All I hear is about the odds of getting an anti-Roe judge on the Supreme Court…that is NOT the only abortion-related issue in this campaign….seems like that is avoiding the point.

And ON the subject of Supreme Court judges, all I can say is that McCain’s judges are extremely likely to be friendlier to the side of life than Obama’s!

Because that was swapping an anti-Roe vote for an anti-Roe vote. It will be different with Stevens, Bader and Souter, particularly when the Democrats actually control the Senate (and, by almost all measures, are likely to pick up several seats this election).

In the past generations, there has been remarkable consistency in swaps, with replacements only rarely differing with the one they replaced with regard to Roe.

-Thomas replacing Marshall
-Ginsburg replacing White (rebalancing the first)
-Alito replacing O’Connor

Unless he won in a landslide (usually considered over 55% at least in the American tradition, pace Bush et Rove) with significant coattails, McCain would have a very tough time wasting political capital on trying to make the case to a Democratic Senate that he had the right to replace Stevens, Ginsburg or Souter with anti-Roe justices. To say the chances are remote would be optimistic.

Not true. Quite a few pro-choicers, for example, voted to confirm Chief Justice Roberts.

This is not silly. This is what is happening.

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I’ve never experienced so promising a political phenomenon as what BO has managed to accomplish in the past year.

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Something new is unfolding; something non-ideological.

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My response:

Bwahahahahahaha! This is funny! Wow! Who ever thought that content-free politics and charisma could be so popular? Don’t drink the Kool-Aid, folks!

Me, I like my candidates to have some actual, you know, ideas….but it’s not that surprising that people that would fall for the content free notion of “choice” would also fall for the content free notion of “change”.

The Constitution limits the governments power and acts as a safeguard – the Constitution protects us from tyranny.

I hear conservatives using that word, “tyranny,” a lot, and I’m not sure what you mean by that. To me, it means the government going overboard with the guys-with-rifles things it does – excessive police powers, things that violate our civil liberties, and so on.

I will add that there are worrisome things done by the Bush administration that could be argued to be tyrannical, or at least pushing the boundaries(warrant-less wiretapping? The “Unitary Executive”?), and there has not exactly been a storm of protest from the right.

I agree with your comments about limiting the scope of the government’s power. However, I would not say that we have ever had a “pure market” system, if “pure market” means unrestricted competition or total absence of government control. We are restricted and controlled in many ways – in the first place law, in the second place, our numerous entitlement programs.

What conservatives think is that the entitlement programs we have tend to do more harm than good. There is a separate but related concern of those programs being unconstitutional – a very strong case can be made for that as well. To begin with, read the 10th amendment. So conservatives see the proliferation of federal wealth-redistribution programs as being fundamentally opposed to our federalist system of government. We also think the federalist system of government is a good thing, because within our government, power is constrained by other power. The Constitution limits the governments power and acts as a safeguard – the Constitution protects us from tyranny.

What do you think of the 10th amendment? Should we get rid of it?

This is it. If we don’t get our shot now in replacing those two ROE v WADe and all that flows from it will be secure for 20 to 30 years at least The damage as the to the Prolife movement on this front will be massive.

It is my guess that fertility control and other technologies will be advanced enough in 30 years so that abortion will be considerably less of a problem, or perhaps no problem at all. Of course, the technologies may be ones that the Catholic Church doesn’t approve of. As for stem-cell research, I suspect embryonic stem-cell research may be a thing of the past by 2038, although genetic engineering may have moved on to other pursuits the Catholic Church will object to.

On the other hand, if I could actually remember what I thought, 30 years ago, that 2008 would be like, I might scale back my predictions for 2038. It may be that the recommendation is that the US embark on a war on cancer, and politicians will be talking about making a major push to achieve energy independence.