Just how incompetent has our government become in preventing terrorist suspects from becoming American citizens? 

According to a Government Accountability Office report released this week, tens of thousands of foreign applicants were granted naturalized status in the United States in 2005 despite their background files being missing during the citizenship screening process.

"It only takes one missing file for somebody with links to a terrorist organization to become an American citizen," said Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. "A terrorist can be unsuccessful thousands of times, but we have to be perfect all the time. We can't afford to be handing out citizenship with blinders on."

The GAO report revels that 111,000 naturalization alien files (A-files) were missing at 14 U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) offices. Nevertheless, about 30,000 of those foreign applicants were given citizenship.

The Republican Congress is history.  While I will work to restore Republicans in both the House and Senate, there are many worthwhile objectives which they failed to accomplish while in power.  Further, there are many worthwhile objectives which they failed even to address.

For example, they passed President Bush's "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001," Pub. L. 107-110, although one may search in vain among the enumerated powers granted to Congress in Art. I, section 8 of the Constitution for the authority to legislate with respect to education.  

The question is, what may we do now, other than prepare for the 2008 elections, to advance a conservative agenda? 

The answer is go to court.  Liberals have been doing this for a long time.   To a great extent, they have succeeded in their objectives.  I will explain how they did it.  Then how we can do it too.

The Democratic dog just caught the Iraqi firetruck it's been chasing for almost four years.  Now what?

Wetting the back tires won't be enough.  The victorious party's hard-left wing (which provides much money and selects the candidates to run for top office) is anxious for an American humiliation. 

But that's not what the majority of Democrats want and it's a scenario that Dems on Capitol Hill, eyes on 2008, know they need to avoid. With just a few missteps, Iraq could become their debacle. 

We went to Iraq to overthrow a police state. Through a combination of stubbornness, naïveté and noble intentions, we've replaced it with another police state - more violent, more corrupt and less accountable.

Our greatest setback in Iraq may be that country's undoing: It has proven impossible to develop an honest, nonpartisan police establishment anywhere in the country's Arab provinces. The police aren't feared by criminals, but by law-abiding citizens.

The secret police are back, in the form of death squads. And the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki looks perfectly happy with the situation.

An ugly truth is emerging.  As dearly as we believe in democracy, Iraq's Arabs are proving that they're incapable of the political, social and moral maturity necessary to run an elected government.

Freeman Dyson, who is a famous physicist and Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University, argues in the current issue of  The New York Review of Books that the 9/11 Moslem terrorists are deserving of “respect” :

"Yes, I wrote that we should respect our enemies as human beings in order to understand them. I do not retract or apologize for this statement. I would like only to add a more general statement, that our lack of respect for our enemies made it harder for us to deal with them effectively." 

Yet it needs to asked:  Why should one respect someone as a human being? Does the mere fact of membership in the human species amount to some worthwhile achievement? No.

Why then respect one merely for being human?  Hitler was human, child molesters are human and it is pretty preposterous to consider them worthy of any sort of respect.  So, that part of Professor Dyson's claim is arguably false.  Let's take the other part. Why would lack of respect imply lack of understanding?

Much of the world around us deserves no respect at all, yet we can understand it pretty well. As a physicist, while he understands them, does Professor Dyson respect the electron or the quark?

Have Americans lost the will to win wars? Not just in Iraq, but anywhere? Do we really believe that being nice is more important than victory?

It's hard enough to bear the timidity of our civilian leaders - anxious to start wars but without the guts to finish them - but now our military leaders have fallen prey to political correctness.  Unwilling to accept that war is, by its nature, a savage act and that defeat is immoral, influential officers are arguing for a kinder, gentler approach to our enemies.

They're going to lead us into failure, sacrificing our soldiers and Marines for nothing: Political correctness kills.  It's all in the Army's new counterinsurgency doctrine laid out in Field Manual 3-24.  The doctrine is so dishonest and cowardly that it's message is: Let our troops die, just don't hurt anyone's feelings. 

The BBC reported on October 10 that in the Indian state of Jharkhand, villagers fled their homes to escape a rampaging herd of grief-stricken elephants. "They say the animals are agitated because one of their herd disappeared. Officials say the missing animal became disoriented, and fell into a ditch and drowned over the weekend."

There was no mention in the BBC report whether or not the village jackasses were braying with delight at the sight of the distressed elephants.

Of course the Indian people are always disturbed when their elephants run amuck, because, since time immemorial they have relied on the strong, intelligent and friendly elephants to do their heavy lifting for them. The donkeys simply do not have the mental or physical capacity to substitute for the prized elephants.

Meanwhile in Washington...