E.J. Dionne, Jr. thinks it raises the stakes:

By proposing that Roberts lead the court, Bush has given the liberal groups that oppose the nomination (and Democratic senators inclined to join them) a chance to regroup and argue that this battle is no longer a practice session for the next round. This is the next round.

"Now that he’s been nominated for chief justice, he’s not a test case anymore," said a Senate Democratic staffer close to his party’s discussions. "There’s a difference between being one of nine and Number One of nine. And if he’s confirmed, he’s likely to hold the job for the next generation."

I have two thoughts. First, the underlying political calculations haven’t changed for most Senators (with the possible exception of Mary Landrieu, who may have an interest in being difficult after having made pro-Roberts noises in the past). Few, if any, will move from support (in the face of the full-court press by the legal Left) to opposition just because Roberts’s title will change. To say that the new title requires a heightened standard of scrutiny, as Dionne and legal Left do, is a sign of desperation on their part.

Second, this new line confirms the notion that no one takes the "maintaining the balance" argument seriously. After all, replacing Rehnquist with his former clerk simply, for the moment, maintains the status quo, which folks like Senators Reid and Schumer had insisted was so important.

I think that this article has it right:

[W]ith conservatives and liberals alike saying that Roberts is on track to be confirmed, the focus was already shifting to what both sides believe will be the real battle: Bush’s yet-to-be-named pick to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Yes, that category exists, as this article by the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews (my favorite education writer) attests. I agree with virtually everything he says about freshman "great books" requirements, objecting only to his characterization of my institution as "small and little-known." Harumph!

Update: Paul Stern’s comments on the effect of Ursinus’"Common Intellectual Experience" bear quoting in full:

Opinions are like our homes, familiar and comfortable. More specifically, they’re like that picture on the wall in your kitchen -- you’ve seen it so often, it’s so familiar, you no longer even recognize that it’s there. It’s only by leaving the comfort and familiarity of your intellectual homes, by subjecting your opinions to the challenges of others, that you begin to recognize your own starting point because then you can no longer take it for granted. . . .

But thinking about them by yourself is not enough. . . . Make the arguments that support your view -- make them to your classmates, to your teachers, to your friends. And then, listen carefully to their arguments, and be willing to change your mind if you find their arguments sufficiently compelling. Because of the common character of this course, you can engage in this conversation night and day, in and out of the classroom.

Niall Ferguson asks this age-old question in relation to Katrina. Voltaire would have used it as evidence of God’s non-existence; Leibniz would have claimed it was all part of some larger plan, incomprehensible to the limited vision of human beings; John Wesley would have cited it as proof of God’s judgment of sinners. Few Christians today will echo Wesley’s line, but some Muslims are already doing it, talking about "Private Katrina" as a recruit in the "global jihad":

It would be hard to get more tasteless. Yet the same underlying impulse — to interpret the disaster as confirmation of one’s own ideological position — was at work among many American liberals too. Opponents of the war in Iraq were not slow to point out that National Guardsmen who should have been on hand to rescue hurricane victims were instead failing to prevent lethal stampedes in faraway Baghdad.

Ferguson concludes that it is pointless to try to find moral significance in natural disasters:

Natural disasters — please, let’s not call them "acts of God" — killed many more people than international terrorism that year (according to the State Department, total casualties because of terrorism in 2003 were 4,271, of whom precisely none were in North America).

On the other hand, disasters kill many fewer people each year than heart disease (around 7 million), HIV/AIDS (around 3 million) and road traffic accidents (around 1 million). No doubt if all the heart attacks or car crashes happened in a single day in a single city, we would pay them more attention than we do.

I almost don’t know where to begin with this article, which suggests that religion could be a focus of the Roberts confirmation hearings.

Here’s as good a place as any:

Conservatives distrusted O’Connor for the same reason that liberals are sorry to see her go: She supported abortion rights and took moderate stances on other social causes, including voting to strike down Texas’s sodomy law, a 2003 case that was a turning point for gay rights.

Needless to say, voting with the majority on Lawrence is not moderate, at least not where I come from.

Then there’s this, which requires much more parsing than she gives it:

The issue for both sides is not so much what Roberts believes is right or wrong. Rather, it is the degree to which he believes religious morality may be permitted to influence public policy. Liberals believe in a firewall between church and state, but as Christian conservatives see it, the Supreme Court should allow elected officials to restrict abortions or permit a Ten Commandments monument to be displayed on public property, if those actions have voter support.

