WELL, AT LEAST IT'S NOT ANOTHER BEST-SELLING CONFESSION

Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was interviewed recently by Wingnut Network - er Fox News Channel. An excerpt from an article about the interview follows

O'Connor, a swing vote in favor of abortion rights and affirmative action, said she was seeing an unprecedented level of public criticism in recent months of state and federal court decisions.

The vast majority of the criticism, she said, is unjustified and borders on harassment of judges, especially in cases where lawmakers threaten impeachment of judges for decisions they disagreed with.

But federal courts, too, play a role in fostering public credibility by generally adhering to "stare decisis," or settled precedent, O'Connor said.

"Obviously, that is a concern," said the Reagan appointee who retired early last year. She responded to a question in a broadcast interview about the public's perception that the Supreme Court based its decisions more on politics than principle and whether that belief undermined the court's credibility.

Her comments come a month after the high court changed course on abortion, upholding a national ban on a midterm method of ending pregnancies known as "partial-birth abortion." It was a 5-4 decision that opened the door for states to pass additional abortion restrictions.

Liberal and some conservative legal experts have criticized the decision as disturbing and inconsistent because it seemed to defy a virtually similar 5-4 high court case in 2000.

In the 2000 case, O'Connor was the key vote in striking down an abortion ban that placed an "undue burden" on a woman's right to choose. O'Connor has since been replaced by conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who voted last month for the ban.

In the interview, O'Connor said she is working to put together a Web site aimed at junior high and high school students that will seek to instill respect for the judicial process, including "stare decisis" and the court's power to overturn actions by the legislative or executive branch that impinge on individual freedoms such as speech, religion and due process of law.

The goal, in part, is to counter recent attempts by Congress and state legislatures to unduly restrict the authority of judges simply on the grounds that they disagree with the outcome of a decision, O'Connor said.

"Now, when I was a youngster I do remember seeing on the highway out by the Lazy B Ranch a big billboard saying, 'Impeach Earl Warren,' and that was in the years when there were some cases like Miranda and some criminal cases, and people got all excited," O'Connor said.

Warren was a liberal chief justice who presided over court rulings that expanded rights for criminal defendants.

"But what we're seeing now is a more broadly based range of criticisms of the nation's courts, both state and federal," she said. O'Connor cited in part a failed South Dakota measure to jail judges for "erroneous decisions" and unsuccessful efforts by Congress to punish judges who cited foreign judgments in Supreme Court rulings.

O'Connor, 77, indicated earlier this year that she would have preferred to stay on the Supreme Court for several more years until she was ill but that she stepped down because of her ailing husband, John, who has Alzheimer's.

You gotta love the last line - you hear it so often lately. Stepped down to spend more time with her "family/ailing husband/blah blah blah." Not making light of Alzheimers. Going out slowly and in ever increasing dementia is horrific, and wouldn't wish that on anyone. Okay, maybe Rove or Cheney. Seriously, though, we have been bombarded in the past three plus years by one after the fact tell all after another from people who could have spoken up when they were close to the seat of power, but kept silently compliant, kept in their jobs, only to come out later and express remorse for not standing up to the Commander Guy of Crawford and his old Apprentice Darth Heinous. Here, O'Connor's recognition - tardily of course, is that partisan political expediency is creeping into and choking the vibrance out of our system of jurisprudence. And hers was one of five votes counted upon to set this whole partisan sycophantasia in motion. Sandy, get out your sackcloth robe and your ashes. But please, don't add to the pile of 35-bucks-a-throw, 400 page "mea culpas" such as Tenet's, or Woodward's last one, or any of the rest of those in the works by dozens of others now striving to cash in on their weakness or unwillingness to speak up and out when it would have mattered. We're up to here with the tardy tell alls. Speak up in your circle. Help shut down those who are trying to re-cast this as some courageous step in a new hundred years war against Islamic extremism. . That's what atonement is all about.