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EARTH TO MAUREEN

Due to time constraints, C-Span ended the broadcast of my speech last week, Why Liberals Are Incapable of Defending America , in the middle of my reply to a question about why most journalists are so liberal.

I was about to use the New York Times liberal columnist Maureen Dowd as an example when C-Span switched to another event. This is because in February 2000 during the presidential campaign, I wrote a letter to the New York Times commenting on a column of Miss Dowd which was such a perfect instance of why liberals, and liberal journalists like her, really don’t care about individual people.

So to complete the answer you couldn’t see on C-Span, here’s the letter:

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NEW SECURITY PROCEDURES

On June 17, 2005 I wrote a column:

Generic Trojan/Adware Removal Procedure

I suggest you open that column in one window while you read this week’s column. I detail all the steps with screen shots there; there will be fewer here. I won’t describe again when to turn off and on SystemRestore, and how to boot in safe mode.

With newer, more clever and more vicious malware, even with protection, sooner or later you’re bound to get caught. I got caught recently. I was back up within a few hours. Here's how you can be as well.

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Stalinist Mullahs

The Iranian regime is in open battle with its own people.

Iran is now racing, literally hell-bent toward two dramatic confrontations: one within the country, between forces of tyranny and forces of democracy and/or reform. The other rages outside the country, a desperate war against the United States, its Coalition allies, and the Iraqis who support us. Both derive from the fundamental weakness of the fundamentalist regime, which has lost the support of the overwhelming majority of the Iranian people, and is increasingly defining itself a pariah state because of its support for terror and its brazen pursuit of atomic weapons.

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THE TRIUMPH OF MONOGAMY


The tragic death of an Indian minister's wife and the overdose of a French president's "wife" give a startling insight into the misery that infidelity causes in a monogamous society.

In cultures like India and France, it is just not possible now for men to reap the sexual rewards that usually attend arrival at the top of society. President Zuma of South Africa has four wives and 20 children, while one Nigerian preacher is said to have 86 wives. Chinese emperors used to complain of their relentless sexual duties. Why the difference?

Human monogamy is an enduring puzzle. Among mammals we are the exception: just 3 per cent of mammals form pair bonds. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and gorillas, are promiscuous, very promiscuous, territorial-polygamous and harem-polygamous respectively.

Yet we are clearly monogamous by instinct as well as by tradition. Even in societies that allow polygamy, most people are in one-partner couples. Free-love communes always, without exception, collapse because people will insist on falling in love with particular individuals. This pairing tendency would baffle a bonobo, where sexual jealousy is apparently unknown.

So at some point in the distant past, we developed the habit of monogamous pair bonding. In human beings, monogamy probably goes back hundreds of thousands if not millions of years.  (See Jack Wheeler's Marriage and the Missing Link, September 2009.)

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TO CLAIM CUTTING FEDERAL SPENDING WILL COST JOBS IS NONSENSE


The head of the Obama White House National Economic Council, Gene Sperling, who is a lawyer, has been claiming that "all economists" agree that sequestration will cost 750,000 jobs. I am an economist with a doctorate from Columbia University, and I don't agree.

The fact is that most classical and Austrian school economists also don't agree (including many Nobel laureates), because they understand that U.S. government spending is well above the optimum for economic growth and job creation, which means that less government spending will create more jobs, not fewer.

The Republicans should use the Continuing Resolution and the budget cap to force a further slowdown in the growth of government, and thus, less federal spending as a share of GDP. This should result in even more private-sector job creation, provided that there is restraint by the administration on all the new job-killing regulations.

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THE DEMOCRATS ARE FRACKED


It's not just that the Dems are going to lose the White House in November.  Control of the Oval Office regularly flips back and forth between them and the Pubs over the years.

It's not just that the Dems are going to lose big ("rrreally big, rrreally big" as Ed Sullivan would say) in November.  Zero will be lucky to carry 10 states in a Romney Landslide, while the Pubs will take the Senate and gain seats in the House.  Yet the Reagan Landslides of 1980/1984 were far greater than anything Romney can hope for - and the Dems were back in the White House saddle four years after the Gipper.

