The Afghan room has more than its share of corners, and we've painted ourselves into every single one of them. Setting aside the Taliban, we're suffering from plenty of self-inflicted wounds.

To start, there's the continuing denial that Islam has anything to do with the Taliban's persistence or Afghan resistance to our goodwill gestures: This mullah's corrupt; that suicide bomber wasn't very religious(!); that local uprising's just a neighborhood feud. Religion has nothing to do with it.

Next, Afghans aren't interested in fighting for a foreign-backed government or for ethnic groups other than their own. If you want to succeed in a tribal society, you exploit tribal identities. Our officials insist that would undercut our goals. Well, perhaps our goals should be more realistic.

So we wind up supporting yet another disdained "president" because we insist that a tribal society must subject itself to a strong central government defended by an American-model army that refuses to be built. This is not a formula for success.

Another sign that Afghanistan's in "beaucoup deep kimchee" (as a former NCO of mine used to say) is that the pundits are already assigning blame -- even on Obama.

Naked evil.  That's what was on display this week in much of the world - what could be half-full about it?

The world's scum are all in support of Ahmadinejad's "election."  The Red Chinese, Chavez, Putin, et al, are congratulating the thugs who run Iran on their "exercise of democracy."

The world's actual democracies are all a-flutter, trying to decide how to condemn the butchery and kow-tow to the Chicoms and the Kremlin at the same time.  Zero doesn't have the guts to take the side of the protestors getting butchered and beat up.

What's half-full is that the mullah regime has lost all legitimacy in the eyes of a majority of the Iranian people. This is a regime with no future.  It's worth recalling that the revolution replacing the Shah with the Ayatollahs did not occur overnight.

The protests started in January of 1978, and succeeded with the Shah fleeing the country in January of 1979.  During that year, there were many periods of quiescence, when the protests seemed to vanish and the Shah's rule was deemed secure.  Then they would crank up again, and up a notch.

So this is a marathon, not a sprint.  There is very serious dissention within the mullahs themselves, there is no longer a center of the regime that can hold.  The protestors are young, determined, and smart.  This is far from over, it has only just begun.

Have you ever wondered why billionaires like George Soros financially support politicians who say they will "increase taxes on the rich"?

The answer quite simply is that the tax increases are most often put on people trying to become rich, not those already rich. Hence, the rich, big government advocates can gain far more by "buying" the politicians. The "bought" politicians then provide them with confidential information about administrative decisions, which these donors then use to place big bets in the market, making themselves much richer. If you have deep financial pockets and inside information, you can make huge amounts of money when markets drop.

Mr. Soros, the Democrats' financial angel, is often referred to as the "man who broke the bank of England" in the 1992 Sterling crisis. During that episode, he made $1 billion in one day at the expense of British taxpayers. The relevant question is, did Mr. Soros bet a couple of billion dollars on mere guesses of what the German, French and British officials would do, or did he have inside information?

Appeasement doesn't work. It doesn't work with dictators, and it doesn't work with terrorists. The attempted Times Square bombing on May 1^st was yet more proof.

We've allowed Islamist extremists to dictate what we can say, print or portray. We don't want to offend them. The First Amendment bows before Islam.

The Obama administration has ducked all unwelcome evidence that such appeasement doesn't work. Instead, it goes to absurd lengths to convince Moslem radicals that we respect their views.  Since the Obama administration deepened our submissive attitude toward Islam -- banning all references to "Islamist terror" or "Moslem radicalism" from government documents and statements -- the number of terror attacks on our soil has gone up. Do any of you believe this is just a coincidence?

Tomorrow's the day, folks.  Crunch time in Tehran.  You know what happened today:  head mullah Ali Khamenei delivered the Friday sermon everyone was waiting for, and he didn't give a fig for freedom.

He insisted the June 12 elections were fair and not fraudulent, ordered the protestors to stop demonstrating in any way, and obey their master Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Any opposition rallies are banned, he said, and any attempt to hold one will be put down with armed force.  His speech was as hard-line as it could possibly have been.

It is 10pm Friday evening in Tehran as I am writing this, and protestors have begun shouting Allahu akbar - their cry of protest - from the rooftops.  Their cell calls, emails, and twitters give every indication that they plan to hold enormous rallies tomorrow in straight defiance of Khamenei and the mullah regime.

There will be blood tomorrow.  But whose?

