Anybody notice, we’re going broke?

 

 

“MEDICARE IS UNDER WATER BY $30 TRILLION DOLLARS, SOCIAL SECURITY BY $5.7 TRILLION, AND THAT’S JUST CONSIDERING A 75-YEAR HORIZON.”

 

(These entitlements comprise 45% of the federal budget.) 

 

 David Walker, Democrat, former Comptroller General.  **

“Clearly you want to minimize tax burdens in order to maximize economic growth, maximize disposable income, and maximize investment, productivity, innovation, to maintain our competitive advantage,” declares David Walker.

 

 

The last thing we do is follow Obama’s plan:  raise taxes, increase federal spending, cut defense, extend benefits and amnesty to illegal aliens, ignore border security, allow the U.N. to tax Americans, launch government funded healthcare, restrict trade.

 

 

McCain’s plan makes sense to me in the face of what David Walker has warned about entitlements, the unfunded liabilities, and Boomers filing for benefits in the face of a shrinking workforce: spending freeze on all but essential services, stabilize the housing market (protect families’ homes), encourage long-term investment in stock market with tax breaks, cut taxes for everyone (which has always stimulated the economy and actually increased revenue to the treasury), go through the federal budget line by line to reduce spending and cut ineffective/wasteful programs, increase trade, support small business and corporations so they expand and create jobs, tax reform making it simpler and more equitable*, real energy independence and development of domestic sources of petroleum so we can transition to cleaner alternatives, and use nuclear and clean coal to get there as well.

*In reality we already have income redistribution.  The top 25% of income earners pay 86% of the income taxes, and the lower 40% of income earners pay nothing at all.  We are already soaking the rich, the very people best positioned to invest and grow the economy and create jobs.

We are seeing wealthy Americans move resources offshore and away from Obama’s IRS.   The Obama effect is already being seen in the markets as well.

As to defense as a percentage of the overall budget:  get a load of this!  (David Walker, Democrat, former Comptroller General)

 

 

1965:  43% of the federal budget spent on defense

2005: 20% of federal budget spent on defense

 

**http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIgrxpp97OQ&feature=related

Who in his right mind suggests cutting defense and hamstringing our military and intelligence agencies in a time of unprecedented lethal threats worldwide?

RECOMMENDATIONS FROM DAVID WALKER

**http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXr_Ga_n0pY&feature=related

 

 

1.  re-impose budget controls both in terms of taxes and spending

2.  increase transparency in terms of long-term costs projected – THE MEDICARE PRESCRIPTION DRUG PLAN IS AN EXAMPLE OF WHAT NOT TO DO! ($8 TRILLION DOLLAR PROGRAM!)

3.  must reform entitlement programs (cut and reorganize, not expand), we simply MUST to remain solvent

4.  must re-engineer the base of mandatory and discretionary spending

5.  tax reform***

 

“Clearly you want to minimize tax burdens in order to maximize economic growth, maximize disposable income, and maximize investment, productivity, innovation, to maintain our competitive advantage,” declares David Walker. (JFK understood this and agrees with McCain by the way.)

 

 

 

 

6. “There are lots of numbers and they are all big and bad.   This is about values and people.”  Public officials have a responsibility to leave the country better positioned for the future.  This has been our tradition.

 

 ”The baby boomer generation may be the first in our history to break that tradition.”

 

This is about our kids and grand kids. “THEY DIDN’T CREATE THIS PROBLEM BUT THEY’RE GONNA BEAR THE BURDEN, AND THEY’RE GONNA PAY THE PRICE, IF PEOPLE DON’T START MAKING TOUGH CHOICES SOON.”

In short, we have to tighten our belts dramatically and become hyper-disciplined concerning government spending, yet, Obama wants to take us in the opposite direction, insisting on an orgy of new spending, and, this will bankrupt us, and destroy our economy.

 

 

McCain Closing the Gap

http://www.newsmax.com/morris/mccain_gains/2008/10/28/145058.html

 

 

October 28, 2008

By: Dick Morris & Eileen McGann

 

Zogby, Rasmussen, and Gallup all report McCain closing the gap to within 5 points. Zogby had him 12 back, Rasmussen 8, and Gallup 6 in their previous polling. McCain’s use of Joe the plumber, combined with the tax issue, is working!

