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The Democratic Convention takes place next week. I’m hoping for word that Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri have been captured or killed.

The White House is pressuring our Pakistani allies to deliver terrorist high-value targets (HVTs) during the Democratic Convention, according to this article in the New Republic. The White House reportedly told a Pakistani intelligence officer that “it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July”—Al Qaeda as counter-programming to the Democratic Convention.

If the Democratic Convention is what it takes to get the Bush Administration to move against Al Qaeda, then let’s have a Democratic Convention every week.

I’m old. When I was a kid, I liked watching space adventure shows on TV: Flash Gordon, Men Into Space, and others. Even as a kid, I understood those shows were fantasies.

If something seemed to be impossible, people used to say, “You could no more do that than fly to the moon.”

Thirty-five years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. The old language for impossible things had to be retired.

Lots of photos from the Apollo missions here. For full immersion, Fox Home Video and a company called Spacecraft Films have released DVD sets featuring all the video and onboard motion picture film from Apollo 8, 11, and 15.

Just forty-four days after D-Day, a group of German military officers made their move to assassinate Adolf Hitler and take control of the German government from the Nazi Party.

One of the conspirators, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, planted a bomb in a briefcase in a conference room where Hitler was reviewing war plans. The briefcase got underfoot, and someone moved it to the other side of one of the sturdy wooden supports that held up the conference table. The bomb exploded on schedule, but Hitler survived, shielded from the full brunt of the blast by the table support.

Most of the conspirators were rounded up, paraded through abysmal show trials, and executed in a variety of sadistic ways. The executions were filmed for Hitler’s private amusement.

Hitler took his escape as a good omen. A little more than nine months later, with Germany in ruins, Hitler killed himself.

Today, on the 60th anniversary of the bomb plot, the German Goverment is honoring the men who conspired to assassinate Hitler.

History sits in judgment of us all.