THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE LIBERATED is up! Don’t confuse that with the Carnival of Liberty, though, even though it’s up, too.

RANDY BARNETT ON HARRIET MIERS:

Harriet Miers is not just the close confidante of the president in her capacity as his staff secretary and then as White House counsel. She also was George W. Bush’s personal lawyer. Apart from nominating his brother or former business partner, it is hard to see how the president could have selected someone who fit Hamilton’s description any more closely. Imagine the reaction of Republicans if President Clinton had nominated Deputy White House Counsel Cheryl Mills, who had ably represented him during his impeachment proceedings, to the Supreme Court. How about Bernie Nussbaum? . . .

While the Senate once successfully resisted President Lyndon Johnson’s attempt to nominate his own highly able crony, Abe Fortas, to be chief justice, perhaps the performance of senators during the Roberts nomination reduced the deterrent effect of “advise and consent.” Judiciary Committee Democrats spent half their time making speeches rather than questioning. What questions they did ask were not carefully designed to ferret out the nominee’s judicial philosophy, favoring instead to inquire about his feelings, or whether he would stand up for the “little guy,” or bemoaning his refusal to telegraph how he would rule on particular cases likely to come before the court.

For their part, Senate Republicans were content to parrot the empty line that a judge “should follow the law and not legislate from the bench.” Sit tight and vote seemed to be their approach. By refusing to demand a nominee with a judicial philosophy of adherence to the text of the Constitution–the whole text, including the parts that limit federal and state powers–Republicans did nothing to induce the White House to send up a nominee who was at least as committed to limits on federal power as Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor had been.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus is bragging about his prescience. Advantage: Kaus!

Beldar, meanwhile, is unpersuaded by Barnett. And Patrick Ruffini is making the case for Miers.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Greg Djerejian says he’s flabbergasted: “One of the (very) few things that has impressed me of Bush of late was his willingness to not buy into all the ‘diversity’ hoopla and pick a hugely qualified judge to lead the Supreme Court. He did that, in spades, with John Roberts. But, in one shot, he’s now squandered all that good will. . . . It’s ultimately that she’s just not Supreme Court timber. Harry Reid can cheer-lead her if he wishes, showing major Democrats don’t care a whit about serious constitutional credentials on the bench either, but those of us who are proud of this court must demand better.”

MORE: A bad sign — the first Sen. Hruska reference.

THIS is depressing:

Just when we thought we couldn’t get any fatter, a new study that followed Americans for three decades suggests that over the long haul, 9 out of 10 men and 7 out of 10 women will become overweight.

Even if you are one of the lucky few who made it to middle age without getting fat, don’t congratulate yourself — keep watching that waistline.

Half of the men and women in the study who had made it well into adulthood without a weight problem ultimately became overweight. A third of those women and a quarter of the men became obese.

Jeez.

CHUCK SIMMINS says that Bush is suffering from the second-term yips.

HERE’S A STORY ON RAY KURZWEIL and others at the MIT Emerging Technologies Conference. Meanwhile, Kurzweil’s book seems to be doing rather well. (My review is here).

Meanwhile, here’s an interesting observation on Slashdot.

DAVE KOPEL looks at Harriet Miers on the right to keep and bear arms.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: From the San Antonio Express-News:

When deficit hawks recently called on Congress to trim some pork out of the federal budget to compensate for the extraordinary costs of storm recovery, then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay had a simple retort: If lawmakers want to cut discretionary spending, they have to put their own projects on the chopping block.

Predictably, DeLay’s charge hasn’t led to a profusion of spending sacrifice. Some members of Congress would rather eat their young than eliminate funding for home-district, pork-barrel projects.

Enter some innovative bloggers and an initiative they call Porkbusters. The effort encourages citizens to volunteer projects in their home districts for elimination to help offset storm reconstruction costs. Its Web site includes a database to track politicians’ responses to requests for spending cuts.

Unfortunately, the list of positive responses is depressingly small. Among the Texas delegation, no member has committed to even a single cut.

It would be hard to believe nowhere in Texas is there funding for hiking and biking trails that might not be better allocated, at least temporarily, for rebuilding the infrastructure of the storm-ravaged region.

Charity, after all, begins at home.

I hope that more local media will start asking local delegations about this.

A NEW TOM DELAY INDICTMENT: Conspiracy and money laundering are vague crimes, easy to allege, hard to prove, and often used by overreaching prosecutors who want to put heat on someone. One would hope that Delay’s legal problems would encourage other legislators to tighten up statutes and reduce prosecutorial discretion on such matters, but I suspect that such hopes would be in vain.

UPDATE: Mike Krempasky offers a positive take.