No, what is going on is much - as in much - bigger than mere electoral loss.  What the Dems are going to lose in November is about as big as it gets.  They are going to lose their raison d'être - their "reason to be," the basic justification for their existence.

This is why they are panicking, why most everything they do now is doltish, for panic makes you stupid.  This is why Zero is making moves of ever-increasing desperation - Amnesty EO's, Executive Privilege merely to protect his corrupt AG.  This is why the Moonbat Media is in a state of foaming hysteria.  For all of them, their fear and fury is existential.

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CONCORDIA


k2

This is K2, the highest mountain in the world next to Everest, at 28,250 feet.  It is so inaccessibly remote in the Karakorum mountains behind the Himalayas on the border between Pakistan and China, that very few human beings have ever seen it.

Last week I was privileged to take a small group of Americans to the base of K2 by helicopter.  It was the first helicopter expedition ever to K2, which otherwise takes 10 days of very high-altitude trekking to reach.

An enormous glacier flows from the south face of K2 called the Godwen-Austen glacier, which meets another huge glacier flowing from a mountain called Baltoro Tengri.  The confluence of these glaciers is known to mountaineers as "Concordia."

It is the consensus of the world's professional mountaineering community that at Concordia is the single spot of greatest scenery on planet earth.

But Concordia could stand for so much more.

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TO THE POINT WASHINGTON CONFERENCE

It is my great pleasure to announce our First Annual To The Point Members' Conference, to be held in Washington DC from April 21-23.

I'll be your host and master of ceremonies.  It's a marvelous opportunity for folks in our To The Point family to get to know each other.

Friday evening, April 21, we'll assemble at the Doubletree Inn in Pentagon City overlooking the Potomac River for a reception and dinner in the revolving restaurant with an extraordinary view of Washington.  Yep, I'll give a speech.

Saturday morning, April 22, is devoted to panels and speeches by our To The Point writers - with lots of Q&A.  You'll meet Dr. Joel Wade, Neal Asbury, Jack Kelly, Michael Ledeen, Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation, Enders Wimbush of the Hudson Institute, and Alex Alexiev, one of the world's grandmasters of geopolitics.

Your mind will be stretched wide and crammed full of insights about what's really going on in the world.

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A YOUNGER BODY

This is a companion piece to A Younger Brain from last March. That discussed how a nutrient called SAM-e (S-adenosyl-methionine) can actually youthen your brain. Now we’re going to talk about it can youthen your body.

The older you get, the more creaks and aches and tightness and soreness you get, particularly in connective tissue like cartilage. Our bodies aren’t designed to last as long as we live today, and these tissues wear out. Unlike rheumatoid arthritis, which is an auto-immune disease, osteoarthritis is a mechanical wearing away of joints, cartilage, and connective tissue.

I started taking the SAM-e regimen described in A Younger Brain for mental benefits. For some time, however, I was increasingly afflicted with sciatica and a variety of aching ailments. After about a month or so on the regimen, I noticed that the sciatica and ailments were gone. Gone as in completely vanished, gone as in I felt many years younger.

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TALK IS CHEAP

Many of you have read of VOIP - Voice Over Internet Protocol. That’s what this column is about. This week we’ll discuss the originator and largest company in the field.

If the people you talk to on a regular basis have computers, you can talk to them for free, through your computer’s microphone. If you want to be ‘fancy’ or ‘stylish’, you can use a telephone that hooks into your PC’s USB port.

The program that made this mode of phone chatting a must have for computer users is the free basic version of Skype.

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The Future of Iran

July 9 was the day the Iranian student movement designated for national demonstrations against the regime, and a general strike in favor of democracy. Shaken by weeks of recent protests, and worried about the mounting criticism from several Western countries, the regime took unprecedented steps to head off a potential showdown with its own people.

