Dr. Jack Wheeler
RELIEF FROM BAGHDAD BOILS
A number of US soldiers fighting in Iraq have become afflicted with a horrible disease called leishmaniasis (leesh-mun-eye-ah-sis). They get it from the bite of a sand-fly which injects a parasite into their bloodstream. The “cutaneous” version of the disease causes huge, ghastly, and painful boils on the face and other areas of the skin - thus the name, Baghdad Boils. The “visceral” version destroys the liver and other internal organs and can be fatal.Compounding the problem is that the treatment seems worse than the cure. It’s a 20-day therapy of being injected with sodium stibogluconate (commercial names: Pentostam or Stibanate), which can leave every joint in your body with screaming pain, plus give you unending blow-your-head-off migraines.There is some very recent research which indicates a way to greatly increase the effectiveness of the antileishmanial drug therapy while greatly decreasing its painful side effects. If you have any friends in the military, know of any soldier suffering from this affliction, or know any soldier serving in Iraq who may be at risk from sand-fly bites, you may want to make them aware of this.It involves the use of a common bioflavanoid called quercetin.
PRETENDING TO BE HAPPY
Last week was the 13th birthday of my youngest son, Jackson. One evening a few days before, I was engrossed in writing on the computer when my wife reminded me it was Jackson’s bedtime. He was in bed reading, waiting for me to kiss him goodnight. As I walked down the hall towards his room, my brain was filled with thoughts about the article I was working on. I was on autopilot and all I could think about was what I would write when I got back on the computer. For some reason, I stopped and stood still. Somehow, an extraneous thought had popped into my consciousness from nowhere. It seemed just a moment ago when he was a little boy. Now, in just a few days, Jackson would become a teen-ager. The time was not far off when he will be too big a kid for me to kiss him goodnight. The time was not far off when he will not be down the hall at all.
THE GOLDEN FLEECE OF FREEDOM
When you were a kid, do you remember reading the great epic of Greek mythology called Jason and the Argonauts? Sent on a mission he is not expected to survive by the man who has usurped his throne, Jason assembles a crew of heroes, including Hercules, Orpheus, Castor and Pollux, and sails in the great ship Argo across the Euxine Sea to the distant land of Colchis to capture the legendary Golden Fleece.Its a marvelous adventure story which the ancient Greeks believed was not myth but true. And sure enough - it turns out that Colchis was a real place and there really was a Golden Fleece. At the east end of the Black Sea (the Greeks called it the Euxine), there is a range of huge mountains called the Caucasus. The mountain streams that poured down the Caucasus and into the Euxine carried so many particles of gold that the folks who lived there - the Colchians - would peg sheep skins in the streams to trap the gold particles in the wool. Colchis is one of the most ancient lands in the world. Its where the original Caucasians came from. Today it is called Georgia. This week, George Bush sailed in Air Force One to modern Colchis to be wildly welcomed by hundreds of thousands of Georgian Argonauts thanking him for rescuing the Georgian Golden Fleece from its former conqueror, Russia.The people of Georgia recognize George Bush as the savior and protector of freedom that he is. Why cant the Russians? Churchill said Russia was an enigma wrapped in a riddle inside a puzzle. Why cant they live in peace with their neighbors instead of always wanting a piece of their neighbors? Part of the answer must lie in there being no word for peace in the Russian language.
ITS TIME! IN MINSK AND MOSCOW
Next week, the President of the United States will stand next to the President of Russia in Moscow’s Red Square commemorating the end of World War II. Last week, you learned in No Apology, No Future that on his way to and from Moscow, Bush will meet with the leaders of former Russian colonies Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Georgia on how to end the dictatorship of Aleksandr Lukashenko in Belarus. The Kremlin has publicly voiced its displeasure with these meetings. Yet it ought to be far more concerned with an unknown, anonymous student alliance that has successfully overthrown autocrats in four ex-Soviet states, and now has Belarus and Russia itself in its gunsights. While its constituent student groups have names, the alliance itself has no name and no leader. Here is its history:
INSULATED FROM HONESTY: The Quarter-Trillion Dollar Asbestos Criminal Conspiracy
In the past dozen years, 700,000 people have sued over 8,000 companies, schools, and municipalities for asbestos-exposure damages. In 2003, some 110,000 individual claims were filed in that year alone. Asbestos litigation has bankrupted over 70 corporations, costing 60,000 jobs, and forced companies to pay out over $70 billion in court judgments and settlements. The suits were filed as “class action” lawsuits by trail lawyers, who of course got most of the money. The litigation is predicted to eventually produce as many as 3 million individual claims, with a final total of $200 to $300 billion paid by businesses and insurance companies in judgments - or by the taxpayers via Arlen Specter’s bill in the Senate should those companies go bankrupt which many will. That’s over a quarter of a trillion dollar pot of ripped-off gold at the end of the trial lawyers’ rainbow. And over 95% is willful fraud. The quarter-trillion dollar asbestos litigation is a criminal conspiracy between plaintiff trial lawyers and the medical doctors they bribed to fake the evidence.