 

Unilaterally, John McCain agreed to disarm himself by refusing to use perhaps his most potent weapon in exposing Barack Obama: the Democrats’ relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

 

The McCain campaign and, at its direction, the Republican Party, have banned use of footage of Rev. Wright from their campaign commercials. Perhaps for fear of being accused of racism, they are not bringing up the single most compromising association in Obama’s past — his close liaison with Wright.

 

Bush vindicated on WMD in Iraq

 Russians moved Saddam’s WMD to Syria and Lebanon

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25546334/

http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/u/uraniumyellowcake.htm

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=300323577877918

http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/8/9/110630.shtml

 

Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2008 10:12:43 -0400

Bush FINALLY vindicated on WMD in Iraq

A national defense analyst says President Bush should be commended for keeping quiet about a discovery that could have blown his critics out of the water.

Retired Major General Jerry Curry is a decorated combat veteran who served as an Army aviator, paratrooper, and Ranger during a military career that began during the Korean conflict. He recently wrote about a very under reported story by the Associated Press.

According to the report, a large stockpile of concentrated natural Uranium, known as “yellowcake,” reached a Canadian port to complete a top secret U.S. Operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad , and a ship voyage crossing two oceans. The Uranium material had been housed at a former Iraqi nuclear complex 12 miles from Baghdad .

Curry says the president kept mum about the discovery in order to keep terrorists in the dark. “He made a very brave stand, a resolute stand…, in which he decided that he wasn’t going to blab everything to the press,” Curry commends. “…And in the meantime while he kept it quiet, he was buying time from the terrorists to get all that stuff out of the country. So that’s what was done — he just very quietly kept his mouth shut.”

“The press beat him to death for the last several years,” he continues, “and now it turns out that, yes, there were weapons of mass destruction….” Curry also maintains that Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear program and the material could have been made into a nuclear weapon.

President Bush’s actions took courage, he notes, and all Americans should be thankful to have such a brave president who puts the welfare of the American people above personal considerations.

………………………………………………………………….

On July 5, 2008

Associated Press (AP) released a story titled:

Secret U.S. mission hauls uranium from Iraq .

The opening paragraph is as follows:

The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program (a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium) reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.

See anything wrong with this picture?

We have been hearing from the far left for more than five years how Bush lied. Somehow, that slogan loses its credibility now that 550 metric tons of Saddam’s yellowcake, used for nuclear weapon enrichment, has been discovered and shipped to Canada for its new use as nuclear energy.

It appears that American troops found the 550 metric tons of uranium in 2003 after invading Iraq . They had to sit on this information and the uranium itself for fear of terrorists attempting to steal it. It was guarded and kept safe by our military in a 23,000-acre site with large sand berms surrounding the site.

This is vindication for the Bush administration, having been attacked mercilessly by the liberal media and the far-left pundits on the blogosphere. Now that it is proven that President Bush did not lie about Saddam’s nuclear ambitions, one would think that the mainstream media would report the true story. Once the AP released the story, the mainstream media should have picked it up and broadcast it worldwide.

That never happened, due in large part, I believe, to the fact that the mainstream media would have to admit they were wrong about Bush’s war motives all along. Thankfully, the AP got it right when it said, “The
removal of 550 metric tons of yellowcake, the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment, was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam’s nuclear legacy.”

Closing the book on Saddam’s nuclear legacy? Did Saddam have a nuclear legacy after all? I thought Bush lied? As it turns out, the people who lied were Joe Wilson and his wife.

Valerie Plame engaged in a clear case of nepotism and convinced the CIA to send her husband on a fact finding mission in February 2002, seeking to determine if Saddam Hussein attempted to buy yellowcake from Niger . The CIA and British intelligence believed Saddam contacted Niger for that purpose but needed proof.

During his trip to Niger , Wilson actually interviewed the former prime minister of Niger , Ibrahim Assane Mayaki.  Mayaki told Wilson that in June of 1999, an Iraqi delegation expressed interest in “expanding commercial relations” for the purposes of purchasing yellowcake.

Wilson chose to overlook Mahaki’s remarks and reported to the CIA that there was no evidence of Hussein wanting to purchase yellow cake from Niger .

