Top Five

A quick rundown of the posts I have read during my travels around the series of tubes,.

- The Plank: Further prove that President Bush was never really a great guy. It was just a Karl Rove spin that the media ate up.

- Think Progress: Margaret Carlson on Meet the Press rips Rudy Giuliani.

The walk in the Baghdad market and the visit to Jerry Falwell. I think he’s lost that to people, even like Giuliani, who by the way, made a huge mistake this week, saying that he spent more time at ground zero than the 9/11 rescue workers. And it made me see that Giuliani now believes his own rhetoric. And that he practically, maybe there was a third tower he kept from falling.

- Political Wire: After a sixth place finish in the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa, Republican Tommy Thompson calls it quits.

- Matthew Yglesias:The latest example of the liberal media at work.

Ron Brownstein focuses some attention on the much-neglected subject of hard-right opposition to any hints of reasonableness on the part of Republican Party politicians. When Joe Lieberman faced a primary challenge for the sin of relentlessly supporting a catastrophically failed policy, the political establishment reacted as if this was the End Times. Now that Chuck Hagel is facing a primary challenge for the sin of mildly gesturing toward the idea that maybe we should avoid catastrophically failed policy, nobody seems to care.

- Sportable: Madden 2008 preview.