A history lesson for those who will not listen and thus be condemed to repeat the mistakes of the past

There was a time in this country when people put the good of the country before their political beliefs. These people knew that their short term political gain was not good for the country in the long run. One of these people was former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren.

He was appointed Chief Justice by President Eisenhower. Eisenhower appointed him to that position thinking that he would be a reliable conservative jurist that would uphold all the old white power structure laws that the old white power structure had spent years enacting. But thankfully ol' Earl saw the bigger picture and when he was Chief Justice the Supreme Court handed down some of it's most progressive decisions ever. Those decisions include Brown v. Board of Education (which forced the public schools to integrate), Hernandez v. Texas (which allowed Hispanic Americans to serve on juries), Miranda v. Arizona (which forces police to inform people of their rights immediately after arrest), and many others.

Now of course these types of decisions pissed off the right wing in this country and they regretted ever supporting Warren's nomination. Even Eisenhower, who didn't do much beyond play golf and not boink his wife Mamie for eight years, said he wished he'd never put ol' Earl on the Supreme Court. People like Phyllis Schlafly and the John Birch Society openly called for Warren to be impeached because he helped craft the decisions that helped so many blacks, Jews, women, and other minorities.

I shudder to think what our country would be like if Earl Warren, a life long conservative Republican before his appointment to the Supreme Court, had not looked at the bigger picture and put his country ahead of his petty political beliefs.

It's too bad that some of these people don't follow his lead.

The decisions that are coming down from this Bush packed court are over turning years of established legal precedents for no good reason. They are chipping away at our freedoms and at the very thing that most all Americans hold dear, the Bill of Rights. The 'Bong hits 4 Jesus' case should send a chill down your spine if you care about free speech for every one, especially if you have school age children or are planning to have children in the future. They also continue to rule that money donated to political campaigns is a form of speech, so that means that once again the rich will get their views heard and acted upon while you and me get shut out in the cold.

But the five member Reich wing majority's biggest outrage is today's ruling that strikes down a law designed to desegregate public schools further. Chief Justice John Roberts, a Bush appointee, said in his opinion that in over turning this law that the way to end discrimination based on race was stop discriminating on the basis of race. Fine theory John but in practice the white male majority in this country will never stop discriminating on the basis of race. In the over two hundred years that this country has been in existence the only way blacks, women, Hispanics, and others have been granted anything even remotely resembling equal rights has been through the courts. To imagine that we will end discrimination if we just stop race based quotas in our public schools is ludicrous. You are dragging us away from Brown v. Board of Education and back to Plessy v. Ferguson.

You've shown yourself to be an intellectual pipsqueak John Roberts. And just like Scalia, Thomas, and your new pal Alito, you've also shown that you're on the side of the multi-national corporations that are run by your Reich wing pals. We have no reason to expect you and the other 4 traitors to the Constitution will ever be like Earl Warren and put the good of all people ahead of your political party. Shame on all of you for being so short sighted and unpatriotic.

I hope you sleep well when you go back home at night to your house in