The Sports Guy asks what we're all wondering:

By the way, is anyone else rooting for Ricky Williams to score a TD, just to see whether he'll blow a hit from a mock bong as part of his touchdown dance? I think I would pay $500 to see this happen during a game that Joe Buck was announcing - his head would explode.

(Speaking of Ricky, doesn't his beard look like something that would be grown after somebody has been playing 'Survivor' for five weeks? Does he just live in the wilderness? Does he own a house anymore? Does he shower? Does he sleep at the football stadium? Can somebody follow him around for a week?)

Maureen Dowd, as she is wont to do, commits [what I can only assume to be] the journalistic equivalent of slashing Judy Miller's tires in the parking lot:

I've always liked Judy Miller. I have often wondered what Waugh or Thackeray would have made of the Fourth Estate's Becky Sharp.

The traits she has that drive many reporters at The Times crazy - her tropism toward powerful men, her frantic intensity and her peculiar mixture of hard work and hauteur - have never bothered me. I enjoy operatic types.

Zing!

An interesting profile of Patrick Fitzgerald, which includes several references to his hopeless disorganization. For example:

During his time in New York, Mr. Fitzgerald's hapless bachelor ways became legendary. For months he did not bother to have the gas connected to the stove in his Brooklyn apartment. Once, in a fit of domesticity, he baked two pans of lasagna, recalled Amy E. Millard, a New York colleague. Distracted by work, he left them uneaten in the oven for three months before he discovered them, Ms. Millard said. When he tried to adopt a cat, she remembered, he was turned down because of his work habits and only later acquired a pet when a friend in Florida had to give up her cat and had it flown to him to New York.

Several months without gas: amusing anecdote. Several months without noticing the old lasagna in the oven: bizarre (and perhaps indicative of some sort of olfactory disability). Wouldn't it have started to smell? I'm no microbiologist, but I'm pretty sure that after three months at room temperature, many food products start to spoil.

Colin Powell's former chief of staff lays into the Bush administration:

"I would say that we have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita - and I could go on back," he said. "We haven't done very well on anything like that in a long time."

Mr. Wilkerson suggested that the dysfunction within the administration was so grave that "if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence."

Mr. Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former director of the Marine Corps War College, said that in his years in or close to government, he had seen its national security apparatus twisted in many ways. But what he saw in Mr. Bush's first term "was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberration, bastardizations" and "perturbations."

Such indignation!

Dahlia Lithwick, in a Times op-ed, rips Bush's power-grabbing:

Justice Roberts and Ms. Miers represent a one-two punch for presidential supremacy: Justice Roberts would turn the Supreme Court into a body of nine constitutional plumbers - tinkerers around the margins with no affirmative place on the national stage. And Ms. Miers is a plumber - a perfectly competent lawyer with no national distinction. Her nomination would be an insult to the court if the court's work still mattered. But President Bush doesn't want it to matter.

"Over 40% of the justices..."

You can't swing a legal brief these days without hitting an indignant (not indigent, as I originally typed it) Harriet Miers supporter vehemently shouting the statistic that 40% of all Supreme Court justices have had no prior judicial experience before their appointment to the Court. Bearing in mind the fact that conservatives are often given to misunderstanding simple facts (ho!), I thought I'd take a look at the actual numbers. And what do you know: they're right.

109 people (107 men, 2 women) have served as justices of the Supreme Court since its establishment in 1789. Every one has been a practicing lawyer in their pre-court life, but only 69 of them, or 63%, had prior judicial experience.

Among those appointed in the last...	# with prior judicial experience	% with prior judicial experience
25 years	8 (of 8)	100%
50 years	16 (of 21)	76%
75 years	22 (of 36)	61%
100 years	30 (of 50)	60%
216 years	69 (of 109)	63%

What does it all mean? Couldn't tell you. Without question, it's possible to be an excellent justice without starting your judicial career somewhere else. Those who have done it include Joseph Story, Salmon Chase, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, and - of course - John Marshall. I suppose that if my objection to the Miers nomination was based solely on her lack of judicial experience, I'd now be shamefacedly changing my mind. But there's clearly a difference between "lack of judicial experience" and "lack of expertise." Every one of the forty non-judicially-experienced justices has had a record of accomplishment stretching well above and beyond "president of the Texas Bar."

Miers' status as White House counsel no doubt indicates that she's a fine lawyer. But that serves only as a jumping-off point, not as a qualification in and of itself. And in an administration so clouded by charges of cronyism (which has become quite the little buzzword, hasn't it?), it's even less of a qualification than it might initially seem.

I remain far from convinced that Miers is a good (or even mediocre) choice for the Supreme Court. But I am now convinced that a lack of judicial experience is not necessarily an impediment to Court performance. So way to go, conservatives!

And what of the argument that the Supreme Court is now required to hear cases of such complexity that prior judicial experience is all-but-required, and that this certainty is reflected in the fact that every justice appointed since 1971 has had some prior court experience under his or her belt? It's a fine argument, and it may very well be true. But this post is already several hundred words longer than I expected it to be, and I'm tired of writing it, so let's pretend I never brought it up.

McCain skips the Funniest Celebrity in Washington contest in favor of the $1,000-a-plate dinner in New York, but gets his laughs in anyway:

"[The dais is] like a veritable 'Who's Who' of people soon to be indicted by Eliot Spitzer," he said, referring to the state's hard-charging attorney general.

McCain described the notables in attendance as "the haves, the have-mores, the have-more-than-thats, and finally my good friend Mike Bloomberg."

Rove and Libby "have been advised that they may be in serious legal jeopardy," lawyers say. Sweet.

When in doubt, blame it on the immigrants.

In an interview, [Margaret] Spellings called attention to the improvement in math by fourth graders. She said the less robust increases and outright declines in some reading scores were understandable in part, because the nations schools are assimilating huge numbers of immigrants.

"We have more non-native speakers, there are lots of so-called at-risk, hard-to-educate students, and in spite of that, steady progress is being made," she said. "We're on the right track with No Child Left Behind."

Oh, yeah, we're blazing an admirable trail. Not only are we continually failing to educate huge swaths of our population, but now we're also justifying that failure with the mind-boggling complaint that "educating people is hard." I understand that there's not much else they could say publicly, but I'm disheartened by the fear that they actually believe what they're saying.

Today's Last Call! Shot and Chaser:

SHOT...
"The questionnaire that she filled out is an important questionnaire, and obviously they will address the questions that the senators have in the questionnaire - or as a result of the answers to the questions in the questionnaire." - Bush, at today's presser (WhiteHouse.gov, 10/20/05)

...CHASER
"At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it." -- Principal ("Billy Madison," 1995).

Multimillionaire Judd Gregg gets multimillionairier:

U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg [R-N.H.] is among one of 47 people in last night's Powerball contest to match 5 numbers, but not the Powerball number. The amount he won, rumored to be in the hundreds of thousands, has not been confirmed by his office.

According to Powerball.com, there were actually 49 Match 5 winners, not 47, and each of them won at least $853,492.

Specter and Leahy go "insane":

The Supreme Court nomination of Harriet E. Miers suffered another setback on Wednesday when the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee asked her to resubmit parts of her judicial questionnaire, saying various members had found her responses "inadequate," "insufficient" and "insulting."

They collectively found it "inconceivable" that Ms. Miers would submit such "incoherent" and "incommunicative" answers to their "inquiries," and "intimated" that further "incidence" of "inaccuracy" on her part would result "in" a series of "indictments" leading to her possible "incarceration."