ELSEWHERE

I normally read Brian Leiter only for laughs but I found this post oddly reassuring. There have been quite a few doubts expressed about whether John Roberts really will be conservative if he is elevated to SCOTUS. His whole career could be interpreted as aimed at sliding himself into a seat on SCOTUS by not revealing anything much about what he really thinks. But Leiter actually mounts some reasonable arguments for believing that Roberts IS conservative -- though almost anybody would be to the Right of Leiter, of course. I also liked this flash of honesty from Leiter: "on a range of issues the U.S. Supreme Court is unavoidably a super-legislature". I have a feeling that I will be quoting that again sometime. Kudlow and Manuel Miranda of the WSJ are also reassuring about Roberts.

A disturbing record: "Seven of the nine current Justices were appointed by Republican Presidents. ... Earl Warren, the father of modern judicial activism, was an Eisenhower appointee. So was William Brennan, who inherited Warren's mantle as the Court's liberal giant. Harry Blackmun, the author of Roe v. Wade, was a Nixon appointee. The most liberal member of the current court, John Paul Stevens, was a Gerald Ford selection. David Souter, a George H. W. Bush and Warren Rudman choice, told the Senate he saw himself in the tradition of the great Justice John Harlan, who revered precedent. But on the court he's arguably been more of a liberal activist than either of Bill Clinton's two justices (Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer). Anthony Kennedy, selected by Reagan after Robert Bork was defeated, was said at the time to share 80% of Mr. Bork's philosophy. But Mr. Kennedy's jurisprudence has proven to be nearly as malleable as Justice Souter's, especially on the cultural and church-state issues where the Court has become the de facto national legislature. ... Our objection to Roe and to Lawrence, the Texas sodomy case, isn't on the underlying policy. It is that the Court has hijacked those social disputes from democratic debate, preventing the kind of legislative compromises that would allow a social and political consensus to form. ... But there are many other issues on which the post-Warren justices have arrogated to themselves an almost legislative authority: overturning voter-passed Congressional term limits by 5-4, dictating racial and gender preferences in law, extending the Commerce Clause to encompass virtually any federal authority as in last term's Raich medical-marijuana decision, or expanding eminent domain in Kelo. ... But the larger goal should be to...restore the High Court to its more restrained historical role. In a phrase, this means putting an end at last to the judicial legislating that was unleashed in the Warren era and that has slowed only on occasion ever since."

GIs criticize Dems: "Soldiers from Massachusetts and Hawaii who work at the U.S. military detention facility at U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, gave visiting home-state senators a piece of their mind last week. Sens. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, and Daniel K. Akaka, Hawaii Democrat, met with several soldiers during a visit led by Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. John W. Warner, Virginia Republican. Pentagon officials said soldiers criticized the harsh comments made recently by Senate Democrats... "They got stiff reactions from those home-state soldiers," one official told us. "The troops down there expressed their disdain for that kind of commentary, especially comparisons to the gulag".

Logical Meme has a horror-story about an out-of-control welfare system in Hartford, Ct.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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