DINNER WITH TOM
On Thursday evening, May 12, in Washington DC, a number of pro-Americans are hosting a testimonial dinner for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. It will be a very impressive show of support for Tom by the conservative movement, and of its determination not to let the Democrats’ War on DeLay succeed. If you can be in Washington on May 12, I would like to personally encourage you to attend. The stakes in this war are large - control of Congress, smoothing or thwarting Hillary’s path to the White House - as explained earlier this month in Hillary’s War on DeLay . You can get the details and make your reservation by clicking here: Dinner with Tom. Or you can call Stacie Rumenap at the American Conservative Union, 703-836-8602. Please tell her you want to sit at my table. I hope I’ll see you there!
LIMBIC PICTURES
What launched the “Reagan Doctrine” - the strategy that dismantled the Soviet Empire - was a series of pictures. They were ones I had taken of individual Afghans, Nicaraguans, Angolans, and others who were risking their lives to rid their countries of Soviet tyranny. At a meeting in the White House in late November 1983, for the first time those attending actually saw what these people looked like - rather than reading classified reports about them, ink on paper. There were plenty of pictures of folks with weapons. But the picture that got to them most was of Amin, a young Afghan boy whose hands had been blown off by a Soviet butterfly bomb disguised to look like a toy: 
Such pictures can bypass all the information-and-analysis processing filters we have in our neo-cortex, and go directly to the primitive, emotional structure of the brain called the limbic system. They are Limbic Pictures, hitting the brain’s emotional bullseye. Because the Pro-Life movement has begun to understand the power of limbic pictures, an end to legalized infanticide in America may now be in sight.
NO APOLOGY, NO FUTURE
In 1997, I was in Budapest speaking to a conference of international business leaders. Another speaker was a Moscow television news commentator well-known in Russia, Boris Notkin. He informed his audience about how humiliated Russians felt, losing their Empire and the Cold War, not winning many medals in the Olympics, and having their Mir space station go belly-up. He warned of a dangerous anti-Americanism emerging among Russians, who resentfully blamed America for their problems. A gray-haired gentleman with a Central European accent stood up and asked Boris a question: “In addition to their feelings of humiliation and resentment, do Russians have any feelings of remorse for inflicting Communism upon so many countries? After their defeat in World War II, the Germans apologized to the world for being Nazis and for the horrible atrocities Nazism committed. After their defeat in the Cold War, will the Russians ever apologize to the world for being Communists and the equally horrible atrocities Soviet Communism committed?” Boris looked straight at the man and coldly answered, “No. Russians feel no remorse. They will not apologize.”This past Monday, April 25, Russian President Vladimir Putin reaffirmed this absence of remorse and refusal to apologize for the genocidal horror perpetrated by Soviet Communism upon so many countries and peoples. In a nationally televised speech to the Russian Federal Assembly in Moscow, he declared that “the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”The truth, of course, is that the existence of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century
THE DE-HOMOSEXUALIZATION OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
A Vatican source has disclosed to To The Point a psychological trauma of John Paul II. Whenever Vatican investigators brought the results of their vetting process regarding an individual’s candidacy for bishop, cardinal, or other office, and they revealed he was a homosexual, John Paul II would refuse to believe it. He did so because accusing someone of homosexuality was a standard practice of the Communist government in his native Poland regarding anyone it regarded as an enemy of the state. From his ordination as a Catholic priest in 1946 to elevation to Archbishop of Krakow in 1963 and Cardinal in 1967, the then Karol Wojtyla witnessed this personal destruction repeatedly. So traumatized, he summarily dismissed such accusations as Pope, and would approve the elevation of anyone so accused. This is why the Catholic Church, from Bishops in Boston to the Vatican itself, is riddled with homosexuals today. As the Dean of the College of Cardinals and the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger learned who the homosexuals are in the Vatican and the almost 3,000 dioceses in the world. As Pope Benedict XVI, he will encourage their departure from the priesthood.
