The Alito nomination may fall “low on the public’s list of priorities,” but it’s tip-top on the list of many a blogger this week, proving once again that bloggers are not like regular people.
Also not like regular people (and painfully bad at communicating with them): senators. Which has Kevin Drum concerned. “Subtle arguments about the nature of stare decisis and the precise extent of the president’s Article II powers just aren’t going to get very many people ready to take to the streets with pitchforks,” Drum argues. “So what’s the battle cry?”
How’s this for a battle cry: “America is going to be fucking sorry when it winds up naked and pregnant in private mega-prisons without even a monitored phone call.” Such is Hell Yeah at College is Nothing But Fun’s message for Americans who can’t bring themselves to care about the Alito hearings (the above-referenced Post article made Hell Yeah “want to throw up”). But it’s not just apathetic Americans that have Hell Yeah riled, it’s also their press. “Bush talks about a ‘fair vote’ for a ‘qualified’ judge, and the media dutifully spout the talking points,” Hell Yeah huffs.
Robert at Ragged Thots, too, has some thoughts about the press’ performance — specifically the Associated Press and its inane headline, “Alito Pleases GOP Senators, Not Democrats.” Sounding rather CJR Dailyish, Robert imagines that “future headlines” on AP stories might well include “Tax Cuts Outrage Democrats, Exult GOP” and “Men & Women See Relationships Differently.”
It’s the New York Times‘ Alito coverage that has Armando at Daily Kos exercised. According to Armando, Adam Nagourney’s piece in yesterday’s Times is “truly one of the worst articles” the newspaper has ever published (“which considering [Elisabeth] Bumiller and Nagourney produce utter junk on a regular basis is quite an accomplishment”), filled with Nagourney’s “typical bullshit editorializing” and little “insight as to what the issues are.” Armando wonders “why in blazes did Linda Greenhouse not cover the hearings?”
Covering the hearings live and in person earlier this week were a group of right-leaning bloggers gathered in Washington for the “RNC Blogger Forum.” In case you didn’t make the cut, here are one attendee’s thoughts on the gathering, at which bloggers were treated to lectures from luminaries ranging from Sen. Orin Hatch to Karl Rove: “It is very encouraging to see the Republican Party understanding the value of blogs and wanting to harness the power of the blogosphere. Since the MSM works overtime to keep the GOP down, the party knows that they have to reach out to the blogs to get their message out,” opines Matt Margolis of Blogs for Bush. Margolis calls meeting Karl Rove “amazing” and adds that “it was nice to learn that [Rove] reads blogs, including this one.”
In other news, Lizzy Ratner’s shocking expose in this week’s New York Observer — Most Magazine Mastheads are Lily White — has Steve Gilliard blogging furiously. Gilliard reserves special scorn for Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation‘s publisher and editor, who told Ratner that “we are always out looking for more diversity in terms of our writers, in terms of our editors” (there are, according to Ratner, “eight people of color among its 99 writers, editors, editorial-board members and Nation Institute fellows”). Sneers Gilliard, “Katrina, you’re full of shit. Out of 100 people, you can find eight editors or writers of color in a city of 8 million people … You could find as many people as you want or don’t want. But don’t talk to me about progressive politics when your staff is as white as a country club.”
Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.