And republicans have been mostly in charge for the past eight years.

So who has been torturing those people at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo?

And I’m appalled at the misreading and dishonesty here. All Lederman said — because he’s a partisan Democrat who is thinking about tools he could use against the Bush administration — is that IF the Geneva Conventions applied to these detainees, then that implies that if a torture case ever did come up, perhaps the detainee would be able to cite to the Geneva Conventions. Even Lederman wasn’t enough of a partisan to say that Hamdan was ITSELF about torture, let alone to accuse the conservative Justices of voting “for torture.”

Again, my analogy is spot-on: Roe v. Wade wasn’t about gay marriage, but you could make the case that its principles of privacy and liberty could be used in some other case to create a right to gay marriage. That does NOT make it OK for a conservative partisan (the mirror of yourself) to accuse the Roe Justices of “voting for gay marriage, pure and simple.” That’s just not an honest way to discuss anything.

Understood, but in the timeframe of the SCOTUS, since 2004 is a blink of an eye.

It strikes me as dead wrong for people to choose this particular moment to throw their hands up and say that electing Republicans is the wrong way to overturn Roe.

I understand it must be rough to be a Catholic and a committed political progressive, given how morally bankrupt the progressive brand of politics has become in many respects over the last forty years. But honestly, if one can’t even manage to budge one’s movement an inch away from enthusiastic support of abortion, euthenasia, cloning, gay marriage, etc.; one can hardly be surprised if one’s fellow Catholics who _do_ take those issues seriously refuse to vote with one, or take one’s efforts in that regard very seriously.

If all the effort which has been put into convincing Catholics to vote for Obama despite his morally repugnant stances had been put into founding a Christian Democrat party in the US, I might be able to respect the fervor. But as it is, I have a very hard time.

No disagreement.

But the God Blogs have spent the better part of the last decade promoting a conservative brand of Catholicism, wedded to the Republican party. The rise of Deal Hudsonism and the First Things Party are obvious examples. (Vox-nova differs on this and provides usually intelligent debates crossing the sides of the culture wars -those very productive battles we have waged for 25 years.)

Blackadderiv is a smart and articulate representative of conservative Catholicism. His articles are always worth a read.

In all fairness, McCain is the most likely Republican candidate ever advanced (including Reagan), should he become President, to actually choose an anti-abortion justice, just on that virtue alone. However, getting the right wing to accept that Republican appointed justices are only accidentally pro-life or pro-abortion is like pulling teeth. On this matter, the pro-life right wing has a credibility gap, to the detriment of pro-life goals.

This goes back to my chronic complaint that pro-life goals have been shackled to other conservative goals and this has left some problems for the anti-abortion movement, particularly in this election cycle, and the possibility of this was evident in 2005-2006, and certainly after the 2006 election.

But I stray off-topic.

All of which are already prohibited by U.S. law.

“Even more importantly for present purposes, the Court held that Common Article 3 of Geneva applies as a matter of treaty obligation to the conflict against Al Qaeda. That is the HUGE part of today’s ruling. The commissions are the least of it. This basically resolves the debate about interrogation techniques, because Common Article 3 provides that detained persons “shall in all circumstances be treated humanely,” and that “[t]o this end,” certain specified acts “are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever”—including “cruel treatment and torture,” and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.”

I’ve been saying this in blogland since 2004. I’m long on record as saying this.

There’s a certain rythm to SCOTUS appointments, and justices do definitely try to time their retirements in order to be replaced by a president they like. Stevens and Ginsburg have been able to hold out through eight years of Bush, but it’s increasingly unlikely they could make it 4-8 more years. Electing a Democrat at this point, thus, does not move the court farther left, but it does definitely give those two particular Roe supporting seats another twenty years or more of like minded thinking.

Frankly, I don’t see McCain as being a very good president when it comes to appointing justices, but I think he would make some basic attempt to pick justices who believe that laws say what they say, and might even manage to get one out of two who opposed Roe.

In this regards, there’s a certain intellectual dishonesty to the Catholics who have been swarming out of the woodwork this year to assure us that it doesn’t matter which party we pick in regards to abortion because the Republicans have already had their chance to reverse Roe and haven’t.