TSANTSAS IN ECUADOR
The first tribe I ever lived with made these. It’s a human shrunken head, made by the Shuara Jivaros in the Amazon jungles of Ecuador. They call it a tsantsa, and this particular one was given to me by Chief Tangamashi when he adopted me into his clan in the summer of 1960. I was all by myself and 16 years old. The practice of shrinking your enemy’s head was once confined to the Amazon, but now it has evidently spread to Ecuador’s capital, for that is what a mob in Quito attempted to do this week with the president of their country, Lucio Gutierrez. I know headhunters, and this was no haphazard, spontaneous revenge-raid. This was well-planned and well-executed. Tangamashi would have approved, and felt he had something in common with the organizers - Porter Goss and Paul Wolfowitz. With the coup in Quito this week, the Bush Administration has finally launched its effort to rescue South America from the threat of Hugo Chavez.
MIRACLE MAX IN EUROPE
There was a very funny movie made back in 1987 called The Princess Bride. Imagine an Errol Flynn swashbuckler with a Monty Python script. One of my favorite scenes is when the hero, Westley (played by Cary Elwes) is wounded and his friends drag his limp body to a Yiddish Wizard named Miracle Max (played by Billy Crystal) in hopes of saving him. But it’s too late. He’s dead, they tell Max. “Look who knows so much,” Max replies after examining Westley. “It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There is a VERY BIG DIFFERENCE between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do.” “What's that?” his friends ask. Max answers, “Go through his clothes and look for loose change.” It turns out there was an adaptive replay of this scene in the Sistine Chapel this week. The College of Cardinals dragged in the limp body of European Christianity - which means of European civilization and culture - and placed it at Josef Ratzinger’s feet. Can you save him? they asked, because we are afraid he’s dead. Their Dean and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith replied that yes, he is mostly dead - but not all dead, so there is hope for his revival. That hope is what elected Cardinal Ratzinger to the papacy.
LINDER’S 16TH PROBLEM
One of the very first “Liberation Links” we put up at the inception of To The Point was to John Linder’s FairTax. John is a Republican Congressman from Georgia who has authored a bill, HR 25 for the 109th Congress, that would in his words, “repeal all corporate and individual income taxes, payroll taxes, self-employment taxes, capital gains taxes, estate taxes and gift taxes - and replace it with a revenue-neutral personal consumption tax.”If the FairTax were to become law, the IRS would cease to exist, and we would pay our taxes like we buy a gallon of gasoline. Yes, that gallon and just about everything else would cost 23% more in a national retail sales tax - but since business-to-business transactions are not taxed, nor would businesses be paying corporate taxes or the employers’ share of payroll taxes, consumer prices would drop by at least that 23% if not much more. The extent of the explosion of increased prosperity that would happen throughout America if the FairTax were to replace the IRS is difficult to exaggerate. Let’s put it this way: The FairTax would be the single greatest act of wealth creation in the history of man.We are now fast approaching a tipping point of acknowledgement that the federal tax code is irretrievably broken and has to be replaced. Linder’s FairTax is by far the best fix. Except there’s this one little problem - actually, it’s the 16th problem.
THE SAHARA SNOWSTORM
It is obvious to anyone with open eyes that the Grey Lady of the New York Times is a liberal propaganda sheet rather than a real newspaper. The examples are legion of its pushing stories twisted to the left. But equally important are stories it refuses to report, that it doesn’t want its readers to know. On January 26-27, 2005 there was a tremendous snowstorm in the Sahara Desert. Much of the Sahara in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia were blanketed by an enormous snowfall, the worst in over half a century. Here are the NASA satellite photos.You would think a snowstorm in the Sahara would be news - but you never heard about it because such a story conflicts with the liberal secular religion of Global Warming.Here’s another example: The Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline has been pumping oil from northern Iraq to Turkey’s oil terminal at such a rate now that Iraq is back to just about 100% of pre-war oil production. It’s one reason for oil prices dropping off the spike of nearly $60, and heading below $50. But such a story, folded into the larger story that security is improving in Iraq so that the country will be exporting well over 2 million bpd by fall, conflicts with the liberal media con that the world economy is failing and oil is rising because of President Bush (oh, yes - and now, according to Nancy Pelosi, also Tom DeLay!)Just two small examples why you can understand the world far better by subscribing to To The Point instead of the New York Times…
VICTORY AND CERTAINTY
At the newly-opened World War II Memorial in Washington, there are inscribed in stone these words of FDR:
No matter what else a contemporary conservative may think of FDR, he was not embarrassed to be American. It is inconceivable that a modern liberal, his brain filled with the goo of moral relativism, multicultural diversity, and the compulsion to Blame America First, could demand that America’s “righteous might” achieve “absolute victory” over its enemies. What characterizes this statement is moral certainty, the sure and certain conviction that America was in the right and the Nazis and Imperialist Japanese were in the wrong with no doubt or equivocation. The “Greatest Generation” of Americans was called such because its members were motivated by this conviction.Americans will never entrust their security to a president who doesn’t grasp this, who embraces moral relativism and rejects moral certainty - or at least seems to. If a Liberal Democrat arose to embody the undiluted patriotism of FDR, the door to the White House would be open to him - or her - especially if he - or she - could convince most folks such an embodiment was real while slyly winking to the liberal elite that it’s a con.
