Below The Beltway

You belong in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. You value freedom above all else. You would fight and die for your family and your home.
Which Heinlein Book Should You Have Been A Character In? brought to you by Quizilla
To be honest, though, I was hoping it would be Time Enough [...]

Regardless of your feelings about the conduct of the Civil War, its hard to dispute the assertion that the United States was fortunate in the fact that, in the end, the North American continent remained unified and never experienced the horrors of war in the way that Europe did in the 19th Century.
But what would [...]

Writing in today’s Washington Post, former CIA agent and former head of the National Counterterrorism Center and the Terrorist Threat Integration Center argues that the U.S. and its allies have lost sight of the fact that, for al Qaeda, terrorism is merely a means to an end.
Terrorism, in bin Laden’s strategy, is only a [...]

I wrote last month about the first round of studies that had come out about the impact of the new bankruptcy laws and the not so surprising news that most of the people filing for bankruptcy were, shockingly, bankrupt and unable to comply with any type of repayment plan. Today comes news of a new [...]

It appears to be relegated to the “Today in History” section of the newspaper, but it was 13 years ago today that, quite arguably, the opening shot in the War on Terror was fired.
On Feb. 26, 1993, a bomb built by Islamic extremists exploded in the parking garage of New York’s World Trade Center, killing [...]

As I said last week, this weekend was pretty much of a bachelor weekend for me, and the choice of movies reflects that.
First up, there’s The Day After Tomorrow, an environmentalist’s dream of a disaster epic from the director of Independence Day. As with ID4, the star of this movie isn’t the plot, which [...]

Writing in today’s Washington Post, George Will uses the example of the recent prosecution of historian David Irving for the crime of denying the truth of the Holocaust to make the point that freedom of speech sometimes means letting some truly offensive people speak their minds.
In 1989, in two speeches in Austria, Irving said, among [...]

From this morning’s Washington Post comes this sad news:
Don Knotts, the rail-thin comic actor who was perhaps best known to millions of television viewers as the bungling Deputy Sheriff Barney Fife in “The Andy Griffith Show” and the squirrelly landlord in “Three’s Company,” died of lung cancer Feb. 24 at UCLA Medical Center in Los [...]

Writing in National Review, William F. Buckley, Jr., certainly not a man capable of being described as a defeatist, declares that the Bush Administration’s objectives in Iraq stand in ruins:
“I can tell you the main reason behind all our woes ? it is America.” The New York Times reporter is quoting the complaint of a [...]

Sometime during the early morning hours, Apple’s iTunes service reached a milestone as the one billionth song was downloaded.
WEST BLOOMFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich. — Alex Ostrovsky got more than he bargained for when downloading Coldplay’s “Speed of Sound” from the iTunes Music Store.
The 16-year-old’s purchase was the one billionth song bought from the online music service [...]