TOM BELL SAYS that the Miers nomination is a Bush head-fake. Reader Mike O’Neal emails with a somewhat similar spin:

The real story here is that they called off the war. The bases on both sides wanted war (they probably wanted a war more than they wanted a victory), but the White House and the Senate did not. The Democrats didn’t want one because they would lose and look bad doing it. Bush didn’t want one because he has a big agenda and not too much time. This way he gets a Justice who is conservative enough for legacy purposes (and will have time to reassure the base before 2006), gets some points from centrists who worry about too much social conservatism (and don’t like political food fights), and gets to move on to tax reform, social security, etc. By year-end things will look better in Iraq, Katrina will have receded, Plame/DeLay/etc. will have blown over, and it may be possible to get some work done. Blogging lawyers and law profs may care intensely about the pure quality of every nominee, but it is not clear that people in general do, or necessarily should. Bush plays a long game; don’t misunderestimate him.

We’ll see, but I’m unpersuaded.

UPDATE: So is Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSBlog: “Even if Democrats aren’t truly gravely concerned, they will see this as an opportunity to damage the President. . . . I have no view on whether she should be confirmed (it’s simply too early to say), but will go out on a limb and predict that she will be rejected by the Senate. In my view, Justice O’Connor will still be sitting on the Court on January 1, 2006.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Larry Solum looks at history. But hey, some people are happy.

Cass Sunstein: “A reasonable conclusion is that this nomination should be viewed with uncertainty and puzzlement. A silver lining: The uncertainty and puzzlement should not divide people along political lines.” Bush: A uniter, not a divider!

SHOCK AND AWE at The Mudville Gazette, via the Associated Press.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF PERSONAL FINANCE is up! And so is the Haveil Havalim!

Plus, here’s the Carnival of Cordite!

FROM THE “YES, IT REALLY IS THE 21ST CENTURY” DEPARTMENT:

The man behind the $10 million X Prize for private spaceflight is joining forces with a venture capitalist who’s also an Indy car backer to establish a NASCAR-like racing league for rocket-powered aircraft.

Is that cool, or what? More here. I was on the National Space Society board with Peter Diamandis back in the 1990s, and we’re both on the Foresight Institute board today, and, well, he’s just the kind of guy to pull this off.

IS THE MIERS NOMINATION ALREADY IN TROUBLE? I discuss, over at GlennReynolds.com.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal (free link) has a roundup of reaction. And, of course, scroll down for more here. And there’s this observation: “Bush’s back-to-back appointments of Roberts and Miers is a clear indication that his goal is at best to merely change the voting pattern of the Court rather than to change the legal culture.”

If you’re looking for the pro-Miers stuff, Hugh Hewitt is undertaking the somewhat lonely task of rounding that up. My concerns are akin to Todd Zywicki’s above: Miers may or may not vote as I’d wish — actually, she’s probably more likely to than Roberts, Thomas, or Scalia if the social-conservatives’ fears bear out — but the appointment seems to me to be a poor one for reasons that go beyond the votes.

IN THE MAIL: Chris Edwards’ Downsizing the Federal Goverment.

It’s certainly timely.

THE HOTLINE has a new blog. There’s lots more Supreme Court stuff, as you might expect.

THE NEW UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LAW FACULTY BLOG is up and running.

TIM LYNCH warns that the most recent Padilla decision deserves a lot more attention:

The federal government has been given a green light to deprive Americans of their rights to due process. No arrest warrants. No trial. No access to the civilian court system. You may not be able to see it on television, but this court decision is the equivalent of a legal hurricane-and it is no exaggeration to say that this is a level 5 storm with respect to its potential havoc for civil liberties.

Federal agents arrested Padilla at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago just after he arrived on a flight from Pakistan. The feds claim that Padilla fought against U.S. troops in Afghanistan, escaped to Pakistan and returned to the United States to perpetrate acts of terrorism for al-Queda. Instead of prosecuting Padilla for treason and other crimes, President Bush declared Padilla an “enemy combatant” and ordered that he be held incommunicado and interrogated by military and intelligence personnel. . . . Does this mean that black helicopters will be coming to the suburbs to take our friends away for questioning? Of course not. Still, even a subtle and selective use of the military to imprison American citizens on American soil ought to concern people regardless of political affiliation.

I agree with Lynch that this deserves a lot more scrutiny. American citizens arrested on American soil are a whole different kettle of fish from unlawful foreign enemy combatants. Most significantly, the risk of political abuses, as I’ve noted before, is much, much higher when it’s American citizens being imprisoned.

BOB KRUMM has thoughts on the NYT’s editorial corrections policy.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS is up!

TOM MAGUIRE HAS THOUGHTS on intellectual honesty. Or, heck, just plain honesty.