However, with British intelligence insisting the claim was true, President Bush used that same claim in his State of the Union address in January of 2003. Outraged by Bush’s insistence that the claim was true, Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in the summer of 2003 slamming Bush.

Wilson did this in spite of the fact that Mayaki said Saddam did try to buy the yellowcake from Niger . The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence disagreed with Wilson and supported Mayaki’s claim. This meant nothing to Wilson who was opposed to the Iraq war and thus had ulterior motives in covering up the prime minister’s statements.

It was a simple tactic, really. If the far-left and their friends in the media could prove Bush lied about Hussein wanting to purchase yellowcake from Niger , it would undermine President Bush’s credibility and give them more cause for asking what other lies he may have told.

Yet the real lie came from Wilson, who interpreted his own meaning from the prime minister’s statements and concluded all by himself that the claim of Saddam attempting to purchase yellowcake was “unequivocally wrong.”

Curiously the CIA sat on this information and did not inform the CIA Director, who sided with Bush on the yellowcake claim. This was made public in a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report in July 2004.

Valerie Plame also engaged in her own lie campaign by spreading the notion that the Bush Administration outed her as a CIA agent. Never mind that it was Richard Armitage – no friend of the Bush administration – who leaked Plame’s identity to the press. Never mind that Plame had not been in the field as a CIA agent in some six years.

The truth is, due to their opposition to the war, Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame, the mainstream media, and their left-wing friends on the blogo-sphere engaged in a propaganda campaign to undermine the Bush administration. Now that Saddam’s uranium has been made public and is no longer a threat to the world, do you think these aforementioned parties will apologize and admit they were wrong?

Don’t count on it.

The rest of the American people should hear the truth about Saddam’s uranium. It is up to you and me to inform them.

As far as the anti-war crowd is concerned, the next time they say that Bush lied, we should tell them to “have the yellowcake and eat it too.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25546334/

 

http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/u/uraniumyellowcake.htm

Liberty Lost?

 

 

 

“Over the past seven years, the media has created the Big Lie that America is the biggest rogue state in the world, with Israel its proxy.  Now it is ensuring that a man who will act on that very premise to crush America and destroy Israel will be placed in the White House to do so. It is not just that the west’s Big Media can no longer be trusted. It has become the most important weapon in the arsenal of the enemies of the free world.”

 

 

THE SACRIFICE OF TRUTH TO POWER

By Melanie Phillips

 

http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/2550646/the-sacrifice-of-truth-to-power.thtml

 

Excerpts:

 

“What’s happening in this terrifying, Orwellian US presidential race is the flip side of the madness that’s been on display since 9/11 itself, when swathes of the UK population decided that ‘America had it coming to it’ because it supported Israel, and that George W Bush was the most dangerous man on the planet. After the Iraq war started this irrationality swelled into pathological proportions on both sides of the Atlantic, when the ‘Bush lied, people died’ narrative fuelled a hatred of Bush and ‘the neocons’ exceeded in its hallucinatory and murderous venom only by the truly deranged way in which the media and intelligentsia systematically either ignored evidence that did not fit this narrative or, even more astoundingly, reported it in such a way that it delivered the opposite of what was actually happening or being said.”

 

“For all Obama’s laid-back, attractive appearance this election is being fought in an atmosphere of menace. Menace in the way ACORN is intimidating voters into multiple registrations. Menace in the way criminal donations to the Obama campaign have been institutionalised. Menace in the serial lies being told by Obama, Biden and the campaign rebuttal team. Menace in the way the few remaining proper journalists such as Stanley Kurtz are finding sources of information shut down and themselves shut out when they attempt to probe Obama’s deeply dubious associations. Menace in the smears and hysterical abuse directed at anyone who questions The One. Menace in the threat of violence if Obama doesn’t win. Menace in the pre-emptive smear that the only thing that could bring about an Obama defeat is the inherent racism of the American voters – a smear that potentially identifies all those who vote against him as public enemies.”

 

 

ONLY THIS BRIT’S OPINION?

 

“No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side — or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del.”

