... I do have to ask what is up with this.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani voiced support Wednesday for the inclusion of prayer at school graduation ceremonies - an issue that has been the subject of a number of court battles.

Giuliani, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, discussed the issue with a supporter during a campaign stop in the southwestern Iowa town of Carson.

"Why have we taken God so much out of the country? I think that's kind of a core issue. I would like to see God brought back into it," said Marsha Sternberg of Carson, a chiropractic office receptionist who was among about 40 people at the Wander In Cafe.

Giuliani said there needs to be a balance between constitutional protections against the government establishment of religion and people's right of religious freedom. "It's OK to say a prayer," he said.

Sternberg turned the discussion to the offering of prayers at commencement exercises. Giuliani, a Roman Catholic, said he's given a lot of commencement speeches, although he made no distinction between high school and college ceremonies.

"In most of them there's a prayer - usually a minister or a priest or a rabbi, or sometimes a professor gets up and says a prayer at the beginning of it," he said. "So I wouldn't think that's prohibited."

Hmmm....

My initial thought on this is that Giuliani is a lawyer-- so it's odd that he would be basing his conclusions as to whether prayer at a graduation ceremony is prohibited on his actual experience of witnessing prayers done at commencements, as opposed to his interpretation of, oh, say, the Constitution. And his knowledge of case law, to date, which upholds the separation of church and state and which has resulted in exactly this kind of prohibition.

My second thought is, ma...

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Ankle Biting Pundits and The Hill both have items up today talking about John Sununu's re-election race, and the Senator's vulnerability heading into next year over his perceived lockstep record of voting with the Republican majority (and the President). Both items hone in on the issue of Iraq, and what that could do to Sununu; the Hill piece also focuses on items related to health care.

Readers will know that the Sununu race is one I'm following particularly closely, and might suspect that I find it completely astonishing that anyone would perceive Sununu as being a Bush-ite, or a run-of-the-mill Republican in any way, shape or form. Still, that's how New Hampshire Democrats are trying to paint him-- and it seems that they're having some success.

On the subject of Iraq, which is probably Sununu's greatest vulnerability, both pieces fail to point out that Sununu is clearly not in lockstep with the President (something that not many people seem to have noticed). In fact, Sununu is a cosponsor of a bill that would base future Iraq strategy on the Iraq Study Group report.

This is significant -- and Sununu should be talking much, much more about his backing of this bill-- for three reasons:

1. This bill seeks to set conditions that would enable US forces to begin coming out of Iraq as early as March 2008. In other words Sununu's sponsorship of it shows that he is not one of those Republicans who's willing to stay the course, even if it takes 10 years. In fact, it shows that he wants to get troops out of Iraq, and in the relatively near future, but isn't the kind of hothead (like certain Democrats) who are prepared to deny troops body armor in ...

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I swear, I'll write about goings-on in a different state at some point soon. In the meantime, let me point to a couple of interesting items.

First, it appears that this story involving CO-Sen candidate Bob Schaffer having taking money from the guy running an organization that benefited from a vote dished out by Schaffer in his position as a member of the State School Board is getting worse. Looks like the same donor may have done some very, very dodgy stuff in Ohio. Looks like. Doesn't mean did. Doesn't mean that Schaffer is the bad guy people are making out. Irrespective of that, expect the "corruption" story to get played out a lot as we get nearer to November 2008. And expect it to hurt Schaffer.

Second, it appears that Mitt Romney has brought some really stunning people onto his team in Colorado. While I like Bill Owens (yes, I do), I really don't like Wayne Allard, and a reader has emailed in to mention that Bruce Benson, who is evidently Romney's Political And Finance Chair for Colorado, apparently once said (or so the Rocky Mountain News seems to think) that he wanted to kill his estranged wife. I guess he also got busted for DUI twice, and donated $1k to Bob Packwood.

I'm not going to beat up on a guy I don't really know much about, and I'm certainly not minded to do it in relation to getting busted for DUI since some people who I'm close to have gotten themselves into that particular mess (I'm also not going to bash Bob Packwood). But it is kind of odd that a guy who is running now as Mr. Family Values has a dude who said he wanted to kill his wife on his team-- even if that was many years...

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