President Barack Obama plans to extend health care and other benefits to the gay and lesbian partners of federal employees. White House officials say Obama plans to announce decision on Wednesday in the Oval Office. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because the president had not yet made the announcement.

The move would give partners of federal employees access to health care and financial benefits such as relocation fees for moves. Officials say Obama would detail more details of the decision on Wednesday.

Chrysler has said a delay could scuttle the deal.

A federal appeals court in New York had earlier approved the sale, but gave opponents until 4 p.m. EDT Monday to try to get the Supreme Court to intervene.

Ginsburg issued her order just before 4 p.m., when Chrysler would have been free to complete the sale of most of its assets to Fiat.

WHISPERING in President Obama’s ear is one of the most ruthlessly effective masters of identity politics in America — and the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the high court is his ultimate victory.

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin — one of Obama’s earliest confidants and promoters — is an accomplished veteran of the federal judiciary wars.

An influential member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and now the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, Durbin has always been among the most brazen about using federal judgeships to promote the political and demographic goals of the Democratic Party.

Operating under close direction from liberal lobbyists, Durbin and fellow Democrats have worked to fill the federal courts with judges who rule most reliably in favor of the party’s top donors and supporters such as trial lawyers, labor unions and abortion-rights groups.

At the same time, Durbin and his fellow warriors also have used federal judgeships to advance their party’s dominance among certain demographic groups — especially Hispanics, the nation’s fastest-growing minority.

This has meant not only promoting minority judges, but also thwarting those nominated by Republicans.

No case has been more blatant than the 2001 nomination of Miguel Estrada, who was picked for the federal appeals court by former President George W. Bush.

When nominated to the appeals court, it was widely speculated that he was being groomed to become the first Hispanic nominated to the Supreme Court.

But liberal lobbyists, Durbin staffers wrote their boss in a secret memo that later became public, identified Estrada as especially dangerous, because “he has a minimal paper trail, he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment.”

Durbin and his fellow Democrats put Estrada on ice and eventually the respected jurist asked for his nomination to be withdrawn.

Now comes Sonia Sotomayor, who stands to become the first Hispanic to sit on the Supreme Court. But, unlike Estrada before her, she doesn’t share his discomfort with allowing the federal courts to legislate from the bench to the benefit of liberal interests.

In other words, Durbin and his fellow Democrats on the Judiciary Committee are all in favor of promoting Hispanic nominees within the federal judiciary — just so long as they think the way they’re supposed to.

Yes, they would if the Hispanic has a record like this:

Judge Sotomayor is a liberal judicial activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important that the law as written.  She thinks that judges should dictate policy, and that one’s sex, race, and ethnicity ought to affect the decisions one renders from the bench.

She reads racial preferences and quotas into the Constitution, even to the point of dishonoring those who preserve our public safety.  On September 11, America saw firsthand the vital role of America’s firefighters in protecting our citizens.  They put their lives on the line for her and the other citizens of New York and the nation.  But Judge Sotomayor would sacrifice their claims to fair treatment in employment promotions to racial preferences and quotas.  The Supreme Court is now reviewing that decision.

She has an extremely high rate of her decisions being reversed, indicating that she is far more of a liberal activist than even the current liberal activist Supreme Court.

Why would Republicans not dare to vote against her?  Is she the only Hispanic out there?  Doubt it!

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After three decades of fighting in court, suspected Nazi guard John Demjanjuk was deported from the United States to Germany on Tuesday to face allegations of being an accessory to the murder of 29,000 Jews and others at the Sobibor death camp.

A unanimous Supreme Court ruled Monday the government has been overstepping the boundaries of identity theft legislation when targeting immigrants who use phony citizenship documents to acquire jobs.

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