Sandra Day O'Connor announces her retirement.

"The shroud of the dark side has fallen, begun the culture war has. "

One of the nice things about having my own politically-themed blog is that I can be as over-dramatic as I wish. The other is that I can bash James Dobson and his ilk at will without upsetting anyone accidentally. If you came here purposefully you probably already knew what to expect.

As far as retiree's could've gone, this isn't the worst thing that could've happened, but it's still pretty bad. David Corn at The Nation has a pretty good "first impression article" on what can happen from this. Even though he was pretty awful as a counselor, Alberto Gonzalez ( Bush crony and current Attorney General) hasn't been that bad as a judge. Sadly he's probably the most reasonable candidate we can hope for. However, there is some hope in this in that if the Republicans push through an anti-choice candidate and Roe V. Wade is overturned then the political firestorm will guarantee at the very least a Democratic presidential win in 2008. However, if they do get a pro-choice candidate through then they will lose a chunk of their new "base" over in the Christian Right.
Either way, that part looks good.

What looks really bad though is that Justice O'Connor was the swing vote on many environmental, health, race, and worker's rights issues and chances are that many of those decisions could easily be reversed by whomever takes her place.

Here's a list of some of the 5-4 decisions where she was the "swing" vote care of "The Nation".
( The decisions themselves are after the article.)