JOHN FUND on the G.O.P.’s crisis:

With Rep. Tom DeLay’s forced departure as majority leader, Newt Gingrich says, the Republican Party stands at a crossroads as important as any it has faced since nominating Ronald Reagan for president in 1980. “It must decide if it is going to be a party that fundamentally reforms government or one that merely presides over existing institutions and spends more money,” he says. Which path the GOP now takes may determine not only how much damage it suffers in next year’s elections but also whether it can hold the White House in 2008. . . .

Mr. Hastert and his fellow GOP leaders have skillfully used their narrow majority to win an amazing number of close votes without having to negotiate much with Democrats. But gradually the fear of losing their majority has also begun leading them to behave more and more like the big-spending Democrats they unseated. “Holding the majority used to be viewed as a means to an end–the end being promoting freedom and limited government,” laments Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona. “Now, holding the majority seems to be an end in itself–holding onto power for the sake of holding onto power.” . . .

Michael Continetti, a writer at the Weekly Standard who is writing a book on the modern Republican Party, worries that a decade in political power might have “exhausted conservatism’s fighting spirit, lowered the movement’s intellectual standards and replaced a healthy independence with partisan water-carrying.” That sounds an awful lot like a description of what the last period of one-party rule did to liberals in 1993 and 1994. Back then they ignored the “unseen” political consequences of their actions and thereby convinced the electorate they no longer deserved that power.

Yes, the Congressional Republicans are looking like the 1993 Democrats, which isn’t a good thing for them, or the country. Of course, as Howard Fineman notes, the Democrats have their own problems. Which makes Stephen Green’s plaintive observation all the more piquant: “Just what we need in a time of war: Two abso-frickin’-lutely useless parties to choose from.”

IT’S HARRIET MIERS for Sandra Day O’Connor’s position. (Via a GOP press release).

UPDATE: More here. Perhaps they’ll change my mind, but so far I’m underwhelmed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Mark Daniels: “Another stealth nominee?”

GayPatriot has predictions.

Paul Deignan: “Harriet Miers is many things, but she is not a Constitutional scholar . . . She is an unknown and unproven functionary whose chief virtue is the one virtue that we must reject–a strong tie to a particular chief executive.”

Baseball Crank: “Color me less than thrilled.”

PoliPundit: “Miers is a cipher.”

The ACLJ, however,loves her.

Rich Lowry: “After the Roberts pick conservatives swooned and said Bush doesn’t care about ‘diversity’; it’s only high qualifications that matter to this bold, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may leader, etc., etc. Don’t we have to take all that back now?”

David Frum: “An unforced error. . . . nobody would describe her as one of the outstanding lawyers in the United States.”

MORE: GayPatriot’s predictions are already coming true!

Meanwhile, Thomas Lifson thinks that this is a brilliant sucker-punch thrown at the Democrats. But even if that’s true, that doesn’t make Miers a good pick. In fact, if I really thought that this pick was motivated by such tactical concerns, I’d be appalled, but I think that Lifson is being a bit too clever here. [LATER: Further googling has convinced Lifson that he’s wrong. Good!]

John Hawkins: “George Bush’s decision to appoint Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court is bitterly disappointing.” Not that there’s anything wrong with having supported Al Gore in 1988 . . . .

What troubles the social conservatives is the fear that Miers may not be a social conservative. That doesn’t bother me, of course. But I don’t see what she brings to the table. Granted, you could have said that about other Supreme Court picks who turned out to be great justices. But you could have said that about a lot of other Supreme Court picks who didn’t turn out to be great justices, too.

Meanwhile, this won’t comfort social conservatives, but it doesn’t comfort me, either:

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., had urged the president to consider Miers, according to several officials familiar with Bush’s consultations with Congress.

Hmm. (Via Jon Henke, who rounds up lots of other interesting stuff). More on Reid and Miers here.

AnkleBitingPundits (formerly CrushKerry.com): “Ugh. This is what we fought for?”

Bush may have managed a Perfect Storm here. Democrats will still want to beat him on Miers, because they always want to beat him. Republicans may be happy to see her go down, too. So who, exactly, is going to get her confirmed? Harry Reid?

STILL MORE: Hugh Hewitt: “It is a solid, B+ pick.. . . The president is a poker player in a long game. He’s decided to take a sure win with a good sized pot. I trust him. So should his supporters.”

The Anchoress thinks it’s rope-a-dope.

Social conservative Professor Bainbridge is deeply unhappy with Miers. Does that mean I should be happy?

Ed Morrissey: “I find this pick mystifying.”

Meanwhile, the GOP just sent out this collection of endorsements — and number 3 is Harry Reid. I smell some sort of a deal.

EVEN MORE: Jeff Goldstein wonders why Miers is friendly to the International Criminal Court. ” I wouldn’t be surprised if she ends up withdrawing, so intense is the conservative pressure likely to become.”

Joe Gandelman has much more.

Michelle Malkin thinks Bush is “stuck on stupid.”