I was listening to the "Diane Rehm Show" yesterday. She had a panel of people talking about the Supreme Court. The woman on the panel said that the Supreme Court only mattered to those at either "extreme." At one "extreme," she explained, were people who cared about civil liberties. Now when I was brought up, civil liberties were seen as essential to democracy, not the concern of some fringe group on the left. It's going to take a while just to get the discourse back so that those of us who take fairly mainstream postures (we shouldn't practice torture) will be considered centrists rather than extremists.