Jonathan's blog

Jim Wallis of Sojourners organized the above-titled forum that was shown on CNN last night featuring Edwards, Obama, and Clinton answering questions about their faith and its relation to their presidential aspirations. David Kuo's take on the forum is here and on the Dems and faith in general is here. Andrew Sullivan's take is here. One of the more memorable moments for me was when Edwards, like most of the rest of us, couldn't bring himself to confess a specific sin. On the positive side, it was good that Edwards said this:

O'BRIEN: If you think something is morally wrong, though, you morally disagree with it, as president of the United States, don't you have a duty to go with your moral belief? EDWARDS: No, I think that, first of all, my faith, my belief in Christ plays an enormous role in the way I view the world. But I think I also understand the distinction between my job as president of the United States, my responsibility to be respectful of and to embrace all faith beliefs in this country because we have many faith beliefs in America. And for that matter we have many faith beliefs in the world. And I think one of the problems that we've gotten into is some identification of the president of the United States with a particular faith belief as opposed to showing great respect for all faith beliefs.

...as opposed to the "inject faith into policy" from Hillary and the "biblical injunction" for policy from Obama. I think I know what they meant (in Edwards words, their "...belief in Christ plays an enormous role in the way [they] view the world", but I like Edward's acknowledgment that there can be a big down side of the president wearing his faith on his sleeve and allowing it to shape policy rather than the constitution and the law and personal freedom and what's best for the country as a whole. The transcript is here. Here are the clips from YouTube (with poor quality audio that is out of sync with the video):

In Finn's 4th soccer game on Saturday he returned to his game 1 form...which is to say, he didn't score any goals (except for the other team) and spent most of the time skipping and hopping around and not getting too close to the ball. We figured out what the problem was. On Saturday, like she did before Finn's first game, Lisa gave Finn a dose of albuterol (asthma medication) before the game because he had been coughing. She though she was helping him with his breathing, but it seems like it made him so hyperactive and spacey that he simply couldn't concentrate on playing the soccer game. The first week, i assumed that he just wasn't that into the soccer game. But after he was a goal-scoring and assist-making demon in games 2 and 3 before reverting in game 4, I'm convinced that the albuterol was a big part of it.

From an AP article of the same title in The Detroit News:

A Wal-Mart cashier who posted a joke on his MySpace Web page lost his job after the company apparently perceived it as a threat. David Noordewier, of Lapeer County's Almont Township, posted a joke that suggested average IQs would increase if a bomb were dropped on every Wal-Mart store. He said he thought it was crude, but funny. His bosses at the store in Macomb County's Shelby Township disagreed, and fired him Feb. 27.

He said he believes a co-worker who disliked him copied the MySpace page and showed it to his boss. "If you have a MySpace site, you better act like you're a politician," he said. "Be politically correct and don't try to be funny."

You might have heard that France recently elected a right-wing candidate. A French friend told me. "We elected our George Bush." It's interesting to see what passes for right-wing among the French. From a recent editorial in The Week:

In the Gallic context, a right-winger doesn't resemble anything close to a Ronald Reagan. He's more like a Bill Clinton or a Tony Blair - tempering a respect for market economics with a strong commitment to social services. Sarkozy's version of tax reform, for example, envisions a cut in the top income tax rate from 60 percent all the way down to 50 percent - still among the highest in Europe. And his plan to reduce France's bloated bureaucracy doesn't call for a single job cut; he simply proposes not replacing some of the civil servants who will retire in the next few years. Add to that his pledges to ban "golden parachute" payouts to corporate executives, make all national museums free, and legalize gay civil unions, and Sarkozy starts to seem more left-wing than most Democrats. In foreign politics, as in foreign policy, perspective is everything. One country's conservative is another country's liberal.

On another blog I've started a new hobby of maintaining a timeline of major news stories about Iraq with links to the articles. For example the next time someone tells you there was a significant pre-war link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda, go there (link) to find a link to the article describing the recently-released Pentagon report debunking that claim. It's also a sad summary of the constant march of death with a rare nugget of good news occasionally mixed in.