For most Westerners, Turkey is a hard nut to crack.

How can you understand a state sponsor of terrorism that is also a member of NATO?

How can you explain Turkey's facilitation of Kurdish independence in Iraq in light of Turkey's hundred-year opposition to Kurdish independence?

What is Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyep Erdogan trying to accomplish here?  The answer is chaos - just like Iran albeit with a very different objective.

On the terrorism support front, today Turkey vies with Iran for the title of leading state sponsor of terrorism.  Here's the explanation.

Where's the pony?

Ronald Reagan was fond of describing an optimist as a kid on a farm happily digging through a huge pile of horse manure, yelling, "There's got to be a pony in here somewhere!"  What would he say about a week, or a time like this?  Knowing him, I think he'd say, "Well, sometimes there just isn't any pony."

Yes, there will be days like this.  But three more years of days like this??  One thousand ninety-eight more days?  (See the Countdown Clock to the end of the Zero Presidency.)

And realize there is a high probability that those 1098 days are going to be progressively worse.  With each passing day and week and month, we're going to have more fascism, more unemployment, more dependency, more cultural depravity, more corruption, more crony capitalism, more liberal hate, more Enemedia lying and cover-ups of Zero scandals, more persecution of Tea Partyers, and more surrender to America's enemies like Iran and the Chicoms.

So - how can we possibly stand it?    What in the Diety's name are we going to do? 

First, we'll review how grim it's been this week.  Then we'll discuss six alternatives to dealing with it.  (No fair skipping ahead, but one of them is following the advice of Josey Wales.)

Should government employees have privileges and legal immunities that the rest of us do not have? The government shutdown battle is, in part, a dispute about the extra subsidies members of Congress and their staffs are slated to get from Obamacare.

Civilian government employees often whine about the lack of respect they receive from their fellow Americans. Part of the antipathy many feel toward the government class is because they, on average, are paid more, receive more benefits, are almost impossible to fire, and are rarely penalized for abusive, rude and even illegal conduct that would get civilian workers fired, fined and, in some cases, sent to jail.

It can be argued that it is unfair to paint all government workers with a charge that they are impertinent slackers when, in fact, many government employees work very hard and take many risks to help their fellow Americans. If civilian government employees were put on a more level playing field, where the real slackers and abusers were either fired or forced to shape up, the respect for all government employees would grow.

So what can be done to achieve this?

The hit on Zarqawi has been described, quoting Churchill, as "the end of the beginning" towards winning the war in Iraq.  What it and so much else also portends is the beginning of the end for the Democrat Party's dream of regaining power in Congress this November. 

Week before last, the Dems were riding high.  Bush's poll numbers were so disastrous Time Magazine ran a cover asking "How low can he go?"  The liberal rag followed this with a cover story on the "massacre" of Haditha.  Nancy Pelosi went on a speaking tour describing what she'll do as House Speaker next January.  Harry Reid told his staff to start planning for when he becomes Senate Majority Leader. 

Yep, the Dems had the Republicans on the ropes, and were gleefully acknowledging their impending victory to the cheering crowd - when without warning and out of nowhere, the Pubbies unleash a series of such punishing blows the Dems find themselves stunned, dazed, and on the canvas.

The current political and military upheavals in the Middle East are producing new and far-reaching demographic realities.  They are primarily due to Bashar Assad's desperation to keep power at any cost.

Assad and his ruling clique are Alawites, a Shiite sect, while the rebels opposing him are primarily Sunnis.  He thus has a policy of ethnically and religiously cleansing Syria of Sunnis.  This includes the Palestinians in Syria.  The impact his policy is having on neighboring countries like Lebanon and Jordan is tremendous - and often counter-intuitive.

So much so that various communities in the Levant and even in Libya are now expressing a positive attitude toward Israel and repudiating pan-Arabism.  Here's what's going on and why.