Morning Reads

1. GGM sent me this about my parents' Representative. I took offense to this sentence: "The rest wouldn't take the political risk of voting for even a fairly weak climate bill that doesn't even come close to doing what science demands." You have to read the article and link within the article to get what I saw as the contradiction. It keeps coming back to what I've been trying to get at in these last few posts. Politics and life is a big debate. What is important is the debate not one particular point of view. David Brooks also addresses this and larger issues this morning.

2. I am not a lawyer or a legal scholar. But I don't know what to think of Madoff getting 150 years. I would rather him be making as much money as he can for the rest of life to pay off as much as he can of the civil suits. The line between criminality and civility seems to be really blurry, and the punishment seems to not fit the crime. Not to beat a dead horse, but how many dogs could Vick's salary have saved if was allowed to continue playing in the NFL? Putting a guy in jail for 150 years isn't going to create wealth or retribution for any of his victims.

3. I don't discuss the Iraq war much. Mostly because I don't know exactly what I think of it. But the following quote from this article sums how complex the situation is:

“Right now we are balanced on a knife’s edge,” said Hamid Majeed, a Sunni speaking near the rubble of a Shiite mosque that was blown up in 2006. “We do not like the Americans, but we also thank God when we see them with the Iraqi Army, because we know we can trust them more than the government forces.”

This editorial also explains some of the complexities.