The season begins

It's official!

The summer people are starting to arrive here in Down the Jersey Shore. Now, I like having the summer people around; it's nice seeing new faces. But for the first few days I try to stay out of their way. For good reason, too. Most of the summer people arrive towing huge boats, and over the winter they've forgotten the correct series of jughandle turns and overpass heights that will get them to their marinas relatively disaster-free. Except for the stretch of road between my house and the supermarket, I'm staying off the roads for the holiday.

So this is what I've been reading while the summer people are settling in….

Reinforcements of good will Juan Cole points out a Bush oopsie during the B&B song-and-dance recital last week.

Bush [admitted] that things are so bad militarily in Iraq that US control of the capital itself is in doubt, so that reinforcements have had to be brought quickly from Kuwait. He is telling us this as a reason fro which he won't set a timetable. But what it reveals is how bad the situation in Baghdad really is.

Jonah obligingly proves Krugman's point Via Jurassic Pork we get Paul Krugman.

But "An Inconvenient Truth" isn't just about global warming, of course. It's also about Mr. Gore. And it is, implicitly, a cautionary tale about what's been wrong with our politics.

Why, after all, was Mr. Gore's popular-vote margin in the 2000 election narrow enough that he could be denied the White House? Any account that neglects the determination of some journalists to make him a figure of ridicule misses a key part of the story. Why were those journalists so determined to jeer Mr. Gore? Because of the very qualities that allowed him to realize the importance of global warming, many years before any other major political figure: his earnestness, and his genuine interest in facts, numbers and serious analysis.

While for God knows what reason the LA Times gives us Jonah Goldberg's assessment of Al Gore's unsuitability for the presidency: He speaks French. Hah hah! He's so serious/wooden/earnest. Hah hah! He cares about facts. Hah hah! He analyzes everything! Hah hah!

Unlike Amtrak, the trains actually run And Billmon gives us a riveting yet self-deprecating account of currency problems and train connections in Egypt.