The good news is that we seem to have moved out of Pryor-like "deeply held beliefs" territory, but moved into questioning whether and to what extent the motives of elected officials are fair game, if they’re religious. That way lies madness, it seems to me.

Finally, there’s this:

One way senators could broach the issue would be through a section of the American Bar Association’s Model Code of Judicial Conduct that states judges should not preside over cases in which they have a financial "or other" interest. Democrats are debating whether to ask Roberts to interpret the section in the context of a decision by some Catholic bishops last year to refuse Holy Communion to Catholic politicians who support abortion rights. If such a ban were extended to Supreme Court justices, would Roberts consider that a sufficient "other" interest?

To introduce this talking point without an even cursory exploration and explanation of Catholic doctrine--my feeble attempt is here (with the links)--obviously only helps the opposition.

It is thought crass to talk openly of the political implications of the New Orleans disaster--unless you are bashing Bush--but sooner or later someone is going to notice that it is the Democrats who face the greatest peril in the aftermath: they may very well lose a Senate seat next year.

Both Mary Landreau in 2000, and Gov. Blanco in 2002, owed their small margin of victory to large turnout from New Orleans. Now probably 200,000 or more of those Democratic voters have been relocated out of state. It is doubtful many of them will be back in New Orleans by election day next year. Some may never return. An absentee voting effort might work, but it will be hard to reach and mobilize that large a diaspora. If the Bush administration can do a decent job of throwing money at the reconstruction (how hard is that?), they may be able to cover up the black eye they got for the chaotic and ineffective response of last week.

I had wondered about this, which effectively preserves the status quo (with O’Connor on the Court until yet another successor for her is found).

Roberts will of course be confirmed, a foregone conclusion even before this additional pressure was placed upon the Senate. We’ve seen the playbook of the "living constitution Left," and we’ve seen how little effect they can have, either on public opinion or on the Senate. As a result, the President can confidently nominate another judicial conservative. And he should, as soon as decency permits. (You know my preference.)

Mark Steyn’s column nails it. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but the people supervising the first responders clearly let them down, not to mention the people they were supposed to protect and serve. Here’s the conclusion:

Those levees broke; they failed. And you think about Chicago and San Francisco and Boston and you wonder what’s waiting to fail there. The assumption was that after 9/11, big towns and small took stock and identified their weak points. That’s what they told us they were doing, and that’s what they were getting big bucks to do. But in New Orleans no one had a plan that addressed levee failure, and no one had a plan for the large percentage of vehicleless citizens who’d be unable to evacuate, and no one had a plan to deal with widespread looting. Given that all these local factors are widely known -- New Orleans is a below-sea-level city with high crime and a low rate of automobile ownership -- it makes you wonder how the city would cope with something truly surprising -- like, say, a biological attack.

Oh, well, maybe the 9/11 commission can rename themselves the Katrina Kommission. Back in the real world, America’s enemies will draw many useful lessons from the events of this last week. Will America?

After a long (nearly 3 weeks!) and arduous camping and fishing trip throughout the Sierra Nevada (Mammoth, Tioga Pass, and Yosemite), I am happy to report that the Ponzi family can brag (despite mosquitos, a possible bout with West Nile Virus, and the many inherent hardships of travelling with a 4 and a 6 year-old) about the budding fishing skills in our young daughter who caught a trout that was nearly 3 1/2 lbs. Of course, in the spirit of a true fisherman, she tells everyone that it was nearly 4 lbs.

Ken Masugi, who was kind enough to buy me a drink yesterday, beat me to the punch, as did Scott Johnson (with links, no less).

My panel yesterday went well (I commented on two papers, one on Nietzsche, the other on Machiavelli, and was fortunate that both richly repaid my modest efforts), and I had nice chats with old friends, including Paul Stern, Carol McNamara, John Seery, the recently reunited Busch family (his wife’s presence in Newport News is real, but not yet virtual), Jerry Weinberger, Leon Craig, and John Eastby (who, if anyone in South Dakota is reading, would be happy to deliver a lecture in his home state).

Jim Sleeper, whom I last discussed many moons ago here has a longish essay on Allan Bloom in Sunday’s NYT Book Review. He argues, correctly, I think, that Bloom is not a movement conservative, but rather someone who would be a burr under the saddle of ideologues all across the spectrum.

Of course, Sleeper is not without his own agenda, which is in part to use Bloom against conservatives who would approvingly cite him, from Roger Kimball to David Horowitz. Sleeper’s portrait of Bloom (and his ideal university) is drawn largely to discomfit his (Sleeper’s) current bugbear--what he takes to be the alliance of corporate capitalism and conservative religion, which threatens his vision of American civic republicanism.

