The Cake Editrix has a longish post about buying a coffeemaker and you should listen because she’s a former barrista.

This is like having Xaviera Hollander give you lessons on sex. Only with coffee. And without the Eau de Guccioni. Okay, it’s nothing like Xaviera Hollander, but it is very cool to have someone who actually understands coffee give a tutorial about coffeemakers.

If you’re too lazy to read it all, I’ll give you the condensed version:

900W/120V/60H

Mr. Coffee FTX29

But really, shame on you. You should be thanking Kathy. She’s forgotten more about coffee than you or I will ever know.

Wow. Ryan Lizza notes that “The counsel to the president of the United States wasn’t licensed to practice law in D.C.”

As usual, I’m months late, but this post on the economics of love and infidelity is pretty excellent. As is the blog Liberty Belles.

This week, Mike Russell does Comics Fest.

Patterico has a quote from Miers at a 1992 ABA meeting, where Miers explained why she understood why abortion rights’ advocates were so vehement”:

When you understand, as I do, that the choice issue is inextricably entwined with the debate of total freedom for women, for empowerment, you fully understand the depth of caring and emotion which accompany the efforts like those in support of this resolution.

Friends whom I trust about nearly everything have tried to convince me to join Costco–and I’m just about convinced.

Yet still, there’s a touch of doubt in my little consumerist heart: Do I really want to pay someone so that I can be allowed to give them my money?

Readers helped me avoid the morass of the TempurPedic; I’m hoping you can give me solid advice on Costco.

Just FYI: I don’t have a Sam’s Club or a BJ’s near me, so if I’m going to join a club, Costco is my only practical option.

Thanks in advance.

It’s a maxim that every writer learns early on, and one that most spend a lifetime working toward, and while it’s generally true of all writing, it’s triply true of opinion writing. When you read the work of a great opinion writer–say, a George Will, a David Frum, a Charles Krauthammer–what you are admiring is the expression of a well-organized mind. These fellows aren’t stupendous stylists the way, say, Anthony Lane is. They’re thinkers. And because they think clearly, they write clearly.

That’s one of the reasons that Patterico’s post on the writings of Harriet Miers (which is an amplification of what David Brooks wrote last week) is so particularly troubling. To quote Brooks again, the written word of Harriet Miers is a “relentless march of vapid abstractions.”

It’s no surprise, then, to seen this post from Ed Morrissey about the “misunderstandings” Miers has been conveying to senators.

She told Chuck Schumer that:

she had never discussed the Supreme Court case that struck down anti-abortion laws, Roe v. Wade, with anyone in a three-decade legal career. He said she told him that she will have to think about whether she supports Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 privacy case that established the legal groundwork for the later abortion ruling.

Then this exchange followed her meeting with Arlen Specter:

After their meeting, Specter told reporters that Miers told him she believed the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut — a landmark ruling establishing the right to privacy — was “rightly decided.”

But when the White House took exception to Specter’s comments, the Pennsylvania Republican released a statement saying Miers later called him to tell him that he had “misunderstood” her answer.

Specter said she told him she had not taken a position on either Griswold or the right to privacy, the legal underpinning for the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

Specter’s statement did not withdraw his comments about Miers discussing Griswold with him, nor did it offer a correction. But the statement said the chairman accepted Miers contention “that he misunderstood what she said.”

It is possible that Specter and Schumer are trying to make trouble for the nominee. It is possible that Miers is trying to game the senators.

But it is also possible that Harriet Miers talks the way she writes. If she’s speaking to senators in vapid abstractions, that would explain how Schumer, Specter, and the White House can all come to such totally different conclusions about what she’s saying.

Germany has a new leader, it’s first woman and it’s first chancellor from the former GDR. So why aren’t Germans excited about all this? As I’ve elaborated in this week’s Weekly Standard (yes, I am linking to myself), because Angela Merkel is presiding over a so-called Grand Coalition that includes her adversaries in the Social Democratic party, people are giving her at most two years before the whole thing collapses.

But at the very least we bid farewell to Gerhard Schröder, who recently told a group of trade unionists: “I do not want to name any catastrophes where you can see what happens if organized state action is absent. I could name countries, but the position I still hold forbids it. But everyone knows I mean America.”

And zis is how ve say ‘goodbye’ in Germany, Dr. Jones…