What were the talking points for Schumer, Kennedy, and the Democrats? Judge Alito is not answering questions. What was the talking point for tonight's Countdown? Judge Alito is not answering questions. Out of hundreds of queries and responses, Keith Olbermann selected about a half-dozen where Alito could not reply and that became the theme of the first segment:

How many of those [questions] did he answer?... Given all that the nominee didn't say...

Olby also seemed obsessed with ridiculing Arlen Specter's statement that Alito had been asked about 700 questions. KO broke it down by minutes, then divided by the number of questions, carried the four and adjusted the cosine versus the tangent, and decided that it couldn't have been 700. Court TV disagrees with Keith--they are obviously aware that a bunch of short questions can make up for Senator Biden's 13-minute spectaculars.

Another parade of taped NBC reports: New Orleans, Iran, Oprah's fictional nonfiction book choice, and companies that prohibit smoking. Discussing animal books, Keith asked Mo Rocca:

How many dogs have written political books, not including Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter?

(#52!) Through the entire painful give-and-take with Rocca, Olby affected a strange, gruff kind of forced laughter that sounded more like gastric distress than amusement.

In the "worst person" segment, the only entry even vaguely political was a runner-up position for Kathleen Rice, a newly elected District Attorney who hired her sister-in-law as an executive assistant. The novelty here is that the D.A. is a Democrat. Of course, Keith neglected to mention her party affiliation, which would not be known by most viewers.

How did this particular case, a menial offense (if an offense at all) by an unknown DA, make it into even a runner-up slot? Maybe it's a kind of affirmative action move by KO. Toss in an obscure local Democrat nobody's ever heard of, give her a runner-up position, and he's inoculated. "See, I go after Democrats too!" Now he can continue to ignore Howard Dean, Richard Durbin, Al Franken, Randi Rhodes, Harry Belafonte, and all his other soul mates.

The record stands. Still no liberal, no Democrat (not even a little known local politico), gets named "worst". Some things never change.