Because I need to clear my Firefox fridge of lingering links:
- Van Johnson died. Turns out he was gay. No, seriously, he was.
- Out of all the pain of the "black vs. gay" discussions on gay marriage, I've found a bright spot - this really interesting take over at The Black Critic: Let's Ban The R-Word.
- I've been waiting to write about this exchange between Charlie Gibson and George Bush because I think it's so instructive of what we've been dealing with - Bush can't even see that the failure to find WMD in Iraq was the truth:
Mr. Gibson: You’ve always said there’s no do-overs as President. If you had one?
Mr. Bush: I don’t know — the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that’s not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.
Mr. Gibson: If the intelligence had been right, would there have been an Iraq war?
Mr. Bush: Yes, because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld. In other words, if he had had weapons of mass destruction, would there have been a war? Absolutely.
Mr. Gibson: No, if you had known he didn’t.
Mr. Bush: Oh, I see what you’re saying. You know, that’s an interesting question. That is a do-over that I can’t do. It’s hard for me to speculate.
- A couple of health care articles I've been sitting on - James Capretta on Tom Daschle and what he can, and can't, really do on health care reform (which I may disagree with, but his assessment is one of the more sensible ones I've seen from the right). Also, via Ezra, this LA Times article on the shrinking number of Primary Care Physicians - I don't know what Ezra's take is, but I thought the reall instructive part of the piece was noting that small practices lack economies of scale: the real solution may be changing the notions of how to practice, more than just changing things like health insurance reimbursement rates.
- Fall Out Boy's new album drops tomorrow... and I really like this song.
- Did you see that Bill Ayers is trying to (finally) defend himself? Katha Pollitt gives a really great takedown of his New York Times piece.
- And following up on my take of how futile things look for the Republicans, I meant to mention this great piece from Marc Ambinder on just how deep their problems are.
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