Finally, a message

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I'm happy to see that John Kerry finall seems to have found a message to run with in this campaign. I wouldn't call myself a fan of Kerry, I'm largely in the Anybody But Bush crowd, but the Kerry campaign's performance has been lackluster at best until this point. Andrew Sullivan, someone who was for the war in Iraq, has a great piece up at The New Republic, talking about the situation in Iraq, and the political hay that Kerry can make of it, if the Bush administration doesn't start changing what they're saying/doing soon.

But the reality is unavoidable: Large swathes of Iraq have been ceded to terrorist insurgents; the multinational force is deeply unpopular in all the surveys of the general population you can read; barely a fraction of reconstruction funds has been spent; military and civilian casualties continue to rise; parts of Baghdad are not secure; the chances of national elections in January look iffy in the extreme; the White House's own internal reports are full of gloom. None of this was discussed at the Republican National Convention, and you can understand why. But the extremely rosy picture of Iraq sketched by that convention could well become a liability if the facts on the ground begin to make the commander-in-chief seem culpably out of it at best, and deceptive at worst.

May the Force be with you

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Star Wars DVDIn case you've been living under a rock, the Star Wars DVD set comes out today. Amazon has a good price on it at $41.99 with free shipping. Mine is already in the mail, since I pre-ordered it with a gift certificate I had back in April. I can't wait to watch it on my big-screen, with the surround sound cranked up high enough to scare the cat. There are a few changes made in this version, even over the Special Edition that was released a few years ago. CNN has the scoop here, nothing too troubling, though I wish Lucas had changed the infamous Greedo scene back to the original version, with Han firing and killing Greedo first.