 

Media’s Presidential Bias and Decline

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Story?id=6099188&page=1

 

HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

Even liberals have the blues over wretched coverage

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3i28df3fc9f6707d1478700b7bc78273ae

 

 

 

President Obama: What the future looks like . . .

. . . if the polls are correct.

Gingrich: Disturbing Look at a very Near Future

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=29235 

Plus

“The conservative nightmare (and liberal dream) is an Obama Court requiring taxpayers to fund essentially unlimited abortion rights throughout pregnancy; ordering all 50 states to bless gay marriage; expanding and perpetuating the use of racial preferences far beyond the 25-year phase out suggested by the justices five years ago; prohibiting tuition vouchers for religious schools; stripping “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance; banning the death penalty; striking down the new federal wiretap law; expanding judicial oversight of military detentions, CIA interrogations, and perhaps other operations worldwide; opening the floodgates to big-dollar lawsuits against business; eroding property rights; and perhaps creating new constitutional rights to physician-assisted suicide, human cloning, and massive government welfare and medical care programs.”  SEE BELOW

 

 

 

Obama’s First 100 Days
Patrick J. Buchanan
Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Undeniably, a powerful tide is running for the Democratic Party, with one week left to Election Day.

Bush’s approval rating is 27 percent, just above Richard Nixon’s Watergate nadir and almost down to Carter-Truman lows. After each of those presidents reached their floors — in 1952, 1974, 1980 — the opposition party captured the White House.

Moreover, 80 percent to 90 percent of Americans think the nation is on the wrong course, and since mid-September, when McCain was still slightly ahead, the Dow has lost 4,000 points — $5 trillion to $6 trillion in value.

Leading now by eight points in an average of national polls, Barack Obama has other advantages.

Not a single blue state is regarded as imperiled or even a toss-up, while Obama leads in six crucial red states: Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Missouri and Colorado. Should McCain lose one of the six, he would have to win Pennsylvania to compensate for the lost electoral votes. But the latest Pennsylvania polls show Barack with a double-digit lead.

Lately moving into the toss-up category are Nevada, North Dakota, Montana and Indiana. All voted twice for George W. Bush.

Not only is Obama ahead in the state and national polls, he has more money, is running far more ads, has a superior organization on the ground, attracts larger crowds, and has greater enthusiasm and more media in camp. And new voter registrations heavily favor the Democrats.  (Translation: even if the polls are slightly off, it will be a miracle if McCain to prevails.)

Though Congress is regarded by Americans with a disdain bordering on disgust — five of six Americans think it has done a poor job — Democratic majorities are certain to grow. Indeed, with Democrats favored by 10 points over Republicans, Nancy Pelosi’s majority could grow by 25 seats and Harry Reid could find himself with a filibuster-proof majority of 60 senators.

Democrats already have 49, plus two independents: Socialist Bernie Sanders and Independent Joe Lieberman. Their challengers are now ahead in New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina, New Mexico, Minnesota, Oregon and Colorado, with a chance of picking up Georgia, Alaska, Kentucky and Mississippi.

We may be looking at a reverse of 1980, when Reagan won a 10-point victory over Jimmy Carter, and Republicans took the Senate and, working with Boll Weevil Democrats, effective control of the House.

With his tax cuts, defense buildup and rollback policy against the “Evil Empire,” Reagan gave us some of the best years of our lives, culminating in America’s epochal victory in the Cold War.

What does the triumvirate of Obama-Pelosi-Reid offer?

Rep. Barney Frank is calling for new tax hikes on the most successful and a 25 percent across-the-board slash in national defense. Sen. John Kerry is talking up new and massive federal spending, a la FDR’s New Deal. Specifically, we can almost surely expect:

– Swift amnesty for 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens and a drive to make them citizens and register them, as in the Bill Clinton years. This will mean that Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona will soon move out of reach for GOP presidential candidates, as has California.

– Border security will go on the backburner, and America will have a virtual open border with a Mexico of 110 million.

– Taxes will be raised on the top 5 percent of wage-earners, who now carry 60 percent of the U.S. income tax burden, and tens of millions of checks will be sent out to the 40 percent of wage-earners who pay no federal income tax. Like the man said, redistribute the wealth, spread it around.

– Social Security taxes will be raised on the most successful among us, and capital gains taxes will be raised from 15 percent to 20 percent. The Bush tax cuts will be repealed, and death taxes reimposed.

