The Washington Times reports this morning:

Nearly half of Senate Republicans say they remain unconvinced that Harriet Miers is worthy of being confirmed to the Supreme Court, according to a survey conducted by The Washington Times.

What’s troubling for President Bush, however, is that 27 Republican senators — almost half of his party’s members in the chamber — have publicly expressed specific doubts about Miss Miers or said they must withhold any support whatsoever for her nomination until after the hearings.

On October 5th, www.politicalwire.com wrote: “The bipartisan group of 14 senators that averted a showdown over President Bush’s judicial nominees earlier this year is set to meet today to discuss the nomination of White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court,” The Fix reports.”The meeting may be the first step in a return to prominence for the group… The group met twice during the Roberts confirmation process, but the stakes in the Miers nomination are seen as higher since she may tip the court’s balance on key issues like abortion.”Of the 14, four face potentially tight re-election bids in 2006: Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), Sen. Mike DeWine (R-OH) and Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI).

The Gang of Fourteen aside, things appear not be be going swimmingly for President Bush and his nomination of Harriet Miers. I tend to be more the hardliner: I was spoiling for a fight (see my 10-06 post) and still find myself perplexed — why won’t President Bush fight for what the Left considers a true Non-Mainstream (NMS) candidate? There are many excellent candidates and I would tend towards Janice Rogers Brown, Michael Luttig, Michael McConnell or Edith Jones. It is possible that Bush thinks, if push came to shove, that the so-called Nuclear Option would have its fuse pulled at the last second by a lack of a 51 majority. On the other hand, if Bush wavers then senators waver.

And I still believe Bush rewards loyalty, and realizes he knows Miers better than other potential candidates. To him, she is a known quantity.

It’s not a given that Miers will be confirmed. More pundits are speculating about the possibility of Miers deciding to pull herself from the process. The greatest criticism has come from within the GOP, not from the Dems. Some think it’s a sign of the GOP falling apart; I submit it’s a sign of disappointment in a second term president’s failing to take full opportunity of, quite literally, a once in a lifetime chance to place true believers in the US Constitution on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Simple as that.

I can’t help but recall, when I think of all the ridiculous things that have occurred and are occurring in New Orleans at the hand of Hurricane Katrina, a particular scene from a wonderful movie (how I absolutely love British humour!), Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Witness the Tale of Sir Launcelot, as the Father speaks to his son, Herbert:

FATHER: “Listen, lad. I’ve built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. The king said I was daft to build a castle in a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show ’em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. An’ that’s what your gonna get, lad — the strongest castle in these islands.”

The media would have you believe that Nero (Bush) fiddled whilst Rome burned. Actually, Mayor Ray Nagin fiddled whilst his city tanked. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco actively decided not to declare an emergency for days. Nagin, in the real world, couldn’t manage his way up into any average Walmart or Hooters. FEMA operates according to strict guidelines. As does the National Guard. You have to ASK for them. That’s how it operates.

Sure, fine, President Bush in the guise of FEMA made some mitsakes.

But he didn’t let acres of perfectly valuable yellow buses languish, unused and ignored, flooded and filled with the excrement of septic waters whilst the poorest of the poor cried for help — his people, in his city. And oh — you did know that Mayor Nagin has a new house — in the city of Dallas? Huh. Imagine that.

President Bush, however, in another ridiculous effort to throw money at a problem and ignore reality and societal issues, said essentially that he’ll do whatever it takes to resurrect New Orleans.

Oh come on, folks. Do we learn absolutely nothing from history? It fell down already. It burned, sank into the swamp, got rebuilt, and then sank into the swamp once again.

Billions and billions of dollars. And like a good American, I contributed absolutely nothing to Hurricane Katrina relief funds. I should have? To essentially the most corrupt state, in a corrupt town, with a corrupt mayor and a corrupt police force? Please. You wound me.

Perhaps it’s actually time to evaluate our actions and, say, move New Orleans another 10 or 20 miles north of its current location. Or at least to something minimally resembling what’s known as Higher Ground.

Mayor Nagin invited people to come back into the city when it still had no infrastructure. No hospitals, no real sewer, power, phone lines, no guaranteed emergency response system. Again — how stupid can you be? As Gen. Honore said: “Don’t get stuck on stupid.” And Nagin is, once more, stuck on stupid.

Check this out: (AP) NEW ORLEANS Mayor C. Ray Nagin hopes to attract tourists and their cash back to his ravaged city with an “out-of-the-box” plan to install Las Vegas-style gambling in the city’s biggest hotels.

Don’t even get me started on the Bush spending trends. I’ll address that another time, when my BP isn’t 210/190.

And then there’s terrorism — and New York, and the Oklahoma suicide bomber, and Al Queda threats, the Asia earthquake,

How do we ever stay sane?

But wait; there’s more. . .

In a morning radio commercial on my local station, KTKZ 1380 in Sacramento, the Blogfather Hugh Hewitt spoke of the Harriet Miers nomination and referenced the Beyond the News website, admonishing listeners that “special interests” are attempting to derail President Bush’s choice.

I had no idea I was a “special interest.” I thought I was just a little fat guy posting on a blog from time to time. Now I’ve been kicked UP into the special interest category. For about 1.35 seconds I was flattered. Then I was upset.

Let me be blunt: I’m no “special interest.” Nor am I an apologist or a shill for the Republican Party, though that is my affiliation. I am an individual who gets to make a choice, listen to and read information on issues, and come to a conclusion. I also, when I so choose, reserve the right to change my mind and thus my opinion on an issue.