THE CHINESE GLASS HOUSE
This past weekend, the Chinese Communist government organized a protest demonstration in front of the Japanese Embassy in Beijing. Under the watchful eyes of Chinese security agents and police, the young protestors were encouraged to throw stones at the embassy in protest over the latest Japanese history textbook continuing to omit mention of Japanese atrocities in China during World War II.Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, on a charm offensive in India at the time of the protest, told reporters in New Delhi that “Only a country that respects and takes responsibility for history can win over peoples’ trust, in Asia and the world at large… (the protest in Beijing) should prompt deep and profound reflection in Japan.”A Japanese response to the Chinese accusations will soon be forthcoming. There will be bland public statements, such as Prime Minister Koizumi’s to the Kyodo News Agency: “Any country can face criticism, but it is not good to let confrontation heighten because of that.” Then there will be the unofficial response, a private letter to Wen Jiabao on Koizumi’s official letterhead, which notes:
I, along with many of my fellow Japanese citizens, must admit to being astounded at your admonishing us to “take responsibility for history,” and to engage in “deep and profound reflection” on our history. Astounded because you pretend not to see how much this advice applies to you and the Communist Party of China.There is an old English proverb of which I am sure you are aware: People who live in glass houses should never throw stones. The government of the People’s Republic of China is such a glass house.The letter is going to be faxed, emailed, mass-reprinted and covertly distributed to millions of folks in the People’s Republic by Taiwan Chinese agents who have gotten a copy. Here it is in full:
HILLARY’S WAR ON DELAY
The most powerful Congressmen have, in addition to their regular offices in one of the House Office Buildings (Cannon, Longworth, or Rayburn) on the south side of Capitol Hill, a private office in the Capitol itself. It was in such an office earlier this week that I asked a member of the House leadership about the MSM (mainstream media)/Democrat vendetta against his colleague, Tom DeLay.“Hillary’s fingerprints are all over it,” came his response. “She has no intention of having to deal with an opposition party controlling the House as her husband did for six years and Ronald Reagan did for eight. She has a very clear plan for seizing control of the entire United States government, which includes orchestrating Democrat control of the House in 2006 so it is firmly in place when she is elected president in 2008.”It is, then, at Hillary’s direction that the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the entire Liberal Media apparatus are waging a relentless war upon House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.
BYE-BYE BOLIVIA?
This map of Bolivia may about to become obsolete: 
For some time now, a lot of Bolivians have been conducting a “Gas War,” blocking roads, demonstrating in cities like El Alto and Cochabamba to prevent the export of Bolivian natural gas by foreign companies. The fellow coordinating the protests is Evo Morales, a Marxist prot�g� of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, the leader of the MAS (Movement Towards Socialism) Party, and also the leader of coca leaf growers (the stuff that’s made into cocaine). The protests brought down the presidency of Gonzalo Sanchez do Lozada in October 2003 and continue to escalate: 820 in the last 17 months. The current government of Sanchez’s successor Carlos Mesa in teetering. There’s just one problem for Morales and Chavez. The Bolivians who are protesting are not the Bolivians who live where the gas is. Bolivia is about to split in two.
NOW THERE IS ONE
We only recognize giants when they are gone, heroic ages when they are past. The day will come when America’s children will learn that the 1980s was such an age, bestrode by three giants who together rid the world of one of the great evils of history, the Soviet Union. They were Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher. Now, only one is left. We mourned the passing of Ronald Reagan last year, Pope John Paul’s this, so before we mourn Lady Thatcher’s, who turns 80 this October, let us acknowledge the incalculable debt those who live in freedom today owe to this triumvirate of truly extraordinary human beings. It is easy to believe the hand of Providence set them on history’s stage one after the other in the short space of two years, exactly at the time America and the West was on the verge of surrender to the seeming inevitability of Soviet power. Easy to believe with hindsight. But at the time,a Polish priest, an English woman commoner, and an American movie actor were about to confront the most evil power in the world. How off the wall do you want history to get? Truth is not simply stranger than fiction, it is more dramatic and awe-inspiring.
