Well, he's no Harriet Meirs...

Looking at the last 200 or so Supreme Court decisions that resulted in a 5-4 vote, about 3/4 of them were decided by the same jurist's swing vote. That judge was Sandra Day O'Conner. I've always viewed her as a decidedly right-leaning moderate. She has ruled for corporations a number of times but generally sides with individual privacy rights as well. All in all, she was a justice worthy of respect from both the left and the right. And, given her literally pivotal role on the bench, replacing her will greatly influence the Court and by extension the whole country for years to come.

So who does our Cowboy-in-Chief say is the most qualified? Why his own personal lawyer, of course: Harriet Miers. Well, trust me when I say that yours truly saw that that nomination was going to implode weeks beforehand. Okay, so...moving on...who is the "second best qualified" person? Why it's Justice Scalia's secret clone: Samuel Alito, a man so far to the right even the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist overturned him.

Of course, the right is digging way, way back his college days for "proof" that Alito will respect gay rights and privacy rights. Yeah, right. Let's give Alito's college writings from 30 years ago the same weight in assessing his judicial mindset as, say, some remarks from his peers on some cases from 1-2 years ago who criticize him for ignoring precedent:

"We suggest that to read the [law as Alito did] not only guts the statutory standard, but ignores our precedent," the majority said in one of the cases, which involved how much credence to give to an African man's assertion that he would be persecuted if sent home.
The two cases, one in 2003 and the other in 2004, were not the only times colleagues have chided Alito over perceived failures to follow established rules.
They were, however, unusual in the strength of the language used to rebuke him -- especially because judges on the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit generally have a reputation for being polite to one another.
The second case, in 2004, involved a Korean couple facing deportation after having filed a fraudulent tax return.
In that matter, the panel's majority accused their ''dissenting colleague" of ignoring ''well-established principles" about how to read statutes.
...
Still, Alito colleagues have accused him on a number of occasions of failing to follow precedent. In 1996, for example, the appeals court upheld a federal law outlawing machine guns. Alito filed a dissent, arguing that the law was unconstitutional because Congress had not proved that machine guns were linked to interstate commerce.
"We know of no authority to support such a demand on Congress," the other appeals court judges wrote of Alito's dissent. ''Nothing in [Supreme Court case law] requires either Congress or the Executive to play Show and Tell with the federal courts at the peril of invalidation of a Congressional statute."
And in a 1996 sexual discrimination suit, Alito was the only judge on the appeals court to vote for throwing out the case without a trial. The other 11 judges cited three circuit cases and eight decisions in other jurisdictions that dictated the woman should get her day in court, and accused Alito of misinterpreting precedent.

The issue of following precedent, in other words NOT legislating from the bench (something the right claims the left does exclusively), was one of the key points that bolstered John Roberts' nomination.

But my favorite example of insight into the moral and legal mind of Judge Alito is in the case of Doe v. Groody where our man dissented from the majority ruling that police officers had indeed violated established constitutional rights. How? Holding a warrant to search a man and his home, the police also found a woman and her daughter and they strip searched them both. Alito sees no violations of civil rights when a ten year old little girl was strip searched?!

Listen to Koko, you Senate Democrats: this one is worth risking the Republicans pulling the "nuclear option". Stop this nomination!