Alito hearing started today...

ReddHedd at FDL live blogs the hearings and begins thusly:

All in all, the news is promising for some in-depth questioning at the hearings. Don't know about you, but I'm planning to pull up a seat to watch the shoot out starting at high noon today. Here's hoping it's more than the intellectual ass-kissing that Roberts got.

A lifetime seat on the nation's highest court should not be handed out for a pittance, because the cost of doing so is too high to the American public at this point in our history. Judge Alito has a lot to answer for, not the least of which is his long history of deference to executive power -- with King George already operating with a rubber stamp Republican Congress in hand, we can't afford to hand him the Supreme Court as well without a fight.

Check out Day #1:

Opening Satements:

Part 2:

Part 3:


She concludes with:

Chris Bowers, who is in DC blogging about the hearings for MyDD, says:

I am in DC today, as I will be for the rest of the week. While I am down here, one of the main things I will be working on is to defeat the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.

I want to make that last sentence clear. I believe the Democratic goal for the Alito hearings should be to defeat his nomination through a filibuster of 41 votes or more, and then to defeat the nuclear option with a vote of 51 votes or more. Samuel Alito is an unacceptable choice to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Strip Search Sammy is an altogether different beast than John Roberts, and his hearing comes at quite a different time. The public is starting to get their first tastes of the corruption scandal growing like a cancer on the Republican party who are vulnerable just at the time they are the most visible. Despite his bluster, John Cornyn is rightly terrified that the free pass given him by the press in the Abramoff matter will end any day now. He's not the only one. There is considerable cover for an attack that didn't exist only months ago.

And Alito himself is personally unappealing. Stiff, humorless, and comes off as a bit of a weirdo. People like Ron Wyden were afraid to go after Roberts because he was likeable, and Joe Biden learned to his peril that shredding the "nice guy" is the wrong place to try and make your bones. There is an opening for Democrats to capitalize on this as they try to tie unpopular Bush measures like the illegal NSA wiretaps to Alito's tail like a tin can.