THE POPE IN CHINA
If you make your way to the northwestern tip of Yunnan province in China, drive from Dali to Baoshan, take a four-wheel drive track up the stunningly beautiful Salween River all the way to within a few miles of Tibet, then hike about three hours up into the mountains, you’ll come to the village of Baihanluo. In this incredibly remote place, you’ll come upon this: 
A Christian church. A Catholic Church to be specific, built in the 1880s by French Catholic missionaries who had trekked from French Indo-China. Still lovingly cared for by the Bai and Lizu tribespeople (not Han Chinese) who live here, it remains a place of great spiritual tranquility.
RED ZIMBABWE
It used to be called Rhodesia, named after its colonial founder, Cecil Rhodes. Before that it was Southern Rhodesia, distinguished from Northern Rhodesia, now called Zambia after the Zambezi River. It was one of the most beautiful and productive countries in the world when I was first there in the early seventies. Now it is hell on earth. It is, of course, Zimbabwe.As most all African countries, it is a national fiction, a colonial construct with no historical or cultural viability as a country. It has been run since “independence” in 1980 by one of the world’s most racist dictators on earth, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, who changed Rhodesia’s name to Zimbabwe after the ruins of a stone fortress built 800 years ago by the Karanga people.All elections are completely rigged by Mugabe’s party, the ZANU-PF. The parliamentary elections held today will be no exception. It was patently rigged elections that caused the recent overthrow of the corrupt governments in Georgia, Ukraine, and last week in Kyrgyzstan. These were hailed as “velvet” revolutions, peaceful and bloodless. You can have no such hope for Zimbabwe. Africa doesn’t do bloodless.
RESPITE FROM LUNACY
I just returned from ten days on the Nile in Egypt. It was a special experience to see it once again, this time through the eyes of my 12 year-old son Jackson. A wonderful side-benefit to such an experience is that you get to ignore newspaper headlines and all the general craziness of the world, if only for a few days. I didn’t read a single paper or magazine while I was gone. So when I arrived back home to wade through those that had piled up in my absence, one lunatic event after another kept popping out at me. After plenty of goofy international headlines, my laughing fits continued with stories here in the US. 59 former State Department diplomats have written a letter demanding the Senate not confirm John Bolton as Ambassador to the UN. Among the signers were Princeton Lyman, Monteagle Stearns, and Spurgeon Keeny. These weirdo first names are not made up inner city jive monikers like Paluja Ratoomba. Only Ivy League ultra-blue-blood aristocrat pansies get names like that. I’m sure Bolton is worried sick that a bunch of over-the-hill Little Lord Fauntleroys are scared he is going to explain reality to the representatives of Third World dictatorships. But then the lunacy stopped being funny. The Bush Brothers’ refusal to prevent Terri Schiavo’s killing will do lasting political damage to them both.
EARTH TO SPACESHIP PUTIN
The White House is becoming increasingly concerned about Pootie-Poot. He actually said point-blank to one of Bush’s key advisors: “Mr. Bush is in no position to criticize me on my actions towards the Russian press - look at how he fired Dan Rather.”
CLEOPATRA WAS A BLONDE
No, this is not a blonde joke. If you want one of those, go to this week’s Humor File. Cleopatra was in fact a blonde. That’s because she was not Egyptian. She was a Macedonian Greek, with hair as blonde as Alexander’s. Alexander conquered Egypt in 332 BC, then went on to subdue all of the Middle East. When he died nine years later, his just-conquered empire was fought over and carved up by his generals. The one who ended up running Egypt was Ptolemy (367-283 BC). Declaring himself Pharaoh, he founded the Ptolemaic Dynasty, with twelve Ptolemies in succession, many of whom had wives named Cleopatra. The Cleopatra we know, lover of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, was the daughter of Ptolemy XII, and entitled Cleopatra VII (69-30 BC). There was not a drop of Egyptian blood in the Ptolemies. They remained 100% Greek, including the Queen of the Nile herself Cleopatra. Can you imagine Elizabeth Taylor as a blonde? It kind of shakes up your image of history. I am writing this overlooking the Nile in Cairo. The Pyramids of Giza are in the distance. If there is one thing omnipresent in Egypt it’s history - and most all of that history is old, in more ways than one. For 3,000 years, Egypt has been a sleeping giant. Now it may be about to reawaken.
