Surprised? Why?

Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. yesterday presided over the reading of some fascinating decisions. Not only did the Court cite Brown v. Board of Education while stomping on the underlying principle that segregated education is, by its very nature, unequal education, it used the resulting smoke to remove a piece of ant-trust law that has protected consumers for nearly a century.

The detail are in your local newspaper, and, for a change, I won't tell you what you already know. But the bottom lines here bear repeating.

Communities made an effort to provide for considering ethnicity in "all other things being equal" situations in order to provide some measure of diversity to combat a situation of increasing defacto segregation.

Merchants had been discounting prices (taking a lower profit per item sold) on products from automobiles to candy bars, to the benefit of the consumer.

In both cases, the Court decided such grassroots actions were occasionally unconstitutional. Not always, and the lower courts need to look at such issues on a case-by-case basis, but occasionally. So much for 6 years' worth of railing against the evils of "clogged courts and delayed justice" we have had from the Neo-Cons.

So we have a C.J. selected in a fog of rhetoric about the evils of "activist judges" the twin benefits of smaller government and "local control" blithely putting the Federal court system ever farther into local community actions, local business actions, and the private lives of citizens.

Concurrently, these decisions, and several others this term, virtually mandate an escalation of lower-court litigation.

The broadcast and cable media paid attention to the former decision while virtually ignoring the latter. Probably because this keeps a good face toward a consumer demographic while not irritating the major economic forces that seem to determine content in the "news mcnuggets" that compose the primary information flow for most of the nation.

But is anybody truly surprised? Keeping "those people" out of pretty much all-white schools and making sure nobody undersells Wal-Mart is hardly anything new. The Administration may be staffed and led by minds that have raised mediocrity to zenlike levels, but they are firmly rooted in the worldview of the oligarchy.

So why is it that when members of the Supreme Court, appointed primarily for their loyalty to the beliefs of people like the President (who describes his ideal audience as "the haves and the have mores") act precisely as expected, people are surprised?