Deregulator: Alive since '85!

Up next ... Harriet Miers should not have been subjected to this. But she showed class and dignity (and a good deal more sense than her boss) by withdrawing. Now, the Bush administration has to show it learned from the debacle. While the president reportedly loves to surprise people, being overly clever here by picking another stealth nominee (or a White House insider who's a cipher to the outside world) would neither mollify his supporters -- nor promote an independent judiciary, which will have an impact on Americans long past 2009. It's just plain sad to see Chuck Schumer and other Democrats blame the Miers withdrawal on the vast right wing conspiracy, or to see Dianne Feinstein (who's sadly becoming more of a party hack as the years drift by) play the sexism card. Miers had few champions, because she clearly was not qualified for the job. It's not her fault; she specialized in the administrative side of law, not the theoretical. Still, it's gonna be fun to watc...

Read all about it In this Reason Online piece, former Tar Heel Jesse Walker notes the migration of zines to public library stacks -- and plugs this humble blog, which began as a zine several millennia ago. The brief history is here . Deregulator was my second stab at publishing. The first, titled The Free Citizen, was a spiffier, tabloid-style rag produced by a handful of libertarians (including me) in the Research Triangle Park circa 1985. We laid it out on a Mac Plus -- which cost several grand back in those days, and featured a whopping 128k of RAM. Since the OS chewed up 99k of the RAM, you had to save everything to a floppy. We spat Microsoft Word copy from a laser printer, used paste-up sheets and photocopies and rubber glue; desktop publishing software was not available to mere mortals in those days. Production costs were microscopic; the newsprint to run 10,000 copies of a 16-page tab ran less than 100 bucks, I think. The plates and ink probably cost more than the paper. And ...

Better Justice My friend and former boss Virginia Postrel formally joins a handful of prominent Bush backers and urges the president to pull the Miers appointment. The group, Americans for Better Justice , is asking people to e-mail and call senators to up the pressure on Bush. It has also produced an ad, set to run on Fox News starting Wednesday, to get out its message. Virginia explains her reasons for enlisting in this diverse group here . Money quote: Unlike some social conservatives, my concerns are not results-oriented. As a matter of policy, I am perfectly happy to have abortion legal, with some restrictions, and actively support gay marriage. If there were any evidence (other than my friend Hugh Hewitt's imaginings) that Harriet Miers shared Richard Epstein's views on affirmative action, I'd give her a pass on that. (Now there' a line of questioning for the Judiciary Committee: Would you agree with Richard Epstein on affirmative action? Does she even know who he...