The hour of indictment.

We had a fun indictment party on October 28. We ordered out for pizza, and then we gathered in our little conference room to watch special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald hold forth on his indictment of I. Lewis Libby.

After five years of one of the most arrogant and lawless Administrations in the nation's history, at last an ounce of accountability.

There ought to be more. The Vice President, as we discuss in the Comment section, is deeply implicated in the Libby indictment. And far from coming clean, Cheney has praised Libby and promoted others from his staff whose hands are dirty. The Vice President acts as though he is above the law. Fitzgerald (or the House, if it had any integrity) should notify him that he's not.

When the far right forced Harriet Miers to withdraw her nomination to the Supreme Court, I knew it was trouble. Miers took herself out not because she flunked the Con Law exam that Senator Arlen Specter was administering but because she flunked the loyalty oath that the anti-abortion zealots were administering.

Bush then bowed to their blackmail and traded a crony for a Cro-Magnon conservative in Judge Samuel Alito.

While on the Third Circuit, Alito dissented in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Alone among the three-judge panel, he argued that it's OK to force a woman to get her husband's approval before she is allowed to have an abortion. That put him at odds with the Supreme Court he hopes to join, since the Court ruled in Casey: "Women do not lose their constitutionally protected liberty when they marry."

Alito has also been hostile to privacy rights and stingy when it comes to allowing people to seek asylum or to sue for racial or gender or disability discrimination.

In one case (Doe vs. Groody), he dissented from a decision by the Third Circuit, which had ruled in favor of a mother and her ten-year-old daughter who were strip-searched by police after they entered the home on a drug warrant for the woman's husband. Alito said that even if the warrant did not authorize the search, "a reasonable police officer could certainly have read the warrant as doing so."

In Riley vs. Taylor, an African American appealed his murder conviction, in part because blacks were excluded from his jury. When he tried to show statistical evidence that blacks have been repeatedly dismissed from juries when the defendants were black, he did not get a favorable hearing from Alito. One of Alito's fellow judges, Delores Sloviter, scolded Alito for trying "to minimize the history of discrimination against prospective black jurors and black defendants."

Finally, Alito, like Roberts, once served in the Reagan Justice Department as it was curbing civil rights and environmental protection and elevating the powers of the Executive Branch. That's precisely what we don't need with the runaway executive we have right now.

Last month, I beseeched you to make a tax-deductible donation to The Progressive. I'm pleased to report that the response has been heartening. We've been receiving not only generous contributions at all levels but also sweet and thoughtful notes of encouragement from many subscribers.

To those of you who have responded already, I can't thank you enough. And if you haven't sent in a tax-deductible gift yet and you can afford to do so, please mail it now so we can end the year on an up note.