Not much, apparently — or at least, not as much as Cooper can do. Aaron Brown is leaving CNN, essentially replaced by Anderson Cooper.

P.S. Here, apparently, is the text of the e-mail to CNN’s staff from network president Jonathan Klein.

And here is some criticism of Klein’s decision.

I won’t be able to watch the game — well, at least not the bulk of it — because of freakin’ Moot Court, but there’s a college football contest tonight that holds a lot of interest for me: UConn at West Virginia at 7:30 PM on ESPN2.

My home-state Huskies, in their fourth year of Division 1-A football, will attempt to notch their first win against a ranked opponent in six tries. The Mountaineers, meanwhile, will try to move one step closer to a Big East championship and BCS berth, much to the detriment of my crazy Rutgers scenario.

West Virginia is favored by 15. But hey, you never know…

UPDATE: Well, that got ugly fast. It’s 28-3 West Virginia, early in the second quarter. Yikes.

UPDATE 2: West Virginia 45, UConn 13, final. D’oh!

Regarding the aforeblogged battery charge against USC linebacker Rey Maualuga, BoiFromTroy weighs in with a post provocatively titled “USC looking like late-’90s Miami“:

So this is the fourth brush-in with the law of current USC players in the last few years. It seems discipline is Coach Carroll’s number one weakness. On the field, it shows up in the form of stupid penalties, and off the field, it results in LAPD investigations.

Though only one of the four is currently playing–Winston Justice–USC needs to get it into their players’ heads that they are under greater scrutiny because they’re playing for a dynasty and that things like assault, or battery, which may get overlooked as dumb jock behavior at, say UCLA, will get you in trouble and on the front pages of the Sports section.

Kevin at FanBlogs chimes in:

Dynasty after dynasty has gone through a fall from grace brought on by their own ego and sense of invincibility. Miami, Florida State, and others have gone from dynasty to laughing stock as their players grew more & more bold in pushing the limits.

BoiFromTroy is spot on - if USC doesn’t address this now, they’ll be the University of Spoiled Crooks.

On a similar note — not to change the subject or anything, but — our resident Terps can’t be too happy about this.

I just told Becky that throwing one of my socks at the dog is “part of the sock’s slow journey across the room toward the laundry pile.” Now if that isn’t the ultimate statement of male sloth, I don’t know what is. :)

Red Sox ex-GM Theo Epstein denies he was driven away from the team by a power struggle with team president Larry Lucchino.

The Argentinian newspaper La Nacion interviewed Bush, and as part of said interview asked what he had in his pockets. The answer: virtually nothing. This is as one might expect, since he has handlers around to do, well, everything for him. Still, I thought he’d perhaps carry a lucky penny to worry over, or maybe a book of Psalms. More here, and for the linguistically gifted, excerpts from the interview (although they apparently left out the part about his pocket contents). (…or maybe my Spanish is really bad.)

(Another note: he apparently wears a Timex. So I guess all that spam I get that tells me he wears some expensive Swiss timepiece is just a lie.)

Posted by Brian (Briandot)

The New Britain Herald has a nice article about Mr. Hastings.

Pete Carroll and LenDale White played a bit of a Halloween prank on the rest of USC’s players Monday. (Hat tip: Scientizzle.) See also here. (Hat tip: Bruce Seltzer.)

Speaking of USC and Halloween, check out fellow ND 2L Lisa’s costume from Monday night’s Halloween party:

Heh. But c’mon, “FUSC” (rhymes with “tusk”) doesn’t have nearly as much oomph as “FUCLA” (rhymes with “truck-duh”) when you say it out loud. :) Now that’s what I call “communicative impact”! (Ugh, just shoot me now…)

On a more serious note, Trojan linebacker Rey Maualuga is in a spot of trouble.

Professors Nagle and Garnett offered high praise for Judge Alito Monday.

Connecticut’s Congressional delegation was less enthusiastic:

Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., said he was disappointed that Bush chose to nominate “a top choice of the extreme right rather than a mainstream jurist” and dismayed that he did not pick a woman or minority.

