roberts see reason to vote against Alito? Perhaps they will.

In that group are my two Senators Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl. I am especially interested to see how Feingold will vote, because I assume he is running for President. Hillary Clinton has already voted against Roberts, so I expect her to vote against Alito. Feingold has already distinguished himself from her, and I'm sure if he wants, he can give excellent reasons for distinguishing Roberts from Alito, and a combination of yes and no votes might serve him well, making him seem to be evaluating the judges in a fair, nonideological manner. He could draw attention to the concerns about expansive executive power, which have grown in the time since the Roberts vote. The changed circumstances alone could justify a different vote on the two men.

Nevertheless, I think Alito deserves a yes vote. To vote no based on his performance at the hearings is to set the expectations too high for the next nominee. We need to worry that good people will decline to be nominated. And Democrats will some day have the power of appointment again. Their treatment of Alito will serve as an example to Republicans as to how far they can go in attacking that new nominee.

On making the nominee's wife cry.

There's lots of talk today about Alito's wife's succumbing to tears yesterday. It's interesting that she lost control when Senator Lindsey Graham was being supportive and sympathetic, chewing out the nasty Democrats who smeared her husband. But it isn't surprising. It's natural to maintain your steely surface during an attack, and then to collapse into the arms of the person who stretches out his arms to you with compassion. But the outstretched arms were only metaphorical. Senator Graham did not come down from behind his fortress of a table to comfort her, and her own husband could not turn around to soothe her. She was left exposed, on camera, and all she could do was run away.

The hearings do need to be tough. They don't need to be as obnoxious as they've been, but they should be vigorous and searching. The odd thing is that we expect a wife to sit behind her husband, unable to participate, just a backdrop of support. It's strange the way wives are used in politics to create an image for the man. In the business world, a man bringing his wife along to sit with him for a job interview would be out of his mind.

Of course, husbands sit with female nominees too. But we have yet to see a nasty hearing for a female Supreme Court nominee. Imagine if the Senators were saying awful things about a woman while her husband sat behind her. Would he glower just enough that the Senators wouldn't dare go too far? Would there come a point when this man would lose emotional control? Would he cry and run off? Would he step forward and say How dare you talk to my wife that way? That would be some new political theater.

ADDED COMMENTARY: Alito's wife's crying works to his advantage:

1. It lends credibility to the Republican's spin on the hearings that the Democrats went way out of line with their questions.

2. It gives the impression that the Democrats lack compassion and concern for women, which is exactly the opposite of what they've been trying to express through attacking Alito.

3. It humanizes Alito, as a man with a sensitive wife.

4. It made the best news story of the day, overshadowing whatever message the Democrats might have hoped would capture the public's attention, like Senator Kennedy bulging with concern about the Concerned Alumni for Princeton.

So are guys wearing shorts today in Madison?

Yes! You know that I think men should resist shorts to the last limit of their masculine strength. But here in Madison, manliness manifests itself in the wearing of the shorts if the winter eases up just a bit, and right now it's 49°, so the inadequate pants are everywhere. Lots of young women in sleeveless tops too. We are hardy folk up here in the north. Somewhat style-challenged, but still....

"They were boisterous, slapping high-fives, laughing and so forth."

CourtTV reports on the trial of the five Kerry campaign workers accused of slashing the tires on 30 vans that Republicans had rented to help get voters to the polls in Milwaukee in 2004.

And here's a more substantial report on the trial, which began on January 8th:

Based on testimony given last year in the preliminary hearing, there is no eyewitness who can identify the men as the vandals. There is a security guard who says he saw someone scurrying in the dark, acting drunk and urinating on a wall. There are police and the Firestone representative, who are to testify about the damage found and the repairs required.

Then there is the bulk of the alleged link between the defendants and the slashed tires: their purported statements in the weeks before the election about planning hijinks on GOP headquarters dubbed "Operation Elephant Takeover" and what they were heard saying after they returned to Democratic Party headquarters about the same time as the police say the tires were cut.

Four of the five men - all but Howell - are quoted by others in the criminal complaint as saying they took part.

Indigo children.

Here's an interesting article about "indigo" children:

Indigo children were first described in the 1970's by a San Diego parapsychologist, Nancy Ann Tappe, who noticed the emergence of children with an indigo aura, a vibrational color she had never seen before. This color, she reasoned, coincided with a new consciousness.

In "The Indigo Children," Mr. Carroll and Ms. Tober define the phenomenon. Indigos, they write, share traits like high I.Q., acute intuition, self-confidence, resistance to authority and disruptive tendencies, which are often diagnosed as attention-deficit disorder, known as A.D.D., or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D.

Offered as a guide for "the parents of unusually bright and active children," the book includes common criticisms of today's child rearing: that children are overmedicated; that schools are not creative environments, especially for bright students; and that children need more time and attention from their parents. But the book seeks answers to mainstream parental concerns in the paranormal.

"To me these children are the answers to the prayers we all have for peace," said Doreen Virtue, a former psychotherapist for adolescents who now writes books and lectures on indigo children. She calls the indigos a leap in human evolution. "They're vigilant about cleaning the earth of social ills and corruption, and increasing integrity," Ms. Virtue said. "Other generations tried, but then they became apathetic. This generation won't, unless we drug them into submission with Ritalin."

I don't like all the Ritalin, but this new age stuff is worse. And it's painful to see the pandering to parents who lack objectivity about the bratty dimension of their own children.

[D]isruptive behavior has a purpose, said Marjorie Jackson, a tai chi and yoga teacher in Altadena, Calif., who said that her son, Andrew, is an indigo....

"The purpose of the disruptive ones is to overload the system so the school will be inspired to change," Ms. Jackson said. "The kids may seem like they have A.D.D. or A.D.H.D. What that is, is that the stimulus given to them, their inner being is not interested in it. But if you give them something that harmonizes with the broad intention that their inner self has for them, they won't be disruptive."

I agree with this criticism of the schools, but this indigo business just makes the criticism seem like part of a big mass of self-delusion and nuttiness. Thanks a lot, new agers!