From AP:

President Bush, stung by the rejection of his first choice, nominated longtime judge Samuel Alito Monday in a bid to reshape the Supreme Court and mollify his conservative allies. Democrats said that Alito may be "too radical for the American people."

"Judge Alito has served with distinction on that court for 15 years, and now has more prior judicial experience than any Supreme Court nominee in more than 70 years," Bush said, drawing an unspoken contrast to his first choice, Harriet Miers.

Unlike her nomination, which was derailed Thursday by Bush's conservative allies, Alito faces opposition from Democrats.

"The Senate needs to find out if the man replacing Miers is too radical for the American people," said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada.

Update: Nice comment by CBS News reporter John Roberts. Roberts apologizes.

Update II: Background on Judge Samuel Alito.

Update III: Law professor Ann Althouse likes the pick.

Update IV: The New York Times has a decent roundup of blogger opinions on the Alito nomination.

Politics, politics everywhere...

Read this from Ed Morrissey.

And you'll want to read this from Tom Maguire, as well.

You'll definitely want to read the posts from Glenn Reynolds here and here.

Christopher Hitchens in the Wall Street Journal:

The Republicans who drafted and proposed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in the early days of the Reagan administration, in a vain attempt to end the career of CIA defector Philip Agee, could not have known that their hasty legislation would one day paralyze the workings of a conservative wartime administration. Nor could the eager internationalist Wilsonians who rammed through the 1917 Espionage Act--the most repressive legislation since the Alien and Sedition laws--have expected it to be used against government officials making the case for an overseas military intervention.

But then, who would have thought that liberals and civil libertarians--the New York Times called for the repeal of the IIPA as soon as it was passed, or else for it to be struck down by the courts--would find these same catch-all statutes coming in handy for the embarrassment of Team Bush? The outrage of the left at any infringement of CIA prerogatives is only the least of the ironies in the indictment of Lewis Libby for discussing matters the disclosure of which, in and of itself, appears to have violated no known law.
...

If--and one has to say "if"--the transmission of any classified information is a crime, then as Mr. Fitzgerald also confirmed, one would be in the deep waters of the Espionage Act, which is "a very difficult statute to interpret." Actually, it is a very easy act to interpret. It declares that even something very well-known is secret if the state defines it as secret: the same principle as the dreaded British Official Secrets Act. As to the critical question of whether Mr. Plame had any cover to blow, Mr. Fitzgerald was equally insouciant: "I am not speaking to whether or not Valerie Wilson was covert."

In the absence of any such assertion or allegation, one must be forgiven for wondering what any of this gigantic fuss can possibly be about. I know some apparently sensible people who are prepared to believe, still, that a Machiavellian cabal in the White House wanted to punish Joseph Wilson by exposing his wife to embarrassment and even to danger. So strong is this belief that it envisages Karl Rove (say) deciding to accomplish the foul deed by tipping off Robert Novak, one of the most anti-Iraq-war and pro-CIA journalists in the capital, as if he were precisely the pliant tool one would select for the dastardly work. And then, presumably to thicken the plot, Mr. Novak calls the CIA to confirm, as it readily did, that Ms. Plame was in the agency's employ.

Meanwhile, and just to make things more amusing, George Tenet, in his capacity as Director of Central Intelligence, tells Dick Cheney that he employs Mr. Wilson's wife as an analyst of the weird and wonderful world of WMD. So jealously guarded is its own exclusive right to "out" her, however, that no sooner does anyone else mention her name than the CIA refers the Wilson/Plame disclosure to the Department of Justice.

Read the whole column.

Michael Barone thinks so:

George W. Bush's administration has come through what many have been saying would be its worst week, and it has turned out to be -- well, if not one of the best, then one that is far more encouraging than most of the mainstream media expected.
...

Much is made of Bush's current low standing in the polls -- though he rates much higher than did Presidents Truman, Nixon and Carter at their low points. But poll results count for less in a re-elected president than performance. Last week's four events turned some things around. Now Bush and his people must act.

Read the whole piece.

The body of Rosa Parks lies in honor in the Capital Rotunda.

October 31 ...

