from Slate’s blog review

Crony on the Court?
By David Wallace-Wells
Posted Monday, Oct. 3, 2005, at 11:30 AM PT

Crony on the court?: This morning, President Bush nominated White House counsel Harriet Miers, who has never been a judge, to replace Sandra Day O’Connor. Bloggers’ reaction was quick and biting—and this time, much of the venom came from conservatives.

At the National Review, former Bush speechwriter David Frum sets the tone by calling the nomination “an unforced error” and a missed opportunity to significantly shift the court rightward. Leading conservative Ed Morrissey agrees. “Not only does Harriet Miers not look like the best candidate for the job, she doesn’t even look like the best female candidate for the job,” he writes at Captain’s Quarters.

Volokh Conspiracy legal eagle Orin Kerr is especially flummoxed. “As far as I can tell, she has no particular experience or expertise in any areas of law that the Supreme Court is likely to consider in the next twenty years; she has no history of having thought deeply about the role of judges in a constitutional democracy; and she is a complete unknown among the parts of the DC legal community that will now be considering her candidacy for the Supreme Court.” Many beltway observers are equally dismayed. “It’s possible that with a six-week bar review course, any of us would be more qualified than Harriet Miers to sit on the Supreme Court,” writes Washington Monthly editor Amy Sullivan, a guest at Political Animal. “Bush chose hackery.”

President Bush today announced he will choose his former personal lawyer, Harriet Mier, as his next Supreme Court nominee to replace the redoubtable and balancing Sandra Day O’Conner.

My friend Sharon Astrin nailed the pick. Her logic was, apparently, impeccable (Sharon is often impeccable in other ways). Sharon figured that Ms. Mier is an insider loyalist with few public statements about judicial matters, and like Dick Cheney who was selected as vice president after leading the search committee for a nominee, Ms. Mier was the lead White House appointee to seek out Supreme Court nominees. My own guess was Alberto Gonzalez, the attorney general. I’m rather glad Sharon was right instead of me.

One of the reasons I’m glad is that it appears that this selection will probably “save” Roe v. Wade from being overturned. Sorry, pro-lifers, but not this time.

Ms. Mier is a former corporate lawyer known for being able to keep her darn mouth shut in her Dallas practice before going to the White House with President Bush. Discretion is a big deal in all events, but in this case it means that this nominee won’t have many uncomfortable questions to answer about things she’s said publicly before going before the Judiciary Committee of the Senate. It will be very difficult for anyone to block this nominee as far as I can tell at this point.

In fact, it doesn’t appear that Ms. Mier is an ideologue about much of anything, at least according to the public records. Smart, savvy and hard working, yes. Hard right wing, no.

Sharon said something else about this nominee that I thought was brilliant: “this is Bush’s Ruth Bader Ginsberg”. Give Ms. Astrin credit where credit is due, she made the pick and polished it off with elan.

Sunday’s Washington Post coverage:

By Jim VandeHei and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, October 2, 2005; Page A05

As the CIA leak investigation heads toward its expected conclusion this month, it has become increasingly clear that two of the most powerful men in the Bush administration were more involved in the unmasking of operative Valerie Plame than the White House originally indicated.

With New York Times reporter Judith Miller’s release from jail Thursday and testimony Friday before a federal grand jury, the role of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, came into clearer focus. Libby, a central figure in the probe since its earliest days and the vice president’s main counselor, discussed Plame with at least two reporters but testified that he never mentioned her name or her covert status at the CIA, according to lawyers in the case.

His story is similar to that of Karl Rove, President Bush’s top political adviser. Rove, who was not an initial focus of the investigation, testified that he, too, talked with two reporters about Plame but never supplied her name or CIA role.

Their testimony seems to contradict what the White House was saying a few months after Plame’s CIA job became public.

In October 2003, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters that he personally asked Libby and Rove whether they were involved, “so I could come back to you and say they were not involved.” Asked if that was a categorical denial of their involvement, he said, “That is correct.”

Washington insiders speculate, according to the article, that the prosecutor is contemplating a sticky wicket for the Bush Administration: a charge of criminal conspiracy to “out” covert CIA employee Valerie Plame by a number of White House operatives, mostly centered in the office of the Vice President, the emotional and intellectual engine of the effort to drive the nation into war in Iraq and the originator of the idea that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

For those of you that read the papers, you will know that the top two suspects are Karl Rove, the president’s chief of staff, and L. “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff. The discussions between those two and reporters for the New York Times and Time Magazine (both of whom were jailed for refusing to disclose their sources) have been the focus of the grand jury for several months. The grand jury is over on October 28, and the prosecutor is expected to hand down indictments, if any, within the next few days.

Present and former intelligence officers decry the exposure of Ms. Plame, wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson. Wilson’s refutation of a State of the Union assertion by President Bush that Iraq had sought to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger began the White House effort to discredit him via his connection by marriage to Ms. Plame. It is widely agreed by intelligence analysts that the failure of the Bush White House to punish the exposure of Ms. Plame would be a long-term problem for the nation. Bush, who originally said he would fire anyone involved, now has a “wait and see” attitude based on whether there are criminal charges that stick.

Clearly this administration is capable of anything, including treason, in service of their failed policies.

This article appeared in Sunday’s New York Times

By ROBERT PEAR
Published: October 1, 2005
WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 – Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush’s education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.

In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated “covert propaganda” in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.

The contract with Mr. Williams and the general contours of the public relations campaign had been known for months. The report Friday provided the first definitive ruling on the legality of the activities.

Lawyers from the accountability office, an independent nonpartisan arm of Congress, found that the administration systematically analyzed news articles to see if they carried the message, “The Bush administration/the G.O.P. is committed to education.”

The auditors declared: “We see no use for such information except for partisan political purposes. Engaging in a purely political activity such as this is not a proper use of appropriated funds.”

The report also sharply criticized the Education Department for telling Ketchum Inc., a public relations company, to pay Mr. Williams for newspaper columns and television appearances praising Mr. Bush’s education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act.

If your stomach isn’t churning after reading this, no comment of mine is going to make a difference.