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HOW DID WE GET TO THIS SPYING-ON-EVERYONE FIASCO PART II


So, in Part I on January 8,  I left on the note about how many of you had thought the RSA had been bribed to handover backdoor information of their supposed unbreakable code.

Not as cute the government finally thinking "Hey, we forked over all this money for this equipment.  We actually own it or parts of it and now we demand access to our stuff."

Then they thought:   "Our partners under the 1994 CALEA law - the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act - requires communications companies to help us and provide a means and method to surveil so as not impede our investigations!  Let's have a talk with them.  Only this time we bring some of our other partners like DEA and DOJ into the conversation and let's get serious on this."

So the list of agencies who can surveil you just got bigger.  But how did they start surveiling?  Let's discuss begin with just one program called Carnivore.

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OBAMA’S FISCAL DEATH DANCE


It is estimated that up to a quarter of all American households still owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. Many of these people have been able to refinance their home loans with much lower interest rates, but that does not solve the problem because they have a balance sheet problem rather than a cash-flow problem.

Those who owe more on their homes than they can sell them for, and who have little other savings or assets, are "locked in" to their existing homes.

Even if they have a better job offer in a location too distant to commute, they may not be able to take the job because they cannot afford the mortgage payments on their existing homes, cannot sell for a price higher than their mortgage, or cannot afford rent or house payments in the new location.

The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve are largely responsible for the problem.  Ironically, they too are locked in to an inescapble conundrum of their own making.

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WILL ROMNEY BE OUR FDR?


If you want to trace back all America's woes caused by the pathologies of liberalism to their original source, you'd focus on the inception of the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932.

True, Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism places the blame earlier, on "America's first fascist presidency," that of Woodrow Wilson.  But much of Wilson's assault on our Constitutional freedoms didn't last, and was reversed by his successors, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.

Coolidge chose not to run in 1928, resulting in the debacle of Herbert Hoover, the Dems gaining the House in 1930 (first time since 1916), and the complete entrenchment of the Dems at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue in 1932.  FDR became America's first president-for-life (he finally died in office in 1945), while the Dems held a monopoly of power in the House for the next 62 years (with two irrelevant interregnums, 1946-48 and 1952-54; the Pubs finally got the House back, 1994-2006).

Yet the FDR/Dem victory of 1932 was far, far more than an electoral victory of one political party over the other. It was transformational, so deeply altering the fundamental relationship of Americans to their government and to their Constitution that the alteration lasts to this day - and is now, in fact deeper than ever.

For conservatives, FDR's transformation was and remains disastrous for America's freedom, America's culture, and the integrity of America's Constitution.  Today, as we reach the final economic consequences of FDR's transformation, it has proved to be equally disastrous for America's prosperity.

What we need is a president who can not only reverse FDR, but who can generate a transformation of his own, altering the relationship of Americans to their government that restores their freedom, their culture, their prosperity, and their Constitution.  We need our own FDR.  The question is: will Mitt Romney be that president?

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FREEDOM’S BIRTHDAY


[This was originally in To The Point for July 4, 2004. It needed only a slight updating for 2006.  We at To The Point wish all of you an exceedingly happy Fourth of July.]

July 4th is Freedom's Birthday. My suggestion is, amidst the fireworks and barbeques and flag-waving fun - all of which are great - that you take the time to feel good about America.

Put aside your worries and concerns, your frustrations and fears about what's wrong with America. For one day, forget the negative - put it all in a zip-lock bag, hide it in the back of the freezer, and pretend it doesn't exist.

One reason is that, for all your worries about America's culture and morality, you and all your fellow conservatives can feel good about your country. Liberals can't. One of the defining characteristics of leftie-liberals is an inability to feel truly proud of their country - proud to the bone.

You cannot be a liberal without feeling apologetic and embarrassed over being an American. You cannot be a conservative without lacking any such embarrassment or compulsion to apologize at all.

Being an American is simply the coolest thing on earth.

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