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If you believe George Lucas isn’t yet rich enough, you’re going to be pleased in September, when you’ll have yet another opportunity to buy Star Wars movies on DVD.

If you believe Lucas has plenty of money already, thank you, but, like me, you prefer the original Star Wars movies to the tarted-up “special editions” currently available on DVD, you may wind up making him richer in spite of yourself. From starwars.com:

In response to overwhelming demand, Lucasfilm Ltd. and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment will release attractively priced individual two-disc releases of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Each release includes the 2004 digitally remastered version of the movie and, as bonus material, the theatrical edition of the film. That means you’ll be able to enjoy Star Wars as it first appeared in 1977, Empire in 1980, and Jedi in 1983.

This is good news. Next year, perhaps we’ll be able to buy the movies again, on hi-def DVD. Maybe with a bonus documentary showing George Lucas morphing from Obi-Wan Kenobi into Jabba the Hutt.

Via Backup Brain: Here’s a performance of Hail to the Chief to pay George W. Bush all the honor and respect he truly deserves.

A friend and I were talking about the 1960s — not the ten years on the calendar, but the era of social and political upheaval. The sixties began, I declared, not on January 1, 1960, but on November 22, 1963, when John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas.

We argued about that a little, and considered a few earlier dates, but there’s no denying that Kennedy’s assassination changed the way we thought about ourselves. So we moved on to the question, when did the sixties end?

December 14, 1972, the last time a man walked on the moon? August 9, 1974, the day Richard Nixon resigned the presidency?

I proposed May 4, 1970, when National Guardsmen fired a 13-second volley of gunfire into a crowd of student anti-war protesters at Kent State University, hitting thirteen students and killing four of them. The closest of the students killed was 265 feet from the gunmen.

Richard Nixon and Ohio Governor James A. Rhodes each put on a sad face, and each blamed the deaths on anti-war protesters themselves. Campus activism against the war — or about much of anything else — never again reached the same levels. Nixon remained as president for four more years. Rhodes served another eight years as governor. The Vietnam War continued for five more years and claimed thousands more lives.

For me, the Kent State killings changed the way I thought about everything. Every year on this date, I try to take a moment to remember those who were killed for speaking up against war here in the Land of the Free.

Allison Krause
Jeffrey Miller
Sandra Scheuer
William Schroeder

Freedom isn’t free.

In the days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there were all sorts of stories in the air. It was healthy to be skeptical.

One story I doubted was that hijacked United Airlines flight 93 crashed in a Pennsylvania field because the passengers had fought back and thwarted the terrorists’ plans. It might be true, but it seemed too convenient — it was just what we wanted to hear in those dark days. Where was the evidence?

The facts were pieced together over months. The evidence: phone calls from crew members and many passengers, made on cell phones and Airfones during the flight; the flight data recorder, and the cockpit voice recorder. The incredible story was true.

I just returned from a matinee showing of United 93, a new movie that tells this story as we’ve never seen it. The film was destined to be controversial. A few weeks ago, some theaters pulled previews for the film because audiences found the subject matter upsetting. To be honest, I didn’t know what to expect when I walked into the theater.

There were only four people in the audience. Which is a great shame. You need to see this movie.

It’s classified as a docudrama, but there is none of the soppy back-story that has been such a hallmark of that genre. You get to know the passengers and crew on the plane much as you would if you were flying with them. You can watch what they do, sometimes overhear what they say, and you never sense the heavy expository hand of the big Hollywood writer.

On the ground, you see civilian and military flight controllers and managers doing their everyday jobs, and gradually coming to understand that September 11, 2001 was not an ordinary day.

The story is told in something very close to real time. The fumbling and stumbling we’ve come to expect from the federal government in recent years is not in evidence here. Controllers make split-second decisions of life and death. Mistakes are made. As well as possible, the mistakes are fixed. When problems seem overwhelming, they adapt and carry on. No excuses, no finger-pointing.

It’s astonishing to see how quickly the passengers on flight 93 — ordinary people, strangers — make their decision, form a plan, and get together what they need to carry it out. Their courage, strength and ingenuity saved uncounted lives. It could not save their own.