Rep. Christopher Shays, R-4, was also discouraged by the choice.

“It seems to me we need a replacement for Sandra Day O’Connor that has a similar record of moderation and jurisprudence. I’m disappointed that the president didn’t take this opportunity to add diversity to the Supreme Court,” he said.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3, said the president “squandered” an opportunity to nominate a justice who would unify the country.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., held back, saying he did not know enough about Alito to say whether he would support him.

Lieberman is the only one whose opinion really matters, since he’s a member of the “Gang of 14.”

Although I’ve blogged about ancillary topics related to Judge Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court, I haven’t yet stated my own position on the pick, so let me say this. At first blush, I am inclined to say that he should be confirmed. The relevant question isn’t, “If I were president, would I have picked Alito?” Rather, the relevant question is, “If I were a senator, would I vote to confirm him?” And the answer is, I think, yes. Unless something emerges that makes him look more like a crazed lunatic than he currently appears, I believe that he possesses the requisite credentials for confirmation.

There are two components to this position. First off, I don’t believe the Senate’s advice-and-consent role extends so far that senators are supposed to act as 100 mini-presidents, each making individual judgments about whether they would have chosen this person if they were in Bush’s shoes. I prefer the approach taken by the Republicans during Clinton’s term, when only 3 senators voted against Ruth Bader Ginsburg and only 9 voted against Stephen Breyer; the vast majority of Republicans voted to confirm, even though I’m sure very few of them actually agreed with Ginsburg or Breyer on matters of judicial philosophy. I think senators are supposed to assess whether the nominee is generally, objectively acceptable, not vote “yes” if they agree with the nominee’s philosophy and “no” if they disagree with it. This isn’t an election. We had an election in 2004, and Bush won it. That means Bush gets to pick the Supreme Court nominees, and as long as his choices are reasonable, I believe they should be confirmed. The Senate plays an important role in making sure the nominee isn’t unqualified (see: Harriet Miers) or otherwise objectively unacceptable for some reason, but I think it’s an abuse of that role to vote against (or, even worse, filibuster) someone merely because of a disagreement over philosophy, so long as the candidate’s philosophy isn’t deranged or truly outside the mainstream. If the Senate starts to act like 100 mini-presidents on judicial battles, that new role will come back to haunt liberals once the Democrats re-take the White House. What happens when there’s a Democratic president and a Republican Senate (or even a Democratic Senate with more than 40 Republicans)? Is the president not allowed to appoint a judicial liberal? I don’t like that idea at all. The president gets to pick the justices; the Senate isn’t just a rubber stamp, but it isn’t a co-picker, either.

Secondly, I don’t believe that a nominee’s disagreement (or suspected disagreement) with controversial cases such as Roe v. Wade is somehow prima facie evidence that he or she is “unqualified.” If Alito disagreed with, say, Brown v. Board of Education, then we’d have something to talk about. But just because some more recent, controversial and debatable cases, like Roe, are seen as gospel truth by liberals, doesn’t mean everyone is required to agree with them or else be seen as objectively unsuitable for a seat on the Court. I simply don’t buy into the notion that anyone who has a Scalia-like conservative judicial philosophy is necessarily deranged or “outside the mainstream.” Frankly, I find that position absurd and borderline dishonest. No matter how much one might disagree with it, the conservative philosophy espoused by Scalia and his ilk is undeniably “mainstream.” It is held by two to three Supreme Court justices and countless other judges around the country, as well as many highly respected lawyers, law professors and others. To claim that judicial conservatism is “outside the mainstream” is to distort the term “mainstream” beyond all recognition. Again: just because one might strongly disagree with it, doesn’t mean it’s deranged or objectively beyond the pale.

