Monday, October 13, 2003

frograbbitmonkey: "So I guess I'm giving advice to murderers here, but really. If you're going to kill your spouse for insurance money again, use your imagination and try a new technique this time." 3:57:24 PM    comment []

Josh Marshall says the dysfunctional Bush foreign policy team is making for some strange bedfellows in DC: "Kristol doesn't agree with Lugar about a lot, and even less with me... But the objective reality of disarray at the highest levels is impossible to miss or ignore. Rumsfeld is on the retreat on every front in the administration’s internecine battles. Powell lacks the clout to fully assert himself --- he remains fundamentally isolated. Cheney is a power unto himself. And Rice has largely abdicated the principal role of the National Security Advisor: to discipline and ride herd over competing institutional and ideological factions within the national security bureaucracy. By default, our current policy in Iraq is drift." 3:50:55 PM    comment []

My proposal to make Yom Kippur a national holiday got picked up by Toronto Globe and Mail writer Michael Kesterton. Definitely one of my more popular efforts, as judged by email, links, and comments from the people around town -- negative feedback so far only from my wife, who thought it was kind of sloppily written. 11:02:39 AM    comment []

A man, a plan, a baseball stadium. In my newspaper column, a discussion of Greensboro mayor Keith Holliday's chance to leverage the vote in favor of a new ballpark into something much larger. "Now it's all about execution. Holliday's legacy will rest in large part on how he navigates his next and presumably final term as mayor. If all we get out of this is a cool new place to watch ballgames -- enjoyable as that will be in itself -- it will count as a wasted opportunity." 10:33:32 AM    comment []

From the batting .500 department, David Remnick in The New Yorker on Russian intel prior to the invasion of Iraq: "Putin was told by his generals and intelligence chiefs that the United States would have an impossible job finding physical evidence of any weapons of mass destruction and that an invasion would take months, if not years, to accomplish." 8:14:50 AM    comment []