Bleak house

even if you think sniper rifles are a Constitutional right for every ?qualified? American.

What anti-gunners call "sniper rifles" us out here in the rest of the nation call deer rifles. Ain't no real diff. Indeed, I often use a semi-auto M-14 as a deer rifle. (Though I don't use the 20-round magazine when hunting deer.) I'm comfortable with it, the cartridge is correct, the accuracy is excellent, and the recoil less than lighter rifles. But a rifle is a rifle.

Other old military-issued favorites in wide use are the Mauser 98, the M1 carbine, and the M1 Garand.

Intelligent Design speaks directly to the reasoning power of a person. Let us not make it complicated. Such reasoning is inherently faulty and such a person cannot be expected to suddenly have their full faculties when approaching complicated legal questions.

Well, I don't agree with that. This is a separate issue, but to reply briefly, I don't subscribe to creationism, but you're assuming the answer if you say that the fossil record proves the non-existence of God, because any entity that really does exist and really was powerful enough to create the entirety of the heavens and the earth is surely powerful enough to remain hidden if they so desire. It strikes me as the height of human arrogance (and for that matter, a repudiation of the history of science, whose repeated refutation of the assumptions of the past is its stock in trade) to assume that all that we perceive is all that there is. That a person is religiously faithful about the unknown, to my mind, in no way suggests there is something faulty with their ability to reason with the known. In my conception of the role of the judge, if they're doing their job right, their views on creationism - or whatever obfuscatory neologism they're using for it this week - is irrelevant.

Abortion becomes a national problem when the poor must find a way to another state for a medical procedure.

Even assuming for sake of argument that is so, not every problem of national scope is ipso facto an appropriate subject for congressional action. Abortion becomes an appropriate subject of congressional action when it is (or becomes) one of the policy areas delegated to Congress by the Constitution of the United States, not merely because it's deemed important. Our Constitution is not one where a (perceived) need to act creates the power to act. The view that "'if a job has to be done to meet the needs of the people, and no one else can do it, then it is a proper function of the federal government' ... [is] an unqualified repudiation of the principle of limited government[,] [and an embrace of] the first principle of totalitarianism: that the state is competent to do all things and is limited in what it actually does only by the will of those who control the state." Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (1990), 9-10 (quoting A. Larson, A Republican Looks At His Party (1956)).

(Ann thinks the commerce clause argument is easy; I disagree because I would overrule a lot more of extant commerce clause jurisprudence than would she. This isn't a one-way thing, either, it goes both ways - as I mentioned below, there is no more federal power to ban abortion than there is to mandate it.)

State regulation of abortion might be the way to go if Roe is thrown out.

It's the only way to go, consistent with the Constitution we have today. Of course, I would want the individual states to limit it and do everything possible (which, as Guiliani is fond of pointing out, doesn't just mean back-end restrictions on abortion, but providing other and better options, and helping re-stigmatize abortion) to reduce or eliminate demand. In some ways it's unfortunate that we have to build the culture of life at the state levle, it'd be much easier to ban it outright at the federal level, but that's just not what the Constitution permits.

If you think a fertilized embryo has a soul, your belief MUST be religiously based. You have no scientific evidence.

If you believe that there is no non-religious basis for morality, you must have a fairly dim view of atheists. ;)

The issue of abortion is conceptually simple, in the abstract, as I set out in response to Brian some time ago - we can't know when life begins, and there is no functional difference between killing a baby carried to term before delivery and killing it after delivery. All bar a few on the fringe agree with that. So at some point during gestation, a collection of cells becomes a living human child; since we cannot know when that is, we must err on the side of caution and assume that after the physical prerequisites are met -- a heartbeat and brain activity -- abortion is never justifiable except if continuing the pregnancy poses clear and certain harm to the mother (I hesistate to confine that to "physical harm," but since "mental harm" has historically been construed so broadly that the possibilty of post partum depression would justify an abortion under some standards of "non-physical harm"). Prior to that point, I'm willing to at least consider regulations, even though I find the enterprise somewhat distasteful (in this regard, unlike Brian's, my position really is somewhat moderate, insofar as it is distinguishable from the mainstream of the pro-life movement and cedes ground to the pro-choice side, at least theoretically).

None of this actually nor necessarily rests on theological grounds.

Gore is a veteran. It is quite wild to think he would not have invaded Afghanistan.

Non sequitur. And even if it weren't, the length and breadth of the administration's response to 9/11 was not merely to invade Afghanistan, was it? We don't know how Gore would have reacted. We don't even know how the electorate might have preferred to act in '04. All we know is how Bush reacted and that he was reelected, either in spite of or because of how he reacted to 9/11.

You would have to assume Democrats duplicated Republican corruption....

What is corruption for Republicans is situation normal for Democrats, who only discovered "fiscal discipline" (an absurd banner for them to wave) when it became a useful political weapon against GOP profligacy. If they've not forgotten it already, they will. (I should add that this doesn't apply to all Democrats, some of whom are far more constrained on spending, but on the whole, the Democratic Party is associated with federal power and federal spending, which the GOP's agenda - if not always its personnel - rejects.)

the nation does not want to deport 12 million illegals nor watch them resort to crime or starvation.

Again, as with abortion, this is an issue on which the same voters hold inconsistent views. An appeal to polls on such issues isn't really persuasive.