I shot the blogwatch

(But I did not shoot the deputy)…

Discriminations: Denmark Vesey never planned a slave revolt??? Maybe. Whoa. Haven’t had time to read yet, but this looks fascinating.

Ninomania: Why was the last election so mind-numbingly focused on the size of prescription drug benefit plans for the elderly? Because the courts haven’t yet “resolved” that issue for us. That was my personal take-home lesson from Prof. Wagner’s discussion of the Priscilla Owens nomination. He replies to reader mail here. And he notes that Scalia’s not a theocrat, which I’d wanted to blog about earlier but then, you know, didn’t. Justice Scalia’s much-misread First Things article clearly distinguishes between the statement, “Governments get their authority from God,” and the statement, “My religious beliefs must be instantiated in government.” Scalia specifically notes that statement #1 applies to Rome in the first century AD–hardly a Christian theocracy! In fact, one of my concerns about Scalia (I haven’t yet figured out my own position on this, hence the wuss-word “concerns” rather than “disagreements”) is that Scalia rules natural-law-based moral reasoning out of legal interpretation. He has some baseline moral principles (chief among them is the principle that the laws should be follow-able and therefore relatively fixed and intelligible), but in general he does not believe that a judge should rule in order to attain the end-result that he believes to be most moral. Judging according to religious belief is not even on the table for Scalia, at least in the work I’ve read by him (including A Matter of Interpretation, his popularized statement of principle).

Virginia Postrel: Lots more good stuff about Guilty Southern White Liberals. But, as always, no permalinks.