This is a movie for grown-ups. It’s not exciting — at least not in the way other Hollywood movies are exciting. It’s not fun. There is violence, but the movie doesn’t revel in it. There’s no dramatic three-act structure. In the end, the plot is not tied up with a neat bow. In the Washington Post, reviewer Ann Hornaday wrote:

“United 93” is a great movie, and I hated every minute of it.

No kidding. You have to see this movie.

Every thinking person disbelieves Iran’s claims that their nuclear program doesn’t seek to develop nuclear weapons. Today, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Jews should leave Israel.

“We say that this fake regime [Israel] cannot … logically continue to live,” he said, according to a translator for The Associated Press.

Ahmadinejad, in a wide-ranging news conference that included international journalists for only the second time in his short term, said anti-Semitism drove Jews out of Europe into Israel.

“We believe that Jews like any other human beings have the right to live in happiness and prosperity and to benefit from security,” he said, according to a CNN translator. “Allow them to go back to their own fatherlands and countries.”

He reminds me of somebody, but who? That aggressive posturing, that religious fervor, that sense of certainty… Who? The squint, the dopey grin…

Uh oh. It’s George W. Bush. With a beard.

George W. Bush told Bob Woodward that he didn’t seek advice from his father. Nevertheless, cartoonist Ward Sutton suggests that Bush has been getting advice from a Republican elder statesman.

That would explain some things.

From email, and too good to pass up: I’m the Decider.

It takes a moment for the audio to start. Patience.

Open Letter to Alberto Gonzales

Dear Alberto,

I hope you’ll excuse my informality. I know you’re the Attorney General of the United States, and George W. Bush’s favorite legal theorist. But I feel like I know you. I was just reading some old comic book stories, and I suddenly found startling evidence that, like me, you read the Fantastic Four when you were young.

Listen, I’ve seen you on TV and read about you in the newspaper, and I don’t always agree with some of the stuff you say on Bush’s behalf, but any friend of Lee and Kirby is a friend of mine. They influenced a lot of people.

Did you see Close Encounters? When they show the Mother Ship at the end, I thought, “Wow, that’s a Kirby spaceship!” And Darth Vader, you know, is clearly a rip-off of Doctor Doom. Obviously.

Hey, remember when the Fantastic Four lost their powers, and Doctor Doom took over their skyscraper headquarters, and they had to confront not only Doom’s weapons and defenses, but their own as well? Man, that was cool!

Well, it’s been good talking with you. Don’t work too hard. When people say mean things about you, try not to take it personally, okay?

Listen, one last thing. Just gotta mention it. I don’t think the Molecule Man was ever meant to be a role model.

Take care … that the laws be faithfully executed. Ha, ha.

See ya.

Not that long ago, House Republicans briefly changed their ethics rules to protect the job of their corrupt majority leader, Tom DeLay. They were full of power, and full of themselves, and they could, by God, force anything they wanted down the throats of the American people, who could like it or lump it. They had rigged the game so that they could never be beaten, and DeLay had done more than anyone to rig it.

Times are changing:

Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), a primary architect of the Republican majority who became one of the most powerful and feared leaders in Washington, told House allies last night that he will give up his seat rather than face a reelection fight that appears increasingly unwinnable.

Not an April Fool’s gag: today is the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of Apple Computer, Inc. Joy of Tech has a birthday cake in the shape of the Apple I computer. The Apple I was one of the very first personal computers, a kit intended for customers who were comfortable around a soldering iron. The company’s fortunes really took off with the introduction, in April 1977, of the Apple II, a machine designed for ordinary mortals.

Thirty years is a very long time in this business, and Apple’s fortunes have been up and down. The Apple II’s success brought IBM into the world of personal computing in 1982, with a hastily-designed machine that was deliberately crippled, to avoid competing with IBM’s expensive “big iron” computers.

