Republican-appointed judges, most of them conservatives, are projected to make up about 62 percent of the bench next Inauguration Day, up from 50 percent when Mr. Bush took office. They control 10 of the 13 circuits, while judges appointed by Democrats have a dwindling majority on just one circuit.

David M. McIntosh, a co-founder and vice-chairman of the Federalist Society, said the nation’s appeals courts were now more in line with a conservative judicial ideology than at any other time in memory.

As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor demonstrated, conservatives can oppose sexism they see in operation, including forms of violence against women that some liberals do not see as such. Reaching across ideology can win legal arguments, but who judges those arguments, at this moment in time, could make or break women’s equality in law, hence in life, for generations.

It reads like a warning to, or about, Mr. Postpartisan who was all set to vote Yes for John Roberts for SCt until an aide told him it would screw his presidential ambitions.  Obama voted no, but went onto the Senate floor and gave a speech defending both Roberts’ nomination and Patrick Leahy’s yes vote.  It seems Obama was more prepared to pay obesiance to presidential perogative than to seriously consider Roberts’ tenure on the Court and its effects on women, among others.  Roberts’ Court, remember, gave us the Leadbetter decision. 

I too would be surprised if anything Calabresi warns about or MacKinnon hopes for would come to pass under an Obama administration.  It’s all backsliding from here.

<i>Positions on women’s rights do not divide neatly along conventional political lines, nor is abortion their sole template. As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor demonstrated, conservatives can oppose sexism they see in operation, including forms of violence against women that some liberals do not see as such. Reaching across ideology can win legal arguments, but who judges those arguments, at this moment in time, could make or break women’s equality in law, hence in life, for generations.</>

From Funnie’s link. 

The real story is that the blocking of judicial appointments began with Clinton, not Bush.  In fact, Clinton’s choice for the Sixth Circuit, from 2002 or so, only recently got appointed, about 6 months ago, in a deal that got a Bush appointee on the District Court for the ED of Michigan.  Stonewalling on judicial appointments is an old story and that,  more than anything else, is responsible for the current sorry state of the Federal Courts. 

If the Dems have been fighting back on judicial appointments it’s only because Republicans stonewalled for years, keeping seats open for future conservative judicial appointments.  Frankly, lower Court appointments aren’t decided in the White House, they’re decided in the Senate.

In any event, I trust neither Obama nor the current Congressional leadership to provide us with progressive, or even notably liberal, judicial appointments.  We have yet to see what Obama will bargain away in obesiance to his great god postpartisanship.  I’m guessing abortion rights and gay rights given the social conservatism of his base in the Black church and his overt wooing of the conservative evangelicals over the past months.  YMMV.

Obama = no change for women as women, and McCain, esp. with Palin, means change for the worse. In addition, war is bad for women.

I am also sorry about your friend, Heart.

On voting: think feasability. It is feasible to get the Republicans out. I’d like to get the Greens or someone alternative in but what is feasible now at the national level is to get the Republicans out.
At local and state levels more can be done. Yes, that means not voting idealistically at the presidential level. I used to do that and I might still do it if I were sure there were no way to defeat McCain in my state. But we are looking at w.a.r. and international embarrassment, don’t go for McCain just because he pays *his* women staffers better than Obama does. Think about women in general.