Just something to keep an eye on:

The Center for Responsive Politics has a lovely site with vast amounts of searchable data on political donors and donations. It answers questions like, "so, just who likes Lyndon LaRouche?" and the other presidential candidates. Expect it to get more interesting as time goes by, although the archives are also quite useful.

The Weekend:

A friend is coming to visit D.C. for the weekend, so it's quite possible I won't be as active in posting for the 4th. But since half of the blogosphere is currently on vacation and the court is in recess, there isn't that much to comment on at the moment either. And there may be some weekend surprises.

Incidentally has it ever struck anybody else as odd that an anagram of "a weekend" is "weak-kneed"?

Movies:

All Deliberate Speed is polling for the best law movie ever. Is it too trite to suggest "To Kill a Mockingbird"?

It's the birthday of playwright Tom Stoppard, born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia (1937). He's the author of many plays, including his recent trilogy The Coast of Utopia (2003). His first big success was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), a comic retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet from the point of view of Hamlet's two friends. It won all kinds of awards in England. When it premiered in New York a journalist asked Stoppard what it was about. He said, "It's about to make me rich."