So it is with Harriet Miers. I am very happy for her that she is an evangelical Christian. I’m glad she purports to have a pro-life stance, good for her. The charge of “cronyism” – yeah, okay, I can go with that to a limited degree. We all are more “comfortable” with those we know as opposed to those we don’t; that’s how humans are Hard Wired.

I think I can go with the Bush “loyalty factor” to an even greater degree than cronyism. History has proven that President Bush places loyalty on a very high pedestal and tends to surround himself with those fitting the category. This is good and bad: the devil you know vs. the devil you don’t, so to speak. It also locks your mind from dissenting opinions and tends to limit options. On the other hand, given the media and the left wing, it is at least understandable (though not desirable) that Bush has apparently surrounded himself with a fleet of “Yes Men & Women” and taken a bit of a bunker mentality.

This still, in my estimation, doesn’t make his choice the best of those available. Nor is it disrespectful to suggest that the president hasn’t made the finest selection, nor is it heresy to write or suggest, as did George Will, that it might not be the end of civilization if Harriet Miers is not confirmed. Loyalty is all well and good; cronyism is not necessarily wrong on its face if it equates to familiarity, comfort level, workability and a known quantity.

Loyalty to me, however, does not mean a total lack of dissent, discussion, issue exposure and examination and, finally, opinions. It is not disloyal or disrespectful to suggest that there exists a better solution to a problem or that a choice, selection or answer may not be the best available.

So no, I’m not in total disagreement with George Will. The earth will not stop rotating on its axis if Harriet Miers is not confirmed. It will simply mean President Bush must make another selection.

I wouldn’t mind Janice Rogers Brown as a nominee if for no other reason (how shallow of me!) than to expose the tacitly condoned racism of the Democratic Party. Put JRB front and center and let Senator Charles Schumer, Ted Kennedy and Diane Feinstein rake an educated and erudite conservative black woman over the coals in public, on television.

No Hugh, I’m no special interest. I’m just a little fat guy with an opinion. BABAGOI.

What a body blow!

As I posted yesterday, it would soon be known that SCOTUS nominee Harriet Ellan Miers, 60, is an evangelical Christian. When the MSM actually clued into this fact, I posited a media explosion. It only took 24 hours, but the Big MSM stories of wide-eyed cheek-slapping are here (and MSM wonders why it’s hemorrhaging readers like a New Orleans levee pump).

The New York Times and the Washington Post both are jolted, jolted I tell you, to discover Miers may actually have faith. Zounds! Let’s see: President Bush selected her, and she apparently has religious beliefs. Huh. D’ya think?

I am still, however, unconvinced that she is the finest candidate for the job. I’m thinking Janice Rogers Brown (as she actually has the gall to be a lone dissenter on the California Supreme Court! — this is a bad thing?); Michael McConnell; Michael Luttig.

And oh: Harry Reid likes Miers.

Heavy sigh.

There I was. Fat and happy, upstairs, typing, minding my own business. I started to access my e-mail and then boom. It happened. I never thought it would happen to me. It always happened to someone else. Yeah, right. I know better now.

I have a custom-built computer. It’s got a zippy mo’board, zippy processor, clear case with cool multi-colored lights winking inside (looks spiff at night!), a flatscreen, an 80-gig hard drive and a gig of ram — acquired when a gig of ram was bordering on apostasy (You have a gig of ram??!!? HERETIC!) As an aside, these days a gig of ram and $5.75 will get you a fluffy Overeducated White Person (OWP) coffee.

And then it happened. The mail wouldn’t open and the whole thing locked up tighter than a B-1B bomb bay. From there it went into one of those impossible circadian loops where it said “Hit F1 to continue” and, natch, when you hit F1 the entire confuser would re-boot back to the Dreaded F1 screen once more. I was actually smart enough to realize I had a problem.

So I pulled out, extracted, removed, unscrewed, unplugged and detached roughly 2,439 wires of every design and color, thick and thin from the rear of the box, tagging none of them because I do, in fact, Love A Mystery. Trudging downstairs I felt somehow. . .betrayed.

When I arrived at my computer store, I described the horrible cycle of events and, heck, while I was at it, asked them to upgrade the beast to USB 2.0. Shoot, its entrails would already likely be draped all over someone’s test bench anyway.

Was it a dead processor? Tanked mo’board? Nasty virus? No sir, no ma’am; failed hard drive. As in dead dead dead.

Well, I pick up my confuser this Friday — to be $647.30 lighter in the shorts than when I was issued from my house at the beginning of the week. And after doing some research I realized: know what? I think I got off light. I checked the net and it looks like what ranked in the 3-digit category could have moved into the mid 4-digit category. Like, oh, $4,000 or so. Like from a digital recovery service.

What did I lose, you ask? Well, that would be every digital photo I’ve taken in the past 5 years — about 50 gigs worth from a 5.1 mp camera (Sony DSC-707 — great camera!). Vacation photos, family photos, landscapes, nature shots and, oh, some obligatory train shots (those who know me will be shocked to read of this). As well as a Great American Novel or three. And my valued copy of Elf Bowling.

But Chris at Sundance Computers was a peach and spent the next week, day and night, in the cold, in the snow, in the driving rain, extracting information byte by bloody byte. This is no lie: he actually had to toss the hard drive into the freezer in order to keep working on info extraction. He was able to resurrect most, if not all, of the photos I wanted. And for less than $4,000. Of course, I won’t be able to buy shoes for my pregnant cat. But she’ll get over it.

So: let that be a lesson to YOU! Hard drive failure: who, me? I’d dodged the bullet for years but now I can tell you: back up your stuff, Jack. Buy one’a them new fangled external drives. Heck, burn a buttload of CDs if you have to.

Hey; why did I title this entry “Let That Be A Lesson To You (Part One)”?

Because I know, some day, there will be a Part Two.