1. Bruce Bartlett ends his newspaper column. Looks like the Internet is putting some columnists out of business. Too bad it had to be Bartlett instead of Paul Krugman or David Brooks.
UPDATE: Don Surber is not impressed.
2. For those who care, here is a look at what it takes to build a champion NBA team. The post is on a Laker blog and focuses on the Lakers, but there is enough general info to make it interesting to fans of other teams than the Lakers. I'm told such people do exist.
3. We should be happy the Democrats are terrified of actually doing something for which they would have to take responsibility. The current Congress is doing nothing but investigating the Bush administration. So far this year they have launched over 300 investigations! Imagine all the harm they might do if they were serious politicians who could think about issues that were more abstract than "I hate Bush."
4. Is Tony Blankley right that we must stay in Iraq for our own national security? Iraq is a complicated war -- hard to figure out what we should do.
5. Don Surber writes about the aging Classic Rock artists at Live Earth. Rock is 50 years old now, but still played on radio and still raking in big bucks on the concert circuit. When rock began in 1955, the music of 50 years ago was operetta, which was long dead; the great writers of "American Standards," such as the Gershwin brothers, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, had not begun their careers.
6. Think the Surgeon General is a disinterested scientist (medicine being a form of science) who is above politics? Think again. When science and government meet, science becomes politicized.
2 comments:
"Iraq is a complicated war -- hard to figure out what we should do."
Yes. Good point. Even Objectivists are divided on this. Tracinski is adamant that we should stay. But Brook and other ARI intellectuals suggest that withdrawing and regrouping would be better.
There was (and is) an excellent discussion about this on HBL recently. Binswanger's comments were excellent IMO. Iraq could have been Westernized if we had approached it like we did Japan and Germany. But we didn't and hope of any lasting victory in Iraq is unrealistic. Further, even if we did succeed in Iraq, it would be a hollow victory because true victory would require defeating the fountainheads of Islamic Jihad; Iran and Saudi Arabia.
I think that is pretty much on target. But like you say, it is a complicated war.
I agree with Blankley. One can argue whether we should have gotten into the war in the first place. But now that we are committed, we need to figure out how to fix Iraq so we can pull out, not just make blanket calls for pulling out.
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