President Bush yesterday gave a recess appointment to Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor to the federal appeals court. Pryor is the second federal judge (the first was Charles Pickering) Bush has given a recess appointment in response to an illegal Democrat filibuster.

The first Times article, which appeared yesterday on the Web site, curiously contains the following paragraph, which demonstrates the depth of the rot that has infected a once-great newspaper's news pages.

Mr. Pryor is known for, among other things, defending the right of high school athletes to pray "spontaneously" and for his initial support of an Alabama state judge who posted the Ten Commandments in his courtroom and erected a monument engraved with the Commandments in the Supreme Court rotunda.

Can anyone name another prominent southerner who defended the right of high school students to pray "spontaneously"? I'll give you a hint: He had problems keeping his trousers buckled.

The article also brings up Pryor's "initial" support of Judge Roy Moore of Ten Commandments fame. What the article irresponsibly leaves out is that once Moore failed to obey a judicial order to have the monument removed, Pryor prosecuted him and had him removed from office.

That action, and a laundry list of others, proves that Democrat criticisms of Pryor's "deeply held beliefs" preventing him from following the law are merely a smokescreen.

New York Sen. Charles Schumer also demonstrates in this latest event that he has no business on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"The president is on shaky ground with the hard right and is using this questionably legal and politically shabby technique to bolster himself," Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, a Judiciary Committee member, said on Friday. "Regularly circumventing the advise-and-consent process is not the way to change the tone in Washington. It's shabby and the motivation is political more than anything else." [emphasis added]

Questionably legal? Is it possible that Schumer has failed an IQ test? The tool is perfectly legal. If he wants to talk about questionable legality he should be looking at his party's filibusters.

Schumer's moronic (and my use of that term may be offensive to morons) behavior and political tactics when it comes to judges -- especially minority judges who just happen to be politically conservative -- recalled this item from Minnesota.

Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty's nominee for state education commissioner, Cheri Pierson Yecke, has riled Democrats.

Pawlenty's response is one that President Bush could direct towards the Democrats in the Senate.

Pawlenty described Yecke as highly qualified and her detractors as "apologists for the status quo." He added: "Not liking somebody's policy direction isn't a good reason to tube a confirmation. If they don't like the policy direction, they should maybe win an election. That might be a new idea for them."

Elections have consequences. You'd think Schumer would have learned that by now.