Shure makes me prad ta be from Oklahoma!

Its wonderful to see the effects of a free press making even one small dent in our cesspool of a government. Kudos!

I find it entirely plausible that the request to withdraw the nomination came from Payne himself, and wasn't forced upon him by the White House.

Does anyone really believe, after seeing everything this administration has done over the past 5 years, that they'd think a judge's ethics were an issue at all as long as his ideology was in line with the neoconservative agenda?

Harriet Miers was defended against complaints that she was obviously unqualified to sit on the Supreme Court, and then unceremoniously dumped when the Right questioned whether she had a commitment to their ideology that was proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

I think it's fair to think that Payne is simply a judge with no sense of ethics, but at least enough of a sense of shame that he doesn't want his name to be further dragged through the mud by having to go through a confirmation hearing.

Here in Oklahoma, not one word of this appeared in our 'state' newspaper or our television media.

We are kept informed, of course, of the terrible time the liberals give poor George Bush. Freedom and liberty are still on the march in Iraq, too.

Thank God or Al Gore or whomever for the internet.

You say that the judges behavior is illegal because "Both federal law and the Code of Conduct for U.S. judges prohibit judges from sitting on such cases."

Official GOPP platform policy on this issue is "SO WHAT?" NEVER FORGET: To the GOP, a public office is an opportunity to profit.

Stories such as questioning Judge Payne's ethics - that Salon.com has done causes me to tell more people to subscribe to your internet paper. It is a shame that our traditional papers seem to have little effect on the rapacious antics of the GOP - they are either cheerleaders of the right, or shamefully under-reporting on the destruction of our civil liberties, the butchering of our national guard - and the accelerated growth of the permanent underclass. In my state we just put in a three-strikes law!!

Thank you Salon for trying to stem the tide of ignorance, by asking simple questions to power...and reporting it.