Apple answered in 1984 with the Macintosh. The Mac sported a mouse-driven graphical user interface with multiple windows, on-screen buttons, pull-down menus, icons representing files and programs, and many other innovations that are universally accepted today as the natural way to interact with computers. Apple built simple networking into every Macintosh in 1985, when some wondered why you would ever want to let two computers talk to each other. Competitors derided the Mac interface while desperately struggling to duplicate it. It took Microsoft more than ten years to come within hailing distance of the Mac interface, with Windows 95.

Ten years ago, many pundits declared that Apple Computer was doomed. Macworld, a magazine for Macintosh users, ran a series of articles to help readers switch to Microsoft Windows. Now Macworld Online has an article about Apple’s impact. Wired Magazine, cNet — even American Heritage — have put together articles and photo galleries in honor of thirty years of Apple.

It’s been no small achievement that Apple has defied the doomsayers to reach this thirtieth anniversary. Time after time, Apple has been daring and innovative when other companies have been timid and conservative. Even if you’ve never touched an Apple computer in your life, if you’re reading this, you’re a beneficiary of Apple’s history of innovation.

Happy birthday, Apple.

Cartoonist Ruben Bolling says 9/11 changed everything.

The Bush Administration is trying again to blame bad news from Iraq on reporters. “Dog bites man” isn’t news because it’s such a commonplace event. Isn’t bloodshed in Iraq so commonplace now that another bombing, another kidnapping, another heap of bodies murdered execution-style is all just a big yawn? Isn’t it about time we started to hear about Iraqi supermarket ribbon-cutting ceremonies?

ABC News reporter Martha Raddatz recently moved from covering the Pentagon to covering the White House, and she recently returned from her tenth trip to report from Iraq. On the PBS program Washington Week, she talked about the difference between what she hears at the White House and what she saw in Iraq:

I have to say that I was struck by a disconnect, and the disconnect is this: you hear the administration talk about this in terms of very stark black and white. There’s a few layers they talk about, but it’s good vs. bad; it’s good news vs. bad news; it’s terrorists vs. us. And when you’re there — and this time in particular to me, because I have just started covering the White House — it is so complex over there, and it gets more complex every time I go. There are more enemies. There are different types of enemies. And when you talk about the different types of enemies, it means there are different ways to defeat those enemies.

One of the things I did on this trip is that I vowed to go talk to the Iraqi security forces. Not to talk to the Americans about the Iraqi security forces, but the Iraqi security forces themselves.

I went to Sadr City, a place I’ve visited year after year, and the place where I last was, where American troops were in charge of that area, now there are 1500 Iraqi security forces, with some American trainers, about 36 American trainers.

So I started talking to them. Do you have enough equipment? No, we don’t have enough equipment. Do you have enough armored vehicles? We have no armored vehicles. Our enemy has better weapons than we do. We could be defeated by our enemy.

So I said — and there were a group of about 200 — I said, “So tell me, are you better off now, or before Saddam Hussein was taken down?” And almost all of them raised their hands and said, “We were better off before, because we had security. We have assassinations now, we have murders, we have all these things. We don’t have security.”

Now the irony here, of course, is that these are the people who are supposed to be providing security, and they were scared.

There was an interpreter there who I’d met years ago, who said, “Can you get me out of here? Can you help me get out of here? I have, in my room, I have all the interpreters that have been killed.”

So it’s very complicated over there.

Raddatz was asked whether the current conflict is a civil war.

Are they in a full-blown civil war? I can’t say that. Is the sectarian violence worse than I’ve ever seen it? Absolutely. I don’t know what the tipping point over there is, when you say we’re in a full-blown civil war.

These same Iraqi security forces said to me — the colonel, the one who’s heading all these troops — said, “We’re in a hidden civil war. You don’t even know the half of it.”

A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.

—Arthur Bloch

I wanted to write something last Sunday for the third anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. But I found that I didn’t have any fresh insights to offer.

I checked a lot of articles and blogs, looking for something to link to, but everyone seemed to be repeating the same arguments they had been making for years. It seemed to me that nobody was casting new light on the situation.

