Justus For All

I doubt I will be posting again until next year, so here is hoping that everyone has a safe and enjoyable New Years eve and that the coming year brings happiness.

The NSA Kid’s site is actually pretty cool. Couldn’t find anything on how to set up illegal wiretaps on your parents though.

The American Enterprise: Movie Messiah
Philip Anschutz is no messiah, but he has made it his ambition to lead Hollywood out of a cynical and amoral ice age. Will this self-made Colorado billionaire become modern entertainment’s rescuer, a lion-hearted savior of American film?
Short and sweet version, he is betting that theater revenues suck because Hollywood isn’t [...]

This Gateway Pundit post show the number of civilian deaths in Iraq on a month by month basis in graphical format. 2005 shows marked reduction in deaths, which is great news.

Washington Post
Regular tourist trips into space are still a thing of the future, but the government is getting ready for the eventual liftoff.More than 120 pages of proposed rules, released Thursday, governing the future of space tourism touch on everything from medical standards for passengers to preflight training.
They spell out qualification and training requirements for [...]

Farris Hassan’s Day Off: Student Visits Iraq : People.com
Give him an A for effort – and empathy for his parents.On Dec. 11, Farris Hassan, 16, of Ft. Lauderdale bought a $900 plane ticket, cut class, sneaked away from his parents and headed to Iraq on a flight from Lebanon, saying that he was pursuing his [...]

I borrowed Ballad of the Whiskey Robber from a friend. It is a highly enjoyable and amusing tale about a bank robber in post-Communist Hungary.
For all the humor in the story, it does have a serious side as well in highlighting the failures of economic transformation in the former communist nations. The same challenges [...]

Victor Davis Hanson writes about Hollywoods portrayal of terrorists in The Honolulu Advertiser. This phrase at the end is especially clever:
If Hollywood wants to know why attendance is down, it is not just the misdemeanor sin of warping reality, but the artistic felony that it does so in such a predictable manner.
I am not [...]

This bit from a 2006 predictions article in the International Herald Tribune sums up the diplomatic strategies on Iranian nukes nicely:
The Europeans keep talking in order to give the Iranians a chance to show how truly belligerent and uncompromising they are, and thereby to isolate Tehran from the countries that form its natural constituency, most [...]

Here is a Wall Street Journal op-ed arguing for the inerent power of the Presidency to conduct surveilance.
Our Constitution is the supreme law, and it cannot be amended by a simple statute like the FISA law. Every modern president and every court of appeals that has considered this issue has upheld the independent power of [...]