I'm trying out a new feed reader today called Omea Reader. I haven't made up my mind yet, but one thing I like is that you can "bookmark" (note obvious anti-Microsoft terminology) news web pages that haven't made it into the RSS world yet. I can't stand opening up a browser and slogging through a menu of 1000 favorites to find news, so this is a nifty feature for my lazy buttocks. All the non-RSS news sites are in a handy list, and it will even check them and tell you when they've been updated, and you can view them right in the preview pane.

Anyway, now that I'm able to read FactCheck.org without exerting any unnecessary effort, I'd like to comment on liberals and conservatives runnings television ads back and forth telling us whether we should confirm Alito or not.

Here's my comment: Huh??

Last I checked, confirming a judge was up to the Senate, wasn't it? So are they making national television ads just for senators now? That seems like a rather large waste of money to me. I guess they have to make the ads national to make sure that the senators can see them wherever they happen to be in the country. So what kind of senators base their voting habits on what they see on TV?

Okay, I'm sure you're probably telling your computer screen about now that the ads are designed to horrify us into writing our senators to tell them how to vote. I find at least three flaws in this thinking: 1) Who pays attention to political TV commercials? 2) Who actually writes to their senator about anything? 3) Most importantly, since when do senators give a flying frak about what the people say? They've got a cushy six-year term ahead of them. I could maybe understand writing to one's representative in the House, but a senator?? Come on. Unless you're a multi-billion dollar corporation and you've attached a check, your mail isn't very likely to end up in their in-box.

So I guess my point is that it's all the corporate fat cats's fault. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'm sure they're responsible somehow.