WORTH IT IN BAGHDAD
Major General Peter Chiarelli, head of US military’s Task Force Baghdad and commander of the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division, spoke a few days ago at a AUSA (Association of the United States Army) meeting at the Ft. Hood (Texas) Officer’s Club. A friend of To The Point’s took notes. This is how it really is.*Baghdad is about the same size, geographically, as Texas’ capital of Austin, with ten times the folks: 700,000 for Austin, 7 million for Baghdad.*Baghdad’s main problem area has been a huge slum called Sadr City. Last fall, there was an average of 160 terrorist attacks per week. For the last three months, they have flatlined: five to zero a week.*The media blared in front-page headlines about the 100 Iraqis killed in Baghdad as they were lined up to enlist in the police and security service. It was never reported that the next day, there were 300 lined up in the same place.
FRUITCAKE FASCISTS
The decision by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer this week that withholding marriage licenses from homosexuals is somehow unconstitutional is the latest example of America’s retreat from democracy. The type of government America is moving towards is a krytocracy.Remember the word. American democracy has been superceded, replaced, by a krytocracy - a government of judges. Unelected judges.America’s Constitution and the laws passed by Congress under its authority no longer have any meaning. The Constitution’s only - only - meaning is what judges say it has. We live in an era of krytocratic tyranny: rule by the arbitrary feelings and whims of judges.But it’s worse than that. The Kramer decision is yet another example of the seizure, the wholesale theft, of American culture by a tiny fraction of Americans. Less than 2% of Americans are homosexual, engaging in practices the vast majority of Americans find abnormal and perverse if not morally repugnant - yet are willing to tolerate and ignore. Yet being tolerated and left alone is not good enough. Despite the fact that no culture in human history has ever looked upon homosexuality as psychologically normal and made no legal, moral, or cultural distinction between its activities and those of normal folks, homosexuals are waging a war upon America to force her to do so. That’s why they have become Fruitcake Fascists.
THE REAL LOCKBOX
So now Alan Greenspan says the “lockbox” the Democrats pretend to advocate for Social Security must be “real.” Addressing the Senate Committee on Aging this Tuesday the 15th, he proclaimed:
In addressing Social Security's imbalances, we need to ensure that measures taken now to finance future benefit commitments represent real additions to national saving. We need, in effect, to make the phantom `lock-boxes' around the trust fund real.It’s going to be very interesting to watch Democrats squirm - and a lot of squishy Republicans - when conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill take Greenspan’s demand seriously.They are going to advocate something called The Real Lockbox. It puts the Dems in a lockbox without a key.There are some very smart Congressional Republicans getting behind The Real Lockbox concept, which is far superior to President Bush's own private accounts plan. Whether they end up in a tug-of-war with the Bushistas, or the latter admit to the flaws of their initial proposal, is going to be a major political drama this spring.
RUSSIA LOSES ANOTHER ONE
A friend of mine whose name you know but is embarrassed to have his name mentioned and I will never forget standing on a street corner in Kishinev, Moldavia. We stood there looking like fools trying to keep our jaws from dropping open and our necks from snapping back and forth - for everywhere we looked, we saw another stunningly beautiful woman walk by. Between the two of us, we had been to just about every country in Europe, and we agreed: the most beautiful women on the European continent were right here. Kishinev left Paris in the dust.That was back in 1990, and the place was still part of the Soviet Union. During World War II, Stalin decided to move the USSR-Romania border westward, from the Dniester River to the Prut River, and called the territory he had seized the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldavia. The smallest of the USSR’s 15 republics (at 13,000 square miles, slightly larger than Maryland), it along with the others declared independence in 1991, changing its name to Moldova and its capital to Chisinau. Except there was this one little problem.
THE UNKNOWN KING OF TERROR and the Coming Lebanon Civil War
Last week, we discussed how there could be a light at the end of the terrorist tunnel. Now let’s talk about how that light could be an oncoming train.One of the most famous quotes of America’s favorite philosopher, Yogi Berra, is: “It’s never over until it’s over.” We’ve all been swept away with democracy seeming to march ineluctably forward in the Middle East, thrilled by the sea of red and white Lebanese flags waved in Beirut’s Martyr’s Square, and confidant that the Cedar Revolution will be victorious over Syrian imperialism. We need to pause now, take a deep breath, and heed Yogi’s words.I have a very bad feeling about Lebanon that this could turn out really ugly. Dispatch after dispatch, story after story, and all you read about is Syria’s getting its troops and spies out of its colony. Congressmen like Darryl Issa (R-CA) write newspaper op-eds entitled “Lebanon: Democracy’s Next Stop.” All without a word about Hezbollah. All without a word about Iran.Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is a puppet of the Mullacracy in Tehran. The people who give the orders to the Syrian troops in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley are Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the Pasdaran. Hezbollah was founded in 1982 among Lebanon’s Shia Moslems with money and weapons from Iran. It is run by the world’s worst terrorist, who is most decidedly not Osama Bin Laden.
