For all of my life, America has stood for freedom in the world. Until now. Ever since Obama’s rise to power, America’s “Freedom Agenda” – the promotion of and support for expanding freedom and democracy – has been squelched.

Supporting, for example, the Green Revolution in Iran in 2009, and the protesters in Ukraine today would have been no-brainers if the Obama administration had the slightest inclination to cultivate US allies and the cause of freedom more generally.

Both the Iranian democracy activists then and the Ukrainian protesters today demonstrated through their actions that they do not seek the mere overthrow of unrepresentative, repressive governments. They seek freedom, and are willing to work for it.

The situation in Iraq, and in Ukraine – as well as in Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan and beyond – makes clear that Obama has killed America’s freedom agenda. And that isn’t all.

Obama doesn’t simply neglect democratic forces in favor of authoritarian regimes. In country after country, under his leadership the US sides with anti-American forces of authoritarianism against pro-American forces. Why?

Tweet, tweet!  As of yesterday (6/20), thanks to Miko, TTP is on Twitter: @2thepointnews.  Or click on the Twitter icon in the right side bar.  Now you can tweet your favorite quotes from or link to any TTP article to any of your followers.  Tweet and Retweet away!

There is so much to Tweet about this week.  Marco Rubio morphing into Charlie Crist.  Zero stepping deep in two cowpies. Sarah Palin is back!  Dems defeating their precious trillion dollar Food Stamp bill.  Dems crying over their prospects all the way to 2022.  Technology protecting us from the Surveillance State.  The EPA failing to fault fracking.  And there's more.

We'll end with a story appropriate to today:  June 21^st, the Summer Solstice (in the northern hemisphere).  No, it's not about flower-bewreathed New Agers communing with the Druids at Stonehenge.  It's about one of the most extraordinary geniuses in history you may have never heard of.

What do you do if the facts don't support your beliefs? If you are honest, you will rethink what you previously believed. If you are a Keynesian economist, though, like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, you make silly assertions.

In his Jan. 31 column, Mr. Krugman said he wants to see "some example, somewhere, of austerity policies that succeeded."

If you are a Keynesian school economist like Mr. Krugman, you define "austerity" as a reduction in government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP). If you are a classical Austrian school economist, you view a reduction of government spending not as austerity, but a growth-enhancing policy.

Mr. Krugman seems to have forgotten that the government share of GDP dropped after Reagan was able to get most of his policies through the Democrat-controlled Congress (which Mr. Krugman would define as austerity). The economy boomed and employment soared. Likewise, when government spending was reduced as a share of GDP during the Clinton administration and the Republican Congress, the economy and employment boomed.

Recently, the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, outraged the Left by claiming people of low IQ need people of high IQ to carry them on in life.  Mr. Johnson has thus sparked a recent burst of interest in IQ, that despite the Left's apoplexy has been encouraging in one sense.

As Robert Plomin, probably the world's leading expert on the genetics of intelligence, put it to me, there used to be a kneejerk reaction along the lines of "you can't measure intelligence," or "it couldn't possibly be genetic." This time the tone is more like: "Of course, there is some genetic influence on intelligence but . . ."

The evidence from twin studies, adoption studies and even from DNA evidence is relentlessly consistent: in children, in Western society, the heritability of IQ scores is about 50 per cent. The other half comes equally from family (shared environment) and from unshared individual experiences: luck, teachers, friends.

This numerical precision easily misleads us into thinking genes and environment struggle against each other. In fact, they are like two pillars supporting an arch: nature makes you seek out nurture, which brings out your nature. But here is where things get interesting.

The acceptance of genetic influence on intelligence leads to some surprising, even paradoxical implications, some of which turn the assumptions of both the Right and the Left upside down.  Particularly to those of Mr. Obama, who is totally clueless in this regard.

A "think tank" is an organization where scholars and specialists seek to find solutions to problems and then promote their findings. Some think tanks deal with many public policy issues, and others concentrate on one or a few, such as medical care, defense, foreign policy or economic policy.

Both the number and size of think tanks has grown exponentially in the past several decades. One reason is the growth of governments, which has created a need for organizations to feed government policymakers with ideas and information -- and, more importantly, to fulfill the need for independent research to critique the many bad ideas emanating from policymakers, politicians and the media.

For instance, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Peter Wallison, a former general counsel of the U.S. Treasury, has just written a book explaining, with all the supporting evidence, how a politically inspired, false narrative about the financial crisis led to the destructive Dodd-Frank Act and what corrective action is needed.

It's: Bad History, Worse Policy: How a False Narrative About the Financial Crisis Led to the Dodd-Frank Act.