Leave it to the littlest one to kick ass

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg kicked butt in this U.S. Supreme Court session. Sadly, the five now-majority Bushie justices -- including Clarence Thomas, who sexually harassed and subjugated Anita Hill as her employer -- kicked ours, ladies.

Apparently, it's rare to read a dissent. Ginsberg, with support of three male justices, spoke twice this month to stand up for us.

The first was the majority decision that men know better than we do that we'd regret it later if we decided with our doctor to use intact dilation and extraction surgery for safe late-term abortions, so it upheld the philandering Newt Gingrich-era legislation banning the misnomed "partial-birth abortion," even though the court struck down the same ban in a state law back before Justice Sandra Day O'Connor retired.

When the court last week made an absurd ruling an employer is allowed to pay its woman worker less than her 16 male counterparts because she didn't file her discrimination suit within 180 days of her first, not last, paycheck, Ginsberg laid out the majority in a war of words and summoned Congress to overturn the majority’s “parsimonious reading” of the federal law against discrimination in the workplace.

“What she is saying is that this is not law, it’s politics,” Pamela S. Karlan, a Stanford law professor. ...“She is accusing the other side of making political claims, not legal claims.”

“She’s sounding an alarm and wants people to take notice,” said Debra L. Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women and Families, an advocacy group that focuses on the workplace.

My own "radar" was absolute during confirmation hearings of both Bush 43 appointees, John Roberts and Sam Alito: They have political agendas to turn back the clock 50 years -- viva McCarthyism -- if not a full century, to marginalize women, minorities and gays.

If Bush gets one more appointment to knock out Anthony Kennedy's conservative-but-generally-sane swing vote, I could imagine women prohibited from voting in the not-too-distant future. The Bush U.S. Department of Justice's assistance in voter caging by the Republicans already bodes my prediction re: minority voters.

Brace yourselves. We're in for a bumpy ride.