Friday, September 7, 2007

Recommended Reading

George Packer pens a gloomy assessment of what's ahead with Iraq. What will happen if we withdraw sounds awful and what will happen if we don't sounds worse.

• Posted at 3:21 PM · LINK

Friday Afternoon

We may be only days from a verdict in the Phil Spector murder case. Yes, I tried to not pay attention to it but it's hard when you go to websites and in the margins, they have these intriguing News Headlines about the case. I'm proud to say that I didn't waste a lot of my life following this one but ashamed that I wasted any, and that I'm about to waste yours for a paragraph or two.

Admittedly, if you follow a trial via news broadcasts and articles, you hear a very different case than the jury hears. You hear all the stuff that the judge excludes. You hear about witnesses that he won't allow to testify. You hear about all the arguments that are specifically conducted with the jury out of the room. And of course, you're relying on brief summaries of the testimony and you don't actually hear the words or see the faces.

Still, I have to say: If this guy is acquitted, I'm going on a killing spree. Because it'll mean no one gets convicted of murder, especially if they're in show business.

• Posted at 1:20 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

We're going to be hearing a lot next week about whose statistics on Iraq casualties and progress are skewed and cooked and disingenuous. Here's Karen DeYoung to explain some of the possibly-misleading numbers that are presently framing the debate.

• Posted at 12:11 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

The annual Chabad Telethon is this Sunday night. If it's not being televised in your city, it's probably because not enough Jews live there. I'll post a link later to where it'll be streaming on a website, though that's a crummy way to enjoy it.

Among the performers this year and almost every year is Mordechai Ben David, who is sometimes called The King of Jewish Music. Well, okay. It's not like John Tesh is going to challenge him for the title or anything. I know very little about "M.B.D.," as he is also called, but I've always enjoyed him on the telethon and on a couple of tapes that I bought years ago for my car and keep meaning to upgrade into CDs. Here's a rousing (if overedited) music video of M.B.D. performing one of this bigger hits, "Moshiach."

• Posted at 12:08 AM · LINK

Tonight's Silly Thought

This is funny. The 2008 Republican National Convention is scheduled to be held September 1 through 4 of that year in the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. That means that most prominent Republicans will have the opportunity to pass through the airport where Senator Larry Craig was busted for allegedly soliciting gay sex. They'll even have the chance to use that men's room.

• Posted at 12:03 AM · LINK