– Two or three more liberal activists of the Ruth Bader Ginsberg-John Paul Stevens stripe will be named to the Supreme Court. U.S. district and appellate courts will be stacked with “progressives.”

– Special protections for homosexuals will be written into all civil rights laws, and gays and lesbians in the military will be invited to come out of the closet. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” will be dead.

– The homosexual marriages that state judges have forced California, Massachusetts and Connecticut to recognize, an Obama Congress or Obama court will require all 50 states to recognize.

– A “Freedom of Choice Act” nullifying all state restrictions on abortions will be enacted. America will become the most pro-abortion nation on earth.

– Affirmative action — hiring and promotions based on race, sex and sexual orientation until specified quotas are reached — will be rigorously enforced throughout the U.S. government and private sector.

– Universal health insurance will be enacted, covering legal and illegal immigrants, providing another powerful magnet for the world to come to America, if necessary by breaching her borders.

– A federal bailout of states and municipalities to keep state and local governments spending up could come in December or early next year.

– The first trillion-dollar deficit will be run in the first year of an Obama presidency. It will be the first of many.

Welcome to Obamaland!

Copyright © 2008 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

Obama and the Law
Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, October 28, 2008

One of the biggest and most long-lasting “change” to expect if Barack Obama becomes President of the United States is in the kinds of federal judges he appoints. These include Supreme Court justices, as well as other federal justices all across the country, all of whom will have lifetime tenure.

Senator Obama has stated very clearly what kinds of Supreme Court justices he wants– those with “the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old.”

Like so many things that Obama says, it may sound nice if you don’t stop and think– and chilling if you do stop and think. Do we really want judges who decide cases based on who you are, rather than on the facts and the law?

If the case involves a white man versus a black woman, should the judge decide that case differently than if both litigants are of the same race or sex?

The kind of criteria that Barack Obama promotes could have gotten three young men at Duke University sent to prison for a crime that neither they nor anybody else committed.

Didn’t we spend decades in America, and centuries in Western civilization, trying to get away from the idea that who you are determines what your legal rights are?

What kind of judges are we talking about?

A classic example is federal Judge H. Lee Sarokin, who could have bankrupted a small New Jersey town because they decided to stop putting up with belligerent homeless men who kept disrupting their local public library. Judge Sarokin’s rulings threatened the town with heavy damage awards, and the town settled the case by paying $150,000 to the leading disrupter of its public library.

After Bill Clinton became president, he elevated Judge Sarokin from the district court to the Circuit Court of Appeals. Would President Barack Obama elevate him– or others like him– to the Supreme Court? Judge Sarokin certainly fits Obama’s job description for a Supreme Court justice.

A court case should not depend on who you are and who the judge is. We are supposed to be a country with “the rule of law and not of men.” Like all human beings, Americans haven’t always lived up to our ideals. But Obama is proposing the explicit repudiation of that ideal itself.

That is certainly “change,” but is it one that most Americans believe in? Or is it something that we may end up with anyway, just because too many voters cannot be bothered to look beyond rhetoric and style?

We can vote a president out of office at the next election if we don’t like him. But we can never vote out the federal judges he appoints in courts across the country, including justices of the Supreme Court.

The kind of judges that Barack Obama wants to appoint can still be siding with criminals or terrorists during the lifetime of your children and grandchildren.

The Constitution of the United States will not mean much if judges carry out Obama’s vision of the Constitution as “a living document”– that is, something that judges should feel free to change by “interpretation” to favor particular individuals, groups or causes.

We have already seen where that leads with the 2005 Kelo Supreme Court decision that allows local politicians to take people’s homes or businesses and transfer that property to others. Almost invariably, these are the homes of working class people and small neighborhood businesses that are confiscated under the government’s power of eminent domain. And almost invariably they are transferred to developers who will build shopping malls, hotels or other businesses that will bring in more tax revenue.

The Constitution protected private property, precisely in order to prevent such abuses of political power, leaving a small exception when property is taken for “public use,” such as the government’s building a reservoir or a highway.

But just by expanding “public use” to mean “public purpose”– which can be anything– the Supreme Court opened the floodgates.

