Good morning. No big events over the weekend but a couple of good pieces to think about.
One, from Sunday's NY Times, (Craig Smith, Adding Newsprint to the Fire, 2/5/06) does a fine job of outlining some of the issues at stake in the demonstrations by Muslims against a Danish newspaper's printing of cartoonists' images of the Prophet Muhammed (Islamic law forbids any imagery of him whatsoever). Consider the issues involved from the point of view of the political culture discussion in Chapter 2 (especially along the procedural/substantive political dimension) and the discussion of religious freedom and toleration in Chapter 5.
This morning's Washington Post has an article about the upcoming congressional elections in November (Dan Balz and Chris Cillizza, Handful of Races May Tip Control of Congress, 2/6/06). While it is way too early to make predictions (and the article doesn’t, in fact, make any) it does do a good job of laying out what are the electoral stakes in the 2006 midterm elections (which seats are vulnerable, what it will take to switch party control in each house, etc.) and putting them into recent historical context. For a close examination of the issues involved in the upcoming elections, (and a spiffy elections map) see CQPolitics.com.
Finally, see the LA Times for a good discussion of what's at stake in Bush's claim to inherent powers to act during wartime as the Senate begins hearings into the latest concrete instance of that claim -- Bush's order authorizing the NSA to eavesdrop on domestic phone calls (David G. Savage, The Power of the President, 2/6/06). I've posted on the issues involved here, here, and here several times in the last month or so. Remember to refer to the What's at Stake in Chapter 8, and to consider how Bush's views of presidential power affect the checks and balances in the Constitution.