The Carpetbagger Report has a good one.

From the state that brought you Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Robert Prosser:

When the collector of the phones, Robert Prosser, died

in 2003 at the age of 81, Ms. Rongstad, his niece, and her three

siblings inherited the unusual collection -- and a problem: what to do

with it.

Around this town of 1,089 people, the heirs now own a

half-dozen other buildings, including a gymnasium, full of similar

heaps of mixed-vintage phones -- more than 750,000 in all.

Now I am not saying that collecting phones is tantamount to eating people. All I'm saying is that Wisconsin breeds crazy people.

The following words were made up by The Simpsons:

• Avoision
• Blurst (Mr. Burns: "'It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?' You stupid monkey!'")
• Chocotastic
• Craptacular
• Dumbening
• Embiggen ("A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man")
• Forfty ("Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forfty percent of all people know that.")
• Jebus
• Jerkass
• Jerkface
• Ovulicious
• Redorkulated (to have become dorky again)
• Sacrilicious
• Scientician
• Scotchtoberfest
• Skittlebrau
  (Homer: "I'm feelin' low, Apu. You got any of that beer that has candy floating in it, you know, Skittlebrau?"
  

  
  

  Apu: "Such a product does not exist, sir! You must have dreamed it."
  

  
  

  Homer: "Oh. Well then just gimme a six-pack and a couple of bags of Skittles.")

• Snacktacular (an acceptable atomic weight for the element 'Bolonium')
• Superliminal (a method of communication using grossly direct persuasion)
• Unblowuppable
• Unpossible
• Yoink!

If you saw me laughing uncontrollably in torts today, this list is why.

Funny stuff.

Wow:

An Oregon woman whose doctor convinced

her that he could cure her lower back pain by having sex with

her is suing him and his medical clinic for $4 million,

according to legal documents obtained on Monday.

The doctor, Randall Smith, who was 50 at the time, was

stripped of his license and sent to jail for 60 days last year

for charging the state's Oregon Health Plan $5,000 for his

45-minute "treatments" involving the woman.

Nailing his patient and charging the state for his trouble! What a country.

BuffaloWings&Vodka sees the Rovian side of the nomination (a la the failed Kerik nomination?):

Well, if by nomination you mean the naming of a woefully underqualified candidate who will never be confirmed but will achieve the White House goal of making Senate Democrats look like total cockknockers on national TV, eventually making me beg for the seasoned, experienced Alberto Gonzales to just put an end to it all, then, yeah.

Ann Althouse makes a comment that seems meant to deflate (or initiate?) an attack on Miers' sexuality:

Never married? Interesting. Is anyone going to say anything about that?

Umm, you just did, I think. Althouse goes on...

Thinks Bush is the most brilliant man she had ever met? Well, that'sjust weird. Or, really, sycophantic.

David Frum is frustrated:

The Miers nomination, though, is an unforced error. Unlike theRoberts's nomination, which confirmed the previous balance on theCourt, the O'Connor resignation offered an opportunity to change thebalance.

AnalPhilosopher reflects on, and rejects, the outrage of certain elements of conservatism (see Frum, above):

It occurs to me that many conservatives, especially those with academic credentials, have bought into the Dworkinianidea that the Supreme Court is made up of Herculean philosopher-kingswhose task is to make the law the best it can be by some external moralstandard. I reject this conception of judging, as should anyright-thinking person. The law is not a plaything, to be manipulated byideologues. It has a life, a logic, and an integrity of its own thatmust be respected.

Tom Goldstein makes a prediction:

Even if Democrats aren't truly gravely concerned, they will see this asan opportunity to damage the President. The themes of the oppositionwill be cronyism and inexperience. Democratic questioning at thehearings will be an onslaught of questions about federal constitutionallaw that Miers in all likelihood won't want to, or won't be able to(because her jobs haven't called on her to study the issues), answer. Ihave no view on whether she should be confirmed (it's simply too earlyto say), but will go out on a limb and predict that she will berejected by the Senate. In my view, Justice O'Connor will still besitting on the Court on January 1, 2006.

Cass Sunstein is confused:

A reasonable conclusion is that this nomination should be viewed withuncertainty and puzzlement. A silver lining: The uncertainty andpuzzlement should not divide people along political lines.

And Larry Solum points to Federalist No. 76. In relevant portion (emphasis Larry's):

The possibility of rejection would be astrong motive to care in proposing. The danger to [the President's] own reputation,and, in the case of an elective magistrate, to his political existence,from betraying a spirit of favoritism, or an unbecoming pursuit ofpopularity, to the observation of a body whose opinion would have greatweight in forming that of the public, could not fail to operate as abarrier to the one and to the other. He would be both ashamed and afraidto bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations,candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the sameState to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way orother personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.

Ezra Klien thinks Bush is half a nihilist:

Bush reacted as most small men in big boots do and surroundedhimself with folks even less qualified than he. With his Spidey Sensetingling, Bush staffed his administration with a who's who of neoconsgrateful to come in from the cold and Texan loyalists eager to erasetheir regional insecurity through national actions. Classicspokes-and-wheel formation -- the connections and loyalty all flowedtowards Bush, not the party or each other.

