HOWIE SPLEEN RULES!

Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

Chief Justice-designate John Roberts's confirmation hearings opened today with set-piece bloviations from the 18 members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. They may not be as entertaining as Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean's remarks on CNN's "The Situation Room" with Wolf Blitzer Friday:

Blitzer: Let's talk about a comment you made. "In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina we have a clear, moral responsibility to do a better job of ensuring social and economic justice for every American, and there is still far too much that we don't know about John Roberts' record and beliefs on these critical issues."
You're making a connection between Katrina and the confirmation hearings of John Roberts, which begin on Monday. And I'm not exactly sure what the point is.

Dean: My point is that John Roberts has a record. John Roberts appears to be a wonderful, decent family person, but, again, we get back to the question about whether you really care and whether you have compassion. It's not enough to say you care. It's what you've done.
John Roberts's legal career has been about taking away every protection for young girls and women who want to participate in sports, for African-Americans and Hispanics, who want the equal same right to vote as everybody else, for taking away for women who believe they should determine what kind of health care they have, instead of having politicians do it.
His entire legal career appears to be about making sure those folks don't have the same rights everybody else does. That's probably not the right thing to do two weeks after a disaster, where certain members of society clearly did not have the same protections that everybody else did because of their circumstances. Americans are fair people and they want a sense of justice. I know Judge Roberts loves the law. I'm not sure he loves the American people.

But the Conservative Bloggers Who Support the Gay Judge Roberts still support Roberts. That's good enough for us.