After three years, we have apparently all stopped thinking about Iraq. We are now in a new mode, the automatic repetition of previously recorded thoughts. The Bush Administration has been in this mode for years.

This is bad — very bad. The administration promises to keep doing more of what hasn’t worked so far, with faith that it will start working any day now. The administration’s critics tell us how much better things would be if Bush had never started this war. Meanwhile, the situation in Iraq seems to be deteriorating day by day.

As much as I wish we had never launched this war, I know of no magic that will turn back the clock and give us a do-over. Like it or not, we are in Iraq. I don’t know how to fix Iraq, now that we’ve done so much to break it. What I do know is that all of us — Republican, Democrat, independent, liberal, conservative, moderate, young, old, skinny, stout — we have all got to get serious about figuring out how to fix it.

Unless we start doing some better thinking than we’ve done over the past three years, Iraq will be the kind of failed state that, in the past, has been a fertile breeding and training ground for despotism and terrorism.

Yes, we’re tired, but we can’t stop thinking now.

Via Swing State Project: More than fifty veterans are running for Congress this year as Democrats, calling themselves a Band of Brothers (even though there are several women veterans among them).

There’s a video clip online, and the group is collecting money to air TV commercials. My favorite moment is when Andrew Duck, standing on Capitol Hill, says “we need to take the Hill back.”

Can you imagine? Fifty Democrats in Congress who know how to fight?

Since he took office, George W. Bush has stalled action to reduce greenhouse gases by calling for “more study” of global warming. Now, scientists seem to be forming a consensus that a catastrophic climate change is already under way, and conservatives are stalling action on greenhouse gases by saying it’s too late to fix the problem. From The New Yorker:

Antarctica is losing ice. The rate of loss, according to researchers at the University of Colorado, in Boulder … is around thirty-six cubic miles per year. (For comparison’s sake, the city of Los Angeles uses about one-fifth of a cubic mile of water annually.) … If the loss continues, it will mean that predictions for the rise in the sea level for the coming century are seriously understated.

The news from Antarctica follows a string of similarly grim discoveries. In September, satellite measurements showed that the extent of the Arctic ice cap had shrunk to the smallest area ever recorded, prompting a prediction that the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summer “well before the end of this century.” Around the same time, a group of British scientists reported that soils in England and Wales have been losing carbon at the rate of four million metric tons a year, a loss that is at once a symptom of warming and — as much of that carbon is released into the atmosphere — a likely cause of more. In January, researchers at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies concluded that 2005 had been the hottest year on record, and, in February, a team of scientists from NASA and the University of Kansas announced that the flow of ice from glaciers in Greenland had more than doubled over the past decade. … “People say climate change is something for our kids to worry about,” one official told the Washington Post. “No. It’s now.”

In the face of such news, how does a country, i.e. the United States, justify further inaction? Certainly, there isn’t much tread left in the argument that global warming is, to use Senator James Inhofe’s famous formulation, a “hoax.” …

The new argument making the rounds of conservative think tanks, like the National Center for Policy Analysis, and circulating through assorted sympathetic publications goes something like this: Yes, the planet may be warming up, but no one can be sure of why, and, in any case, it doesn’t matter — let’s stop quibbling about the causes of climate change and concentrate on dealing with the consequences. …

The beauty of this argument is its apparent high-mindedness, and this, of course, is also its danger. Carbon dioxide is a persistent gas — it lasts for about a century — and once released into the atmosphere it is, for all practical purposes, irrecoverable. Since every extra increment of CO2 leads to extra warming, addressing the effects of climate change without dealing with the cause is a bit like trying to treat diabetes with doughnuts. The climate isn’t going to change just once, and then settle down; unless CO2 concentrations are stabilized, it will keep on changing, producing, in addition to the “same old problems,” an ever-growing array of new ones. The head of the Goddard Institute, James Hansen, who first warned about the dangers of global warming back in the nineteen-seventies and recently made headlines by accusing the Bush Administration of censorship, has said that following the path of business-as-usual for the remainder of this century will lead to an earth so warm as to be “practically a different planet.”

On the plus side, think of the money we can save on the space program.