I suppose that having someone in the NYT present Bloom as, in effect, an anti-neocon is better than the more common alternative, which is to make him the villainous presence behind the neocon throne, as Anne Norton did. I suppose that it’s a measure of his greatness to be used for and against any number of positions.

I will not pretend to speak for him and only lament the fact that he’s not around to speak for himself.

I’m off to the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, where I’m commenting on a couple of papers, looking in on a panel here and there, and finding time to break bread with old and new friends from various parts of the Anglosphere. I’ll spend some time haunting the book room, but you’ll also find me here (scroll to the end).

I’m taking my laptop along, but I’m not sure how much time or energy I’ll have to blog.

Betcha didn’t know that the influx of Asian-American students into the Ivy league has reinvigorated student religious groups. So I learned from this article, which offers an account of evangelicalism at Dartmouth, Harvard, and elsewhere. But don’t call it evangelicalism, if you please!

According to Ivy League campus ministers, politics has become a stumbling block in evangelism. Craig Parker, staff leader for Navigators at Dartmouth, says his ministry does not use the term evangelical, due to its "political and moralistic connotations." Jimmy Quach says Harvard students loathe the Religious Right. He said, "One student told me, ’I love everything I’ve learned about Christianity. I love the community. I love what I’ve learned about Jesus. But if I were to become a Christian, I’d have to consider those in the Religious Right in my family. And I can’t stand that idea.’"

I’m not sure that Richard Reeb has left much to say about Francis Fukuyama’s rather conventional NYT op-ed on Iraq. What Fukuyama offers is a measured version of Democratic talking points, liberally sprinkled with wishful thinking about the sustainability of a sanctions-and-inspection regime that was riddled with corruption and bound ultimately to fail.

I remember a song with that title by Katrina and the Waves. Yes, you read that right: a mid-80s pop band that had a big hit in Toronto and, I’m sure, elsewhere.

Well, after Katrina’s hit, I may well be walking. I was at a reception at the President’s house when my wife called to tell me to tank up on the way home, as gas prices were approaching $5/gallon and lines were quite long. It seems that much of Atlanta’s gas comes through two pipelines from Texas and Louisiana; service was obviously interrupted.

Well, I paid $4.30 a gallon (mid-grade, which was all that was available) at a station that closed soon thereafter.

It will be interesting to see how long this price bump lasts. As a short-term phenomenon, it won’t affect people’s behavior. If it persists, those who have an axe to grind or who are less well-informed will blame the President, who needs to respond much more effectively than did his predecessors in the 1970s.

But let me hasten to add that our quite trivial problems in Atlanta pale before those in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Our thoughts and prayers are with the folks down there.

Here’s the 46 page pdf. Here’s the web summary, which contains everything but the raw data and the precise questions asked.

The news stories emphasize either evidence of substantial public support for "teaching the conflict" between evolution and creationism or evidence that people regard the Democrats as less religion-friendly than the Republicans, not to mention less religion-friendly than they were a year ago, during the 2004 campaign.

My explanation for this last finding, not substantiated by anything in the poll, is that the anti-religious vitriol spewed by the Bush-hating Left in the aftermath of the election has come to be identified with the Democrats, Jim Wallis’s best efforts to the contrary notwithstanding. Howard Dean’s ill-advised wiscrack about the "white Christian party" surely hasn’t helped either.

Other interesting, but thus far unnoticed poll findings include these: Support for the faith-based initiative remains high (66-30 favor it), unless the question is posed in terms of "taking some of the federal funds spent on government anti-poverty programs and giving them to religious groups to provide social services," in which case the numbers roughly reverse (33-58). The latter formulation is of course oversimplified and misleading.

Regardless of whether they approve of the job he’s doing (he’s still down 45-47), people’s overall opinion of GWB is still favorable by a 51-46 margin. By contrast, the favorable-unfavorable ratings of other groups are as follows: Christian conservatives (42-34), corporations (49-40), the ACLU (38-35), Congress (49-40), Republicans (48-43), and Democrats (50-41).

Finally, by a 67-28 margin, respondents thought that liberals have gone too far in keeping religion out of schools and government. This sentiment is held by whites and blacks, in all regions, across all levels of education (though only by a 54-42 margin for college-educated folks [I should note that the poll in many ways suggests that college education seems to be the great secularizing influence in the U.S.]), in both parties and among independents, and among all groups of Protestants and Catholics. The only outliers are liberal Democrats (33-64) and secularists (42-50).

There are other nuggets in the report, but it’s late, and I’m tired.