(Chautauqua, N.Y. - 26 August 2010) Is neutrality dead? Is the political center in this country officially gone, or just being shouted down by fringes, or both?

As Sandra Day O'Connor was interviewed at her old haunt, Chautauqua Institution - she met her husband here - one begins to wonder about how the radical right and "professional left," as Robert Gibbs terms it, are eating away at our independent nation.

Her tone would suggest that she's concerned by what's happened here during the past few decades. "Our young people today are not being taught how government works," she said, adding that simple civics classes are no longer on schools' agendas with the math- and science-heavy No Child Left Behind Act. That focus caused school systems to drop civics and government as a study area. (O'Connor has a fix for that, though, in icivics.org - and she's actively working on it today.)

She was an unintentional mythbuster for me - and even took on the disgusting idea of having state judges elected by popular vote. Andrew Jackson was a crusader on this issue; Georgia, my home state as an Atlanta resident, was the first to adopt the practice. As a result, "The special interests are buying judges, and it's wrong. We need to move to a system away from the popular election of judges."

An audience member at Chautauqua asked about the election of Elena Kagan as Supreme Court Justice,  and how sitting on the bench must be a precursor to the Supreme Court. "Fully one-third of the justices in the history of the Court had no previous experience as as a judge." I don't think this fact was properly reported by our national media.

The first woman to sit on the Supreme Court still keeps an office there, which means she must, by U.S. law, preside over cases on a lower court. "I'm seeing more cases now than I ever did on the Supreme Court," she said with a laugh.

O'Connor, for me, is the last bastion of fairness and "mainstream empathy" - not the empathy that was so disgustingly twisted and maligned during the eventual nomination of now-Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Sandra Day should be our model in any future Justice selections.

My headline draws from a song by Susan Werner of the same name - with "straight" meaning down-the-middle fair and straightforward. Is she a dying breed or a just a hint of Justices to follow?