To satisfy your Monty Python thirst, here are 59 sketches.

The biggest threat to our rights is not Al Queda, or so argues McQ at QandO. He writes:

Presently an estimated $40 billion is spent on the War on Drugs annually and the result is dead grandmothers and prisons bursting with non-violent drug users, while the obscene profits Friedman notes continue of flow virtually unabated to the drug lords. If there are those among us who judge Iraq a debacle and a failure, what in the world is the War on Drugs if not infinitely worse in that regard?

Isn’t it about time we seriously reconsidered this abject failure of a policy and gross violation of our civil rights and come up with a sane policy to address drugs within our society? My guess is if we’d honestly and forthrightly address the problem as we have with alcohol, we’d find a way to ameliorate the problem, tremendously cut the crime related to drugs and again free our police to “protect and serve” against real crime instead of increasingly engaging in activities which end up violating citizen’s rights.

I think I’ve linked to these picture on another site, but they are great pictures and worth seeing again.

One was the reasons Bill Clinton was a decent president is because he is an economic moderate. Sadly, the Democrat’s recent victories have emboldened the economically-leftist Democrats. This is bad news for America. The NY Times reports:

The populists argue that the national income has flowed disproportionately into corporate coffers and the nation

Radley Balko has an update on the Atlanta police’s shooing of an old woman during a drug raid. The Atlanta Journal Constitution writes:

The confidential informant on whose word Atlanta police raided the house of an 88-year-old woman is now saying he never purchased drugs from her house and was told by police to lie and say he did.

Chief Richard Pennington, in a press conference Monday evening, said his department learned two days ago that the informant

Here’s a good example of what too many environmental groups are about–promoting their unscientific causes to the detriment of poor people. In this case, trying to get African countries to not accept biotech rice.

With the release of Al Gore’s docu-drama, An Inconvenient Truth, CEI sent out a press release that included some refutation of some of Gore’s points. An editor at Chud.com received the press release and absolutely lost his mind. It has to be read to be believed. You have to wonder how widespread this amazing lack of thinking is. Maybe it’s why Gore’s movie was so well reviewed.

From Fortune Magazine:

A Yale professor, William Nordhaus, compared the price of lumens (a standard unit of measurement for light) over time. In 1750 b.c., the average Babylonian, relying on lamps fueled by sesame oil, had to work 350,000 hours to buy as many lumens as the average American could buy with one hour’s work in 1992. The amount of light Thomas Jefferson could buy for $100 in 1800 cost just 3 cents (in constant dollars) in 1992.

Jim Fohwer, The Numbers Game, Fortune Magazine, Nov. 22, 1999.

Two crazy Frenchies call this “speedflying.” It’s a lame name, but these guys are awesome.