If you live in Alaska, you might want a new senator
Sen. Ted Stevens, R-AK, has proven himself to be a giant idiot time and again. Never mind his championship of last year's biggest pork-barrel project, the Bridge to Nowhere. Never mind that, as chairman of the committee investigating high gas prices last September, he refused -- even at the insistence of Democratic colleagues on the committee -- to place the presidents of the nation's largest oil companies under oath.
Last Thursday, Sen. Stevens has voiced his opposition to net neutrality in the Senate because of his own hilarious misunderstanding of how the Internet works. According to Sen. Stevens, there are two "internets": the commercial Internet and the personal Internet. Sometimes, the commercial Internet gets too clogged with things from the personal Internet, slowing down the commercial Internet, and this is why we need two Internets.
Now, I understand that Sen. Stevens thinks his "tubes" analogy is just a metaphor for how the Internet really works. But the Internet still doesn't behave in the way that he claims it does.
Please, people who live in Alaska, don't re-elect this guy. (Brian, tell your sister to dump his ass.)
Comments
and then consider these statisitics, via the New York Times:
" Nonetheless, there was little doubt that in its transition, the court was becoming more conservative. A statistical analysis by Jason Harrow on the Scotusblog Web site showed that Justice Alito voted with the conservative justices 15 percent more often than Justice O'Connor had.
"A separate analysis, by the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University Law Center, showed that Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts had the highest agreement rate of any two justices in the court's nonunanimous cases, 88 percent, slightly higher than the agreement rate between Justice O'Connor and Justice David H. Souter in the first half of the term, 87.5 percent.
"Chief Justice Roberts agreed with Justice Scalia in 77.5 percent of the nonunanimous cases and with Justice Stevens, arguably the court's most liberal member, only 35 percent of the time. The least agreement between any pair of justices was between Justices Alito and Stevens, 23.1 percent."
What were the questions that this law professor thinks should've been asked of the Justices-to be? "Um, Judge Alito, are you aware you will be strengthening this Court's minority;" or, "Judge Roberts, I'm Senator Feinstein. I have no concept of legal reasoning or even what exactly judges do, but I have an honorary law degree from Golden Gate University, so I must ask you this: shouldn't we not vote for you b/c you'll just vote similarly to your predecessor who was conservative and therefore a racist?"
Posted by: Anon | July 7, 2006 4:33 AM
She tried. Everyone knows he's in bed with the oil companies, the problem is most of Alaska's residents are former (or current) military personnel who just don't care. I'm not saying no one does, but the vast majority of the population (which is something like 70% male) is not all that interested, as long as he keeps the checks from the pipeline rolling in (ignoring the fact that a loaf of bread is still about $5). So yeah, he's a douche. But he's a douche who puts money in their pockets, and to be honest, the Alaskans consider the US government to be almost a colonial power. Even if the US federal gov't did something unpopular, they could just kind of ignore it and it would go away, as no one in the contintental US really cares that much about Alaska. And the cycle of indifference spins on and on and on
Posted by: Wolf | July 10, 2006 7:30 PM
First of all, Ned, you posted your comment in the wrong entry . But seeing as how I can't just transfer the comment, I'll reply here.
I think the law professor's point was that we had fooled ourselves into thinking that Roberts and Alito weren't as conservative as they turned out to be, and that we got this idea in our heads because we heard it repeated time and again that they weren't ideologues. As Professor Turley points out, those statements were made by others, not by Roberts and Alito.
Second, if you want to talk about grandstanding by senators, look no further than Sen. Sam Brownback, R-KS, who never really asked Judge Roberts a question during his Senate hearing as much as he railed on about activist judges and gay marriage.
Third, the "conservative therefore racist" is hopefully a joke. If not, then it's a hilarious straw man. Only the most insanely liberal of liberals (unfortunately, some of these people inhabit Air America) equate "conservative" with "racist."
Posted by: Mark | July 12, 2006 9:43 AM