Our effort in Iraq passed a major milestone this week: Our troops are leaving the cities.

Advisers remain in place. Joint patrols will still occur. And our forces will wait nearby to respond to Iraqi calls for support. But the last of the bases and US-only outposts within Iraq's urban centers will be vacated.

Terrorists have already begun testing the new security arrangements. Iraqi forces won't always pass with flying colors.

Yet this situation seemed a pipe dream not so long ago: Iraq's security forces, serving an elected government, assume primary responsibility for the good order of their own country.  It is an extraordinary achievement, the credit for which goes to President George W. Bush.

To borrow historian Niall Ferguson's metaphor, if finance is an evolutionary process, then regulation is its intelligent design - which, I would add, is a cognate of faith, not science.

Or, to take the observation of former Federal Reserve Governor Frederic Mishkin, if "the financial system (is) the brain of the economy," then, I would suggest, heavy regulation is its lobotomy; while it removes the emotional highs and lows, it also dulls the perception, facility and adroitness.

A century ago, medical science had faith in lobotomies. Today, it seems, Washington political science has faith in lobotomizing financial regulation.

I have been saving a very special bottle of wine - a 1992 Chateau Vieux French Bordeaux - for a very specific occasion:  to celebrate the death of Fidel Castro.  Looks like I'll be opening it soon - for the best news of the week is Castro's announcing he has one foot in the grave by ending his 49-year run as Cuba's El Jefe Maximo.

I chose the vintage not just because 1992 was a great year for French reds, but because I went to Cuba that year.  I told the story a couple of years ago in Cuba Libré.  A meeting with Castro had been set up, at which I intended to tell him the Cuban people would some day urinate on his grave.  He got wind of it and canceled the meeting.  My wife was very relieved.

Dagny D'Anconia explained the dictator's slow and awful descent towards demise some time ago in The Partial Assassination of Fidel Castro.  Drawn-out lingering nightmare agony - just the sort of hell a piece of murderous human garbage deserves.

What's hilarious is the lib media's portrayal of Raul Castro as a Cuban Mikhail Gorbachev reformer.  Raul is a 76-year old alcoholic who hasn't much longer to go himself.  The army and secret police still run everything, but with Fidel gone the regime has no legitimacy.  Odds will increase for a really bloody revolution.

There is a wonderful new book, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, by distinguished climate physicist Fred Singer and award-winning environmental economist Dennis Avery. The conclusion of their book in a nutshell is that, yes, the world is getting a bit warmer, but this is just the natural cycle.

They provide overwhelming evidence this warming would occur with or without mankind increasing CO2 emissions or doing anything else. The good news is that if we realize we cannot stop global warming, and concentrate on constructively dealing with the problems it causes -- which are all manageable at reasonable cost -- and then enjoy the benefits, mankind will do just fine.

We have already had two cycles in recorded history; the Roman warming (200 B.C. to 600 A.D.) which was a very prosperous period, and the medieval warming (900 to 1300) during which farms were created in Greenland and Iceland. The modern warming period began about 1850, well before mankind was producing massive amounts of CO2.

Assume you are a mid-level bureaucrat in a government regulatory agency, and you know your pay and title depend on how many regulations you are responsible for administering, and the number of people who work for you. Do you think you would push for more or fewer regulations?

Assume you are a corporate regulatory compliance officer, and again you know your pay depends in part upon the number of regulations you must comply with, and the number of people who work for you. Would you tend to favor a world with more or fewer regulations?

Or, assume you are an elected politician, and a major scandal occurs because a financial manager has embezzled funds. Are you more likely to get coverage on the TV news if you say, "We already have laws against theft, and the authorities will take care of it," or if you say, "We need more regulations to stop greedy financiers"?

Last weekend's European Parliament and British local county council elections (6/04-07) were not only a victory for the right over the left. More significantly, they were indications of the growing rejection of the last 60 years of denationalized European history.

They were, particularly, a sharp assertion by many indigenous Europeans that they will not put up with losing their culture to overly assertive Islamic immigrants in Europe.

The latter point was made emphatically by the voters of Holland, Hungary, Finland, Britain, Austria, Denmark and Italy.  But the loudest vox populi was heard in Britain.

Many in the Washington establishment were shocked Aug. 17, when the Congressional Budget Office reported a surge of "unanticipated tax receipts" that will sharply push down this year's deficit.

Those who had been proclaiming the Bush tax rate cuts would result in a big reduction in tax revenues tried to hide their disappointment. It was tough being proved wrong again after having said the same thing when Ronald Reagan cut tax rates in the early 1980s.

We have now had three major experiments with tax rate reduction in the last half-century, and each time both economic growth and tax revenues have surged, despite the fears and cries of the anti-tax-cut crowd.

How much more evidence will they need to understand the difference between tax rates and tax revenues?

During his White House years, William Jefferson Clinton -- someone Judge Sonia Sotomayor might call a "white male" -- was dubbed "America's first black president" by a black admirer.

Applying the standard of identity politics and pandering to a special interest that earned Mr. Clinton that distinction, Barack Hussein Obama would have to be considered America's first Moslem president.

This is not to say, necessarily, that Mr. Obama actually is a Moslem any more than Mr. Clinton actually is black.

However - after his five months in office, and most especially after his just-concluded visit to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, a stunning conclusion seems increasingly plausible:

Miami. The skyline appears to have more cranes than buildings, as if the city were just one vast construction site, and that has been the good news.

The bad news here in Miami, as well as most major U.S. cities, is that the real estate boom of the last few years is coming to an end. The villain in this drama is the U.S. Federal Reserve (the Fed), which fueled the boom and now is destroying it.

The Fed, by its own admission, has been failing to keep inflation within its own targets. Yet, the Fed's main responsibility is to provide the U.S. with a sound currency; one that neither loses value (inflation), nor gains value (deflation).

The Fed has a long history of reacting too late, then overreacting, to the inflation or deflation it causes. One reason the Fed keeps failing is its overreliance on lagging indicators of inflation, such as the well-known consumer price index (CPI).