RATHER DISTORTED
I write this with a Reidel glass of Rosemount Merlot at the ready, toasting the forced departure of an individual who has infested America’s airwaves for 43 years - ever since he joined CBS News in 1962. I won’t be watching Dan Rather’s final broadcast this evening, just as I haven’t watched CBS News for many years. I’ll merely sip my merlot in gratitude for all those bloggers who exposed Rather’s Memogate and did him in. And my friend Brent Bozell.
A YOUNGER BRAIN
One difference between younger and older folks is that the former feel “endless possibilities of the future,” while the latter feel the future closing in on them. Time seems repetitive - like being caught in Groundhog Day with Bill Murray. This is a significant drain on one’s mental energy. An openness to the future, on the other hand, creates a youthful mental energy. Such a feeling of endless possibilities requires new neuronal connections in the brain. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks because the dog’s brain has become static, and has lost the capacity to grow new neurons and to establish new connections between neurons old and new. Now there may be a clever way with quite sophisticated nutrients to regrow new neurons and neuronal connections, literally youthening your brain.
THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TERRORIST TUNNEL
The War on Terrorism - more precisely the War on Moslem Terrorism - may have been won on March 1st, 2005. That was the day US intel folks announced they had intercepted messages from Osama Bin Laden to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, begging Zarqawi to launch terrorist attacks inside America itself. The media went into a tizzy, bombarding Homeland Security officials with demands as to how they were going to protect us from this latest threat. And maybe there is a threat. Far more likely it’s an announcement of surrender. Osama’s message was in Arabic. Let’s translate its real meaning into plain English: “Dear Abu. I’m afraid I must announce to the world that, as a pitiful schmuck hiding in a mountain cave, I am powerless to organize or conduct any more terrorist attacks on the Great Satan of America. Can you do anything? I know you’re being hunted down in every mud-hole in Iraq right now, and it might be a little difficult for you to make your way undetected to the US, create your own terrorist network since mine obviously no longer functions, and start your own terrorist war there - but do your best, OK? I am depending on you, since our Islamofascist brothers can no longer depend on me. Yours, Osama.” This is why Osama’s plea to Zarqawi should be a cause for celebration - as it proclaims his Al Qaeda no longer has the capacity to attack America any longer.
CONDI AND ARLEN
The nightmare of a PIAPS Presidency - Hillary - trumps all other considerations for me. Should she be the Democrat nominee, there is only one GOP candidate who could defeat her: Condi. For others - like my friends Rod Martin and Joe Farah - what trumps all considerations of being for Condi is that she is, however “mildly” or “reluctantly,” pro-abortion. I believe they would agree to choose Condi over Hillary any day if that were the only choice. Where we disagree is that they think some other GOP candidate, and one who is staunchly pro-life, could also beat Hillary. I have deep doubts. I think Condi is the only one who could do so. But who knows? She’s very untested as a candidate. 2008 is a long way off. What’s important is to make it unimportant what Condi’s or any other candidates’ position on abortion is. The goal should be to have new pro-life Supreme Court Justices in place by the end of GW’s second term, giving the Court a pro-life majority that the next occupant of the White House can do nothing about, and will overturn Roe v. Wade. Which brings us to Arlen Specter.
TEHRAN ON THE BRINK?
My friends at RegimeChangeIran have just received a copy of a secret report prepared by the Pasdaran Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s key security forces, for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It warns they would be unable to control a demonstration or rebellion in Tehran lasting longer than six hours.Here’s the report’s key confession:
Society is in an unstable state. Were certain sensitive locations in Tehran to 'explode' under these circumstances, and the capital sink into chaos, if uprisings continue unabated and grow larger for more than six hours in Tehran, the situation would become uncontrollable.You can be sure every student protestor in Iran knows about this report by now.
SHARANSKY IN TAIWAN
The ripples don’t stop. The stones hurled into the world’s political lake by the people of Ukraine and Iraq keep generating ripples washing up on the borders of ever-more countries benighted by dictatorship. Now they are about to hit the shores of China. This is thanks to a Taiwanese named Frank Hsieh who has read a book by a diminutive bald ex-Soviet dissident named Natan Sharansky. This is the book - The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror - that President Bush has absorbed and is giving out to his friends. It is destined to become the most influential book of our day. If you haven’t read it yet, you simply must. Sharansky explains the mechanics of democracy and tyranny that drive the former towards peace and freedom and the latter towards repression and the creation of external enemies. He issues a clarion call for “moral clarity” to distinguish between Free Societies and Fear Societies - an either/or with no society in between. The way to so distinguish is simple - the Town Square Test:
Can a person walk into the town square [of the society in question] and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm?If yes, that society is free, if not, it isn’t, period. Moral clarity. Does America (excluding PC university campuses) pass the town square test? Yes. Does Taiwan? Yes. Does China? No. No matter how much economic development China has experienced since Tienanmen in 1989, it remains a Fear Society. And Frank Hsieh knows it. Late last month, Frank was appointed Premier of the Taiwan Government...