In 1517 Martin Luther posted the 95 Theses on the door of the Wittenberg Palace church, marking the start of the Protestant Reformation in Germany. In 1795 English poet John Keats was born in London. In 1864 Nevada became the 36th state. In 1941 the US Navy destroyer Reuben James was torpedoed by a German U-boat off Iceland with the loss of 115 lives, even though the US had not yet entered World War II. In 1955 Britain's Princess Margaret ended weeks of speculation by announcing she would not marry Royal Air Force Captain Peter Townsend. In 1968 President Johnson ordered a halt to all US bombing of North Vietnam, saying he hoped for fruitful peace negotiations. In 1980 Reza Pahlavi, eldest son of the late shah of Iran, proclaimed himself the rightful successor to the Peacock Throne. In 1984 Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two Sikh security guards. In 2000 American astronaut Bill Shepherd and two Russian cosmonauts rocketed into orbit aboard a Soyuz rocket on a quest to become the first residents of the international space station.

Here is something about Iran you might want to read. (via Andrew Sullivan)

From The Tax Foundation: (via TaxProf Blog and Instapundit)

Since 1977, governments collected more than $1.34 trillion, after adjusting for inflation, in gasoline tax revenues—more than twice the amount of domestic profits earned by major U.S. oil companies during the same period.

John Leo writes:

The editor of The New Republic suggested the other day that "the new liberal political culture emerging on the Internet" looks a lot like the McGovernite revolution that descended on the Democratic Party in 1972. In a lecture at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Peter Beinart said the mostly young Internet activists are clearly taking over the party.

If so, this would be the first ray of sunshine for conservatives and Republicans in almost a year. The McGovern movement severely damaged the party, pushing it toward four presidential defeats in five tries, until Bill Clinton won by dragging the party back to the center in 1992. If the Internet people had prevailed in 2004, Howard Dean would have won the nomination and then been buried in an enormous landslide, just like George McGovern.
...

The McGovern reform commission and the people who changed the party in 1972 wrought lasting damage, and not just to Democrats: They helped mightily to create the modern split between red America and blue America. Many members of disfavored groups -- Catholics, Southerners and much of the white working class and lower-middle class -- decamped for the Republican Party, while the Democrats emerged more clearly visible as the party of well-off liberals, the poor, identity and grievance groups, secularists and the cultural elite. A second coming of McGovernite guerrillas wouldn't do much to improve that image.

Read the whole column.

Michael Barone:

Whither the Bush administration? Two months ago, just before Katrina hit New Orleans, the administration had a game plan that it seemed to be, more or less successfully, executing. Since then that plan has been blown away by hurricanes meteorological, political and, yesterday, legal. In late August, Congress seemed primed to extend the earlier Bush tax cuts. House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas seemed ready to push some form of Social Security reform through his committee and the House. John Roberts seemed headed for easy confirmation to Sandra Day O'Connor's seat on the Supreme Court. Iraq, at least in the minds of administration officials, was moving in the right direction, with new Iraqi security forces coming online and the constitution heading for approval in the election scheduled for Oct. 15.
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The Miers fight and the failure to advance Social Security reform teach the same political lesson: Mr. Bush can count on being firmly, and more or less unanimously, opposed by the Democrats, and he can succeed only when he has the strong support of the Republican base. That is the same lesson taught by the 2004 election, in which, despite a strong economy, he was reelected by only 51% to 48%. It seems reasonable to expect that his next Supreme Court nominee will be strongly supported by the base and will, despite vociferous opposition from the Democrats, be confirmed. We'll know more next week.
...

On many fronts the Bush administration can claim success--more than is registered in the polls. Tax cuts have helped to stimulate the economy. The No Child Left Behind Act, together with state and local efforts to make schools accountable for results, has been followed by some modest improvement in test scores; one might hope it is extended from the middle grades to high school. On health care, the private sector seems to be following the cues in the 2003 Medicare bill's provisions encouraging health savings accounts. But there are surely many other ways in which government can be made more accountable and in which citizens can be given incentives to make progress on their lifelong project of accumulating wealth. The Democrats have little to offer on these fronts; the thrust of their policies seems to be to make America more like Continental Western Europe, with its torpid growth and high unemployment. Mr. Bush has three more years and three more months in which to take the lead in another direction. Will he use them well or squander them?

