Whatever might be said about John Kerry's candidacy--one thing for sure is that his choice of John Edwards as his VP running mate should give everyone a reason to reject this ticket--and that is that Kerry has chosen a trial lawyer to sell his philosophy to the American people. I have been a lawyer for almost 40 years. I am generally proud of the profession, notwithstanding the many corny lawyer jokes I've had to suffer. However, there is one segment of the legal profession of which I am not proud, and that is the so-called trial bar--the plaintiff's' attorneys who have for years raped, pillaged and plundered American society, usually in guise of rectifying ills that don't exist.

The indictment of Enron chairman Kenneth Lay gives the Democrats a “windfall” according to the San Francisco Chronicle:

The indictment of former Enron chief Ken Lay represents an election year windfall for Democrats -- who say the man President Bush nicknamed "Kenny Boy'' is a poster boy for corporate greed and malfeasance. Lay's indictment Wednesday (July 7) in connection with the energy giant's 2001 bankruptcy hands Sen. John Kerry and the Democrats the perfect person to link the president's re-election campaign to the high-living corporate miscreants who left their companies, workers and stockholders in financial ruin, politicians and analysts said.

This week we introduce a new feature to To The Point: The Members' Forum, selected articles submitted by TTPers themselves. We launch this feature with TTPer Wayne Daniels. Publication of such submissions does not imply To The Point's full agreement with them. ---JWJune 30, 2004 marked the "Official" end of the Iraqi occupation. Yes, we will have troops on the ground there for years. Remember it is 59 years and counting that we have had troops stationed in Germany and Japan; 50 years and counting in Korea, etc. I will argue that the only US strategic interests in Iraq are (1) that the Iraqi government not fund or otherwise support terrorist groups; (2) we need military bases on the borders of three of the primary state sponsors of terrorist groups - Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia; and (3) that enough oil reaches the world markets to keep the price of crude in the $25 to $40 range. As long as these interest are satisfied, we really don't care who controls the streets or the government.

The political class's Edwards-huffing is like a summer heat rash -- it is mildly irritating but should subside in about a week: Wear loosely fitted clothes, keep out of the heat and ease your way through an adequate provision of gin, tonic, limes and bitters. Tropical drinks served with little umbrellas are acceptable substitutes. Now would be an excellent time to catch up on your genuine summer fiction reading (in other words, avoid Edwards media commentary for a week, which is not quite fiction, nor quite non-fiction. It is not so much fiction as it is faction.)

The conservative movement believes in the American people’s ability to rise to the occasion, in their ingenuity. They believe that entitlement, government programs in mass and laws regulating every aspect of our daily lives infringe on the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and that government intervention in our daily lives should be held to a necessary minimum. By contrast, the Left has more ideological factions than a Douglas Fir has needles. There is the NEA, which champions a globalist multicultural agenda in our public schools. Their agenda includes seeing children forced to participate in the study of the Koran in California under the guise of multicultural tolerance while doing everything to banish Christianity from our nations classrooms in total. There is the ACLU who sued the City of Los Angeles in an effort to remove a cross from their city seal and who chose to represent NAMBLA -- a group that advocates pederasty between men and boys -- in a murder trial under the pretext of free speech. There is the National Organization for Women and the National Abortion & Reproductive Rights Action League who, without a mandate by the medical community on when life actually begins, has championed as a natural right the act of partial birth abortion. These are but a very few of the “causes” and “action groups” that effectively comprise the Left and the Liberal-Left.

Not the country. Not the people who live in the country. Eliminate the country's name. "Iraq" is a plain Arabic noun - al-iraq - meaning “the shore and grazing area of a river.” Inspiring, isn't it? Prior to 1921, there had never been a country called “Iraq” - never in history. “Iraq” was an invention of the British after World War I, who along with the French were carving up pieces of the defeated Ottoman Turkish Empire into colonies called League of Nations Mandates. Yet there already was a name for the region encompassed by the Ottoman remnants, a name from the mists of time. For thousands of years before it was eliminated from history by reasons known only to the unfathomable British colonial mind, it was called Mesopotamia.

As wars go, the conflict in Iraq was -- and is -- as good as it gets. A three week military campaign with minimal casualties, 25 million people liberated from one of the most sadistic tyrants of modern times, the establishment of a military and intelligence base in the heart of the terrorist world. What well-meaning person could oppose this? In addition, two thirds of the Al Qaeda leadership is gone, and there hasn’t been a terrorist attack in America in more than two and a half years, something no one would have predicted after 9/11. By any objective standard, the Bush war on terror is a triumph. These real world considerations are why the campaign waged by the Democratic Party and a Democratic press against the Bush war policy is based not on any analysis of the war itself, but on maliciously concocted claims about the prewar justification for military action. For purely political agendas, the Democrats hope to attempt to convict the Administration of “misleading the American public” and wasting American lives through deception and fraud, and thus to defeat the President at the polls in November. This is the campaign of the Big Lie.