Was the Miers nomination legit from the beginning?

Recall that after the Bork debacle Reagan nominated a guy named Ginzberg(sp?), a non-entity about as qualified as Miers. When that started to become controversial also, lo and behold it was discoverd that the guy had smoked pot as a college law professor and the nomination was withdrawn. Reagan then selected a moderate, Arthur Kennedy. Everyone was so tired of the fighting by then he was quickly confirmed.

Or was it more cynical than that. Did Rove, er, Bush, select Miers for the same reason that Thomas was selected: to be a clone of Scalia? Did they intend to use the Br'er Rabbit ploy, with the Right making play acting objections hoping that that the left would figure anyone the Right hated that much can't be all bad, but it backfired? Was the Right maybe not able to decipher the secret handshakes, body language and code words, or perhaps too distrustful?

Is it possible for O'Connor to rescind her resignation? She had made it effective as of confirmation of her successor.

Can't think of anything that would please me more, or upset the Bushies.

rosalie wonders: "Also, as much as I strongly reacted to these [new pictures], I do wonder why we are seeing pictures which are 3 years old. When people see them, we react to them as if they are fresh and new."

True, but that is the sole fault of the military, which tried to prevent what was inevitable. Now it has to take its lumps again, just as the horror of the original pictures was beginning to subside. These pictures would have added little to the effect of the original disclosures if released then.

Joe's absolutely right on about this. If the Democrats cannot regain control of Congress on this one issue alone, they don't deserve to win ever.

But you can bet the ranch the pharmas are reading the tealeaves, and doing everything possible to curry favor with incumbent Democrats and all those likely to be freshmen next session.

Will they be like those challengers who campaigned on term limits, and once successful refused to honor their pledges to serve a limited number of terms -- because they had to continue ther work to make term limits a legal requirement.

The infamous Stanford Experiment of 1971 should have taught us: People put in control of others will inevitably abuse their subjects, unless prevented from doing so by higher authorities.

In that experiment, ordinary people volunteered to play either guards or prisoners, and were assigned to either role by chance. The abuse got so bad, particularly on the night shifts when there was little supervision, that the experiment had to be called off.

I had a personal experience with this syndrome long before 1971. After basic training at Fort Dix in 1953 I was assigned to the MP detachment there as a prison guard. There had been a major scandal involving prisoner abuse, and a new provost marshall arrived about the same time I did, with orders to clean up the situation. He did, virtually overnight; the abuse stopped once the guards realized it would not be tolerated. I witnessed no abuse during the year I was there, but I did hear some real horror stories from those who were there before me.

The prisoners were not dangerous criminals or unlawful combatants; for the most part they were young draftees in basic training having difficulty adjusting to military life. The guards were not naturally mean people either, and could easily have been on the other side. But when given the opportunity their baser instincts took over. I would probably have joined in had I been assigned there earlier, as would most of the prisoners if the situation had been reversed.

The situation had festered for years, despite it being common knowledge within the training batallions. I suspect the leadership there tacitly encouraged the mistreatment, to sapread fear in the other trainees through word of mouth. That is also why dictators like Saddam Hussein tolerate and encourage such abuse.

As with Abu Ghraib, the Fort Dix abuse didn't stop until it finally became public, most likely after the son of a prominent individual got abused.

The point is that prisoner or detainee abuse, in military or civilian prisons, will not happen unless the supervising authorities take positive action to prevent it; it is dereliction of duty at best if they don't. And those supervizing authorities extend to the very top of the chain of command.

In "One of Life's Great Mysteries, cross1242 writes: "I read somewhere that Medicare's new prescription plan will cost $1.2 billion (with a "B") unlike the official projection at the time it passed of no more than $300 million (and a silenced analyst's projection of $600 million)."

In only cross were right. The latest estimate is indeed a fourfould increase over the originallowball estimate, but cross is off by a factor of 1,000; the original estimate was $300 billion (with a "b") over ten years, and the silenced analyst's projection was for $600 billion. The latest estimate is $1.2 trillion (with a "tr"), or $1,200 billion over ten years. That's $100 billion a year, about the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars -- so far. As Everett Dirksen famously put it, pretty soon we'll be talking about real money.

I'm sure I won't be the only one to point out this discrepancy.

cross is absolutely right in the rest of his letter though. There is indeed something enormously wrong. This law was written by and for the pharmas and insurance companies, and they're the only ones profiting from it. They and the congressional members they've paid off.