From AP:

Near-simultaneous explosions rocked the Indian capital Saturday evening, tearing through a bus and two markets crowded with people shopping for gifts for a Hindu festival. At least 58 people were killed and dozens wounded in the blasts, which the government blamed on terrorists.

Police declared a state of emergency and closed all city markets. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh urged calm while denouncing the apparently coordinated bombings, which did not prevent an unprecedented India-Pakistan agreement to open the Kashmir border to facilitate aid for survivors of the region's devastating Oct. 8 earthquake.

"These are dastardly acts of terrorism," Singh said in a brief televised statement. "We shall defeat their nefarious designs and will not allow them to succeed. We are resolute in our commitment to fighting terrorism in all forms."

Asked who was responsible, he would only say "there are several clues." The Indian government faces opposition from dozens of militant groups — particularly Kashmiri separatists, some of whom also oppose the peace process between Pakistan and India.

Read the rest of the story here.

October 30 ...

In 1735 the second president of the United States, John Adams, was born in Braintree, MA. In 1938 the radio play "The War of the Worlds," starring Orson Welles, aired on CBS. (The live drama, which employed fake news reports, panicked some listeners who thought its portrayal of a Martian invasion was true.) In 1945 the US government announced the end of shoe rationing. In 1953 Gen. George C. Marshall was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Dr. Albert Schweitzer received the Peace Prize for 1952. In 1961 the Soviet Union tested a hydrogen bomb with a force estimated at 58 megatons. In 1961 the Soviet Party Congress unanimously approved a resolution ordering the removal of Josef Stalin's body from Lenin's tomb. In 1975 the New York Daily News ran the headline "Ford to City: Drop Dead" a day after President Ford said he would veto any proposed federal bailout of New York City. In 1995 Federalists prevailed over separatists in Quebec in a secession referendum by a vote of 50.6 percent to 49.4 percent. In 2004 the decapitated body of a Japanese backpacker (Shosei Koda) was found wrapped in an American flag in northwestern Baghdad; the militant group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi later claimed responsibility.

From The New Republic:

Well, that was much ado about nothing. I don't really think the indictment of the man who served as the Vice President's Chief of Staff--and whose role in the administration was in fact much larger than that--is no big deal. It is. But the way Democrats were talking about this case leading up to the indictment, this has to come as a letdown. After all, liberals believed that Patrick Fitzgerald was going to cripple the Bush administration and reveal the lies and deceptions behind the Iraq war. There was speculation that Fitzgerald would shine a bright, unflattering light onto the inner workings of the White House Iraq Group. There was talk that he was going to name a "Constitutional officer"--namely Cheney--as an unindicted co-conspirator. And there were rumors that he was seeking to empanel a second grand jury to investigate who ginned up the fake "Niger documents."

Maybe Fitzgerald just has a very impressive poker face, but it sure seemed from his press conference that none of those things is now going to happen. Even the talk, earlier in the day, that Rove was now in an excruciating legal limbo seems like it was overblown. The five indictments against Libby appear to be the only indictments Fitzgerald is going to bring. It seems there's a good chance Rove is off the hook and an even better chance that everyone else is, as well. And since Fitzgerald's such a stickler for rules, it's doubtful we're ever going to get much of an accounting of what else, besides the charges he's laid out against Libby, he learned about the Bush administration's shenanigans in the course of this investigation. In other words, the whole notion that the Fitzgerald investigation was going to reveal how the Bush administration led us into Iraq now seems to have been completely wrong.

From the Wall Street Journal:

... the five-count indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the Vice President's Chief of Staff--[was] not for leaking the name of Valerie Plame to Robert Novak, which started this entire "scandal," but for contradictions between his testimony and the testimony of two or three reporters about what he told them, when he told them, and what words he used.
...

