Picks of the Week

College Football
#22 Tennessee at #5 Florida = In the Swamp it's the GATORS!
#10 Ohio State at Washington = It will be close but no cigar for the Dawgs, OSU wins!
#1 USC at #14 Nebraska = Defense, defense, defense...USC will be victorious.
Fresno State at #19 Oregon = Oregon gets a scare but wins....
Idaho State at Oregon State = OSU back on track after their poor outing in Ohio

National Football League
Buffalo at Pittsburgh = Steelers start 2-0...Bills are beat up from Denver last week
San Diego at New England = Patriot Gate, gives NE "us against the world" edge against SD
New Orleans at Tampa Bay = Saints score points and a win in Florida
Dallas at Miami = Dallas is rolling out of Miami 2-0
Seattle at Arizona = Bad luck follows 'Zona...Seahawks win

Your thoughts fellow prognosticators?!

Why they should stay

For all General Petraeus's spin, Iraq is still a violent mess. That is why America should not leave yet

POLITICS, said the late John Kenneth Galbraith, is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. The problem for America in Iraq is that it is agonisingly difficult to tell which is which.

General David Petraeus, America's senior commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, its ambassador, went to Capitol Hill this week to tell Congress that bringing the troops home too soon would result in disaster. The general took along a flipchart of tables purporting to show that the “surge” of recent months was beginning to work (see article). The ambassador said he could not guarantee success but that if America gave up now the consequences would be massive human suffering, the intervention of regional states and gains for Iran and al-Qaeda. Continue at The Economist...

A Humbled President

He seemed almost broken to me. His voice raspy, his eyes watery, his affect exhausted, his facial expression almost bewildered. I thought I would feel angry; but I found myself verging toward pity. The case was so weak, the argument so thin, the evidence for optimism so obviously strained that one wondered whom he thought he was persuading. And the way he framed his case was still divorced from the reality we see in front of our nose: that Iraq is not, as he still seems to believe, full of ordinary people longing for democracy and somehow stymied solely by "extremists" or al Qaeda or Iran, but a country full of groups of people who cannot trust one another, who are still living in the wake of unimaginable totalitarian trauma, who have murdered and tortured and butchered each other in pursuit of religious and ethnic pride and honor for centuries. This is what Bush cannot recognize: there is no Iraq. There are no Iraqis. There may have been at one point - but what tiny patina of national unity that once existed to counter primordial sectarian loyalty was blown away by the anarchy of the Rumsfeld-Franks invasion. The president's stunning detachment from this reality tragically endures - whether out of cynicism or delusion or, more worryingly, a simple intellectual inability to understand the country he is determined that the United States occupy for the rest of our lives. Read on...

Credit for Beginners

Economics lesson for Friday September 14, 2007, click here.