Over at Concurring Opinions, Robert Tsai spends a lot of time trying to figure out how Chief Justice Roberts could vote to uphold administrative declarations that assisted suicide is within the scope of the Controlled Substances Act while also voting to uphold a preliminary injunction under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act against the CSA. As Tsai puts it, "what gives?"

While I do not mean to reject out of hand the possibility that Roberts is "a nationalist through-and-through" (but see his vote in Central Virginia Community College v. Katz), wouldn't a more logical answer be "the merits of the cases"?

We have entered a new stage in the Iraqi conflict. As a model of chattering class follow-the-herd behavior, I enthusiastically supported the war, had reservations about the occupation, and have largely been silent since. The destruction of al-Askariya (the site whence the Mahdi is supposed to rise) has changed everything. The situation on the ground is no longer tenable. I said it yesterday, internally to Crescat, but before this crime a unified national Iraq was holding on by threads. Now it is probably an impossiblity. The Ottoman/British/American dream collapses with the golden dome of Samarra.

The Times, as usual, has the best round-up. (Can someone get Ed Wong a Pulitzer?) The most important facts are in the lede. Despite a general curfew, political assassinations of prominent Sunni clerics are continuing apace (including imams at Al Sabar, Al Yaman, and Al Rashidi mosques in Baghdad), and both the Association of Islamic Scholars (the group widely linked to the native Sunni Insurgency) and some Sunni MPs have pulled away from the new government.

The big thing to watch right now is how the Kurds react. The two feuding Kurdish parties recently united, with Jalal Talabani continuing to lead the Kurdish delegation in the National Assembly and Massoud Barzani taking a back-seat role in pseudo-autonomous Kurdistan (the former no-fly zone). If they (or Barzani) decide that now is the best time to cut-and-run, the Kurds have a state, Turkey, Iran and Syria are going to be very unhappy, and a Sunni-Shi'a civil war in the lower governates will be an inevitability.

This is remarkably bad. In a violent civil war, the streets of Baghdad would run with blood. Think Beirut in a city the size of Chicago.

(For up to the minute reports, check out the optimistically named Healing Iraq, which has an English translation and maps from the Arabic language site of the Iraqi Islamic Party (Sunni) [hat-tip Sullivan]). Other analysis can be found at the always accurate Belgravia Dispatch. There, Greg Djerejian focuses on Sistani and Sadr's appeals for calm, while nailing the DoD culture that hampers counterinsurgency evolution.

Further Update: CNN reports that the entire Sunni Accord Front (not only isolated Sunni MPs) has officially pulled out of political unity talks with Talabani and and al-Jaafari. Again, watch Barzani. If there was a time for the PDK to break ranks, now would be it.

I have been trying to think of a way to tie the Dubai-ports tempest-in-a-teapot to the Constitution's port-preference clause, but alas can think of no clever tie-in. Dan Drezner's conclusion (that there's nothing suspect going on here at all) seems eminently right.

Indeed, the objection to it seems almost entirely parallel to the (silly) fears when foreign nationals bought up American currency or American stocks. And for that matter, rather similar to the xenophobia that marked the Alien Land Acts, too.

My very-speculative suspicion is that public fears about these things stem from the intersection of latent American xenophobia and American romanticism about ownership. The intuition is that owning stuff is important and gives one a certain sovereignty and immunity against the government with respect to the thing that one owns, and that "therefore" when people that Americans don't trust or don't like own stuff, they must somehow gain power over us and ours.

Now this is eminently silly, but I think romanticism of ownership is what underlies the odd misunderstanding that foreign ownership of a port somehow implies foreign control of port security.

The Florida Supreme Court recently reached the baffling conclusion that a constitutional requirement that the state fund public education implicitly creates a constitutional prohibition on state funding of private education. I am dismayed to see that this reasoning appears to be catching, at least according to the Salt Lake Tribune. If anybody knows where the opinions mentioned in the article can be found, I'd love to see them.

[Thanks to Howard Friedman.]

UPDATE: I should be clearer in distinguishing between two different arguments that vouchers are unconstitutional. One argument, which is not frivolous, is that state constitutions that forbid the expenditure of money as aid to religious schools forbid voucher programs that allow students to go to religious schools. The Florida Court was reluctant to make this argument because there is some nervousness that such provisions might themselves violate federal guarantees.

The other argument, much more dubious, is that the state constitutional obligation to fund public education creates a separate, and implict rule that forbids funding private education, whether religious or irreligious. Some state constitutions have a constitutional school fund that can only be spent on the public schools, but the vouchers are rarely funded from that school fund, and it would be odd to suppose that funds not in the school fund should be subject to the same rules.