So if you think John Roberts is a lightweight who came out of nowhere, how do you like Harriet Miers? Not only does she have no experience as a judge, she doesn’t even have any significant experience in court, but the guy who thinks he’s President told us with a straight face that she’s the best nominee he could find. Maybe that’s true. Maybe there’s not a serious jurist in the country who wants to take the best judicial job in the country, if it comes at the invitation of Gee Dub.

Actually, this is not the first time a President ever appointed his personal lawyer to the high court. LBJ sent his personal mouthpiece, Abe Fortas, up to the big bench, but he at least had a little courtroom and judicial experience. Fortas ended up resigning from the court behind a financial scandal which was small by today’s standards. I read one piece which said that Harry Truman appointed four poker playing companions to the Court and, "They were a mediocre lot." Every president seems to view Supreme Court appointments a little differently.

Bush claims, out of one side of his mouth, that there are no litmus tests, but at the same time he tells us that he’s looking for people who reflect his judicial philosophy. It’s a little hard to imagine that Dub has a "judicial philosophy," but if Miers has one, few people would know it, since she has no judicial record by which anyone could measure it. We do know that she belongs to one of those born-again, evangelical Protestant churches which clearly turns her red in the big litmus test on abortion. Miers has been Dub’s lawyer for about 20 years, but he told us, again with a straight face, on Tuesday that he didn’t know her opinion on Roe vs. Wade. If you believe that, I have some weapons of mass destruction you might be interested in buying.

Curiously, the Democrats, the so-called liberals, haven’t even come out of the gate on Miers and Dub already is fending off the skepticism of his conservative constituency. Those folks don’t think Miers and Roberts have ENOUGH right wing credentials. In other words, those God-fearing, patriotic, born again Protestants are deathly afraid one of these people might actually vote in favor of something like free speech, gay marriage or the right to abort a pregnancy.

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I thought Dub’s press conference on Tuesday showed us a guy who’s lost a lot of political swagger. The answers he gave and even the questions he was asked showed that he’s not the horse he once thought he was. Someone even had the hair to ask him, "Are you still a conservative?" and if he’d been sitting, he looked like he’d have fallen off his chair. In discussing the failure of his proposals for Social Security reform, he didn’t talk about staying the course, he said, "I did make some progress convincing the people there is a problem." Some of the conspiracy mongers used to blow smoke about how the Bush gang was set to concoct one or more crises as an excuse to retain power beyond the two-term limit. What we saw on Tuesday was a guy who’s winding down. His financial goals are close to being accomplished. He’s no longer obligated to tell anyone about any more noble goals. When Bush first stepped into the national spotlight, he couldn’t lie without that little smirk. He’s lost the smirk, but he still can lie. He no longer has any need, however, to lie that he’s committed to peace in the world.

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I wonder if Tom Delay’s little problem with a grand jury in Texas contributes to the Bushwhacker’s more humble demeanor. Even the pious born-again, Bill Frist, whom many regard as Dub’s anointed successor, has a little financial ethics problem looming in his future, and then there’s the matter of a couple of influential people in the Bush administration being up to their eyeballs in what the press has begun to call "Plamegate."

Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, finally admitted that he was the source whose anonymity kept New York Times reporter Judith Miller in jail since July 6th, and she got out last Friday. I have to admit I don’t understand this story. First of all, Miller never published anything that could be attributed to Libby, but she’s said to have a long-term relationship with him as a news source. If so, why would he let her sit in jail for nearly three months over a story she never wrote? Libby says his staff gave her the go-ahead from the beginning to testify about their conversations, but she was holding out for his personal contact which she didn’t receive for 85 days. I’m not sure Miller is standing entirely on journalistic ethics, here, but I’m guessing she knows something that would have been more damaging to the Bush gang three months ago than it will be now.

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I enjoyed the way the GV Union played the Tom Delay story alongside our local congressman’s reaction to it. The two greatest names in Congress, side by side: Do little and delay. This is from a website called FOCUS. Eugene Robinson asks, "What’s the difference between the Republican Party then and now? Richard Nixon was the president who established the Environmental Protection Agency. Tom Delay is the congressman who called it a ‘latter-day Gestapo.’"

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Great headline, top of the front page in last Saturday’s Union: "Too much pot? Call the cops." I can think of several different things that might mean, but nothing that occurred to me was in the story which followed. The story was that if you’re growing weed with a medical recommendation, and you’re not sure how much you’re allowed to grow, you should call the cops and let them take any excess off your hands. What it didn’t say was that they might also take you off to Wayne’s World.

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