A fantastic woman

One of the WaPo op-ed writers, I forget who, nailed the problem with Harriet Miers: no other president would have nominated her. Without her personal connection to Bush, her nomination is inconceivable, she wouldn’t have been on a list of the top 100 candidates, and no one can argue otherwise. What I’m enjoying is that with all the right-wing opposition, the Bushies may not be able to get away with refusing to release her papers. So that could be fun. The wingers (Bork of all people attacked her today) are in fact taking the line that I did with John Roberts, that the default position with a candidate you don’t know enough about should be rejection. Bush says “when she’s on the bench, people will see a fantastic woman who is honest, open, humble and capable of being a great Supreme Court judge.”

Maureen Dowd and others keep talking about how much Bush likes to surround himself with strong women, but then how do you explain Jenna and Not-Jenna?

Still, for corrupt cronyism you can’t beat Silvio Berlusconi. While he has often sponsored measures that weakened the Italian judicial system to save his own ass, and decriminalized bribery and corruption, now he is pushing a new law through intended to save his own personal lawyer from going to jail for bribing judges to ensure the success of one of Berlusconi’s personal business deals, but which will have the little side effect of striking down half the cases before the highest court, setting free murderers, embezzlers, etc etc.

During his visit to Nicaragua, Zoelick didn’t just threaten to cut off aid if political events there did not go as he liked, but went so far as to warn businesses that if they supported the Sandinistas they would be banned from doing business with the US.