Importing cheap drugs from Canada, a bad idea, seems to be on a fast track to becoming law. Drugs are cheap in Canada because the Canadian Marxist style health care bureaucracy controls prices. Drug companies make up the loss by charging Americans more.

When drug importation becomes law, I think there will be a race between drug companies cutting back of research and development and drugs becoming scarce in Canada. These are unintended consequences to be sure, but uitterly predictable.

John O'Neil, a Houston lawyer who first jousted with John Kerry on the Dick Cavett show thirty three years ago, still has some not nice things to say about his fellow Vietnam Vet.

Rush Limbaugh deconstructs Bob Woodward and his book, Plan of Attack.

I think I agree with this premise that when John Kerry is defeated this November, it will be in part at the hands of the "Band of Brothers" that he so arrogantly boasts of, having abandoned, smeared, and dishonored them up until this election year.

All things considered, it is a fair question to ask what John Kerry thinks he has to hide.

Update: Under pressure, the Kerry Campaign has released some of the military records.

Arnold the Governor is just as adroit at cutting through his political opposition as Conan the Barbarian was at cutting off heads. "What is best in life? To crush your enemies and to hear the lamentations of the Democrats."

Ever since first seeing George C. Scott's outstanding portrayal of General George S. Patton, I have wondered what would have happened if Old Blood and Guts had fullfilled his desire to go to war against the Soviets. Apparently, so has someone else:


Too bad Scott is no longer with us. This would make a splendid sequal that doesn't involve a miserable death as a quadaplegic.

Tim Russert, on Meet the Press, called John Kerry on his thirty three year old slander of American soldiers as war criminals, first by playing a clip from Meet the Press in which Kerry appeared in 1971:

There are all kinds of atrocities and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free-fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50-caliber machine guns which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search-and-destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare. All of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down. And I believe that the men who designed these, the men who designed the free-fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed off the air raid strike areas, I think these men, by the letter of the law, the same letter of the law that tried Lieutenant Calley, are war criminals.

Then Russert questioned Kerry in the present day:

Russert: You committed atrocities.

Kerry: Where did all that dark hair go, Tim? That's a big question for me. You know, I thought a lot, for a long time, about that period of time, the things we said, and I think the word is a bad word. I think it's an inappropriate word. I mean, if you wanted to ask me have you ever made mistakes in your life, sure. I think some of the language that I used was a language that reflected an anger. It was honest, but it was in anger, it was a little bit excessive.

Russert: You used the word "war criminals."

Kerry: Well, let me just finish. Let me must finish. It was, I think, a reflection of the kind of times we found ourselves in and I don't like it when I hear it today. I don't like it, but I want you to notice that at the end, I wasn't talking about the soldiers and the soldiers' blame, and my great regret is, I hope no soldier--I mean, I think some soldiers were angry at me for that, and I understand that and I regret that, because I love them. But the words were honest but on the other hand, they were a little bit over the top. And I think that there were breaches of the Geneva Conventions. There were policies in place that were not acceptable according to the laws of warfare, and everybody knows that. I mean, books have chronicled that, so I'm not going to walk away from that. But I wish I had found a way to say it in a less abrasive way.

I would use harsher language than Kerry than "a little bit over the top" and "abrasive" to describe his lies and slanders. "Evil" is a word that comes to mind. I think that at the very least Kerry should apologize to all of the Vietnam Veterans whom he smeared. I'm not holding my breath, though.

Gregory Anderson has some interesting thoughts on asteroid resources, third world poverty, and the War on Terror.

The last Confederate funeral took place when the crew of the Hunley, the first submarine to sink another war ship, was laid to rest with military honors.

Jeff Foust discusses the question of whether John Kerry supports or opposes space exploration. I think Jeff forgets that Kerry has led chants of "Send Bush to Mars!" at campaign rallies and has openly ridiculed the President's space initiative. I think that, since Kerry has not offered any alternative space policy, that we have to place him in the opposition camp.

Abduel Aziz Rantisi now burns in Hell

One wonders if NASA had followed this advice forty odd years ago, if Apollo would have continued. Could be. NASA's public relations operations has always been terrible and perhaps anything would be an improvement.

One wonders what would have happened if anyone else (besides American Indians) had demanded the removal of the passage in a Arab Studies text suggesting, falsely, that Muslim explorers had preceeded Columbus to America.

Some kind of robotic mission to extend the life of the Hubble Telescope seems to be taking shape. Oddly enough it will be a test of technologies that will enable the exploration of the Moon and Mars.

Why haven't more movies been made about the War on Terror? To be sure there was an excellent Showtime film, 9/11:DC that actually depicted the President in a good light, there is an Afghanistan film in development, and of course the seedy MOW about Jessica Lynch, but the point is well taken.

Dwayne Day recently published an article that seems to me to confuse marketing with the policy being marketed. He has noticed that words like "leadership" and "conquest" (masculine words) are absent from the President's speech announcing his space initiative and that "exploration" (feminine in his view) was not. I'm pretty sure Day is making a bigger deal than is merited. Those people who are impressed by what Day calls "masculine language" already tend to support concepts like the President's space initiative anyway. The President was reaching out to other people who might find words like "conquest" upsetting, but might still support his initiative if described in language they find more comfortable. That's Political Rhetoric 101.

The results of what the President has proposed are pretty clear, no matter how they are justified. In my view, that would be a largely American populated solar system, dominated by American business, the American military, and American civilization.

Rand Simberg, by the way, is pretty sure that all this doesn't matter, but for different reasons. Just as Marx once suggested that the state must eventually wither away, he seems to suggest that the same thing will happen to state operated space programs (like NASA), albeit from a libertarian rather than Marxist view of "historical inevitability."

Of course, I think that this is all orthogonal to our actual future in space, since regardless of the presidential justifications for it, government space programs are doomed to mediocrity by their nature, and we'll have a sufficiently robust private sector in the next couple decades such that NASA will become superfluous.

Of course, were that to happen, the high frontier of space would become unique among every other frontier ever conquered (if one uses the "masculine") or explored (if one uses the "feminine".) I would suggest that it is more likely that the pattern established by history will assert itself and that a synergy will arise between the public and the private. State actors have always been huge factors in the opening of any frontier. It was true for Columbus five hundred years ago, Lewis and Clark two hundred years ago, and NASA today. This may not satisfy the desires of libertarian theorists, but it is the way things work and always have.

Having seen Proof, I am very interested to see the film version as well as this historical epic being penned by its playwright.

History was amde in the Middle East. The fantasy of Israel ever returning to the pre1967 borders was just put to rest forever.

More and more folks are concluding that Jamie Gorelick is on the wrong side of the witness table at the 9/11 Hearings.