Tbilisi, Georgia. Despite having been invaded two months ago by a country 30 times its size, the Republic of Georgia appears to be dealing with that crisis far better than the United States and other major governments are dealing with the international financial crisis, and thus the question is, "Why"?

The answer quite simply is that the Georgia leaders are not so arrogant to think they know better than markets, and hence they are relying on the market to solve most of their problems.

The prime minister, Lado Gurgenidze, was both educated and spent considerable time in England and clearly was influenced by Margaret Thatcher. I asked him if he was concerned that the pressures to grow the size of government because of the invasion would undermine Georgia's reforms (note: history shows governments almost always grow in relative size versus the private economy in the time of crisis, such as wars or financial instability, even if governments create the crisis).

The prime minister replied that the Georgians have not retreated from their reforms, including shrinking the size of government, and they fully understand any retrenchment would be very damaging.

American and European leftists share the conviction that the immigrant, legal or illegal, is always right -- and the native-born citizen is always wrong.

This bigotry toward the law-abiding American, Brit, Frenchman or Italian doesn't help the immigrant in the end. Instead, it's a powerful engine driving divisiveness.

There are deep differences between Europe's experience with legal immigrants intent on importing intolerant lifestyles and our problem with illegals responsible for social friction and violent criminality.

But the left's blame-game is identical: Anyone who doesn't elevate the "rights" of the immigrant over the rights, safety and desires of the citizen is a bigot. No exceptions. Could there be a formula better designed to excite anti-immigrant sentiment?  As the left's blame-the-citizen demands for special privileges for all immigrants only intensify an anti-immigrant backlash, let's apply some commonsense maxims:

David Letterman certainly settled one thing this week:  that the terms  "no-class pervert scumbag" and "liberal" are synonymous.  

Sarah Palin wrote a classy yet scathing response to his depraved jokes about her 14 year-old daughter, but she shouldn't have restrained her husband Todd from responding how he wanted.  Like any father, he wanted to punch Letterman out.

Todd wanted to issue a public statement saying something like: 

"Mr. Letterman, you have insulted my daughter in the most grossly perverted way.  I am on my way to New York as you read this to see you.  We shall settle this man-to-man, with our fists.  Prepare to defend yourself.  If you choose not to fight, you will have declared to the world that you are the yellow-bellied coward I know you to be."

Can you name a country that has a flat 10 percent income tax on both personal and corporate income, and that is also running a budget surplus of 8 percent of gross domestic product (the equivalent of the United States running a budget surplus of more than $1 trillion)?

The surprising answer is Bulgaria, formerly one of Europe's most backward countries.

Most of the former communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe have instituted flat-rate income tax systems. Estonia was the first, and Bulgaria is one of the most recent, having only moved to the 10 percent flat rate at the beginning of this year.

It's one of several lessons America and the politicians she elects could learn from Bulgaria.

South of the border, down Mexico way, a new and savage revolution rages just beyond our inspection lanes. After less than five years of fighting, estimates of the dead have reached 22,000.

The rate of killing accelerates each month. And Washington covers its eyes like a kid at a scary movie. Well, the Mexican narco-insurgency, in which well-armed guerrilla forces confront the authority and presence of the state, is our No. 1 security challenge.

The chaos in northern Mexico has far deeper implications for our country than Islamist terror or even an Iranian nuclear capability (as grim as those threats are).

The rule of law has collapsed from Tijuana (across from San Diego, California) on the Pacific's edge to Matamoros (across from Brownsville, Texas) on the Gulf of Mexico. Major cities are now "ungoverned spaces," as our diplomats refer tidily to distant trouble spots.

And Arizona's "discriminatory" new state law empowering police to pursue criminal aliens? Should Phoenix let the rule of law collapse because Washington prefers political correctness to public safety? In DC, it's about politics. In Arizona, it's about survival.

If government agencies pressure banks to give loans to people who are poor credit risks, do you view this as a failure of capitalism or a failure of government? A number of left-wing politicians and commentators have made the assertion that the financial crisis is a result of too much deregulation under the "capitalistic" policies of President Reagan.

Those who make the assertion are either ignorant of the facts or being untruthful.

What we have seen is not a failure of free-market democratic capitalism, but another failure of a government that destroyed the normal market mechanisms for dealing with risk.

There have been many calls for the "greedy" to be punished, but the political "greed" for power and money is even more dangerous than excesses practiced by occasional business people.