Happy New Year!

The best part about every New Year's, I think, is the chance to read Dave Barry's always hilarious "Year in Review" where he pokes fun at the good, the bad, and the ugly from the past twelve months. For example, in his look back at 2005, he had this to say about filling the Supreme Court vacancy:

President Bush, needing to make another appointment to the Supreme Court, conducts a thorough and painstaking investigation of every single female lawyer within an eight-foot radius of his desk. He concludes that the best person for the job is White House counsel Harriet Miers, who, in the tradition of such legendary justices as Felix Frankfurter, Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes, is a carbon-based life-form.

The nomination immediately runs into trouble when Miers, though reportedly a nice churchgoing person and a good bowler, turns out to be not such an expert on constitutional law, at one point expressing the view that the Fourth Amendment requires restaurant employees to wash their hands after using the restroom. (In fact, it is the Seventh Amendment.) Ultimately Miers withdraws her name. The president, after conducting another exhaustive search, decides to appoint "John Roberts" again, because it worked out so well the first time. Informed by his aides that there could be some legal problem with this tactic, the president finally decides to nominate Samuel Alito. Democrats immediately announce that they strongly oppose Alito and intend to do some research to find out why.

Read the whole thing here, nobody does it better than Dave. Happy New Year everyone, may 2006 be your best yet!