the more recent decisions handed down by these right-tilitted clowns is beginning to scare me. Scalia's has such a huge erection from his latest triumphs, including the Rovarian strategy of using "Brown's" strengths against itself, would like nothing more than to hand his hunting buddy and nearly-elected gumba, President Cheney, a decision that would bury those nasty detainees so far back into the Gitmo dungeons that detention in Egypt would be considered a blessing...

A Roberts-led 5-4 that Bush's detainees have no rights. Bush and his boss want him the step on this airhose pronto.

and the only question in anybody's mind should be: Whassup with Kennedy??

The Opus Dei sector of the Court, Scalia, Alito, Roberts and Thomas haven't ever met a torturer they didn't like.

The godless secularists will endorse the rule of law.

Then it will be up to Justice Anthony Kennedy to demonstrate if his big talk as the keynote speaker at the ABA last August was the real deal or bullshit:

I suggest that the rule of law has three parts. The first is that the law is binding on the government and all of its officials.

Now I'm just scared they want to take away another right, or undo more hard-won precedents.

This court, this administration, and this Congress have me deeply questioning our system of government. Since the election was stolen in 2000, things have gone nowhere but downhill; and the few times hopes appear, they are raised only to be dashed further than I ever imagined possible.

Forget new filings by lawyers, what triggered the Courts decision to review this case was the Appeals Court decision bitch slapping Bush over the lack of Habeus Corpus and declaring his actions unconstitutional.

This Court is about to reverse that decision in the harshest possible way.

I’m afraid I must echo many others fears about what the Court will do to Habeas Corpus.

Every Democrat who voted for Bush in 2004 out of fear of terrorists is responsible for the next 20 years worth decisions handed down by a conservative Supreme Court. Add to that the starkly conservation nature of Bush’s appointments to the Federal Bench and we’re looking at a very ugly time for many constitutional rights and protections we’ve grown to enjoy over the last 200 hundred years.

You thought the ‘War on Drugs’ brought little more than an erosion of civil rights we haven’t yet gotten to the bottom of the ‘War on Terror’ will do to us.

In 2004 8 out of the 9 Supreme Court Justices ruled that the President does not have the ability to hold US Citizens without charges or access to a legal process indefinitely. Although Alito and Roberts have replaced O'Connor and Rehnquist since then, I doubt that they would side with the truely horrific oppinion served up by Thomas which held that the President has the right to point any citizen in a time of war and order them incarcerated forever with no access to any legal proceedure.

Saddly the Supremes have not required the same set of rights for non-citizens as citizens, which has long been the marker of a truely civilized society. However, they have indicated that non-citizens must have access to some formally laid out process that affords tham a real oppurtunity to prove that they are are being unlawfully held. I think that the recent revelations about how prisoners came to be labled enemy combatents combined with the outcome of the recent attempt to hold hearing for them has lead some of the Justices to rethink there faith in this administratoins desire or ability to behave in a lawful, competent and reasonable manner.

Is that "Mission Accomplished" sign still around? Perhaps it should be draped across the pediment of the Supreme Court building.

Why does this surprise anybody?

The events of the last six years have been ugly, saddening and disgusting. But surprising? Not a bit. From the moment these thugs took office, I for one (and many others) have been predicting the way things would go: they would find some excuse to start attacking other countries, they would ruin our environmental and social agencies, they would pack the Supreme Court, and give preference to power-mad fundamentalists, and trample on the citizens' rights, and, and, and...

From the beginning, I've heard people say, "Why be such a pessimist? They may be Republicans, but they're patriots! Didn't you see how mad they got when 9/11 happened?" (That last one I actually got from a co-worker who used it as an excuse to exonerate Bush of his gung-ho war crap.) So after a while I stopped saying things like that, mainly because I got tired of having to crawl under my desk to retrieve my eyes after they'd rolled so far back they popped out.

These guys were always power-hungry thugs. Bush 43 was always a hypocritical, lazy, self-absorbed idiot. Cheney and Rumsfeld have been pulling this kind of crap for thirty years, for gods' sakes, in and out of the White House.

We're simply on the same road we've been on for the last couple of decades. We've been on it since Reagan was elected. (Having grown up in California, I always knew what a right-wing, duplicitous asshole that guy was, and really, I thought his presidential campaign was a joke at first. I mean, who in their right minds would even consider putting him in the White House?) This is just the logical extension of where we started out.

The time to stop all this was way back in the 80's, when these political thugs and crazy fundies started getting serious power. You don't just let an invasive weed grow and grow and grow and then try to whack it down once it's completely covered your house. You don't just let an infection get worse and worse and worse until it's taken over the whole body and the patient is raging with delirium. You nip those problems in the bud. If we as a nation have been so lackadaisacal, so gullible, and so hypnotized by our mass media's messages of paranoia and disinformation that we let our country get taken over by the worst sort of banana republic dictators, then...what the hell did anybody expect would happen?

This is what they've been planning for at least 30 years. If we were too wrapped up in ourselves to notice, we deserve what we're getting.

(Not that I think we should stop trying to rectify things, mind you. As the Norse well knew, just because you have no hope of winning does not mean the battle is not worth fighting. We may be "fighting the long defeat", but at least those of us doing so can go down knowing we tried. There's nobility in that, even if it's the sad kind.)