As our president arrived in Brazil last week, our media made it sound as if Latin America had erupted in flames. TV news featured flying tear-gas canisters; a typical newspaper headline read, "Angry Crowds Rally Against President in Brazil."

Message: Bush is hated. He's ruined our relations with the hemisphere. Nobody loves us anymore - and it's all his fault.

If you bothered to read the reports below the headlines, you learned that 6,000 Brazilians had gathered in Sao Paulo to protest Bush's arrival in their country.

Wait a minute - wasn't that 600,000? Or at least 60,000?

Nope. Just 6,000 outraged citizens.   In one of the world's largest cities, with a population close to 20 million.

But no way were you going to see a headline that admits, "Anti-Bush Demonstrations Fizzle, Numbers Just Aren't There."

In the last week, two news items caught my attention.

News item No. 1: Dateline Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates - The Louvre Museum is selling the use of its name for a museum in Abu Dhabi for $520 million, and will rent out some of its art exhibits and provide technical museum management services for another $747 million.

News item No. 2: Dateline Dubai, United Arab Emirates - The Halliburton Corp. is moving its worldwide corporate headquarters to Dubai. It will keep most of its staff in Houston, will maintain its legal incorporation in the United States, will remain listed on the New York Stock Exchange, but will list its shares on a Middle East exchange also.

Twenty years ago, even 10 years ago, these items would have given rise to Third World screeching about Western cultural and economic imperialism. But today it is French and American whining that greets these moves.

Imagine the reaction if Western agents slaughtered a hundred Sunni pilgrims on their way to Mecca. The outrage would spark incendiary rhetoric, riots and revenge killings from Peshawar to Paris.

But when Sunni suicide bombers murdered 118 Shia pilgrims (and wounded almost 200 more) on Tuesday (3/6), Sunnis around the globe looked away: Shias only count as Moslems when America can be blamed for their suffering.

Human-rights groups were too busy applauding European requests for the extradition of CIA operatives (the real enemies of Western civilization, of course). Since this butchery wasn't the fault of Americans or Brits, the Europeans themselves took no interest.

American leftists, who raved that Abu Ghraib was another Auschwitz, didn't offer a single word of pity for the Moslem victims of Moslems.

All to be expected.  But shouldn't Moslems have denounced the attacks on the pilgrims?  How do you say "fugedaboutit" in Arabic?

Science works by means of prediction on the basis of testing a hypothesis. 

Once data is collected and evaluated, and a hypothesis formed, scientific method requires that certain predictions be made to act as tests of the overall theory. If the predictions work out, we can regard the hypothesis as proven. If not, we vow to do better next time.

How, then, can the hypothesis of man-made ("anthropogenic") global warming be tested?  Wouldn't one way be to have access to some natural example comparable to what's occurring now, so that we could analyze it and get some idea of what we're facing?

It so happens that we have exactly that. This isn't the first time warming has occurred on earth - it's a commonplace and recurring phenomenon.  One such episode took place in relatively recent historic time - the Medieval Warm Period.

During the MWP, worldwide temperatures rose by 1 to 3 degrees centigrade for a roughly three-hundred-year period beginning in the 10^th century and ending late in the 13^th century.

Warming advocates have made a series of predictions concerning climatic effects over the coming century. Do they pass the MWP test?

The 2008 Democrat presidential primary season has gotten off to a good start -- for the Republicans.

As the Democrat Party presidential aspirants finished their speeches last week to the party's winter meeting, the early big political fact is the dangerous populist and anti-war pull that the candidates feel. This is particularly dangerous for Sen. Hillary Clinton as she ratchets-up, almost weekly, her anti-war Iraqi rhetoric and policy.

Only Jimmy Carter after the Watergate scandal and her husband after the fall of the Soviet Union got a pass from the American electorate on their national-security shortcomings.  Hillary won't be so lucky.

At the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Benjamin Franklin, then 81, had gained a reputation for shrewd realism.  The handiwork of the Continental Congress impressed him, but he believed it imperfect; he knew it was better than any other plan for government on earth but he feared the plan might not survive. 

As he left the Convention for the last time, a group of anxious citizens asked him what kind of government the delegates had created.  The deliberations were secret and, so, the curiosity of Philadelphians had reached a fever pitch.  Responding to the inquiry, Dr. Franklin replied, "a republic, if you can keep it." 

Sadly, 220 years later, we have lost it.

Today our nation is largely run by the unelected heads of the federal independent regulatory commissions.  Those heads are the most powerful political leaders in the United States, more powerful than the President, any member of Congress, and any federal judge. 

Their will is very much the law.  In their hands rest legislative, executive, and judicial powers which they wield daily without having to answer to anyone for the consequences.  They rule as oligarchs.  A simple legal fix could put an end to their unconstitutional rule.

Some two years ago Saudi clerics issued fatwas forbidding Moslems to play soccer unless its rules were replaced by "Islamic rules," or it was used as physical training for jihad. To the extent that anybody noticed that in the West, they were promptly dismissed as the inconsequential ravings of misguided fanatics.

This is not likely to be the fate of recent promises by British chancellor and prime minister-in-waiting, Gordon Brown, to make Britain "a key hub for facilitating Islamic finance" and to turn London into "a major enabling and structuring center for global Islamic finance."

Yet, completely different as these two cases appear to be at first blush, they are both part of a concerted effort by radical Islamists to make the rest of us accept their reactionary worldview as legitimate in the name of multiculturalism and diversity.

David Ignatius, the highly esteemed journalist at The Washington Post, wrote a revealing column last week based on an extensive interview with Democratic congressional leader Rahm Emanuel. Here is the last paragraph:  

The secret for the Democrats, says Emanuel, is to remain the party of reform and change. The country is angry, and it will only get more so as the problems in Iraq deepen. Don't look to Emanuel's Democrats for solutions on Iraq. It's Bush's war, and as it splinters the structure of GOP power, the Democrats are waiting to pick up the pieces.