The latest micro-battle when it comes to the Roberts Supreme Court nomination process is over access to past tax returns. This will, of course, just be one small element in several days or weeks of positioning and politicking.

But the details of this nomination (and let’s be realistic, its a go, period) are really just a story within the broader story of this era.

So what’s the big story? It’s the one many of us don’t want to think about, much less accept: One can easily make the argument that we are one robe away from seeing battles we thought were long over, reopened, refought, and resulting in very different outcomes.

Prayer in schools. Come on, we’ve been there and done that right? Debates over the teaching of evolution in school. Wait, am I watching Fox News or a remake of Inherit the Wind? What’s next, restrictions on free speech based on the split second unveiling of a nipple belonging to an android pop star?

Cultural questions that many Americans assumed were asked and answered years if not decades ago are back in a big way.

One side assumed these debates were over, and they stopped fighting. The other side didn’t get the memo and they are running at a full sprint right now.

The broader issue is not Roberts, but rather that the cultural and intellectual issues many thought were on solid ground are actually hanging by a thread.

Over at Yahoo, they’re starting to tie more things in with their 360 service. This makes perfect sense. The more open it is, the more traction the service will get.

Yahoo is helping to develop a trend (Tribe.net has been doing some interesting things as well) on the web I’d like to see accelerate. Your 360 now includes Flickr photos, rss feeds, etc. This collection of content and feeds is both a page that is useful to you, and serves as your profile page for the outside world.

This makes perfect sense. If you want to see a page that really gives you an idea of what I’m about, then you should be able to check out My MyYahoo page. You’ll know what news I like, what stocks I own, what photos I’m looking at (and likely be able to pick up on a few of my subtle perversions). And of course, you’d see the headlines from this blog.

As much as any page on the web, my MyYahoo page is really my profile. You don’t need one profile page and one page that you actually use as a tool. They can be the same.

Greg Lindsay has an interesting take in Business 2.0 in which he suggests that the window for unknowns to podcast their way to audio stardom may already be shut:

But it does mean that podcasting’s wildcatting era is over before it ever really began. An unknown number of those Apple-made microstars will convince themselves that they hold a first-mover advantage in an untapped medium and that there is at least a modest living to be made from a popular weekly podcast that maybe, just maybe, could become a bona fide media brand. Eventually they’ll fail, and they’ll fail faster than ever before. Because the sense of novelty attached to streaming audio and video — the sense that one could build a brand and a studio before big media showed up to play — has already passed when it comes to podcasting. For the first time in the history of the Net, big media showed up early to play.

It is amazing how quickly mainstream brands have taken to the podcasting craze. Compare that with the sluggish and at times undetectable acknowledgement that blogs are sort of neato (and the related unwillingness to publicly acknowledge my nearly unimaginable ability to wow the masses).

Does podcasting’s adoption mean the end of opportunity for the little guy? And if so, it makes you think. What would have happened had blogs been adopted earlier by big media?

Actually, come to think of it, I’d still probably be reading Kottke…

The war on terror, it turns out, is not quite a war – at least not according to its current description.

General Richard Myers: “The long-term problem is as much diplomatic, as much economic, in fact more diplomatic, more economic, more political than it is military.”

I wonder, when exactly did that statement become true?

Many of us political junkies are all too familiar with the 16 words from the State of the Union Address that set off the current CIA scandal.

We’re still talking about those 16 words. In fact, those words and the new polito-celebrities connected to them are about all most of think of when we hear the words Niger.

It turns out that there is more to the story of Niger where children are starving to death.

How might have history unfolded if those 16 words had been replaced by a sentence or two indicating that to stand for such starvation in our midst is itself scandalous?