Pun Salad

• Pejman points to this article and says "Read. The. Whole. Thing." And he's right, of course. Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post looks at the response to Hurricane Katrina from the government and the private sector, compares and contrasts without ideological blinders, and concludes:

  … the worst failures of the past two weeks have been big government failures. The biggest successes, by contrast, have come out of this country's incredibly vibrant, amazingly diverse and fantastically generous civil society. Sooner or later, it will be impossible not to draw political lessons from that paradox.

  When you see this kind of admission in a canonical "mainstream" outlet, you can't help but think: Is it time for a resurgence of small-government thinking? That would be neat.

• Ann Althouse observes:

  You know one Supreme Court case the Senators aren't grilling Roberts about? Despite all the talk about the Commerce Clause at the hearing, none of them wants to bring up Gonzales v. Raich, the medical marijuana case.

  Why not? Because the Senators like the blank-check interpretation of the Commerce Clause that the Supremes relied on in Raich.

  Professor Althouse is one of the most entertaining sources of analysis for the confirmation hearings; if you're in the mood for that sort of thing, and you inexplicably haven't done so already, check her out.

Another Kurosawa samurai movie with Toshiro Mifune as our semi-reluctant hero. This is very popular among the critics; for me, it was (only) OK, sorry. So I'm a philistine.

Part of the problem, perhaps, was that I've seen the remakes (Last Man Standing with Bruce Willis, and A Fistful of Dollars with Clint Eastwood) and so was pretty sure how it was all going to come out.

More generally, it was probably groundbreaking in its day. When you've seen all the imitations, the original loses some of its specialness, unfortunately.

But it's fun to watch overall. Mifune's deadpan, dark humor is great.