Interim reading material. This stuff was too good not to pass along.

Thomas Friedman on the war and how Bush and Blair hyped the wrong reasons for a war that made sense.

Ralph Wiley with an sad, eloquent piece on the murder Baylor basketball player Brian Dennehy.

The Hitch doesn't cut Bob Hope a break just because he's dead. My first reaction to the opener of this piece was "Oh, here Hitchens goes, trying too hard to be an old contrarian," but turns out he's got a good point.

Finally Andrew Sullivan has been posting a lot about what the Vatican defines as a marriage. For instance, if a man (or a woman somehow) becomes impotent, their marriage basically becomes invalid. There's another long explanation dealing with which secretions from the testicles constitute the juices (my term) of marriage and which don't. There's really only one way to describe Catholicism's stance on sex: It's fucked up.