The indictment itself contains no evidence of a conspiracy, and Mr. Libby has not been accused of trying to cover up some high crime or misdemeanor by the Bush Administration. The indictment amounts to an allegation that one official lied about what he knew about an underlying "crime" that wasn't committed.... [Joseph Wilson] was a critic of the Administration who was lying to the press about the nature of his involvement in the Niger mission and about the nature of the intelligence that it produced. In other words, Mr. Libby was defending Administration policy against political attack, not committing a crime.

... [Fitzgerald] has thrust himself into what was, at bottom, a policy dispute between an elected Administration and critics of the President's approach to the war on terror, who included parts of the permanent bureaucracy of the State Department and CIA. Unless Mr. Fitzgerald can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Libby was lying, and doing so for some nefarious purpose, this indictment looks like a case of criminalizing politics.

From the Washington Post:

The charges of perjury and obstruction of justice filed yesterday against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby are serious and appear to be backed by substantial evidence.
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Nevertheless, it is also a fact that Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, after substantially completing his two-year investigation, has brought no criminal charges in the leak of Ms. Plame's identity to journalists and its publication by columnist Robert D. Novak. Judging from the indictment, Mr. Libby was not Mr. Novak's source, and Mr. Libby himself is not charged with any wrongdoing in revealing Ms. Plame's identity to journalists. Though Mr. Fitzgerald says he has not wrapped up his work, that is the right outcome and one that reflects prudent judgment on his part.
...

The special counsel was principally investigating whether any official violated a law that makes it a crime to knowingly disclose the identity of an undercover agent. The public record offers no indication that Mr. Libby or any other official deliberately exposed Ms. Plame to punish her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. Rather, Mr. Libby and other officials, including Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff, apparently were seeking to combat the sensational allegations of a critic. They may have believed that Ms. Plame's involvement was an important part of their story of why Mr. Wilson was sent to investigate claims that Iraq sought uranium ore from Niger, and why his subsequent -- and mostly erroneous -- allegations that the administration twisted that small part of the case against Saddam Hussein should not be credited. To criminalize such discussions between officials and reporters would run counter to the public interest.

From the National Review:

There has been much high-minded talk about how the Valerie Plame controversy is really about the case for the Iraq war. No. For liberals, it has always been about inflicting as much damage as possible to the Bush White House, especially by taking out through indictment its most central player in the person of Karl Rove. That has not happened. Nor has special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald alleged a conspiracy at the top levels of the Bush administration to out a CIA agent. What he instead charges in his five-count indictment is that Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, lied to investigators about conversations with three reporters. This long-hyped, two-year investigation appears to come down, in other words, to one man's alleged dishonesty when investigators came knocking. This is not Watergate or Iran-Contra, but neither is it a trifle.

Please spare us the excuses warmed over from Democratic talking points in the 1990s: the prosecutor is out-of-control, there was no underlying crime, etc., etc. It is the responsibility of anyone, especially a public official, to tell the truth to FBI agents and grand juries. If Libby didn't, he should face the consequences. Fitzgerald's indictment is not a Ronnie Earle-style partisan production, held together with scotch tape and malicious intentions. But this is the prosecutor's day, when he gets to make the argument against his target unrebutted. Libby will get his chance to respond, and it might be that Fitzgerald's case looks weaker soon.

From the New York Times:

The five-count indictment handed up yesterday against Lewis Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, may seem anticlimactic to those who were hoping to finally learn who gave the columnist Robert Novak the name of Valerie Wilson, a covert C.I.A. officer whose cover was blown by his column on July 14, 2003. Although the grand jury investigating the case was attempting to determine whether Mr. Novak's source violated the federal law against revealing the name of a covert operative, the special counsel was mum on that as well.

Patrick Fitzgerald, a federal prosecutor, left open the possibility that we may never know all the answers.
...

As for Mr. Libby's case, the charges suggest that White House officials did, in fact, use Mrs. Wilson's classified C.I.A. job as a weapon against a critic of administration policy - to smear his reputation or to warn off other dissenters. A jury will determine whether Mr. Libby broke the law as a result of that campaign. But it seems clear that he and other officials violated the public trust.

And as absorbing as this criminal investigation has been, the big point Americans need to keep in mind is this: There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Here's the transcript of Patrick Fitzgerald's press conference.