I think you may have lost perspective on how far to the right the SCOTUS has gone.

The Democrats will control all branches of government very soon; since even the court is so balanced that just a couple of appointments will change its character greatly.

Seven of the nine current judges were appointed by Ford, Reagan and Bushes 1 and 2, including the four youngest members (the youngest being Chief Justice Roberts, at age 53). No, we will have a blatantly Republican biased court throughout an Obama administration.

God, I just had a horrid thought... Could John Paul Stevens, the oldest judge at 88 and a Ford appointee, retire and let Shrub have one more chance to appoint a young, neo-conservative radical to the bench?

and I predict that only Stevens and Ginsberg will retire during Obama's presidency, leaving a solid radically anti-freedom majority on the court. All the 5/4 decisions of late are about issues that an 8th grader who has done marginally well on the Constitution test (do 8th graders still have to take that?) would have concluded, correctly, were no brainers. Reagan, Bush I an Bush II consistently picked judges who were radical ideologues, and even some of them are unable to stomach the retched disregard for the Constitution of the radical right-wing loonies currently on the bench.

But then, I gave up on the SCOTUS way back when they replaced the need for a warrant to break into somebody's home to seize evidence with "good faith" on the part of police.

Also, in Buchanon's defense, while he certainly didn't help, most of the conditions that gave rise to the civil war could hardly be laid at his feet. What is remarkable about Bush is how many times he created disasters out of thin air, or took something only mildly bad and made it into a catastrophe.

A remarkable group we've had running the show here for 8 years.

Did anybody else notice the suit McCain was wearing? That shiny black pinstripe... isn't that, like, say a rich banker's suit? Kind of a bad choice given what has been happening in the financial markets lately.

And while on the trivial, I also noted that Obama wore a flag pin and McCain did not.

So now I am waiting for all those Fox News "fair and balanced" types that attacked John Edwards for his $400 haircut and Obama "refusing" to wear a flag pin to start howling about how McCain isn't proud of his country and is an elitist, out of touch dandy.

those automatic flushers that have become so popular in public restrooms, but, invariably when you are sitting there doing your business suddenly start flushing, and you have to move fast to keep your privates from being soaked with toilet water.

It is easy to wash your hands after pushing a toilet lever in a public restroom, hard to take a shower after getting sprayed with urine and fecal contaminated water. What a dumb ass idea those were.

Umm.... why all this vitriol wasted on these "reporters"? These twits are doing exactly what they were hired to do. The corporations who own the major media outlet have their pick of thousands upon thousands of journalists for these top of the line, cream of the crop assignments. It is not that there are fewer intrepid, principled reporters out there than there were in the past, it's just they aren't the ones the corporate media are sending on these trips and their stories aren't the ones that make the front pages or get the tv headlines. This is an inevitable consequence of news media not being independent entities, but instead part of multinational corporations who have their own agenda which is largely that of the Washington power brokers.

All these poor sods are doing is exactly what they were hired to do. If they started to act like real reporters, they'd likely quickly find themselves out of a job.

Such outrageous "reporting" does not exist in a cultural vacuum. Hollywood's disgusting continual promotion of the New American Royalty (Brangelina, poor Jen, Paris, Britney) through an explosion of gossip magazines, internet sites and television shows by "reporting" ad nauseum every little sexual escapade of "the people that matter". This not only allows Hollywood agencies to make oodles of money off of their stars, it preconditions the public to thinking that sexual scandal is more important than anything else. I mean, while we are vaguely aware that Angelina Jolie spends much of her time trying to help poor kids in Africa, who cares about that compared with whether or not she is having cat fights with Jen?

Every time I see someone reading one of those paper wasting horrors, I just feel like yelling at them that they are the ones who allow true evil to exist in the world.