Well, well, it’s all over but the presidential coronation. Hope you enjoyed 33 years of sovereignty over your own bodies, ladies. Don’t worry, big corporations always have the little guys’ best interests at heart, so you needn’t worry about your class action suit getting fair treatment at the Supreme Court.

While I have no children, I fear the world my nieces are soon to inherit.

I can’t channel my disgust any better than The Rude Pundit did today.

Today, Senators who voted for cloture are going to vote against the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. And when Lincoln Chafee, Maria Cantwell, Herbert Kohl, Blanche Lincoln, and Jay Rockefeller, as well as all the others run for re-election, they can say, “Look, I said ‘No.'” But that “no” matters so little as the very issues they say caused them to vote that way – the power of the presidency, abortion rights, the right to privacy, the favoring of corporations – are turned against them time and again. Yeah, they voted against Alito, but there’s a starving, beaten prisoner in Gitmo, a pregnant teenage girl in Nebraska, a coal mining family in West Virginia who are all gonna be the ones f*cked because of such cowardly courage. And when they say they voted against Alito, someone’s gonna be smart enough to say, “Hey, Maria, if it’s such a big f*ckin’ deal, why didn’t you join the filibuster?”

And if someone doesn’t wreck Susan Collins, Arlen Specter, or any supposed pro-choice Republican after the first Supreme Court case that limits access to abortion, then DNC consultants need to have their Blackberries shoved up their asses.

…

(And if you really want your stomach to do the Charleston, remember the precedent that’s been set: should someone put rat poison in Justice Stevens’ creme brulee, Alito’s views are now the bar at which a nominee can be approved.)

Update: The vote was 58 to 42. Enough to have sustained a filibuster even without Chafee if 16 Senators believed in more than empty gestures. And Olympia Snowe voted for Alito. There is no middle in the Republican Party. There is only Democratic capitulation masking as moderation.