DEAL

Thank God there are some sane grown-ups in the Senate. I don’t think, as I’ve said, that either side has behaved very admirably in all this. The Dems have to get used to the fact that this administration won the election, that today’s GOP is an essentially religious group and that hard right fundamentalists are going to become judges. I worry about people like Bill Pryor making rulings – but the president picked him, his party supports him, and he’s not incompetent or unqualified. If the Dems want to stop such people becoming judges, they can always try winning a presidential election. Equally, the Republicans have become a sour, ideological bunch, and the complete lack of consultation with the Democrats or indeed even the few sane Republicans left doesn’t help matters. I hope (but don’t expect) that this compromise helps both sides back down. But it is the president who should take most stock. He should nominate to the Supreme Court someone as moderate on his side as Bader Ginsburg and Breyer were for Clinton. Clinton could have picked hard-left nominees. By and large, he didn’t. Bush should not pick an extremist nominee for the Supreme Court; and he shouldn’t nominate Scalia or Thomas to Chief Justice. Give that to O’Connor, who is, in any case, the real compromise-manager on today’s court. In the end, the Republicans would thank him. If the GOP leadership continues to look as extremist as it has done lately, the Republicans are going to lose badly in the near future.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Regarding ‘Me and my virus’ and ‘The changing climate’: The disincentive to getting HIV is that it is still killing people, even people on the medications. My brother tested positive in 1993 and has developed resistance to every HIV medicine, one by one. He now somehow lives a halfway decent life with only a handful of T-cells and each day is a gift. If you can improve your viral loads with two pills a day, that is wonderful. But it doesn’t work that way for every HIV positive person. Each case is different.”