IS THE SPEED OF LIGHT SLOWING DOWN?
I’ve received a number of letters regarding the constancy of the speed of light as discussed in Aristotle, Einstein, and Ayn Rand . They ask about an argument claiming that the speed of light is slowing down. The basis for asserting that the universe is billions of years old with galaxies billions of light years away is substantially based on what’s called the red-shift. It’s like a train whistle with its sound waves bunched up coming towards you, then the pitch shifts dramatically as the train passes by with the sound waves stretched out. Light waves from sources racing away from us (such as distant galaxies) are shifted towards the infra-red part of the spectrum. The amount of the shift indicates the distance the light source is from us, because the speed increases with the distance. The claim is that light from distant galaxies is not red-shifted at random but is “quantized,” grouped into “quantum bands.”
CAN PORTER TURN SYRIA ORANGE?
Immediately after the success of Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution,” all the buzz in foreign policy Washington was: to where can we next export it? Russia? Belarus? Azerbaijan? Iran? The answer became blazingly clear this week: Syria. With Syria’s assassination of Rafik Hariri in Beirut on February 14, Porter Goss has been handed a golden opportunity on a platinum platter to expand the Bush Doctrine in the Middle East and get rid of the Assad tyranny. The critical question: is his CIA up to it? Despite the usual denials and red herrings, only Syria could have made the professional hit on Hariri, with 700 pounds of explosives planted under the asphalt after “repairs” a few days before, blowing up his armored convoy as it passed over. The hit was conducted by a Lebanese unit of Syria’s Shu'bat al-Mukhabarat al-'Askariyya, Military Intelligence Service, on the orders of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat.
THE TRILLION DOLLAR SCAM: Kyoto leaves Oil-for-Food in the dust
One of the busiest guys on Capitol for the next six months will be Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), whom House International Relations Chairman Henry Hyde and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay have put in charge of the new subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight.Dana’s assignment: Expose the entire slimy mess of the UN Oil-for-Food scandal and feed it to the fishes. Doing so will be rewarding for Dana - and frustrating at the same time. For only when his committee is finished gutting Oil-for-Food can he turn to a scandal that leaves it in the dust - the multi-trillion dollar scam of the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty.At the heart of Kyoto is criminally-prosecutable research fraud. This fraud has been used to try and scam hundreds of billions of dollars a year from you and me and all Americans, to try and irreparably damage our economy. The global warming industry is a criminal enterprise, and criminally insane to boot.
CHENEY AND CONDI
There’s a red-breasted rumor bird that’s been flying around Washington for a while now, but recently it’s been nesting in Capitol Hill. Talk to just about any Congressional Committee Chairman and they’ll tell what this bird has whispered in their ear.
RIPOSTE TO PYONGYANG: PROVE IT
For every newspaper in the country and around the world this morning, the supersize-font headline is the same: North Korea Admits It Has Nukes!! or a variant thereof. Yet while everyone else is running around like a panicked Chicken Little, the White House remained calm. “This is unfortunate,” Condi sedately pronounced. The most White House spokesman Scott McLellan could rouse himself to say was, “It’s rhetoric we’ve heard before.”Why the insouciance? Because they think North Korea is bluffing. As Donald Rumsfeld put it when queried at NATO meeting in France, yes, the North Korean announcement was a cause for concern, “if you believe them that they have nuclear weapons.”Bush has to go beyond the initial response of calm indifference and there is a debate going on among his advisors as to what that should be. A number are arguing that it should be just two words to Pyongyang: Prove it. Declare that North Korea has to prove its claim of possessing nuclear weapons with a demonstration, and until then its claim will not be taken seriously.That means a test.
CORTEZ AND QUIXOTE
My friends at the Wall Street Journal told me that Letters Editor Ned Crabb just couldn’t handle my response to the January 25 WSJ editorial “Quixotic Journey,” celebrating the 400th anniversary of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. “Let’s say it went a little bit over his head, Jack,” was how they put it.So here it is for your enjoyment.Dear Ned, The 400th anniversary of the publication of Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” is nothing to celebrate. It would be celebrating a curse.