Monday's Reads

That's not a foul on the last shot of the UCLA/A&M game, by the way. No call. Wonder what the ref was looking at?

 

I didn't have much today...but this Dark Knight article from the LA Times was pretty good. We'll be there opening night with Travis. Who else is in? [LA Times]

 

A sad day and a happy day? I call this a sad day in Pacers history. Donnie Walsh is leaving. [Indy Star]

 

Justice Department finally OK's the Sirius/XM merger. So can I get baseball on my receiver soon? Now we wait for the FCC to decide with the parameters of the merger are. [NY Times]

 

Got time for a little PBS tonight and tomorrow before the tournament kicks back up? This is taken from Dan Froomkin's WashingtonPost.com article today:

Bush's War

Barry Garron writes in the Hollywood Reporter: "The Civil War isn't called Lincoln's War and World War II isn't Franklin D. Roosevelt's War. So what gives 'Frontline' and producer Michael Kirk the right to call the invasion of Iraq ' Bush's War?'

"The answer is soon obvious in this exhaustive two-part, special, which claims to present a 'definitive' analysis of the five-year-old war. Practically from the moment the World Trade Center was struck, the Bush administration sought a pretext to invade Iraq. Facts that argued against an invasion were discredited or ignored and new 'facts' were invented.

"In dozens of interviews and with meticulous fact-gathering, 'Frontline' makes a convincing case for two important aspects of the war. First, it was primarily orchestrated by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Bush was only 'the decider' insofar as he signed off on their plans, often paying no heed to Secretary of State Colin Powell and others.

"Second, practically every plan, idea, assumption and strategy advanced by Cheney and Rumsfeld was incorrect, once Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled. The level of incompetence uncovered by 'Frontline' is stunning."

Tony Perry writes in the Los Angeles Times: "Some of the best lines belong to Tom Ricks, Pulitzer Prize-winning military reporter for the Washington Post. Here's Ricks on Cheney:

"'Dick Cheney is the Moby Dick of the Bush administration. And it's all very mysterious and it only occurs between him and President Bush, but you get a sense that as soon as the meeting's over, he sits down with the president and says: "OK, here's what you need to take away from this." '"

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