Top Five

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

- Washington Monthly: Michael Gerson is full of it.

Rove's main influence on the Republican Party has not been a series of tactical innovations but a series of strategic arguments. In this way, Rove is the opposite of a cynical political operator.

- Think Progress: Someone is walking around with a lot of money in their pockets.

- Lance Mannion:As always, TIME's Michael Duffy and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews are full of it.

In the minds of Inside the Beltway Media Types it is still 1985 and Ronald Reagan is still President.

This is how despite Bill Clinton's two terms in the White House, despite Al Gore's having won the popular vote and having the Presidency stolen out from under him by partisan and unprincipled Supreme Court justices, despite John Kerry's coming within a whisker of unseating a President who should have been re-elected in a landslide but who needed Karl Rove to steal votes for him in Ohio and Florida to stay in office, despite the shellacking the Republicans took in the 2006 elections, despite polls showing the GOP is in for a bigger drubbing come 2008, despite George W. Bush's being the most unpopular President since Herbert Hoover and the most despised since Andrew Johnson, with Richard Nixon as his only rival for either title, in other words despite the reality of the last decade and a half, Insider tools like TIME's Michael Duffy will still go on TV and blather on as if it's the Democrats who are in disarray, demoralized, and on their way to becoming a permanent, merely regional, minority party.

- Crooks & Liars: Apparently, Tony Snow can not feed this family on $168,000 salary.

- Daily Herald: Carlos Zambrano will stay with the Chicago Cubs for the foreseeable future.