New nominee

The conservatives seem to be up in arms about the nomination- she doesn't seem to represent what they want. Of course, that could just be because she has no record to go on.

Agreed about patronage, though.

There was a pretty long article on past Supreme Court nominations in the Atlantic Monthly I believe.

Basic upshot: kind of hard to predict how an appointee-for-life is going to act. Author seemed to think that there were too many non-lawyer former judges, and that the court was turning into a sort of bizarre thought experiment with tortured, non-rational opinions.

The buzz seems to be all over the map on Miers - several reports seem to think that Bush just caved in the face of all of the recent craziness on a relatively non-controversial candidate (apparently she actually donated to Gore in '88, among other oddities).

Personally, I've never heard of her before, I am glad she is at least female, and of course I have my usual skepticism over anything this administration does.

I'd argue that while she may have a conservative bent, I'm not sure she's got quite the political apointee / patronage appointment problems that "Good 'ol Brownie" had.

I just wish we were going into a presidential election in a month. :P

I think she's probably the fat-cat-conservative candidate rather than the Jesus-freak conservative candidate. The big business one.

Republican "values voters" are like anti-war Democrats now; kicked around by their representatives because who else are you gonna vote for? God bless the Germans for giving us such a good word.