Air America News just said Miers withdrew her nomination.

no link yet.

By the time another candidate is prsented, Republican lockstep will have been further splintered... or am I just delusional.

Part 2, wherein Bush nominates the real whackjob rightie he wanted all along, for whom the "qualified" bar has now been significantly lowered.

Mostly

in with Bush's tactics. Who do you think will be next?

"And nominating them to SCOTUS. Given Mr. Quemada's status as a member of the undead, we firmly believe he will be the very model of a non-activist judge. Or a non-active anything. In other words, he's a zombie, so he's not real active. Heh heh."

-Excerpt, Bush's Nomination Speech, 11/08/2005

Seriously, I don't follow the courts closely enough to know WHO would fit the bill but I've suspected since about day 2 (once Miers record was firmly non-established) that the idea was to lower the bar enough to make the next non-qualified nominee seem emminently qualified.

My prediction is that the next nominee (the REAL nominee), whoever it is, is somebody who four weeks ago we would have uniformly derided asa nobody, completely out of his/her league and now it'll be all "Holy crap, he's the second coming of Clarence Frigging Darrow compared to Miers!"

Mostly

get much worse before it gets any better.