Sunday Surfing

It's been a heavy week so I'm trying to catch up on news and blogs.

• Will Obama run in 2008? Man, wouldn't that be nice. I still wonder if he should grow a little more first but, on the other hand, it might be nice to have a president who doesn't bring years of IOUs into office with him. If he chooses to wait he should get out of the Senate post-haste with a run for Illinois Governor instead. Senior Senators are always at a disadvantage because of how their voting records get used against them at election time (the way legislation is bundled makes it easy to twist voting records in a thousand meaningless ways but most people don't understand that).
  

• I find Scalia's recent comments amazing:

  "Deeply controversial issues like abortion and suicide rights have nothing to do with the Constitution, and unelected judges too often choose to find new rights at the expense of the democratic process, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said Saturday."

  Am I the only one who thinks he has this backwards? That the focus of the constitution was not meant to explicitly define (and therefore limit) individual rights but rather to explicitly define (and therefore limit) the power of government? We are born with ALL rights; the constitution does not grant them to us. It does call out specific rights that serve as a foundation for our law but it was never meant to be a complete laundry list. And it's only via the democratic process that we decide to limit them, via law. Jefferson summarized this idea quite articulately when he said:
  

  "Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the Author of nature, because necessary for his own sustenance." --Thomas Jefferson: Legal Argument, 1770. FE 1:376

  I surfed a bit to read what else has been said on the topic and found this 2003 blog post from Common Dreams... it's really quite brilliant. As an aside, I always thought one of the most telling (and dangerous) things about Bush's Supremes (including the rejected Harriet Miers) is their general belief in the less-limited power of the Executive Branch of government. All the abortion brouhaha is just a total load of obfuscational crap. Roe v Wade as a litmus test is irrelevant... it's not going to get repealed in my lifetime. It's just a tool for both sides of the aisle to bludgeon us with. People need to get a little smarter about not continuously falling for this sleight of hand.
  

• Is Bush flip-flopping on "stay the course" or does he just think we're all stupid?

• I've noticed this phenomenon, too.
  

• Looks like I missed out on a lot of to-and-fro over John Kuo's new book, "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction. Tristero and Digby (here too) over at Hullabaloo fill me in, as does this story in time. Read the all book excerpts... yikes. I don't know what to make of this story if it's true, quite frankly. Part of me feels bad for the theo-voters who got snookered into getting out the vote for Bush but - then again - you'd have to have been blind not to see the obvious "god and gays" manipulation going on during the last few election cycles. I also don't understand why government funding of faith-based programs is any better than direct administration of the same programs. Why does everyone assume the private sector is better or more efficient at providing these services when there is ZERO oversight or accountability? And finally, I think the unnecessary blurring of church and state is bad for both church AND state.

• Fox News strikes again (surprise, surprise).