The counterargument to this, I guess, is that if a judge isn’t clearly willing to “uphold” such “fundamental rights” as a woman’s right to choose, then he or she is just as objectively unsuitable as someone who opposes Brown. Sorry, but no. There is nothing “objective” about the debate over Roe and other issues that pit judicial conservatives against judicial liberals. There is an ongoing, vibrant discussion in which both sides have valid arguments and intelligent points. Just because you think someone is on the “wrong” side of the debate, doesn’t mean they’re objectively unqualified for high office. It just means they disagree with you. Presumably you registered your disagreement in the 2004 election; so did millions of others, and the other side won. That doesn’t mean you have to give up the fight, but it does mean you need to realize that elections have consequences, and the “wrong” side is going to win some battles in the short term, because they won. Crying “fundamental rights” resolves nothing, since whether the “rights” in question exist is the very thing that’s being debated. No matter how well you dress it up in flowery language suggesting the conservatives that evil, rights-stealing bastards, it still boils down to a fundamental disagreement over what the law should say and what the role of the courts should be, and whereas we can all agree today that segregation was objectively wrong, no such agreement is possible on the issues currently at stake.

Thus, since I believe senators should vote for a SCOTUS nominee unless that person is unqualified or otherwise objectively unacceptable, and since I do not believe Alito’s undeniable judicial conservatism makes him unqualified or objectively unacceptable, I am inclined to believe he should be confirmed, barring some new information or a poor performance at the hearings that raises doubts about his suitability for the job.

That said, I don’t particularly begrudge liberals the fact that they are vigorously opposing this nomination. This isn’t like Roberts, where I felt it was downright foolhardy to oppose a candidate whose positions on hot-button issues generally seemed to be either moderate or ambiguous, which is about as much as a liberal could realistically hope for from a conservative Republican president. Here, we’re looking at the quintessential conservative dream candidate, which means the quintessential liberal nightmare candidate. This is the guy the Democrats should have been saving their fire for; this is the one worth opposing. Although I ultimately don’t agree with the basic precepts that one must accept in order to oppose a SCOTUS candidate on purely ideological grounds, I can at least see where the Left is coming from on this one. So, for example, when my mom told me she’d written a letter to her senators urging them to oppose Alito, I didn’t feel the need to start an argument with her, like I did over her opposition to Roberts. :)

So anyway, there you have it. I tenatively support Alito, but I’m not about to join his fan club, either. And now, I need to either get back to my Moot Court paper, or sleep, or some combination of the two…

Shortly after Harriet Miers’s nomination was withdrawn, somebody (Bea, I think) asked me to dig up the old posts where I had mentioned the various conspiracy theories that were floating around right after Miers was picked. Well, here they are:

I read somewhere this morning (I can’t remember where now) a comment, presumably tongue-in-cheek, suggesting that the Miers nomination is a ruse; Bush nominated Miers knowing she’ll be rejected (or eventually withdrawn after a bitter fight), and figuring he can then nominate a qualified but far-right conservative, because the public won’t have the stomach for a second consecutive Senate bloodbath, and the new nominee’s judicial credentials will look stellar compared to Miers’s.

Far-fetched, and almost certainly false, if for no other reason than that I can’t believe Bush, Mr. Loyalty, would throw a long-time confidant under a bus like that. But who knows? It might work out that way for him accidentally…

…

The Anchoress [writes]:

She may not make it to the Supreme Court. Bush may not even intend for her to get there. She may be, rather than the ‘misdirection’ many expected, an out-and-out decoy, floated to allow both the liberals and the conservatives to blast her out of the water so that Bush can then put up another candidate that both left and right - after having behaved very badly over Miers - will get behind.

I’m still finding that “throw Miers under the bus” theory hard to believe, but who knows? Only time will tell, I suppose.

So, what did time tell us? I still seriously doubt Miers was thrown under a bus. But the “might work out that way for him accidentally” thing is looking pretty good right now. Still, with the Left girding for an all-out war over the new nominee, I’m not sure if things are really that much different than they would have been if Bush had skipped Miers and gone straight to [Sc]Alito in the first place.

Meanwhile, the jury is still out on my conspiracy theory about the “evil-genius Rovian plot to deliberately lose the 2006 elections.” :)