Law Prof Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, has five questions for Judge John Roberts in an op-ed in today's New York Times.

On a lighter note, I'm kind of partial to TChris's questions:

Did anyone in the White House ask you about Roe v. Wade? If the word abortion came up during any conversation with a member of the White House, please repeat that conversation for us. Was Guantanamo mentioned during your job interview? If given the chance, would you go duck hunting with Dick Cheney? Who should decide elections: voters or the Supreme Court?

More questions from TChris here. On a most serious note, I recommend Elaine Cassell's article on how death penalty jurisprudence will change under Roberts.

Here are some of the criminal law decisions authored by Judge Roberts.

Confirmation hearings begin at 11:30 ET for Judge John Roberts. You can watch them here. If confirmed, he will be the youngest Chief Justice in the past 200 years. That's important, because it means he will be shaping our jurisprudence for decades to come.

Roberts is expected to be confirmed, although his questioning may become testy at times. According to Yale Law School Professor Jack Balkin, there are good reasons for the Democrats to stand up to the President and ask Roberts the tough questions.

Poverty, Race and a National Shame. No, that's not from Move-On or Daily Kos. It's from Newsweek, and it's the cover story.

Like many of us, Nora Ephron at Huffington Post has been puzzled by Dick Cheney's absence during Katrina and doesn't buy that it's because he was on vacation. She wonders whether the President and Cheney have had a falling out.

Could Cheney – and not just his aides -- possibly be involved in the Valerie Plame episode? Is Cheney not speaking to Karl Rove? Does the airplane/bicycle incident figure into this in any way? And how is it possible that the President is off on vacation and the Vice President is too? Not that it matters particularly if the President is on vacation; on some level, the President is always on vacation. But where was Cheney?

A few months ago, I heard of a lunch conversation that Cheney had with a political type in Wyoming. I have no idea if it's true or not, but it makes some sense. Here's the tale:

As President Bush begins his third tour of the Gulf Coast, here's what the rescue workers around him are seeing in New Orleans - a view of which he undoubtedly will be spared:

Police, troops and rescue crews in New Orleans pursued their round-the-clock mission of fishing out rotting corpses and pressing lingering survivors to leave their homes....A National Guard unit patrolled one neighbourhood, trying to persuade the old and infirm to abandon their homes, as nearly half a million others have done, and were inevitably stumbling across decomposing bodies in the streets.

"It ain't a pretty sight," said Sergeant James Terrel as his men went house to house. "I don't recommend walking down there. Even a lot of my guys don't want to see this kind of thing... and some of them have been in Iraq."

Mark Fiore outdoes himself. This is his best ever, please watch the whole thing.

The Sunday Mail has an agonizing report, quoting a rescue doctor in New Orleans:

Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she 'prayed for God to have mercy on her soul' after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.

If TalkLeft's blog traffic the past ten days is typical of other left-leaning blogs, there can be no doubt that the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe is the blogger story of the year - and that the Bush Administration is in big trouble.

by Last Night in Little Rock

Time.com posted this evening has several articles about Katrina, as a disaster for the victims, the people of the United States, and for the Bush Administration, with one aide virtually admitting that they really blew it:

Don't miss the New Yorker's Top of the Town. Here's a snippet:

...to a frightening degree, Bush’s faults of leadership and character were brought into high relief by the crisis. Suntanned and relaxed after a vacation so long that it would have shamed a French playboy, Bush reacted with fogged delinquency, as if he had been so lulled by his summer sojourn that he was not quite ready to acknowledge reality, let alone attempt to master it. His first view of the floods came, pitifully, theatrically, from the window of a low-flying Air Force One, and all the President could muster was, according to his press secretary, “It’s devastating. It’s got to be doubly devastating on the ground.” The moment demanded clarity of mind and rigorous governance, and yet he could not summon them.

[hat tip Terry Kindlon.] On a much lighter note, check out Eyewitness Muse's Administration "Natural Terror" Color Charts. A sample:

by Last Night in Little Rock

The U.K. Independent Online has an article today Cover-up: toxic waters 'will make New Orleans unsafe for a decade' contending that U.S. government officials know it, and they just aren't saying it.

by Last Night in Little Rock

The NY Times today has an article entitled Disasters Waiting to Happen about the deteriorating levee system south of San Francisco Bay that keeps the Bay back and salt water out of the drinking water of millions of people in the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta.