View From the Sky

I am back to trying to get in the habit of blogging regularly. My current kick is Getting Things Done. I am reading David Allen's book Getting Things Done. I am midway through the book. I have taken a break from the reading to work on the organizing stuff. I have tackled much of my unfiled paper and now need to sort through the stuff that had previously been filed. I also have a few weeks worth of mail to catch up on (although the urgent stuff has been cherry picked). I am guessing that I will be done with the filing by the end of the week.

Labels: GTD

Obviously, Judge John Roberts is topic number 1 in the blogosphere. The biggest questions about him are:

• Why was he introduced now? The process seemed to have been moving a different pace until yesterday. Could the increasing volume on the Rove/Novak/Plame scandal have anything to do with the sudden acceleration from by the end of next week to last night? The Daily Kos has a nice perspective on this.
  
• How conservative is he? Obviously, the Bushies were not about to nominate Ralph Nader or Al Sharpton. Kos (with additional material from Armando) weighs in on this as well. My take is that he is exactly what the Fox News crowd has been hoping for. He is a former coporate attorney who has opposed environmental protection. He has worked in previous republican administrations, arguing that Roe v. Wade should be overturned. And, he has both some experience on the bench and yet not enough to have a long record that canbe used to understand his judicial philosophy (although there is the terror prisoners case).
• What will the process look like? The armies of the extreme (on both sides) have already begun loading their arenals. And, I think that even if W had nominated God herself, there would have been strong opposition. That said, I think that if Judge Roberts answers the questions, including the tough ones that Democrats will use to show his right-wing tendencies, and does not try to hide, he should make it on a party-line-ish vote.

Finally, Media Matters has an interesting piece, posted before the nominee was known, about Top Supreme Court Myths.

The Carpetbagger Report � points out (a) contrast in the ‘culture of life.’ While there are a few people on the right who truly espouse a pro-life position (opposing the death penalty in addition to being anti-choice), most are more like Shrub. They believe that a woman should not be making health care decisions about her own body when she has a fetus inside. But, they have no problem with the State taking the lives of its (frequently most reprehensible) citizens.
Then again, this is an administration that has taken Orwellian naming (No Child Left behind; Clear Skies, etc.) to new lows. Maybe when they said that they had evidence of WMD, it meant that there was no indication that they ever would ever even find any.