Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
I just heard Colbert say that Tony Blair is thinking of converting to Catholicism.  Um, Tony, here’s the thing:  I know that churches are hospitals for sinners and not museums for saints, and Jesus was all about forgiving even really messed up stuff.  So I know we’re obligated to accept even an architect of [...]

It’s Al Gore’s world and we’re just living in it:
At 59, he’s an Academy Award winner, a bestselling author, a front-runner for the Nobel Prize, and a concert promoter who turned out to be a bigger rock star at this year’s Grammys than the rock stars themselves.
What no one is talking about is that he [...]

Matthew Yglesias makes a good case that, contrary to what I wrote the other day, “according to Jim Mann’s account in Rise of the Vulcans Cheney very much didn’t want Powell as a colleague (they’d worked closely together in the Bush I administration, and Cheney knew he didn’t like him), but his appointment was ordained [...]

By Thoreau
I just finished reading James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. The basic premise is that a group can (under the right circumstances) be smarter than its smartest member. Say that everybody has a little bit of information, and not everybody has the same information, but everybody also has some mistaken ideas. [...]

By Mona
From Think Progress:

Yesterday on ABC’s Good Morning America, Coulter said, “[I]f I’m gonna say anything about John Edwards in the future, I’ll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot.” She has previously called Edwards a “faggot.” In 2003, she wrote a column claiming that John Edwards [...]

By Mona
The CIA has declassified a trove of documents regarding their activities through 1973, some unobjectionable and others, well…… According to USA Today:

The documents are divided into two groups: The Family Jewels [Mona could not successfully reproduce this link; go to story to click], the agency’s skeletons-in-the-closet, and an analysis of Soviet [...]

By Thoreau
Mona already blogged some of the remarks by former FISA judge Royce Lamberth, but this morning’s Washington Post has an interesting look at how his job actually worked.  In a nutshell, he was able to act very quickly when needed, but he could also hold a federal agent accountable and question him pretty closely.  [...]

Iraq’s lost generation.
Via Yglesias.
At some point I’ll get up the energy to dig up the links, but I clearly remember that four years ago at this time, serious commentators wrote columns arguing that Iraq proved we could free countries pretty cheaply and easily with military force, so we probably had a duty to do so. [...]