That’s not “a living Constitution.” That’s a dying Constitution– and an Obama presidency can kill it off.

Copyright © 2008 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

 

THE NEXT PRESIDENT & APPOINTING JUDGES

by Stuart Taylor Jr.

 

http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/cs_20080726_6164.php

Saturday, July 26, 2008

 

 

EXCERPTS:

 

Apart from the Supreme Court, the next president will fill a steady stream of vacancies–and perhaps a batch of newly created seats–on the federal District and Appeals courts. The cumulative impact of those choices may well be more important than any one Supreme Court appointment, although far less visible.

 

The door would be open for Obama, if he were so inclined, to appoint the kind of crusading liberal that the Court has not seen since Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall retired in 1990 and 1991–or, for that matter, to appoint Hillary Rodham Clinton if she wanted the job.

 

Replacing one or more of the current liberals with such a figure would solidify the liberal bloc. And a Scalia or Kennedy retirement would enable Obama to move the Court dramatically to the left, creating a solid liberal majority for the first time since Chief Justice Earl Warren retired in 1969.

 

 

ABORTION

On abortion, Obama assailed the Court’s April 2007 decision upholding the congressional ban on “partial-birth” abortion as a dramatic departure from precedents protecting a woman’s right to choose. He also warned that “conservative Supreme Court justices will look for other opportunities to erode Roe v. Wade.”

 

The anti-abortion McCain said: “I’m very happy about the decision, given my position on abortion. ‘Partial birth’ is one of the most odious aspects of abortion.”

 

 

GUN RIGHTS & DEATH PENALTY

McCain has been consistent in championing broad gun rights and the death penalty; Obama was not until after he had wrapped up the nomination and turned to courting centrist voters. Obama’s general statements on judicial appointments suggest that he would choose new justices and judges who would take the liberal side on such issues.

 

 

SAME SEX MARRIAGE

On court-ordered same-sex marriage, Obama’s campaign said that he “respects” the California Supreme Court’s decision in May requiring the state to recognize gay and lesbian marriages. This contrasted with Obama’s previous position that he opposed gay marriages and supported “civil unions”–the same distinction that the court struck down. Obama later denounced as “divisive and discriminatory” a ballot initiative designed to overturn the gay-marriage decree.

 

McCain’s campaign said that he “doesn’t believe judges should be making these decisions,” and he welcomed the ballot initiative as giving “the people of California … the opportunity to decide … the definition of marriage, rather than having that decision made by judicial fiat.”

 

 

GITMO DETAINEES ACCESS TO CIVILIAN COURTS

The contrast between them was particularly striking when they reacted to the Court’s 5-4 decision on June 12 that Guantanamo detainees have rights to full federal judicial review of their petitions for release–a strong rebuff to Bush. Obama praised the liberal justices (plus Kennedy) for “an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law.” McCain condemned them for “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

 

 

The liberal nightmare (and conservative dream) is McCain replacing one or more aging liberals with conservatives who proceed to overrule or hollow out Roe v. Wade and other liberal precedents; throw gay rights into reverse; discard the constitutional right to privacy; outlaw all racial preferences and school integration programs; narrow the reach of civil-rights protections for women, minorities, and disabled people; bless virtually unrestricted government funding of religious schools and sponsorship of crosses and other religious symbols on public property; stop shrinking and start expanding the death penalty; mow down gun control laws; roll back the four decisions since 2004 that have checked Bush administration efforts to expand presidential power in the name of fighting terrorism; and make it ever harder for consumers and workers to sue businesses.

 

 

The conservative nightmare (and liberal dream) is an Obama Court requiring taxpayers to fund essentially unlimited abortion rights throughout pregnancy; ordering all 50 states to bless gay marriage; expanding and perpetuating the use of racial preferences far beyond the 25-year phase out suggested by the justices five years ago; prohibiting tuition vouchers for religious schools; stripping “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance; banning the death penalty; striking down the new federal wiretap law; expanding judicial oversight of military detentions, CIA interrogations, and perhaps other operations worldwide; opening the floodgates to big-dollar lawsuits against business; eroding property rights; and perhaps creating new constitutional rights to physician-assisted suicide, human cloning, and massive government welfare and medical care programs.