The Oregonian editorialized the other day that John Roberts was "an inch to the left of a filibuster." Obviously implying Bush didn't leave anything on the table in his calculation of just how conservative he could go and still get his appointee through the Senate.
Now, if that is true, it is more evidence that Bush is hardly a dunce. I don't know much about Roberts, so I can't really analyze his credentials as a constitutionalist.
But the Oregonian went on to say:
"But he does have a troubling spot on his record. As a deputy solicitor general for President George H.W. Bush, he endorsed a legal brief that read, ". . . We continue to believe that Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled. The Court's conclusion in Roe that there is a fundamental right to an abortion . . . finds no support in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution."
This is another example of the damage that is done by Portland being a one newspaper town. A monopoly newspaper can regularly insult half its readers and really pay no price.
Since when is a legal critique of Roe v Wade a black mark on a jurist's record? There have been many legal scholars - both liberal and conservative - who agree that Roe was an awful piece of jurisprudence. It has been vigorously debated for more than 30 years, and if anything, the notion that Roe was an egregious example of outcome-based jurisprudence that invented rights in the constitution out of whole cloth has pretty much become the majority opinion.
But rather than admit that there are valid criticisms of Roe, which every honest person I know regardless of their position on abortion admits, the Oregonian characterizes such criticisms as some sort of character flaw, as if Roe had the standing of Brown v Board of Education.
Little wonder that the editorial board at the O finds its influence so dramatically on the wane.
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These huge federal, state, county and city payrolls are not much more than out-of-control government welfare programs that we-the-tax-payer can no longer afford to support.
There are too many fat-ass government bureaucrats that do nothing more than drain our personal funds and stifle positive economic activity. This country will continue to sit in an economic-hole as long as this huge government-welfare-monkey is on our back.
Too many people expect government to give them these huge, unrealistic guarantees. These guarantees, necessarily, need to go away!
These huge payrolls and benefits, including fabulous retirement programs, need to be cut back at a rate of 10% per year for the next five years. This, I believe, would go a long way to balancing the budget and would put some degree of sanity back into these government programs.
A Realist-pig
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