It’s official.

And there it is, the final count is 58 yes, 42 no.

Well America, there you have it. Samuel Alito is sitting on the bench and will watch the SOTU from his new position. I don’t really have anything to say about it, there’s not much to be said that I didn’t talk about last night, so I’ll just worry more about the aforementioned address tonight at 9. Though talk about a squeaker. Needs 51 yes votes and gets 58.

Huh, Chris Matthews predicted it just like that. Good work, Tweety.

New look!

Finally got a site overhaul. No more high school looking design and we’ve got an actual banner now. Also got rid of that stupid “Pandora of Political Ponderings” name. Not sure why I thought that sounded any good.

Not the first overhaul, not the last, hopefully in the next few months it’ll start looking professional.

A loss?

Well, as many of you probably know by now, the filibuster of Alito got shot down tonight.

I sit here with a pint of Guinness to think things over, as good of a brain juice as any far as I’m concerned, and to be perfectly honest I don’t consider it a loss. Yes, I entirely disagree with the concept of an Alito on the bench. I believe the future rammifications will be quite frightening, from the loss of civil rights (women particularly I fear) to the idea that Alito will be on the bench when Bush is eventually investigated for his scandals (secret to getting off for breaking the law? Make sure you hired the judge).

On that same token, that’s fine. The way I see it, there were basically three issues facing us in this country when it comes to Bush: Alito, Abramoff, and the NSA. I would rank them in that order from least to most important, personally. I know Alito has more potential for problems 10 years down the road than Bush dealing with Abramoff, but no matter what the concept of Bush spying on the US without a warrant is something that needs stopped more than anything.

My point of “ranking” the issues, aside from rationalizing that our “loss” was the “least important” one, is that Democrats came pretty far in the past week. We went from a few disjointed complaints to the potential for a filibuster. No, it didn’t happen, but solidarity is building, and I think the hesitance toward such filibuster was not its importance but its futility. Thanks to numbers and the time frame, I believe a lot of dems thought that trying to mount such a movement.

But what this tells me is that all is not lost. It tells me that the left is starting to see the big picture, that they can’t just sit around and complain about things without doing anything. Hopefully when Abramoff comes around as a full-blown issue, more Dems will rally together, and when Bush is on the grill for the NSA it’ll be all out.

I think things are going to be difficult as hell for the remainder of Bush’s term. Maybe we should just shoot them all in the head.

…sorry if that sounded like it was in bad taste, Anne Coulter told me it’d be a funny joke.