Three interesting things have happened since President Bush announced plans to "surge" U.S. troops. First, al Qaeda appears to be retreating from Baghdad.  Second, the radical cleric Moqtada al Sadr is retreating.  Third, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki is retreating from his support of al Sadr. And the surge has barely begun.  Yet the Democrats say it has to fail.

If Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez deliberately intended to sabotage his nation's economy, he would be hard-pressed to do anything different from what he is now doing to his country. It has been widely reported that Mr. Chavez has been increasingly taking control of the oil, telecommunications and energy sectors, as well as the media. What has not been reported is the full extent of the corruption in Venezuela and how this ultimately will destroy the economy. The financial scandal taking place there is far bigger than Enron, and may ultimately even exceed the U.N. "oil-for-food" scandal, the biggest financial disgrace of all time. Venezuela has had a rapidly growing economy for the last few years, due to high oil prices, but the house of cards is about to collapse.

The FBI's bumbling in the war on terror, and the tendency of the FBI to promote the bumblers, has made it one of our weakest links in the chain of agencies tasked with protecting America's security. Foreign spies have been eating the FBI's lunch for years.  Katrina Leung, for example, was permitted to pass along critical national secrets for years after she'd confessed to being a spy for Red China because the two FBI agents who were supposed to be monitoring her were sleeping with her.  Neither of those agents was punished. The ghastly reality is that, for many senior people in the FBI, their careers come first, the reputation of the FBI second.  The security of the United States is a distant third.

I think that, for the most part, Americans' knowledge of history comes from movies and television. It's hard to deal fully with real history in either medium. Hardly anyone knows, therefore, that after the death of Hitler in the bunker and the surrender of Germany in World War II, there was a vicious Nazi terrorist resistance to the occupiers of the Reich. Formed by remnants of the SS who called themselves the "Werewolves," they are described by Canadian historian Perry Biddiscombe in his book, The Last Nazis: "The Werewolves did considerable damage. Their...guerrilla warfare and vigilantism caused the death of several thousand people, either directly or through the...reprisals that they provoked. The property damage...equaled tens of millions of dollars." Big numbers in that long-ago world, big enough to constitute an "insurgency" every bit as worrisome as the Iraqi version, at least early on. And it provoked a brutal repression on our part.

[One of the most infuriating aspects to the Duke Rape Case is the media's refusal to disclose the name of the woman involved.  She is only identified as "the accuser," while the real victims in the case, the Duke lacrosse players, have had their names and pictures broadcast to every inhabitant of the planet. Not in this article.  The woman's name is Crystal Gail Mangum.  Google her name and you will get 16,000 hits.  There is even a Wikipedia entry on her.  So we are hereby happy to end the journalistic conspiracy and insert her name along with "accuser." ---JW] CBS's "Sixty Minutes" broadcast Sunday (1/14) showed many people the gross abuse of prosecutorial power in the Duke rape case. Durham district attorney Michael Nifong indicted three Duke University lacrosse players last April after a stripper who performed at a team party claimed she had been raped. The accuser, Crystal Gail Mangum, picked the three defendants from a photo lineup consisting only of lacrosse players, a violation of police procedures.  (Clearly innocent people are supposed to be mixed in with suspects.) Liberals rushed to condemn the Duke lacrosse players because they loved the narrative: rich white guys abuse poor black woman.  Some furious backtracking is taking place as evidence of their innocence mounts.  A new verb, to "nifong," has been coined.  It's a synonym for "to frame."

There were a lot of responses to and questions about Arabia in America.  After discussing them, we'll discuss how "global warming" is just a scam to de-industrialize America and has nothing to do with cutting world-wide CO2 greenhouse gas emissions. John Boland made a very informed and cogent case for the safety and practicality of nuclear power.  Ryan M. asked about the role of natural gas, in light of The Natural Gas Solution from last May. Bill Gregory mentions the trillion barrels of oil in Colorado and Wyoming that can be extracted from oil shale with new in situ technology. While I am all in favor of more nuclear power plants, they produce electricity and not gasoline to run our cars.  I focused on coal not for power plants but on coal-to-oil liquefaction plants to replace the 11 million barrels of foreign oil we import every day. The grotesque phoniness of the Left on global warming is most clearly demonstrated regarding coal.  Pelosi Galore is forming a new House Committee on Global Warming, while Barbara Boxer is submitting a bill to ban all coal power plants in the country.  It's all hate-and-blame America all the time.

The Supreme Leader of Iran - the man who really runs the place, not the Persian Midget Ahmadinejad - is the Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei.  Some people confuse him with his mentor and founder of the Iranian Revolution, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, as the spellings are confusingly similar. But Khomeini died in 1989, and Khamenei assumed power after that.  Ever since, he has been the Terror Master in Chief, the principal sponsor of Islamic terrorism in the Middle East, especially against Israel and America in Iraq.  Now, at age 66, he is dying. Thus the mullahs are now engaged in a succession struggle, and they are worried that the Iranian people might seize the moment to act against the regime.  Most worried of all is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as there is an effort being made in the Majlis, the Iranian Parliament, to impeach him.