“You didn’t fail. There’s just no possible way you failed. If anyone failed, it’s me,” James said unconvincingly, taking a bite of our local diner’s famous blueberry pancakes.

“What’s up, you guys?” Kevin burst through the grimy door in a sweat. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, scanning our cluttered table, “but glad to see that nobody waited to order.” James and I shrugged.

“Anyway, the reason I’m late is that I have some pretty huge news.” Kevin grinned nervously. He slid into the booth next to me, placing his arm around my shoulder. “Judge Adams got the nod.” Full stop. James looked ill. My brain felt like an out-of-control calculator—not computing. “Both Specter and Shepard called her yesterday and she’s in. She’s going to be a Supreme Court justice.” Kevin tried, but failed, to conceal his excitement.

Since our lunch at Jones weeks ago, there had been radio silence on the Supreme Court nomination front. The Friedman-in-manhole episode had caused President Bush to steer clear of the third circuit. While I blamed the guy for a lot of things, namely the destruction of our country, if not the world, I couldn’t blame him for wanting to distance himself from anything judicial in Philadelphia.

At first, it’d just been the Philadelphia Inquirer and local news stations. But then it went national. The video was too good. I’d worked in television for two years, and in that time I’d never seen video like this. An old lady with spinning eyes in a crumpled black robe and bun, waving her fist in the air, spitting and screaming as she’s lifted out of a mammoth hole in the street. The pictures proved more compelling than rescues, riots, or shuttle launches. A local cameraman caught the flecks of spit flying out of her mouth—audio and all: “Do you even know who I am!!!! I am a FEDERAL JUDGE. A FEDERAL JUDGE!!!”

The camera then panned to the recipient of her saliva bath. The young, handsome cop who’d just saved her life. It took exactly one afternoon for an associate producer to discover that Friedman had been appointed by Gerald Ford at a time when presidents were trying to get women and Jews on the federal bench. During her tenure, Friedman had nailed cops for racial profiling, overturned a law banning pornography on First Amendment grounds, and nine out of ten times thought company executives were sexually harassing pricks. If she weren’t a tyrant who racially profiled her law clerks, she’d be worth idolizing as far as I was concerned. Rupert Murdoch owned way too many media outlets to let this one go. Having an unapologetically liberal judge appear insane and disrespectful of a uniformed officer who’d just rescued her was a crowd pleaser to the edgy underground and right-wing machine.