Now that I have lived in Washington for 6 years, it great to see that DC will be the home of the Montreal Expos starting next season! I go to a few Orioles games a year, but the drive to Baltimore at rush hour is horrible and I hate supporting a team that is owned by someone was evil as Peter Angelos. Now I don’t have to.

Check out this 10,000 word review of the new Star Wars box set. I haven’t read all of it, but there is some good information and historical context for the movies. Here’s the opening graph:

The main attraction, 2001: A Space Odyssey, hadn’t started yet, and the audience was getting antsy. For this small theater in Indiana, a special engagement showing of Stanley Kubrick’s masterwork was an event, and a capacity crowd consisting of the curious and the converted were anxious for the magnificence to begin. Of course, a trip to the cineplex wouldn’t be complete without a few previews to tantalize and tempt. The theater went dark and a light came up on the screen. Suddenly, a strange set of images streamed by: Odd, geometrically-shaped ships tore through the endless void of space; creatures that looked like rejects from a Halloween party gathered and fought in a claustrophobic cave cantina; a man dressed in a monk’s robe battled an effigy in black, whose face was covered by a bizarre crash helmet; the weapon of choice was some manner of a laser sword; and there were infinite shots of people running, firing ray guns, and careening through futuristic sets accompanied by robots and hairy beasts. As the final title card came up, declaring that this cinematic mess was “coming to a galaxy near you this summer,” a collective chuckle rose out of the audience. Then a single, sonorous voice bellowed from out of the darkness:

“What the hell was that sh*t?”

In case you have forgotten some of the wonderful anti-drug PSAs over the years, here’s one that definitely kept you from doing crack. Be sure to watch the actual PSA linked at the bottom of the screen.

President Bush wants more than $7.1 billion to help Florida and Southeastern states recover their unfortunate geography. While this is a naked attempt to engender good feelings towards the President from the state that decided the last presidential election, it is bad policy. The rest of the U.S. should not have to pay to insure people that chose to live in hurricane alley. It is unfortunate the four hurricanes struck the Southeast, but this is not new or unexpected.

People should be responsible for their own choices, including where they chose to live. The federal government should take tax money from my Grandma to pay for foreseeable disasters. If you live in Florida, a hurricane will hit you. Plan on it.

Harvard Law School constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe is a plagiarist.

Mark Steyn writes:

But last week he did it again. Ayad Allawi, the first prime minister of post-Saddam Iraq, was in Washington to give a joint address to Congress. A tough, stocky, bullet-headed optimist, Iraq’s interim leader delivered a simple, elegant and moving speech, which made three basic points:

”First, we are succeeding in Iraq. [Applause] It’s a tough struggle with setbacks, but we are succeeding . . .

”The second message is quite simple and one that I would like to deliver directly from my people to yours: Thank you, America [Applause] . . .

”Third, I stand here today as the prime minister of a country emerging finally from dark ages of violence, aggression, corruption and greed . . . Well over a million Iraqis were murdered or are missing . . .”

Kerry didn’t show up for Allawi’s visit to Washington — he was in Ohio again, which is evidently becoming the proverbial Vietnam-type quagmire for him. Nonetheless, barely had the prime minister finished than the absentee senator did a daytime version of his midnight ramble and barged his way onto the air to insist that he knew better than Iraq’s head of government what was going on in the country. One question from his accompanying press corps was especially choice:

”Prime Minister Allawi told Congress today that democracy was taking hold in Iraq and that the terrorists there were on the defensive. Is he living in the same fantasyland as the president?”

It would be nice to think this was a somewhat crude attempt at irony, but given America’s Ratherized media this seems unlikely. Just for the record, Allawi is not living in a fantasyland. He’s living in Iraq, and he begins his day with a dangerous commute across Baghdad’s ”Green Zone.” John Kerry’s regular commute, by contrast, is from his wife’s beach compound at Nantucket to his wife’s 15th century English barn reconstructed as a ski lodge in Idaho. Nonetheless, he’s the expert on Iraq and the guy living there 24/7 is the fantasist, and he’s happy to assure us the prime minister doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s all going to hell, forget about those January elections, etc.

What a small, graceless man Kerry is. The nature of adversarial politics in a democratic society makes George W. Bush his opponent. But it was entirely Kerry’s choice to expand the field, to put himself on the other side of Allawi and the Iraqi people. Given his frequent boasts that he knows how to reach out to America’s allies, it’s remarkable how often he feels the need to insult them: Britain, Australia, and now free Iraq. But, because this pampered cipher has floundered for 18 months to find any rationale for his candidacy other than his indestructible belief in his own indispensability, Kerry finds himself a month before the election with no platform to run on other than American defeat. He has decided to co-opt the jihadist death-cult, the Baathist dead-enders, the suicide bombers and other misfits and run as the candidate of American failure. This would be shameful if he weren’t so laughably inept at it.

Link via LGF.

I’ll be bummed if the allegations that Tyler Hamilton recieved a blood transfusion to boost his performance turn out to be true.

I despise Kofi Annan for appeasing terrorists. In an AP story about the murder of a second American hostage in Iraq, it says:

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news – web sites) condemned the taking and killing of hostages in Iraq. But he also said Iraqi prisoners had been disgracefully abused, an implicit criticism of the U.S. treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib.

“No one is above the law,” Annan said. “Again and again, we see fundamental laws shamelessly disregarded

According to Bryan Curtis at Slate:

Of all the gloriously absurd moments in the Memogate scandal, only one qualifies for Dan Rather’s greatest hits. Asked last week if he would ever concede that the National Guard memos he showed on the Sept. 8 broadcast of 60 Minutes were forgeries, Rather replied, “If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I’d like to break that story.” Never before had Rather so perfectly summed up his career as Journalistic Self-Parody: I’ll get you the big story, Chief, even if it means interviewing myself.

On Monday, Rather conceded what the blogosphere had known for a week. The National Guard memos were too dubious to effectively dispute George W. Bush’s service record. The next few days will determine whether Rather continues as anchor of the CBS Evening News or exits with a Peter Arnett-like thud.
…
In reponse to these brouhahas and the National Guard story, conservative media critics have demanded blood. They charge that Rather’s careless muckraking belies a liberal bias, but it’s actually much worse than that. Rather isn’t a liberal hack. He’s bonkers.

Here’s another “fake but accurate” memo.