To those not voting in 2012, are you comfortable letting the GOP pick two Supreme Court justices?

Scalia and Kennedy are both around 74 years old. If we win again in 2012, we may finally have the chance to have a liberal leaning Supreme Court. You might want to consider this before you either vote third party or stay home in 2012.

So far, President Obama has gotten to replace liberal justice with liberal justice.

Kennedy is a swing vote, and Scalia is the most stalwart conservative.

"Be afraid, be very afraid."

roe vs wade. This is reality not fear. If we cannot secure the court then we lose.

The right uses Roe vs Wade just like the left uses other things. The job of the court is to be solidly on the side of business and property owners.

is to appoint conservative judges. They are probably right - that would be the only way to stop it. We have already seen some very damaging moves from the court - especially the move to let corporations fund political races. We cannot afford more like that.

that bales on the party right now.

I'm a Canadian watching US politics and it ain't pretty. The US MSM defines the "right" by Limbaugh, the "teaparty" - Palin, Angle, Paul, etc., putting the "moderate center" in that space just to the left of absolute insanity. That is, putting the "moderate center" in the space once occupied by the far right G.W.B. admin, and, slightly to the left of that, the Reagan admin. And this is the same "moderate center" that the Obama/Reid/Pelosi trio are claiming. I find it mind-boggling, and I don't have anything directly invested in the US political scene. How much more so all those Dem voters, especially the first time Dem voters, who were carried away on the "hope and change" campaign with all the fine fine words that captivated the whole world with their poetry. Which captured a Nobel peace prize.

Quite frankly, US Dem/Rep politics doesn't make sense to me unless I conclude that the people are being coldly and cynically played. Yes, I've no doubt that Obama's supreme court nominees are way better than anything the R's would make. But if I try to put myself in the shoes of a Dem voter, I'd find that to be cold comfort when set against.... well, jeez, an assassination program???? Something when, alleged of Cheney, fit Cheney's darth vader image to a T, and which repulsed every thinking man and woman in the world (I mean, those who share in some of the progressive ideals that underlie protections like "equal rights under the law" etc.) And that's just the start of it.

The huge problem can't be addressed just by suspecting the motives of people who say they won't vote to continue what they consider to be a charade. Because the huge problem is just that the Dems in power, the big shots, have been systematically pissing all over "the left", all over their "base" - in their rush to fill the void left by the Republicans. Because the traditional R voter isn't too likely to switch en masse over to the D's, the R politicians aren't going to give the D's any "bipartisan wins", and the Dem base is demoralized. Unenthused, and feeling abandoned.

So the big problem isn't the suspected motives of the D's and potential D's who don't turn out, the big problem is that the Dem politicians, the big shots who have the power to change things around, are failing to motivate the people they claim (on voting day) to represent.

And when Bush won, and the Democrats had an opportunity to filibuster his SCOTUS nominees, Democrats sat back and did nothing but vote for monsters like Alito and Roberts.

Your threat would be more persuasive if the Democratic party truly showed any interest in making sure the Supreme Court is somewhere to the left of Genghis Khan.

will help how exactly?

matters more to the base than it does to the elected representatives of our party, apparently. If our proxies were really interested in halting the Court's shift to the right, they might consider fighting it on occasion.

:applause:

Yes, I have heard Dems say this...

:banghead:

and have claimed they will stay home and not vote

I've seen polls and seen people ask about it, but I've not seen a post where someone comes out and says they're not voting.

But then I'm not here every single minute of every day.

up to 7 vacancies. We have 2 so far in under 17 months with 21 months left in Obama's first term. There could be another vacancy in 2011 and another in 2012 before the end of Obama's first term.

And if we want to wreak havoc on the Republicans we need to make sure that Obama is elected to a 2nd term so he has a chance to replace some conservatives and swing the court back to the mainstream. IMO the mainstream is mostly liberal. It is just that scumbag conservatives and whacko religious are the most vocal.

If, may, finally, choice, liberal, leaning. Pretty unsure of WE, aren't YOU.

As long as turnout among the remaining Dems is decent, the Democrat wins again.. its a demographic thing and the GOPers cant do anything about it.

The Democratic candidate (presumable Obama) will only need to win one of them assuming he wins at least the Kerry 2004 states. I think Florida is the the key state. Florida could easily end up with a Dem Gov and and one Dem Senator and one Democrat-friendly Independent which should help any Dem Prez candidate. Of course alot can happen between now and then but I like our chances.

But I also retain great disappointment that when judicial activists were nominated by the GOP, our Democrats did not force them to do the full filibuster, or force them to go for the "nuclear option" knowing that it is Republicans who have used the filibuster just to obstruct Democratic administrations. I remember my longing for Harry Reid to be tough during the Alito nomination and call for that full filibuster. Let the Republicans read the phone book.

And we should have done that during the healthcare debate too. Make the Republicans fully obstruct by carrying out a full filibuster while our people were desperate for reform. Take the public option to that level. Democrats want to control costs with the public option but Republicans want to serve the rich private insurance companies.

I just hope Team Senate and Team House democrats can push themselves harder to speak out for more progressive Democratic values and encourage our president to move further in that direction.

The GOP Greedy Obstructionist Party has always been so much worse than the Democrats.

But we get mad at President Obama for not being progressive enough while Team Senate and Team Congress can't corral their own Blue Dogs to vote with our team.

President Obama can't push the ship of state all by himself. We need a stronger Democratic block behind him pushing to remind the country of the GOP's Bush Economic Crash and Bush Bailout and Bush Wars of Choice.

If all those legislators are too afraid to band together as a block to support the Democratic agenda to help the 90% non-rich, how can we expect our President to oppose those giant multinationals?

But "New Democrats" voted to allow media conglomeration and now right wingers own most of our large broadcast media so they can spin the stories and magnify progressive discontent to support the tired old story that "the opposition party always gains seats."

Well, the opposition party that crashed our economy and crashed our ethics by practicing torture should not gain seats. I wanted a Truth & Reconciliation session at the beginning of the president's term, to really examine how thoroughly the GOP had destroyed our country. Then making more dramatic progressive steps would have seemed like a logical thing to do. Including assessing why the country that spends more on its military than many other powerful nations combined should ever think it needed to violate the Geneva Conventions to achieve its goals. Smarter military spending would have been on the table. We have a bunch of different intelligence agencies and we couldn't figure out a way to get OBL without invading and occupying countries? We have a large country with lots of engineers and we couldn't push bold subsidies to alternative energy development as part of our national security strategy? Mass transit subsidies nationwide should be part of the defense budget.

So yes, I'm still a Yellow Dog Democrat because our country is still dominated by the two parties and I do not want to see more Republicans in leading positions. They prefer the rapid suicide course. They set out to prove government is bad by appointing incompetents so they can say-- "See, government can't do anything right." Here's hoping more and more Democratic Senators and Congressmen will push their way onto our airwaves to make that case. We all voted for Hope & Change in 2008. We still want the party of FDR to be bolder-- we know progressive changes make more long term economic sense. We are tired of serving the Quarterly Profit Statement of multinational corporations.

We should make a red letter calendar out of these.

18 months or less is all it took to forget the lesson from 2000.

It is selfishness in its rawest form,

So hip and pissed off, why I'm going to vote AGAINST all of my interests! That'll show em!

...that I'm going to let everyone else decide for me."