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.

Got a Web site? How about a blog? A Myspace page?

If you do, you could be raking in the bucks - if you play your cards right, that is. All you have to do is figure out how to draw thousands of people to either click on your site and/or link to it. That's the dream, at least.

Once upon a time, the dream was to write a script that would be bought by a Hollywood TV or movie producer, or maybe writing the Great American novel. But with YouTube and its ilk everybody's a producer - and who has time to read books anymore?

Today, making big money from a Web site or blog is the latest quick-rich fantasy. Is it attainable?  Let's see.

It has been quite clear for some time now that al Qaeda and the other major terrorist groups — Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Jamaa, etc. — are all working together, and have been ever since we went into Afghanistan.

The war in the Middle East — for it is a regional war, not merely a battle for Iraq — cannot be analyzed at the level of the individual terrorist groups, because the terrorists are part of a larger context. The organizing center is, as Spanish Magistrate Balthazar Garzon publicly put it, a "directorate" located in Iran, that works closely with Iranian intelligence organizations, including the Revolutionary Guards. Those organizations, in turn, work with their counterparts in other friendly countries.

I kept asking myself, why would DiFi - Senator Dianne Feinstein - approve a "report" whose main effect inevitably would be to damage America? 

And it occurred to me that it might be a mistake to try to understand this bizarre event in the usual context of domestic politics.  It probably belongs to a different realm of analysis:  national security, international affairs, and espionage.  Maybe that was really the point of the operation.

It benefits our enemies, after all.  It undermines other countries' willingness to share information, and to work with us "in the field."  Anyone who takes life seriously must acknowledge that, quite aside from the merits of the "case" brought by Democrat staffers on the Senate Intel Committee, we've been damaged. 

The real scary question is:  Did DiFi and her Democrat colleagues issue the "Torture Report" for no other purpose than to damage their own country?  The report itself contains a very large clue why the answer may be yes.

I've often said that Iran=Italy squared, in terms of political complexity.  You can't identify the players even if you have the latest scorecard.

Still, there's no excuse for so many articles and official pronouncements exploring who's going to "win" the Iranian "elections" on June 14. 

Nor is there any excuse for failing to understand the Obama administration's latest pretense at getting tough on the regime. 

And there is certainly no excuse for writing about a presumed sexual revolution that is threatening the regime, of all things.  Let's get it all straight.  In order:

The Main Enemy: Islamism
Chapter II:  The Nature of the Threat

Whether it is called radical Islam, Islamism, Salafism, or Islamo-fascism, the adversary we face, even as we often refuse to identify it for what it is, is clearly on the march.

The reason we fail to see that is because its objective is not terrorism, but the imposition of an uncompromising totalitarian interpretation of Islam worldwide by means of proselytism, subjugation, and violent jihad as need be.

Purely terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, which rely on terrorism as a first and only resort, however murderous, are a rather marginal factor in this essentially ideological struggle, and the fact that we have bestowed on them the status of principal enemy has prevented us from really understanding the nature of this war.

So let's be clear on the real nature of the threat.