What was different about this case was that allmanner of conservatives got shafted. From the theocrats to thelibertarians to, eventually, the neocons, the only group who found Busha reliable genie were the plutocrats, and they're more self-interestedRockefeller types than ideologues. But that's because Bush was neverinto ideology, he was into power, into winning. That's what happenswhen you pick a cipher. In politics, if you're not driven by ideology,you're driven by drive. And with that sort of self-referentialmotivation schematic undergirding the candidate, better bet he's nomore wedded to your agenda than his.

And Kevin Drum suspects that Bush is too tired to fight, so he's gambling that Miers won't go all limp on him when she gets on the bench:

Here's my guess: if he had picked a highly qualified moderate with along paper trail, it would have been way too obvious that he really wasbacking down from a fight. Conversely, by nominating Miers, he's goteveryone convinced that he's just picking a friend. Sure, the base istemporarily pissed that he's let them down, but before long they'llconvince themselves that (a) it's just cronyism and (b) she's probablypretty conservative after all (especially after Dick Cheney has spentenough time peddling her conservative cred to Limbaugh and Hannity).

It's never too early to start talking about the playoffs! Joking, only joking -- but it's nice to be undefeated. It's a little worrisome that in 180 minutes of football we've only been able to score 43 points, but our defense is 'sick with it,' as they say. Do note  that it was a Terp who kicked the winning field goal in overtime. And as long as we're talking about the Terps, I might as well mention that Maryland beat Virginia yesterday, defying all the nay-sayers (save Champ) in Matt Schuh's comment section. Nice pick, Champ.

I've experienced a noticeable bump in traffic since Prof. Landsman mentioned me at orientation, so to those of you who've been checking out the site for the past month, thanks for stopping by.

I apologize for nothing. Nobody puts a gun to your head and demands that you find out what I've been reading/thinking about since you last checked. You take the risk that GH will suck or, worse than that, that it hasn't been updated each time you visit. Hopefully things will improve and/or I will figure out how to incorporate my newly begun legal education into the posts.

In the meantime here's an example of what courts in this country should never, ever, be allowed to do.

According to the storyline that drives many advocacy groups andDemocratic activists - a storyline often reflected in comments on thisblog - we are up against a sharply partisan, radically conservative,take-no-prisoners Republican party. They have beaten us twice byenergizing their base with red meat rhetoric and single-minded devotionand discipline to their agenda. In order to beat them, it is necessaryfor Democrats to get some backbone, give as good as they get, brook nocompromise, drive out Democrats who are interested in "appeasing" theright wing, and enforce a more clearly progressive agenda. The country,finally knowing what we stand for and seeing a sharp contrast, willrally to our side and thereby usher in a new progressive era.

I think this perspective misreads the American people. Fromtraveling throughout Illinois and more recently around the country, Ican tell you that Americans are suspicious of labels and suspicious ofjargon. They don't think George Bush is mean-spirited or prejudiced,but have become aware that his administration is irresponsible andoften incompetent. They don't think that corporations are inherentlyevil (a lot of them work in corporations), but they recognize that bigbusiness, unchecked, can fix the game to the detriment of workingpeople and small entrepreneurs. They don't think America is animperialist brute, but are angry that the case to invade Iraq wasexaggerated, are worried that we have unnecessarily alienated existingand potential allies around the world, and are ashamed by events likethose at Abu Ghraib which violate our ideals as a country.

It's this non-ideological lens through which much of the countryviewed Judge Roberts' confirmation hearings. A majority of folks,including a number of Democrats and Independents, don't think that JohnRoberts is an ideologue bent on overturning every vestige of civilrights and civil liberties protections in our possession. Instead, theyhave good reason to believe he is a conservative judge who is (like itor not) within the mainstream of American jurisprudence, a judgeappointed by a conservative president who could have done much worse(and probably, I fear, may do worse with the next nominee). While theyhope Roberts doesn't swing the court too sharply to the right, amajority of Americans think that the President should probably get thebenefit of the doubt on a clearly qualified nominee.

A plausible argument can be made that too much is at stake here andnow, in terms of privacy issues, civil rights, and civil liberties, togive John Roberts the benefit of the doubt. That certainly was theoperating assumption of the advocacy groups involved in the nominationbattle.

I shared enough of these concerns that I voted against Roberts onthe floor this morning. But short of mounting an all-out filibuster --a quixotic fight I would not have supported; a fight I believeDemocrats would have lost both in the Senate and in the court of publicopinion; a fight that would have been difficult for Democratic senatorsdefending seats in states like North Dakota and Nebraska that areessential for Democrats to hold if we hope to recapture the majority;and a fight that would have effectively signaled an unwillingness onthe part of Democrats to confirm any Bush nominee, an unwillingnesswhich I believe would have set a dangerous precedent for futureadministrations -- blocking Roberts was not a realistic option.

In such circumstances, attacks on Pat Leahy, Russ Feingold and theother Democrats who, after careful consideration, voted for Robertsmake no sense. Russ Feingold, the only Democrat to vote not onlyagainst war in Iraq but also against the Patriot Act, doesn't becomecomplicit in the erosion of civil liberties simply because he choosesto abide by a deeply held and legitimate view that a President, havingwon a popular election, is entitled to some benefit of the doubt whenit comes to judicial appointments. Like it or not, that view has prettystrong support in the Constitution's design.

Exactly how I feel about it.